Chapter 303: Practical Potions
In the Briar, a month had passed since Heila completed her transformation and became Ashlynn’s Willow Witch. During that time, true to her word, Amahle had drilled both women on the fundamentals of witchcraft.
The increasing heat of the Briar pressed down on them and made the hot days seem endless and the slightly cooler nights feel far too brief. Within a week of Heila’s reawakening, both women from the Vale of Mists abandoned their long skirts for the shorter, divided skirts favored by the villages across the lake. Similarly, Ashlynn found herself going barefoot whenever possible and when it wasn’t, she was much more comfortable in simple woven sandals than in the short ankle boots she’d arrived in.
At first, Ashlynn had felt that Talauia was bold for flashing her porcelain legs as often as she did, but now that they’d reached the height of summer, Ashlynn realized that there was nothing bold about it at all. She felt anything but attractive as sweat rolled down between her full breasts and soaked the underbust of her sleeveless tunic and the feeling of unbearable heat was made even worse by her proximity to a bubbling cauldron and the fire beneath it. If she’d tried to maintain her old wardrobe, she’d only have felt worse.
"I still think I should cut my hair short," Ashlynn grumbled as she stirred the simmering concoction. The scent of fragrant herbs filled the air along with a musty, pungent scent from ground valerian root that still clung to the mortar and pestle on Ashlynn’s workbench.
"Should I make another batch of cooling drops for you, my lady?" Heila asked, looking up from her own work. More than a dozen different herbs lay on the table in front of her, along with a set of scales and precise weights for measuring each of them but the young Willow Witch had yet to begin assembling her concoction.
"No," Ashlynn said as she paused to inspect her concoction. As the liquid thickened, she’d found that she had to pay extra attention to scraping the bottom and sides of her cauldron or it would burn, just like a stew left too long unattended. Only, if a stew burned to the bottom of the pot, the worst that happened was that you threw out a batch of stew. If a potion burned to the bottom of the pot, the results could range from creating toxic clouds of gas to setting off small explosions.
"I can’t interrupt your lessons every time I feel uncomfortable," Ashlynn said. If she really wanted cooling drops to get through the oppressive heat, she was entirely capable of making her own it was just that Heila’s affinity for water magic was so much greater than hers that Ashlynn’s concoction frequently yielded only half as much as Heila’s would for the same amount of starting ingredients.
"I don’t mind," Heila said as she started gathering another set of herbs. "Practice is practice and the cooling drops are useful. It isn’t a bad thing to get better at making them. It’ll be harder to practice once we go home until we’ve had a chance to grow our own gardens."
"Wait till I’m done with this one before you start reducing yours," Ashlynn said as she returned to stirring. "One fire is already almost too much, I don’t think I could bear two at once."