personality
TRAITS: adaptable, nonviolent, introverted, sympathetic, even-tempered
IDEALS: to prove her innocence and make sense of where she belongs
BONDS: her ailing father; she holds out hope that there will come a day she will discover a medicinal herb capable of restoring his consciousness
FLAWS: passive, self-conscious, naive, emotionally dependent, absent-minded
thatched cottages breathing slender smoke rings. half-finished needlepoints forgotten amongst peaks overwhlemed with heather. the scent of wet sheep following a spring thick with mist. you can take the girl out of the mountains but you cannot take the mountains out of the girl. gerda is a silhouette trailing the sun across the bluffs: blink, and you'll miss her. tethered to earth yet buoyed by dreams, her presence is as billowy and soft as the perennial cloak she wears. one might peer beneath the hood to glimpse her expression—eyes unbearably distant, mouth quirked in a sleepy, knowing smile—and come away wondering whether her soul and body are strangers destined to stray toward two different poles. she is a stormless sea of bottled emotion, a bride whose dowry is paid in untold secrets. wistful and warm, her nature is a comfort that drudges up the fossilized remains of a childhood steeped in nostalgia. she's the burnt breakfast cakes your mother made on sundays choked blue by frost; she's the dusty lullabies the memory unwinds in the starless hours before dawn. when her eyes are unclouded by the haze of her thoughts, they are vivid and vast, daubed in shades of the rosiest pink. accepting of races great and small, she imposes no judgements and carries nothing of man's prejudice. she swears fealty to the kingship of virtue, believing in compassion that tames with velvet-bound promises and subtle gestures that drip milk and honey. when she expresses affection, it is fragile, like moth wings and rabbit bones, but hers is a love that is stubborn and raw-edged, a thicket of wildflowers that rebels against the whetted blade, forgetting its vulnerablility in its desire to protect.

appearance
HEIGHT: 4'11"
BUILD: slim
HAIR: light brown
EYES: blue
DISTINGUISHING MARKS: scar-ringed fingers courtesy of clumsy knife-use during her apprenticeship; pale scars circling her wrists and ankles, remnants of rope burns accumulated through multiple bouts of imprisonment
a wisp of a girl, all small bones and parchment skin, gerda is a shrinking violet who speaks too softly and loves too fiercely. she is a bisque doll who has been handled one too many times, a latticework of faded scar tissue and jagged wood splinters, an anthology of bruised knees and bloody palms. she plays the saint in her cloak, whisper-white and cloud-soft, her voice a lilting hymnal that inspires sinners to kneel by candlelight and clerics to preach with arms outstretched. she plays the wildling in her lavender frock, treading lightly amongst the ferns, apple-cheeked and round-faced, herb juice oozing down her elbows, hair a star cluster of shattered twigs and coiled ribbons of moss. her eyes are as inscrutable as a prey animal's: try to hold her sizable gaze for more than a moment and she will have already made her escape, cometing through the undergrowth with fevered thoughts. she is a fugitive masquerading as a martyr, a martyr masquerading as a fugitive. her appearance is a toxin more potent than any poison nature could provide.

history
in gya there lives a man with inkstained fingertips and a greenhouse watered with regret. he is feared: women shy away from his name in polite company, men go out of their way to avoid the sight of his vine-strangled manor. he is revered: minstrels compose songs touting his poisonous tongue, captains pen letters praising the ghostly glow of his coastal moonlilies, visible to ships navigating the slow-moving waters of the moaning tides. rumor has it even king baelfire lingered a fortnight at his estate, seeking insight into botanical toxins potent enough to fell a dragon. were he a younger man, berold the baneful might have entertained the king's request, but he has not been a young man in decades. stooped and balding, his beard a host for stray seed pods and day-old dinner crumbs, he is simply berold, elderly master to a handful of apprentices he deems worthy of the title.

before gerda approaches his doorstep, a sonnet in one hand and sheep's wool in the other, berold has never consented to educate a commoner. owl-eyed dukes, fidgety lords, ladies with hook noses buried in scrolls. if any one of his highborn pupils had told him he'd play master to a shepherdess, he would've laughed loud and long at the absurdity of the notion and prescribed them a motherwort tincture for fear they'd gone daft. gerda hands him her poem, the verses shimmering with pastoral imagery marred by spelling errors, and slowly offers him the last fleecy vestiges of her flock. after a moment's hesitation, he moves to welcome her in, suspecting that, despite her peasant birth, she is up to the challenge. what he doesn't suspect is that, unlike the king of the black castle, gerda has no interest in his knowledge of poisons. she neglects to tell him about the blight that claimed the lives of her sheep and snatched the senses of her father, now slumbering like a giant of yore in her family's mountaintop cottage. her secrets remain a festering wound she prods late at night when no one is looking. she longs for dreamless sleep and the bloated glow of a harvest moon, but the sky is razed by waning crescents and sleep breeds dreams that taste like copper pennies.

each year she accompanies master berold on his medicinal pilgrimage, along with a handful of willing apprentices. armed with herbs tenderly raised under a sun-warmed roof, they wander mountainside towns both sparse and swarming, curing arthritis, sailor's cough, dragon-burns. gerda discovers a simple remedy for earaches lies with garlic clove and becomes so practiced at healing burns she can brew a salve with her eyes closed. she bandages the bleeding knees of sniffling boys, combats the venereal diseases of guilty men, comforts expectant mothers with willow bark and devil's claw. every patient she ministers to reminds her vaguely of her father, confined to his sickbed. she sees their wounds, hears their cries, and wants to erase their pain, to save them all. she asks for the beautifully impossible. what she receives is a death sentence.

in gya there sits a grave hewn from a petrified tree trunk bearing a lavish inscription suffused with rubies and fire opals. berold the baneful died three days before gerda's thirteenth birthday, but "died" does not do his death justice and "died" is not how bounty hunters hear tell of it. berold the baneful was murdered, and neither broadsword nor crossbow was the culprit. poison, oh irony of ironies, proves to be the key to berold's undoing; and despite the lack of motive, gerda is indicted as the she-devil responsible for his foxglove-laced tea. within days there is a lynch mob distributing wanted posters and kindling torches. she has no time to mourn her master's death nor celebrate the hour of her birth. gathering her belongings, she steals away before the hangman lowers his noose, skirting the law as she shivers across mountains and staggers through cities. by the time she falls victim to a pack of bounty hunters, she appears more wildling than human, her skin windburnt, her feet blistered, her hair in desperate want of a comb. she awaits her fate with timid bravery, expecting the worst: a return trip riddled with abuse, a trial in gya, a noose or a pyre, a small grave for a small girl; but is surprised to find herself freed by a dwarf who singlehandedly slays her would-be captors. she shadows him for days, months, years. sometimes she forgets she harbors a shadow of her own, but she never forgets her smoky cottage or the bleating echo of her long-dead sheep. if she closes her eyes, she can almost hear the mountains bellowing, a sound not unlike her master savoring his tea or her father whistling for her safe return.
CODE BY TESSISAMESS