The Vampire & Her Witch

While Ashlynn prepared the seed of witchcraft with Jacques standing guard, Talauia focused on preparing Heila for the trial ahead. At the moment, that meant both women were working in one of Amahle’s many gardens, collecting both ingredients for dinner and for something else that the older witch intended to concoct for Heila.

To Heila, the garden itself was something of a marvel. She wasn’t unfamiliar with vegetable gardens, she’d helped tend to her family’s garden as a young girl and she helped with the flower gardens in the castle once she joined the serving staff.

One thing she had never seen, however, was a garden that was so free of weeds. Not only that, but every plant in the garden seemed to grow larger than any similar plant she’d ever encountered, towering over her and requiring sturdy wooden posts in the ground to hold themselves up with the weight of vegetables they produced.

”You know, you know, it’s not easy to become a witch,” the winged Thistle Witch said as she hovered over an overgrown okra plant, carefully selecting the best-looking seed pods. ”You have to really know, really know who you are and who you want to be. If you lose yourself or if you lose sight of your goals, the seed will consume you.”

”Like Sister Holly?” Heila asked, shuddering slightly as she recalled the holly bush that had once been a living person. ”Is that what happened to her?” Heila asked as she held a basket above her head for Talauia to drop freshly harvested okra into.

Ever since her visit to the unnerving ’Sister Holly’, Heila had found it difficult to put her heart at rest. The sight of the failed witch was a powerful lesson that nothing in this process was guaranteed to succeed and that failure could carry a price so heavy that she would never recover. But she still didn’t understand what ’Sister Holly’ had done wrong or why things had turned out the way they had.

”Don’t know, don’t know,” Talauia said with a sad shake of her head. ”Sister Holly, she, she wasn’t very strong,” Talauia said softly. ”Well, she was strong, but she wasn’t very sharp,” she said, correcting herself as she thought back on the young woman from the Clan of Painted Masks that she’d once tried to rescue.

It had been decades since she brought the gentle woman to the Briar in order to escape abuse at the hands of her family. Sister Holly had an incredible talent for cultivating all manner of rare plants and her family in High Fen City had turned her into a virtual prisoner on their estate while she tended to the medicinal gardens that supplied the arena with more than half of their medicines.

Talauia had only been visiting to procure a few seeds to bring back to the Briar but when she saw the pitiful woman who struggled to raise her eyes from the ground, beaten down by years of mockery and abuse for her ’worthless’ talent that could ’only’ be used in the gardens, she’d been absolutely furious.

The young woman had no idea how much money her family was making from her labor and instead believed herself fortunate that she hadn’t been exiled for her inability to follow her family’s traditions, using sorcery to restore broken valuables to pristine condition.

When the young woman’s father casually struck her while entertaining Talauia, the Thistle Witch snapped. The scene that followed was so bloody and horrifying that the surviving members of the family fled the High Fen altogether, hoping that the winged witch would never find them. Meanwhile, Talauia brought the abused genius back to the Briar in the hopes that her talents would allow her to become a witch.

”Sister Holly, she was too gentle,” Talauia said, descending from the okra plant and moving to a large bush covered with brilliant red and yellow sweet peppers. As much as the peppers made for a bright and cheery sight, it was hard to shake off the remorse that clung to her when she spoke about Sister Holly.

”Mother chose the holly for her because its leaves started rounded and smooth. They only grow sharp when something tries to devour the holly bush,” she explained as she let her own prickly aura wash over the pepper plant, scaring away any insects that might cling to the peppers that would become part of their meal.

”After everything she’d been through, she needed to grow some spines to protect herself,” Talauia said sadly. ”It’s okay to be soft and gentle on the inside but if you’re soft and gentle on the outside too, you can never really be free. You can only count on others to protect you then and you’ll always live in one cage or another. That’s why we wanted to help her learn to grow sharp enough to protect the softness in her heart.”

”But she couldn’t do it,” Heila guessed, stepping up next to Talauia to join her in harvesting peppers. ”Because she was too broken to learn to protect herself?”

”Might be, might be,” Talauia said, nodding her head. She and Amahle had discussed it several times but the only person who really knew was Sister Holly and she had yet to give either woman an answer, though at least the plant that she’d become didn’t seem to bear any ill will toward the witches who had been responsible for her current state. Just as before, if Sister Holly blamed anyone for her failure, she seemed to blame herself.

”That’s why you need to decide what kind of witch you want to be,” the Thistle Witch said firmly. ”The person you want to be. If you don’t know who you are and who you want to be...”

The look the Thistle Witch gave Heila sent a chill from the top of her horns to the bottom of her hooves. Images of slowly turning into a tree, like Sister Holly, filled her mind, followed by images of Ashlynn and the rest of her family coming one by one to prick themselves and make an offering just to tell her that they hadn’t forgotten her...

In her mind’s eye, those tear-filled faces of her loved ones looked at her with haunted eyes as if asking her ’If you didn’t know then why did you take the risk?’