The village of Ashfeld existed in that peculiar space between prosperity and poverty. Close enough to the trade routes to avoid complete destitution, far enough to never taste real wealth. Its houses were timber and thatch, its streets packed dirt that turned to mud when the rains came. Victor Morningstar had known every inch of those streets since he could walk, had mapped them in his mind with the same precision he applied to everything else.
At eight years old, he understood things that made the village elders uncomfortable.
He understood that water boiled at a specific temperature, that certain plants grew in specific soils, that the world operated on principles that could be observed, tested, and replicated. He understood that his mother, Elara Morningstar, was the finest herbalist in three villages, though she possessed no formal education and worked from a cottage that leaked when it rained.
What he didn't understand, what infuriated him, was why understanding wasn't enough.
"Hold the pestle steady, Victor." His mother's voice had that particular patience she reserved for his mistakes. The cottage smelled of crushed valerian and chamomile, just some of the hundred dried herbs hanging from the ceiling beams. "Grind in circles, not back and forth. You're bruising the leaves."
Victor adjusted his grip, his small hands barely able to manage the heavy stone pestle. The mortar was older than he was, worn smooth by his mother's constant use. "Mother, I've been thinking about the Henderson fever remedy. The one with willow bark and elderflower."
"Have you now?" Elara didn't look up from the tincture she was preparing, her hands moving with the skills of someone experienced. She was a thin woman, made thinner by years of giving away as much as she sold, with dark hair perpetually escaping from a practical bun and eyes that had learned to smile even when exhausted.
"The willow bark reduces fever because of the salicin compound. But elderflower promotes sweating, which also reduces fever through evaporative cooling. They're achieving the same result through different mechanisms." Victor paused his grinding, warming to his subject. "If we increased the willow bark and reduced the elderflower, we'd use less material and achieve a more consistent effect. It's more efficient."
Elara finally looked up, and something complicated crossed her face. Pride mixed with worry, love mixed with fear. "Perhaps. But the elderflower also soothes the throat and eases breathing. Healing isn't just about efficiency, my clever boy. It's about the whole person."
Victor frowned but returned to his grinding. His mother was brilliant, he knew that. She could diagnose ailments from a glance, could mix remedies that physicians with their expensive education couldn't match. But she thought like a healer, not a scientist. She saw patterns but didn't question the principles beneath them.
He wanted more than that, heck he craved more.
The urgent knock came three hours later.
"Mistress Elara! Mistress Elara, please!" The voice belonged to Mathew Reed, the chief's steward, a man who normally wouldn't acknowledge their existence if he passed them in the street.
Elara was at the door in seconds, Victor close behind. Reed's face was pale, sweat beading despite the cool evening air. "It's the young master. The chief's son. He's burning up, won't wake, can barely breathe. The physician from Millbrook has tried everything. Please, the chief says he'll pay anything—"
"How long has he been fevered?" Elara was already moving, gathering her kit.
"Three days. Started as a cough, now..." Reed's voice broke. "Please hurry."
They ran through the darkening streets, Victor's shorter legs pumping to keep pace. His mind was already working through the symptoms. High fever, unconsciousness, respiratory distress, sudden onset. Not the regular seasonal illnesses. Something more aggressive.
The chief's house was the largest in Ashfeld, two stories of solid construction with glass in the windows. Victor had never been inside. Now he followed his mother through rooms that seemed impossibly large, up stairs carpeted in actual carpet, to a bedroom where the air was thick with sickness and fear.
The boy on the bed couldn't have been more than twelve. His skin had the gray-pale quality of the severely ill, his breathing shallow and rapid. The chief stood beside him, a large man suddenly made small by helplessness. His wife clutched the boy's hand, tears streaming silently.
Victor watched his mother transform. Gone was the tired herbalist from the leaky cottage. In her place stood something else, a professional, a master of her craft. Her hands moved across the boy's body with quick understanding: checking pulse points, examining the tongue, pressing gently on the abdomen, listening to the quality of his breathing.
"Lung fever," she said finally. "Advanced, but not yet beyond help. I need hot water, clean cloth, and space to work."
She worked through the night. Victor assisted, handing her tools and ingredients as she called for them, watching her methodology with intense focus. She combined herbs he recognized like elecampane for the lungs, mullein for the breathing, boneset for the fever, but also things he didn't expect. Mustard plaster for the chest. Steam inhalations with eucalyptus. And something else, something she mixed with particular care, murmuring words under her breath as she worked.
Victor kept that at the back of his mind for later examination.
By dawn, the boy's breathing had eased, by mid-morning, his eyes opened and by afternoon, he was sitting up and taking broth.
The chief wept, and his wife kissed Elara's hands. They offered gold, actual gold coins, more money than Victor had ever seen.
Elara took only a fraction, enough to buy supplies and repair their roof. "I'm a healer," she said simply. "This is what I do."
Then they walked home as heroes. People emerged from their houses to watch them pass, to murmur thanks and blessings. Victor felt a strange warmth in his chest, something he couldn't quite quantify or explain.
That warmth lasted exactly three days.
And on the third day, the whispers started.
Victor heard them at the market, where he'd been sent to buy flour. Two women at the vegetable stall, their voices pitched low but not low enough.
"...unnatural, is what it is. The physician from Millborrow couldn't save him, trained physician with all his learning..."
"...and she just waves her hands, mutters some words, and suddenly he's well? Doesn't sit right..."
"...my grandmother knew a woman like that once. Burned her, they did, and good riddance..."
Victor's hands clenched on the flour sack. The ignorance... the superstition. His mother had saved that boy's life through skill and knowledge, and they reduced it to witchcraft because they couldn't understand it.
