Mavis

In Ignoble Assets, Amber's young hedge-witch.

Background

Mavis is a 19-year-old hedge witch (strong knowledge of the properties and behaviours of plants and animals, how to heal and how to hurt with them, occasional bits of ritual and incantations to local gods and spirits, that sort of thing) from a small town not much worth mentioning a bit north of Ravenwood. Early on, Mavis' mum ran off to "reinvent herself" and the re-invented version didn't have a tiny daughter, father unknown, so Mavis was raised by her gran, dead now the past couple years, who taught her the witching trade.

Mavis' appearance, like her place of birth, is barely worth mentioning. She is certainly not ugly, but not beautiful either. Average enough that you would probably see her and promptly forget. If she were inclined towards a life of crime this would be useful - "Well, officer - she was a -- person? of average height? her hair was... brown maybe...?" In fact, her hair is the same brownish color of bathwater after child #7 has had their turn in the tub, not quite straight enough to be remarkable; her eyes are a similarly unremarkable brown and her skin, apart from having finally grown past a blemishy phase is equally average. Her bosom is on the smaller side and she has a figure that will probably settle to pear-shaped when she reaches her gran's age.

Mavis, however, has an overblown belief in her own beauty, imagining that it is her loveliness and feminine charm that had all the young men of the neighborhood making indecent suggestions, rather than an ability to observe that the women of Mavis' line have had daughters but no husbands for the last few generations, and a hope that the daughter might take after the mother. Mavis has no time for the attentions of these village louts and is generally mistrustful of any man's intentions.

Not long ago, the town's mayor discovered that his wife's failure to conceive was not just bad luck, but aided by an occasional potion; and that the mayor's wife had solicited this prescription to avoid the chance that her future child looked more like the innkeep than the mayor; and Mavis' hometown became much less hospitable. Mavis made clever use of a sleeping draught and "borrowed" a set of clothes from one of her gentleman admirers, chopped her hair off, and set out with a pack and a knife at her belt rather unconvincingly disguised as a young man ("Martin") to seek her fortunes elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Mavis has hardly any money (scraped up the bit gran had sat aside for just-in-case) as the neighborhood witch often gets paid in barter (at least she has some idea what to do with the knife, people aren't that different from goats or pigs, right? and gran taught her some very basic hand to hand combat, just-in-case - two or three ways to squirm out of someone's grasp, etc.) and very little idea of how to make it in the outside world. Besides her skills, she's got two things going for her - she has basically no other choice, and at least in Mavis' mind, she's as clever as she is beautiful (and she learned things proper, not that garbage book-learning they do in the cities to seem all high-and-mighty.)