Written for the Crowdfunding Creative Jam.
Within a coven the strongest Witch is always a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. It’s something they aim for, even though it’s easy for things to go wrong. I know all about things going wrong, because I was born the seventh son of a seventh daughter, and I was the reason my mother had to flee her coven. She could have stayed, allowing the coven to do the ‘right’ thing. That’s what most Witches do, fearing the way male Witches can see into the future, but my mother loved me too much to permit an unproven fear make her choices for her, so she gathered a few things and ran away with me.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes as I can see into the past and into the future. Personally I prefer looking into the past, because the future is too fluid while the past is, mostly, solid. Very few things can change the past. Nothing will change the choice my mother made to give me a chance of life, not even the return of the man who was my father. I’ve seen that too. It was really strange to try to watch something I’d seen hundreds of times before and find that it had changed, because the Witches managed to pull together a spell that would, they hoped, keep my mother with her coven.
They wanted to execute me. Every other mistake was put right long before the child could reach adulthood and that was what they wanted to happen to me, because they were scared. All of the covens knew I existed, knew that my mother’s coven had failed to do what needed to be done, so they were pushing for me to be found too, which I think is the only reason such a spell worked. For the first time in years, since the execution of the Witch Queen, they all pulled together to bring my father back into my mother’s life. He was a man who just happened to be a male Witch who had managed to survive on Raenarin.
My mother loved him. There was no way she could have found out what he was before she chose him to be my father, but I don’t think even finding out that he was a Witch would have bothered her. It’s possible she might even have run away sooner, so she could be with him, and bringing him back into her life with the belief that he was going to convince her their son was a mistake was never going to work. That amused me. I watched him convince her to run away with me, even gave her a few coins from the world she was planning on running to to help her survive, and even travelled with her for a short time to make sure that she got safely to the door. When the coven found out their plan hadn’t worked they knew they had only one other choice, because the other covens weren’t in a forgiving mood.
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.