He wanted to scream at them, to explain that there was no magic, only methodology, only the application of principles they were too stupid to grasp.
Instead, he went home and said nothing.
But the whispers didn't stop. They spread like their own fever, mutating as they passed from mouth to mouth. Elara Morningstar had healed the chief's son when no one else could. Elara Morningstar had been seen gathering herbs by moonlight. Elara Morningstar's cottage always smelled of strange smoke. Elara Morningstar's son was too clever by half, spoke with words beyond his years.
Elara Morningstar was a witch.
Victor noticed his mother growing tense, noticed how she smiled less, worked faster, looked over her shoulder. He noticed, but he was eight, brilliant and arrogant, and he thought he understood everything.
He was wrong.
The real witch found him a week later.
She appeared in the forest where Victor had gone to collect specimens, bark samples from different trees, to compare their properties. He was crouched by an oak, carefully stripping a small section with his knife, when her voice made him jump.
"Wasting your time with the obvious ones."
She was old, perhaps sixty, perhaps eighty, it was hard to tell. Her clothes were rough homespun, her hair gray and wild. But her eyes were sharp, and they looked at Victor like she could see straight through him to the gears turning in his mind.
"The oak, the ash, the willow, any fool can use those. You want real knowledge, boy? You want to understand what your mother does in that cottage when she thinks you're not watching?"
Victor stood slowly, knife still in hand. "Who are you?"
"Someone who recognizes hunger when she sees it." The woman stepped closer. From her bag, she produced a book. Not a large book, but substantial, bound in leather that had been water-damaged and carefully restored. "Your mother is gifted, but she's limited by fear. She could be so much more. And you... oh, you're something special, aren't you? Already asking the questions that matter."
Victor stared at the book like it was gold and poison mixed together. "What is it?"
"Principles," the woman said. "Real principles. Not the hedge crap your mother practices, thinking she's just being a good herbalist. The foundations beneath it all. Take it. Read it. Learn what you're actually capable of."
"Why?" Victor's mind went through all the possibilities and still couldn't think of a reason for this gift, if he could call it that. "What do you want?"
The woman smiled, and it was not a kind expression. "I want to see what happens when someone like you has access to real knowledge. Call it an experiment."
She pressed the book into his hands. The leather was warm, as if it had been sitting in sunlight.
"One warning, boy. Hide this better than you hide your cleverness. People in this village are already afraid. Give them proof, and they'll burn everything you love."
Then she was gone, vanishing into the forest with disturbing ease.
Victor looked down at the book in his hands. He should throw it away. He should tell his mother. He should do a dozen sensible, safe things.
Instead, he opened to the first page.
The words were handwritten in a cramped, intense script. The diagrams were precise. And the contents...
He took in a deep breath.
It was everything. Principles of energy manipulation. Laws governing transformation. Methodologies for combining intent with action to produce measurable results. It wasn't superstition or folk wisdom. It was science, just science his world didn't have names for yet.
It was beautiful.
Victor took the book home and hid it in his room, under a loose floorboard he'd discovered months ago. Every night after his mother slept, he would pull it out and read by candlelight, absorbing information like a drowning man gulps air.
He was so absorbed in his new knowledge that he didn't notice the whispers growing louder.
Didn't notice the way people stopped looking his mother in the eye.
And definitely didn't notice the group forming outside the church after Sunday services, their faces hard with righteous fear.
He didn't notice until it was too late.
They came at dawn, a week after the old woman had given him the book. Twenty men with torches and cudgels, led by the chief himself. The same chief whose son Elara had saved.
Victor woke to his mother's scream.
He rushed from his room to find their door broken open, the men flooding in like a tide. His mother stood in her nightgown, arms spread as if she could hold them back by will alone.
"Please, I've done nothing wrong! I'm a healer, just a healer—"
"You're a witch!" The shout came from somewhere in the mob. "The physician said that boy should have died. Said no natural remedy could have saved him!"
"I used herbs, just herbs! Let me show you—"
But they weren't listening. They never listen, Victor would learn. Fear doesn't listen to reason.
They tore through the cottage like a storm. Herbs scattered across the floor. Jars smashed. His mother's careful notes, accumulated over years, thrown into the hearth. They were looking for proof, for evidence of the witchcraft they'd already decided existed.
And they found it.
One of them, a farmer Victor recognized from the market, emerged from Victor's room holding the book. The leather-bound book with its damning diagrams and careful script.
"Here! Look what I found!"
Silence filled the space and Elara's face went white. Her eyes found Victor's across the room, and in them he saw understanding, forgiveness, and terrible grief all at once.
"That's mine," she said clearly. "I confiscated it from a traveling merchant who tried to sell it to me. I was going to burn it."
"Liar!" The chief stepped forward. His face was red, veins standing out on his neck. "You saved my boy with this devilry! You worked your evil on him!"
"I saved him with herbs and knowledge! I would never—"
"Mother, no!" Victor pushed forward, but hands grabbed him and held him back. "It's mine! I found it! She didn't know—"
"Quiet, boy!" One of the men cuffed him across the head, and he was barely standing and seeing double.
Elara's voice rang out, clear and strong. "The book is mine. My son is innocent. He's a child. Whatever sins exist here are mine alone to bear."
Victor struggled against the hands holding him, fought with all his eight-year-old strength, but he was a small boy and they were grown men. He could only watch as they bound his mother's hands, as they dragged her toward the door.
As she turned back one last time, meeting his eyes.
"Be better than this place, Victor," she said. "Be better than all of us."
Then they took her away, and Victor's childhood ended in that moment.