Tala thought about Dougal for the rest of the day as she finished sewing up her shirt, pricking her finger several times in the process. She thought about him as she made her evening meal of bread and soup and she was still thinking about him as she went to bed. She tried to force her mind to think about something else, but every time her attention slipped she found herself imagining the two of them living as man and wife. She would be helping him work his farm under the friendly gaze of Dougal's father while two or three fine, handsome children played nearby, their shouts of happiness filling the air like birdsong.

     It wasn't fair! she cried internally as she lay in her bed, her fingers tightening to claws as they clutched at the pillow. Other women got to marry and have children. Why couldn't she? Damn Roderick, the King whose greed and paranoia had doomed the green witches. Damn all the people who'd been so ready to believe the lies he told. There'd always been people who'd envied and feared the power of the witches, of course, but the majority had accepted them, on the surface at least.

     Had there been a reservoir of hatred there all along? Not given voice in case it was denounced by their neighbours? Had everyone only been waiting for the reassurance that others shared their feelings before speaking out? King Roderick's voice of authority had been the spark that lit the fire. A fire that had swept the Kingdom like an inferno. People had wanted to gain favour with the King by agreeing with him, and once people heard Knights and magistrates denouncing the witches, once they realised they weren't alone in their prejudice and bigotry, their fear of speaking out had vanished. Suddenly it was the sane, reasonable people who were in the minority, and they were shouted to silence until anyone who still opposed the pogrom were afraid to say so in case they met the same fate as the witches. The tyranny of the majority was too strong to oppose.

     Tala was still thinking about Dougal as she awoke and went through her morning routines. It was a Tuesday and she was expected in town to teach the children again. What if Dougal was there? What if he saw her? She thought about staying home instead. When someone came to ask why she hadn't come she would say she'd felt unwell.

     She got a grip on herself angrily. All you did was turn down an invitation to a dance, she told herself. Stop acting like you killed his cat or something. If you see him in town you'll wave at him and smile and he'll wave back and you'll be friends. And he'll go to the dance with someone else and have a great time. He'll probably marry her and take her back to his farm and he'll forget all about you. It didn't help, though. If she did see him she knew it would he awkward and difficult and all she'd be able to do was try to brazen it out. Try to act as though there was nothing wrong.

     <Why are you sad, mummy?> asked the mice as she put on her coat and shoes. They gathered round her and stared up with their glittering black eyes, unable to understand the reason for the torment she was transmitting without realising it. <Don't be sad. Please don't be sad.>

     Tala smiled as she reached down to stroke their silky-soft fur. <How can I be sad with all my friends gathered around me?> she asked. <Thank you for being my friends.>

     <Always friends,> the mice replied. <Always friends! You're our mummy. You keep the monsters away.>

     <Always,> she promised. <I'll always keep the monsters away. You're safe here, I promise.>

     But who'll keep me safe? she wondered as she went to the pantry and pulled out a handful of the ripe ears of corn she'd surreptitiously gathered from farmer Willow's field a couple of weeks earlier. She thought about King Abulard, who was by all accounts every bit as petty and vindictive as his father had been. She thought about the Knights of Vell as she placed the ears of corn on the floor. The Knights, named after their first Captain, Harold Vell, who patrolled the Kingdom searching for witches and who came to Ellford every few months, asking questions and acting in a generally obnoxious manner. She thought about the stocks and the pile of stones.

     Who will protect me from the monsters? she thought as the mice pounced joyfully on the corn and she made her way to the door.

☆☆☆

     Dougal was nowhere to be seen when she arrived in town, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she made her way to the church hall. Once again all the children were there, except for little Cindy who, the other children told her, had woken up with a fever that morning. Tala went pale. A fever was what had carried off her mother three years ago. Of course, there were many ailments that caused fever, and most of them did nothing more serious than confine the victim to bed for a day or two. Tala whispered a prayer to God as she hung her coat on a hook and picked up a cloth sitting on a shelf at the base of the blackboard. Someone had left the lyrics of a hymn written on the black paint, she saw. The choir had been practising the evening before.

