In recent years Heareda is known as a witch, a woman wise in the ways of nature. She sells potions and cures from her hut hung with bundles of fragrant herbs. Old traditions are relived in her chants and among the bottles that line her shelves. Expectant mothers looking for omens have come to her doorstep at the wood's edge, as have soldiers leaving their homes for war. Her clients - guests, as she calls them - are the straw-haired crofters of the Sutcrofts and the Folde and dark-haired hunters from the Stonedeans alike. If they cannot pay her in coin, they can pay her in food for the winter or glittering charms. Better yet, she will take favors to be claimed later. Some have even claimed to leave her house changed, eyes rapt and distant as if witnessing some miracle. 

While she finds remedies for all she can, she will never sell a curse. 

Many years ago, before she was the witch Heareda, she was called Alruna. The eldest daughter of Alaric, the then-young Thane of Willowslade, she grew up in a bright town amid the willows of Kingstead. She was a wild girl, skirts hitched up so she could run barefoot among the trees, flowers and twigs always tangled in her red-gold hair, laughing and singing well into the evenings. It came as no surprise when her father, owing a great debt, offered her to a wizened woman as an apprentice.

When Alruna returned home, none could doubt that she had changed. She stood a maiden on the cusp of womanhood, fingers stained green and red, taller than anyone in Willowslade remembered her. With her long hair tumbling down from a crown of ash and cold eyes that peered through his skin, she was not the girl Alaric remembered. He took her with him to the court of Edoras, where she might play her harp and sing while he searched for a rich heir. She was a sunbeam in Meduseld for a time, her oddness easily overlooked, and ever surrounded with other giggling maidens. 

When she departed, alone on a horse with her prized possessions, the rumors whispered that she left in disgrace.