Coriander

© Jenne Gray

This challenge is produced by GirlieOnTheEdge with the following simple rules:
Write six sentences, no more, no less.
Use the current week’s prompt word – EDGE

Coriander

The cottage looks quaint, hiding among trees and shrubs, flowers trailing down the walls, birds singing in the bushes, the scent of roses – and something else, indefinable – wafting over from behind the gate.

Then I hear singing, a light, youthful voice, which surprises me because she must be well advanced in years by now, and I catch sight of her passing the gate; she’s just as he described her, except that the curls that still tangle down her back have mellowed from fiery orange to salt and pepper and she wears a shawl over her much-faded, once-so-colourful, flowing dress.

She’s a spey-wife, he tells me, the kind of woman who would have been strangled and burned at the stake as a witch a couple of centuries ago; the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, she’s a herbalist and a wise healer.

The vengeance I nurse in my heart has taken root and spread tentacles through all my waking and sleeping hours, driving me to the edge of reason, so I have no wish to be healed, desiring only to cause hurt to the one who hurt me.

He knows this, yet insists that she owes him a great debt and, as she once did for him, will use her healing skills to the limit (some might say far beyond, but she sees not right and wrong, only duty and necessity) and will do whatever is needed to redress the balance in my life.

I stare at the cottage, still hesitant to put my future in her hands, then, breathing deeply, I lean over the gate and call ‘Hello Coriander, an old friend says you can help me’ and when I mention his name, the singing stops abruptly.