     "Today we're going to be studying geography," she said as she used the cloth to erase the lyrics. Then she picked up a piece of chalk and used it to draw a crude map. "This is Meddelvy. The Kingdom where we live. This is the city of Denwell, where the King lives. Our village is up here, to the north. Our country is bordered to the west by the Skyrake mountains, on the other side of which are the Broken Baronies. That's where you come from, isn't it Marcus?"

     "My grandad came from there," the boy replied, scratching his head. He had the olive skin that characterised the people of that region. "He came here to get away from the Candlemaker wars."

     "Because he was a coward," said Paul with a smirk.

     "He was not a coward!" Marcus declared furiously, jumping up from his seat to confront the older boy.

     "Then why did he run away from a war?" demanded Paul, also standing and towering over the smaller child. "Only cowards run away."

     "Sit down both of you," Tala told them firmly. "Marcus, don't rise to the bait. He wants to provoke you. If you respond, he wins. If you ignore him, you win." Telling a nine year old to ignore an insult to his family was probably pointless, though, she knew. "Paul, sit down and shut up or you'll get extra homework."

     Marcus refused to back down and glared up at the taller boy, his hands balled into fists, while Paul glared back, a wicked grin on his face. Tala strode forward and pushed them back into their seats but they continued to glare at each other while the rest of the class watched with interest. The two boys intended to fight after class, Tala knew, and Marcus didn't look the least bit intimidated by the larger boy. If the fight was allowed to take place Tala thought it quite possible that Paul would soon regret his rash words. She decided to escort the younger boy home after class. She would find a plausible reason for it that would avoid the appearance that he needed her protection.

     In the meantime, best to change the subject, she thought, and she returned to the front of the class. "Now then," she said. "Does anyone know the name of this country here?" She tapped the chalk on the country that bordered Meddelvy to the east.

     "Berkanol!" the children chimed in unison, followed by boos and hisses. Berkanol was the great enemy. The enemy that Meddelvy had been at war with three times over the past hundred years and which had captured a large swath of territory from them before the most recent war had finally fizzled out.

     "My granny lives in Newmarket," said Alice Spaniel darkly, the scowl looking out of place on her pretty face. Newmarket lay inside the occupied territories. "My mummy and Daddy are sad because they haven't seen her for so long."

     "My Da says there's going to be another war," said Paul, looking excited by the prospect. "As soon as the King's finished raising another army. He says we're going to kick the Berkishmen's poxy arses all the way to the sea and hang Roth from the walls of his own castle."

     "A little less of that kind of language please," said Tala and the other children giggled. "I'm sure your granny's quite safe, Alice," she added. "I'm pretty sure you could go visit her if you wanted. Merchants go back and forth across the border all the time."

     "Daddy says the Berkishmen are cannibals who eat any Meddelmen they catch," said Simon Baum, leaning forward in his seat as he squinted at her. He had weak eyes and had to sit at the front of the class to see the blackboard clearly. "They probably ate Cindy's granny years ago." A collective gasp rose from the other children. Cindy stared at Tala in horror, silently begging her to deny it.

     "I'm sure that's not true," the green witch replied, trying to make herself sound confident. "They're probably just people, just like us."

     "How do you know?" asked Paul sceptically.

     Well, she didn't. Not for certain, but she knew that the things people said about witches weren't true so she tended to be sceptical about bad things said about anyone she hadn't met. She couldn't say that to the children, of course, and so she ignored the question.

     "Are there witches in Berkanol?" asked Paul, staring at the map.

     "There are people they call witches," Tala replied. "When they saw King Roderick rounding up women and stoning them to death it gave them ideas, and now, whenever there's someone making trouble, saying the local magistrate's taking bribes or something, the magistrate says they're a witch and has them killed." Colm, the son of Mikkel the Merchant, had told her that. He and his father went back and forth across the border, buying and selling their wares, and they brought back all kinds of stories from the neighbouring kingdom. "They're not real witches, though. They don't have magical powers like real witches."

