Education: Fantasy

Your child needs an education, the old woman said sternly, shaking her finger in his face. And what kind of education do you think she'll get here? How to do laundry? How to bake bread? True, those can be tricky things, particularly the laundry--but she'll learn that and much more if she comes with me. He hesitated. He knew his daughter was bright, and already he'd started worrying about how he could possibly ever get her married off happily, but he'd never once thought of apprenticing her to the crone. He knew what happened when the crone found an apprentice--crone and child disappeared for several years. Eventually, the crone came back alone. Nobody ever saw the child again, not usually, but the parents would get letters that knew things only the child could have known, and there would be monies sent back from the child's new life. There were some who muttered that the crone killed the children and wrote the letters herself, but nobody actually believed that. They knew her too well. She'd healed the sick, removed the blight from the crops, and kept the women from dying in childbirth. They'd all heard the stories about crones gone--

Inspiration: "Your Child Needs Sex Education" icon.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Meh.