The Vampire & Her Witch

”They’re different,” Ollie said as he studied the thick, wide trunks of the trees. When Ashlynn had mentioned them as trees that grew walls around themselves, his mind had conjured something that was a bit more literal than the lumpy, gnarled knees of the cypress trees, but when he thought about how they must help the tree to anchor itself against even the worst of storms and how thick the trunks of the trees themselves were, he realized that they truly were like giant sentinels, standing guard over the islands that dotted the flooded forest.

”Will they grow in the Vale of Mists? Can I plant them in the village?”

”They will, though they may not grow as large without your help,” Ashlynn explained patiently. ”Our winters will stunt their growth a bit. But they should thrive at the water’s edge in your village. Or wherever else you’d like them to grow, so long as you’re willing to nurture them. Are you willing to give of yourself or to sacrifice the growth of others to nurture these trees so far from home?”

”What?” Ollie said, turning back to look at Ashlynn with a face contorted in confusion. ”Why would a person sacrifice the growth of others for these trees? Do I need them? As a source of power for my witchcraft?” he asked, trying to puzzle out why he would ever need to make sacrifices just to grow a stand of trees.

He had seen Ashlynn sacrifice trees to heal herself once before, but when she did, she didn’t sacrifice trees that were still growing. Instead, she sacrificed the ones that were weak and dying, and in the end, she still gave back a portion of the energy she’d harvested to help new saplings take the place of fallen trees. Was that what she meant?

”What happens to the grassland when a farmer sets his plow to sow his seeds?” Ashlynn asked, refusing to give Ollie a direct answer. ”Or when he looses his hounds upon the foxes to protect his chicken coop?”

”Some things die so that others can thrive,” Ollie answered. ”Is that all you mean? If I want to grow these trees, I’ll have to sacrifice some of the cedars to make room for them?”

”It’s more direct when you do it with witchcraft than when a woodsman does it with an ax,” Ashlynn said. ”But in a sense, yes. Given the power to not only decide who lives and who dies, but who struggles and who thrives, are you ready to make those choices?”

”I am,” Ollie said resolutely and without a moment of hesitation. He’d prepared for this and discussed it many times with Sir Thane and even Sir Marcel as he took charge of the village. He’d slowly grown comfortable mediating the seemingly endless disputes that came from bringing so many different clans together in a single village, and he’d come to take solace in a piece of advice Marcel had given him.

”The best deals are often ones where no one is happy with the outcome, but everyone walks away with something they need,” the Black Merchant had explained while Ollie recovered from the physical exertion of one of the stealthy vampire’s knife-fighting lessons.

”The happier one side is, and the more aggrieved the other side is, the more lopsided the deal,” Marcel said. ”If you are strong and your opponent is weak, you may be able to strike such deals, but if you force a man who is only temporarily disadvantaged to accept a losing deal too often, then he will return to bite you when you can least afford it.”

”So it’s better to give up a little bit, to avoid making things too lopsided, even when you don’t have to?” Ollie had asked.

”It’s best if everyone gets what they need, even if they don’t get everything they want,” Marcel answered. ”That way, everyone has a chance to keep moving forward. And if you balance it right, the things each side loses are things that hurt less to lose than the pain of not getting what they need. That way, even though there are losses, both businesses are able to thrive.”

In the village, Ollie had been forced to navigate the needs of the Night Weaver Clan who wanted to preserve as many trees as possible to build their treehouse-like nests, next to the Horned Clan who wanted to clear cut space to establish clusters of huts for their sprawling families with seemingly dozens of children, and finding ways for them to assemble reasonable clusters around a smaller number of the largest trees in the village had been just one of the many places he’d navigated asking people to make sacrifices so that everyone had enough room to thrive.

”I am ready,” Ollie repeated, looking at the vision of Ashlynn sitting on the cypress knee above him. ”But, if I need help, if the decision is ever hard, then I’m not ashamed to ask for advice,” he added. ”I don’t have all the answers yet, and if Sir Thane doesn’t even after a hundred years, then I’m sure I never will. But I promise to listen and learn and to do my best,” he said solemnly.