     "Maybe they have real witches as well, though," said Simon. "Maybe some of the women they kill are real witches."

     "Maybe," said Tala, nodding, although she knew it wasn't true. There were no true witches in Berkanol, or anywhere else outside Meddelvy. She wasn't going to tell that to these children, though, or tell them how she knew it. The Meddelvy authorities knew it, unfortunately, and the knowledge was one of their greatest weapons against the witches, but Tala saw no reason to spread the knowledge any further than it already was. Give it a couple of generations in which no more witches were found and it was possible that the information would simply be forgotten, and then any surviving witches would be far safer than they were at present. She had to believe that there were other witches out there somewhere, hiding as she was. Others beside the Crone, that was.

     "King Roderick wanted the witches to help him fight the Berkishmen," said Simon, staring as he struggled to focus on her face. "If the Berkishmen have witches as well, why don't they use them in their armies?"

     "That's an excellent point," said Tala in delight. Simon was very intelligent. The boy was born to be a scribe or a monk and Tala thought it a terrible crime that he was destined to spend his life looking after horses in the town stables. She turned to the rest of the class. "What do you think, Children? During the last war the Berkishmen had cavalry and archers and Knights. Why didn't they have witches making herds of cows stampede towards our armies? Why didn't they use crows and ravens to spy on us? And not just them. We've been at war with lots of other countries over the last few hundred years. None of them had witches in their armies. Why was that, do you think?

     "Because... Because they don't have real witches?" asked Cindy hesitantly.

     "Maybe," said Tala, smiling. "Or maybe green witches hate fighting. Maybe they just want to be left alone to live in peace."

     "Some of them would fight, if they had real witches," said Paul confidently. "They're evil. They'd love the chance to kill people and get paid for it."

     "The green witches of Meddelvy could have joined the army when King Roderick asked them to," Tala pointed out. "They could have killed as many Berkishmen as they wanted and the King would have paid them gold instead of hunting them. Isn't that what they would have done if they were evil?"

     "They refused to fight because they wanted Meddelvy to be conquered," Paul replied. "They're evil and they wanted the Berkishmen to win."

     "Then they could have joined the Berkish army and fought against us," said Tala carefully. She was treading on dangerous ground, she knew. Paul would almost certainly repeat this conversation to his father.

     "Because they're cowards," said Paul. "They're scared to fight, just like Marcus's Grandad."

     Marcus leapt from his desk with a shout of rage and threw himself as the larger boy. "Fight, fight, fight!" chanted the other children in delight as Tala ran forward to separate them. "No fighting in the classroom!" she demanded as the pulled the smaller boy from the larger. He'd already inflicted a bloody lip on the other boy, she saw, and had received a scratch to his face for his trouble. Tala examined them to make sure no more serious harm had been done and breathed a sigh of relief. Her class wasn't popular with the adults, she knew. Many of them considered it a waste of time and begrudged the time the children spent away from their chores at home. Something like this was just the excuse they would need to shut it down and Tala would be reduced to serving drinks in the tavern to earn the money she needed to live.

      "Am I going to have to tell your parents?" she demanded. Perhaps they wouldn't tell anyone about the disturbance in class if she presented it as something their parents would punish them for. She glared at the two children, who avoided her eyes and squirmed as she held them firmly by the arms. "Sit back down," she told them. "Or you'll both have extra homework tonight."

     She released them and they reluctantly sat down, although they eyed each other warily. Tala gave them both another warning glare and then returned to the front of the classroom. "Alright," she said, using the chalk to add some more detail to the map on the blackboard. "Now, if we're all paying attention, to the south of Meddelvy is the Groaning Sea, and in it are the Yellow Islands..."