The young girl had strayed from the group as they gathered mushrooms between the moss-covered roots of the great mother trees. She could not see her sisters and brothers anywhere. She was alone. This made her smile.

From the moment she could distinguish variety among the common family around her she felt the need to be different. Where her sisters wore plain frocks she sought after patterns. When her brothers contented themselves with lower-branched fruits, she climbed ever the highest and plucked the richer tasting rewards her tiny hands could reach. If the fashion was to dress the hair plainly, she would spend an hour braiding long strands and tying them with elaborate grass threads. She would shout when others whispered. Contrariety was in her nature. She was Meresinth Woodbine of Velvet Glade.

The children had been climbing for several hours among the tumbled rocky landscape high up over the three main villages. The great trees that sought sustenance between those rocks, pushed their roots into cracks, sundering granite with ease, creating a world of chasms and caves and hollows. Yellow mosses, the softest of natural carpets, crept stealthily over these broken lands and provided a rich mould with the dropping leaves so that tasty mushrooms and puffballs sprouted overnight in season.

The girl enjoyed plunging her foot through the squashy carpet, listening to the squelching sounds and watching in wonder as millipedes and beetles scurried in outrage from their wrecked homes to seek peace elsewhere. She forgot the mushrooms in the quiet of the forest. Birds were few, and the great beasts that her fathers hunted for meat on feast days would not haunt glades and copses so close to village settlements.

A gentle rain began to fall, creating in moments a symphony of new sounds as surfaces were pattered from on high by droplets clustered amid oily leaves and subterranean hollows began to fill with rushing waters that rumbled deep beneath her feet.

A greater darkness filled the leafy heights with a sinister gloom and shadows created depths hitherto unnoticed by the child. She looked around her at the tall tree trunks and dripping foliage, wiping raindrops from her eyes and smiling at these new sensations. Her vision blurred and the strange sounds began to catch her ears, as if some hidden creature whispered to her, sometimes on her left, sometimes just ahead where she was looking, and most thrillingly, behind her, up close, as if right on her shoulder. She could almost feel a cold breath from strange lungs fluttering the braid of hair she favoured. Then she would glance quickly over her shoulder, but there was no one there.

A long, calling voice echoed through the trees, drifting up against the misty rain. It was one of her mothers seeking the lost child. Her brothers and sisters must have returned already and by their return revealing her mysterious absence. She knew thus in straying she would be in trouble, not simply because the forest was full of dangers for a little girl, but because she had disobeyed.

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The voice sounded closer and the girl felt sure something terrifying must dwell in the shadowy depths all around her. She sensed it. Felt it as a thing too real to be anymore ignored. She screamed and screamed until the high pitched sounds that cut through the air drew the searching mother to her, gathering her up and calming the child with soft crooning noises. After all she was but five years old and how could anyone blame such a waif lost and alone in a spooky forest?

"And that was your first experience of the Witch of Arbornica?" Esper asked as the two girls walked up the gentle incline from Cherryball Flats towards school amid warm sunshine a world away from the misty gloom of an ancient haunted forest.

"I was just a little girl," Meresinth said. "I knew nothing of the strange spirits that might lurk in the forest. We were always taught in the community gatherings the forest was a place of blessings and kindness, but through my naughty ways of straying out alone my experience suggested otherwise, much to the dismay of the elders. They questioned me then, stood me up in front of a whole line of grizzled menfolk, uncles and grandfathers and great wisdoms as they were. Me, a five year old girl in her patterned frock and braided hair, standing before these glint-eyed souls, expecting to give an account of what I saw, what I heard. So I told them and it terrified the hardiest of them all." She laughed at the remembrance of the sensation she had caused.

"What did you see? I thought you were merely lost," Esper pressed, fascinated by this ghost story of a sort.

"In the hall that night those were not the only glint-eyes that had fixed upon me with intensity. Back out in the forest that afternoon I saw, in spite of the gloom, through a curtain of misty rain, a pair of glowing eyes that belonged to no horned and four-legged beast of the woods. They stared at me, those eyes, ignoring the rain, never blinking, never wavering. A reddish tinge of deep earth fires kindled in that stare, a hungering after child souls that seemed to increase every second I was transfixed by its gaze. Only when I screamed did it waver and only when my mother found me did it withdraw back into the depths where it had first emerged."

"Did they hunt the creature, your village men?"

"Of course. I showed them where I had seen it, but naturally it left no track except that which lived in my memory. They searched long and hard and found no magical being, though some poor travellers and independent wood gatherers picked up in the search were used harshly at the time before being released. I can see her still. Everywhere a dark shadow falls just so, even here without any curtain of rain to enhance that malicious lustre I sometimes think I am being watched."

"You were only five. That was a long time ago," the other girl said as they climbed some steps that led into a garden on the outskirts of the great school, where the sounds of feminine voices still filled the air before the afternoon of lessons and discipline would bring silence again. "Surely you can't be still haunted by that baby memory? You called it a her, based on two glowing eyes. What picture of the imagination did you build from that brief glimpse of something unexplained?"

"As I said, it was the first time I saw her, the Wicked Witch of Arbornica. There were other times." She could say no more just then, for Mr Bantleberry was waiting for everyone to settle to begin an afternoon of geography.