Chapter 269: Learning From Sister Holly’s Failure
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.