Daphne's POV
"You are marrying me tomorrow!"
I bit back a cry as Carl jerked me back and around to face him. He was just as ugly now as he had been months ago. I pulled away from him, but he held me firmly.
"Let go of me."
His lips curling in a disgusting sneer, “Don't you fucking run away from me! Tonight you will leave your stupid cabin and move in with me. Am I clear?”
Again with this. My stomach turned in disgust and anger. Carl, my supposed fiancé, was the son of the chief of the village near the cabin I used to live in with my grandmother. A feral gleam of possession had been in his eyes since the day we met.
I pulled away from him sharply, slipping from his grip and glaring at him though I could feel a tremor of fear go through me. I could almost hear my grandmother’s prayers that I wouldn’t still be living alone after she passed. Maybe she thought being married to him was better than being alone, but my heart knew better.
This man would never care for me beyond what pleasure he could get from seemingly own me. Maybe once I had considered making my peace with finding some measure of peace in the village, but that was before he tried to force himself on me.
The arrogant pig.
“Why would I take orders from you?"
He flushed, "How dare you speak to me like that, you witch!”
A murmur went around the crowd around us. I refused to flinch at the word. I’d heard it all my life. I should be immune to it by now. There was fear and disgust in that word, but he was only using it to try and get his way.
To keep me silent and get control over me.
“I’m not a witch.”
His shoulder trembled with rage, the way it always did when I was too calm for his liking. He raised his hand as if to strike me, but it was an empty threat. I stared him down, almost daring him to do it in front of his future subjects.
I may be a witch in their eyes, but he had been proclaiming me his intended for years, saying that he would cure me of my evil ways. In some ways, his possessiveness was a protection, but it wasn’t enough of a protection to make me want to join the village as his wife.
The people of the village threatened to burn me on a pyre to protect their lives, but no one had the stomach to follow me into the woods to find my cabin or attack me, whispering about traps and telling themselves that so long as I didn’t do anything to them and left quickly, then it was all fine.
I turned my heel as Carl began to shout, “You have nothing but that pretty face! If it weren’t for me and my family—if your grandmother hadn’t begged me to marry you--"
I felt the twinge of pain and the rush of the wind around me as I turned and struck him across the face. His face bloomed with a slow-forming bruise.
“Don’t you ever speak of my grandmother!”
Carl was frozen, seemingly shaken by my fury. I took his stunned silence to escape. No one stood in my way.
He shouted after me, “I’ll make you pay for that, you bitch!”
I took the familiar path from the village to my cabin, through unmarked roads and muddy underbrush, sliding over steep slopes and rushing through streams. I hadn’t passed the outer bounds of the village when the tears of grief welled in my eyes, burning and falling down my cheeks, rushing away in the wind. I had no memories of my parents; both of them had died when I was too young to know them. My grandmother was the only family I had ever known. It hadn’t been a full year yet since her death, yet it still felt like yesterday.
We lived in our lovely cabin tucked in the forest for years, only going into town for rare necessities and what we couldn’t grow or forage in the forest. I met Carl several times over the years. From the first time he saw me, he had been interested, proposing marriage when I turned 18 by sanction of his father though we knew nothing of one another.
My grandmother urged me to agree, but she never listened or didn’t care to listen to the way he grew ruder and meaner as we got older. She may have thought she was doing me a favor, but I would rather live in the forest alone for the rest of my life than marry him.
Still, his words worried me. The maddened urgency in his eyes made my heart clench with fear. Maybe they did know where my cabin was. Maybe he would just come early in the morning and drag me away the next day.
The fear the villagers had for me and my grandmother was nothing compared to the fear they felt at the thought of being expelled from the village.
What should I do?
What could I do?
I’m not a witch. I didn’t know magic or much of how to defend myself…