”That’s a good start,” Ashlynn said, stepping off of the cypress knee and into a flat-bottomed boat that Ollie could have sworn wasn’t there before Ashlynn stepped into it. ”Come with me,” she said, holding out a hand to help him out of the knee-deep water and into the boat. ”It’s time for a lesson in gardening, the way witches garden.”

”A lesson?” Ollie asked, frowning as Ashlynn began to use a pole to steer the boat through the winding waterways of the strangely flooded forest. ”In gardening? But, I thought this was supposed to be a trial.”

”You will be tested, Ollie,” Ashlynn said as they approached a small island that resembled one of Amahle’s gardens in the Briar, though this one was filled with vegetables that had wilted in the oppressive summer heat, and many of the garden beds were overgrown with weeds.

”But before you can pass a test, there are lessons you must learn, starting with this one,” she said, gesturing to the garden. ”A gardener could help the vegetables to thrive by pulling the weeds, building supports and shade, and all of the ordinary things that any person could do,” she explained as she stepped into the garden and knelt beside a sad, shriveled plant bearing dark green and dull red peppers.

”But you can do something greater,” she said, touching the base of a prickly thistle with one hand while gently cupping the pepper plant with another. Jade-green energy began to flow across her arms as the thistle slowly wilted, turning brown and dropping it’s seeds as the stalk became too weak to hold up the leaves and purple flower at the top of the long stalk. The peppers, on the other hand, grew plump and smooth under her hand as jade-green energy spilled down on the plant like a gentle rain.

”Let me ask you something, Ollie,” Ashlynn said as she stood and brushed the thistle seeds from her short skirt. ”You’ve worked hard to keep your villagers fed with only what you can grow in quickly planted gardens and first-year crops. I know the vale is plentiful and the other villages have helped, but has it been lean this year?”

”At times, it was very lean,” Ollie admitted, staring at the pepper plant in wonder. Not only did the peppers look shiny and ripe, but several new peppers had formed, growing from buds into the tiny beginnings of what was sure to be an extra harvest for this little pepper plant. And all Ashlynn had sacrificed to create the abundance was a weed that would have been ripped out by a gardener anyway!

”Can you do this to the entire garden?” Ollie asked. Then, as he thought about the scale of Ashlynn’s magic when she healed herself in the forest outside of Orava village, he swallowed heavily before asking something that seemed even more ridiculous. ”Could you do this to an entire farm?”

”Of course,” Ashlynn said with a smile. ”Let me teach you how,” she said, tapping the ground next to her and gesturing for Ollie to join her.

Of course, the trial that Ashlynn had prepared for Ollie wouldn’t be as simple as learning how to weed a garden. There would be harder questions to follow as he came to understand the power of witchcraft. But just as she’d started her trial in the healer’s tent, Ollie would begin with the place that he had the strongest convictions, providing food for the people he cared for.

Eventually, he would have to confront the limits of his new powers, just as she had. The question was, when he reached those limits and he had to choose, could he live with the consequences of those decisions?

Thus far, Ollie’s life had been difficult, but he had yet to lose anything truly precious as a result of his actions. If Ollie was going to take up the mantle of the Cypress Witch, he had to be capable of transforming himself into a guardian that continued to stand, even the losses he couldn’t prevent piled up around his feet like the water around the roots of a cypress tree.

”I believe in you, Ollie,” the Ashlynn in his vision said as she began to teach him how to feel the energy within the plants of the garden. ”And even if this is hard, I believe you’ll grow even stronger once you’ve learned these lessons.”

”Of course,” Ollie said, cheerfully focusing on the cucumber plant surrounded by weeds, blissfully oblivious to the things that awaited him at the end of the trial. This wasn’t what he’d expected his trial to be like, but as long as he could learn how to take care of the people who mattered to him, then he intended to learn as much as he could, eagerly anticipating the look on Milo, Juni and Old Nan’s faces when he returned after becoming a witch.