The Vampire & Her Witch

”So from here on out, we’re ’on our own’ unless something catastrophic happens,” Ashlynn said, looking from Jacques to Talauia and receiving a nod from both of them.

”Jus’ keep it simple, Auntie,” Jacques said. ”Ain’t no need for nothing fancy. Get what you came for and we can get going home.”

”That’s right, that’s right,” Talauia added with a flutter of her wings as she stepped off the boat to hover in the air above them. ”Pretend we’re not even here,” she added, fighting every reflex she had to not focus on the places where she could hear predators moving through the water or among the trees. This was Ashlynn and Heila’s choice, their test, and she wouldn’t be caught giving them any hints. She wouldn’t, no matter how hard it was to resist.

”We understand,” Ashlynn said with a smile before she turned to Heila. ”Like Jacques said, our first goal is in the direction where the witch-moss glows. Heila, can you take us there?”

”Yes, my lady,” Heila said with a nervous smile. Her grass-green eyes flickered around the boat, looking for any signs of disturbances on the water or anything lurking among the cypress knees that might pose a threat before she got to work.

From a small leather sheath at her waist, she withdrew an intricately carved wand, nearly ten inches in length. Building the wand had taken her an entire week, carving ancient glyphs into the tips of three soft and pliable willow branches given to her by the Ancient Willow. The hardest part had been tracing out the pattern for the glyphs, remembering that their positions would shift once she braided the three pieces of willow into her final wand and bound the ends with bands of silver.

Once she’d completed the wand, it quickly began to feel like it was a living part of her. With the slender wand held lightly between her fingers, she felt almost as though her arm had grown longer and her fingers could reach as far as her eyes could see to gather up the energy of the world and shape it as she desired.

”Like endless tides that never tire,

Let currents flow as I desire.”

Heila’s words were simple as was her intention but she wanted the practice of working with the wand now. When her last word spilled from her lips, it flowed across the inky black surface of the water, like a single ripple from a stone dropped into the depths below them, reaching out more than a hundred feet away before the ripple rebounded, flowing back towards them and lapping gently against the sides of their boat.

”That way,” Heila whispered as she focused on the magic she’d gathered for her use and pointed with her wand in the direction of the glowing moss. It took a moment for the water to gather enough strength to move a boat that carried three people and all of the baskets they’d brought for collecting things. After a moment that was too short to draw a deep breath, the boat began to move as the currents of the waterway shifted at the Willow Witch’s direction, gently moving them along the path through the water that Heila matched Heila’s desires.

Ashlynn smiled at Heila’s calm, controlled use of the abundant water energy in the Briar. While Ashlynn could have executed the same spell, Heila had already left her behind in the practice of subtle and gentle magics like this. If Ashlynn had attempted to do what Heila was currently doing with apparent ease, she had no doubt that the result would have been a shaky ride propelled by cresting waves that resembled to the ocean she’d grown up beside.

While it might seem wasteful to use witchcraft when they had a perfectly serviceable paddle, this was one of the strategies Ashlynn had developed to make up for the lack of Talauia or Jacques’s thorny auras. By shifting the currents around their boat, they could manage a less obtrusive passage through the water and attract less attention than they would have by plunging a paddle constantly beneath the surface of the water.

Their progress was slow but steady as Heila gained experience and confidence navigating between the smaller islands and cypress knees that dotted the waterway. The further they went into the Deep Water region, the more Ashlynn strained her enhanced senses to the limit, peering into shadows and listening to every rustle of branches or ripple of water for anything that might pose a threat to them

Thankfully, though Ashlynn felt several times as if she was being stared at from places just out of sight, nothing made any moves against them before they reached their first destination.

The island Heila brought them to played host to more than a dozen mighty cypress trees, each more than a hundred years old with trunks more than five feet in diameter, though approaching within a dozen feet of their trunks was only possible from one or two directions as the rest were blocked by piles of thorny blackberry vines that wrapped around the bulbous cypress knees as though they were the supports of a hedge fence.

”There,” Ashlynn said, pointing at a cluster of pure white flowers on a lonely-looking magnolia tree on the opposite end of the island. ”I count at least two dozen mature blossoms,” she said as they ran the boat aground and set out across the small island on foot. ”We should be able to take eight without doing much harm.”

One of Amahle’s most important lessons for the pair of newly minted witches had been that they should never take more than a third of any available flower or herb unless circumstances demanded an exception. Over-harvesting could quickly disrupt the native ecology with both immediate consequences like fewer herbs growing back the following year to things that were far more dire and less predictable without an in-depth understanding of how different parts of the ecosystem connected to each other.

Ashlynn had seen this herself when she followed the advice of an old text to plant a butterfly bush in her vegetable garden at Blackwell Manor. The bush grew quickly and produced flowers constantly, attracting not only butterflies but bees and other insects.

Jocelynn thought the plant was a nuisance and refused to visit her garden that summer, but by the end of the growing season, Ashlynn found that her harvests had been considerably more bountiful than the year before even though she did nothing different aside from planting the butterfly bush nearby.

Looking at the magnolia tree and the many buds that had yet to bloom, it was entirely possible that they could strip the tree bare of its current blossoms without harming anything. Or, if not bare, perhaps they could take half or even two-thirds. But without knowing for sure how that could affect the rest of the environment, Ashlynn wasn’t willing to take risks driven by greed or lazy thinking. She was still a student and she had a long way to go before she felt she would be wise enough to disregard Amahle’s advice.

”Ashlynn,” Heila said, pausing as she looked around the island. ”I don’t think I can help much with the magnolia,” she said, holding a hand out at the height of her head. The lowest blossoms on the magnolia tree were at least two feet above her head and many of them were even higher. ”But I think that’s Lizard’s Tail growing among the blackberries by the water’s edge. I’ll collect those while you gather the magnolia blossoms?”

For a moment, Ashlynn considered telling Heila no, that they should stick together even if one of them was idle while the other worked. But, looking at the pale white Lizards Tails that grew deep in the tangled blackberry vines, Ashlynn realized that she wouldn’t be able to approach anywhere near as many of them as Heila would.

”I don’t like splitting up in general,” Ashlynn said as she thought through Heila’s suggestion. ”But it’s not a very big island. Whistle if there’s trouble, I think shouting would attract unwelcome attention,” she said, looking around the island again.

The feeling of being watched had come and gone as they moved through the Deep Water region but here on the island, the feeling had returned again, even though she couldn’t see anything.

”I don’t like it either,” Heila said. Adjusting her Hedge Hat and running her fingers over the different loops that were there to hold her harvest, Heila turned in the direction of the tangles of blackberries and the Lizard Tail blossoms she intended to take as her prize for braving the wicked thorns. ”But if we split the work, we’ll be done in half the time,” she said hopefully.

Meanwhile, in the branches high above them, several pairs of black and yellow eyes turned to follow the women as they split up. A few pairs of eyes looked at the boat and the reptilian man waiting there in the company of a winged woman but most dismissed the pair as too far away to get in their way if they made a move.

By the time anyone could react to their presence, it would already be too late.