Chapter Text
On the day of Yennefer’s sixteenth naming day, which is also the night of Beltane, her mother gives her a wool kirtle in a cheery yellow. She had watched her mother dye the dress in between the chores and the children-minding; setting two buckets of dried onion skins to boil in the largest cooking pot over the fire, leaving the linens to soak as they chopped potatoes and carrots for the evening meal. A bucket of stale cow urine fixed the colour into permanency the following day before it had been washed out in the village pond with the rest of the laundry. The garment is repurposed from her mother’s own meager collection of clothing, and a little bit too large for Yennefer’s rake-thin body, but it’s new to her and therefore treasured.
Yennefer is sixteen now, the age when most maidens have arrangements to wed, or have wed. She is a woman by the law of Aedirn, expected to have a future of bearing children, tending hearth and home, and make pretty kirtles to give to her daughters.
The day she receives her yellow kirtle also the same day Yennefer learns that flowers can be used to make doors into other places.
---
It has been three nights since her first brush with magic and Yennefer is beginning to feel that the boy in the cave of skulls had only been a dream. She had hit her head on the ground after Druneille had pushed her, and thinks that it could have been just a hazy memory like the ones she gets when she gets cuffed for doing something Father doesn't like and her ears ring for hours.
Word has spread that Druneille and Nikolas had seen the pig-farmer's hunchbacked daughter disappear into thin air. Yennefer was punished severely by Father when she couldn't explain what had happened in the barn, and had been ordered, bruised and sore, to stay inside the house, out of sight and out of mind. Strange occurrences don’t sit well with the farm folk of Vengerberg - the recent wars are still fresh in memory, where differences were enough to burn farms down, heedless of what or who might be trapped inside.
The question of what is to become of Yennefer is obviously on her parents' minds, too, if the hushed conversations by the fire are any indication, the gloomy glances when Yennefer makes a noise above a whisper. Her physical deformities are too prominent to offer any hope of attracting a husband, and the meager dowry of a suckling pig or two is likely not enough to turn the head of even the most desperate of unwedded men. And Yennefer - desperately, deeply - wants to mean more to someone than what quantity of livestock or bags of goods will be sent with her.
So Yennefer’s resigned herself to years of living with her family, growing old and more physically twisted, vainly hoping for a dashing figure to come save her from a life of loneliness. She knew the stories - of scullery maids rescued from dusty hearths and whisked away to beautiful balls, destined to meet and marry a handsome prince.
Yennefer would settle for anyone who loved her.
—
The nip of the morning chill is sharp against Yennefer’s bare legs as she hobbles to the pig pen with a heavy bucket full of slops bumping against her thigh. She’s trailed by a dozen eager chickens and the pungent smell of decomposing onions. It’s mostly chopped turnips and the peelings from yesterday's supper of potatoes and leeks, with some moldy old bread she found in a sack and soaked overnight in stale goat’s milk.
Yennefer is newly determined to show that she is able to look after the farm on her own, that she can be useful beyond minding the fire and cooking and cleaning. She’s up before the sun peeks over the roof of the barn, stoking the fire, starting the morning porridge, and out to the pen, intent on feeding the piglets bound for the weekend market before her father can tell her not to.
But Yennefer is unlucky; her father wakes up earlier than expected, and her plans for morning chores are upended along with the heavy bucket. The ground is cold and wet, and Yennefer’s clean yellow kirtle is decidedly less cheery when covered in slop and shit-soaked mud.
The inevitable punishment for willfully disobeying Father is interrupted by the arrival of a single-horse cart on the road from the village; the horse’s hooves clattering noisily on the crushed rock as it trots briskly to the edge of their land before coming to a neat stop.
Yennefer’s father stands up straight, like he does when he's bargaining with a customer at market, hand on his belt, shoulders back, trying to look taller than he actually is. Yennefer stares too, because the driver of the cart is a woman, and unlike any person she’s ever seen.
The woman jumps down lightly from the seat and walks towards the pen, her clothing billowing out behind her in the breeze. She’s beautifully dressed in a rich red cloak with soft-looking fur lining the wide hood, and Yennefer’s first thought is that she’s one of the wealthy merchants from the city, shopping for wool at the local market. As she approaches, Yennefer knows instinctively that this woman isn’t a merchant. There is something in her sharp face, the set of the small mouth, the faint upward tilt to her eyes, that reminds Yennefer of their old barn cat - the silent, sleek-coated one that had cleared the farm of rodents and then disappeared two winters ago.
Yennefer’s curiosity about the visitor is tempered by the unpleasant sensation of cold muck leaching into her shift, and she shakes some of it off her hand, grimacing at the stains on the sleeves of her woolen smock. The piglets snuffle around her, looking for the choicest bits of food in the mess, ignorant of their part in all this and of their eventual fate, even as the woman asks Father their price.
It only really registers what is happening when Yennefer watches coins (four copper marks, the same as for a small bag of salt, or two chickens, or a sack of onions late in the season) being dropped into a waiting hand, and she hears the word ‘witch’ whispered by her mother.
Yennefer’s world cracks like a fallen mirror.
(What had the boy in the cave said before he’d pushed her back through the door in the air three days ago? She will be coming for you?)
Terrified, her heart fluttering in her chest like a songbird trapped against a glass window, Yennefer screams out for the one person who loves her, but it is in vain. Her mother - tired and scared and defeated - cannot help her daughter, and the father-who-isn’t will not. Yennefer was unwanted, after all, always lesser than her half-siblings, a crooked reminder of her mother’s dalliance before this cruel man, birthed just soon enough after their marriage that the village wives whispered about how a child could have survived such an early birth.
As Father wrestles a vainly-struggling Yennefer past the gate and shoves her to the ground, away from her mother and her brothers and her sisters - she has a better view of the one who has bought her for four coins. The woman is even smaller than she’d looked from a distance, and her beautiful porcelain face is expressionless, but her very presence is unsettling, because there is more to her than her delicate body. Yennefer feels like a juicy mouse, out in the open and unable to run to shelter.
‘Come, Girl,’ the woman-who-might-be-a-witch says, turning on her heel, making her way towards the horse and cart, clearly expecting Yennefer to follow after her.
(Yennefer can only rely on herself, it seems.)
‘You can’t take me!’ she cries out, planting her feet and straightening up as much as her crooked back will allow.
Yennefer watches the beautifully-dressed woman stop in place, perfectly still, and her voice quavers as she finishes with a choked, ‘I won’t go.’
There is a dreadful pause and then the woman turns around to fully face Yennefer. Her blue eyes are very clear in the morning sun, and a rising sense of dread threatens to overwhelm her.
COME.
The cold blow of force from that single word echoes in Yennefer’s mind like a church bell. Her vision turns into spots of white light and the wave of dizziness swallows every thought of defiance whole.
She feels herself walking forwards, towards the cart and the horse, away from her mother and only home Yennefer has ever known.