Characters:Dun Barethsol:Marcella

Marcella Kurwen is a fifteen year old orphaned Human. She has no idea who her parents were or what happened to them, only that they probably aren't alive anymore. She grew up with Padrig and Merigan Kurwen, raised as their daughter. Indeed, when asked about her father and mother, she usually replies that Padrig and Merigan are her parents.

Marcella knows that there is a great deal being hidden about the recent past. She knows that whoever her parents were, Padrig and Merigan know but will not tell her. She knows that horrible and unspoken things happened in Erinsford. She knows that the people would like to forget, so they don't say what happened. She also knows that she can't explain how she knows some of these things. Feelings sometimes come of their own accord. Knowledge comes at times which cannot be explained as coming from any of the five senses which she had been trained to use.

From these phantom scraps of insight and her parent's rearing, Marcella formed her goals. She is determined, somehow, someday, to know the truth of her birth. She is an intelligent young woman, trained to be observant. Padrig and Merigan taught her not only basic herb lore, but the high skill of reading. She is not an accomplished reader, or by any means a student of lore, but she can read well in the Human language of the southern parts of the world. She also knows a smattering of the Half-Elven tongue and can sing parts of their myth of the the world's making.

Among the many things she knows there are things that few Humans know or really understand. Wise humans know, in general terms, to avoid the signs of the Spider and the Fang. They know that it would be better to be damned for committing regicide than to let a Fang rule or a Spider take a throne. Few understand why they are to be avoided, however. Marcella knows that they are Alchemists.

There is, however, a darker side to all that she knows. Her knowledge is also enough to show her all that much is being kept from her, both by those she loves and by those who hate her because she is named Kurwen. She knows that the people of Erinsford seem to reply to her parents' skill and kindness with hatred and that all their vicious rumors about the two avid gardeners are so much rubbish. But she is still angry at the people for being so blind and stupid and ungrateful. She wishes Ma and Da would just trust her with her own past.

As Padrig Kurwen sometimes remarked before his death, Marcella is worrisomely fond of the color red.