Chapter 458: Just A Woman
For a moment, Ashlynn sat stiffly in Nyrielle’s tight embrace, stunned by the powerful vampire’s words. The seed of witchcraft she was growing beside her heart had been there for several months now. She placed it there not long after Heila completed her trials so that she could take the time to nurture this seed properly, without subjecting its recipient to the added strain that came from attempting to receive a seed from an Ancient Tree.
The seed had been there for so long, in fact, that Ashlynn herself barely thought about it. She showered it with her own energy and strength in the same way that she watered her herb garden in the Briar of her vegetable garden at Blackwell Manor. It was something simple and routine that she did with little thought.
When it came to the battle against the spirits possessing Hauke, the idea that she could reclaim all of that energy from the seed and use it in the battle or use it to heal herself had never occurred to her. Not once did the thought enter her mind. She hadn’t chosen to make her battle harder in order to preserve the seed, it had just never occurred to her to use it that way.
But Nyrielle was much older than her, and while she knew little about witchcraft, her knowledge about sorcery was extensive, and her experience with battles was much, much greater than Ashlynn’s.
To Nyrielle, it must have seemed like the most ordinary of things to use the energy contained within the seed like using water carried from a well. It didn’t matter what you had drawn the bucket of water for originally, if you happened on a fire, using the water in the bucket you already had to put out the fire was so obvious that a child would think of it.
But Ashlynn, who in many ways was still very new to using her powers, hadn’t thought of it, and because of that, Nyrielle came to believe that her lover valued the seed more than she valued her own safety.
"My love," Ashlynn said as she finally came to understand. Gently, she wrapped her arms around Nyrielle and shifted her position in the warm, steaming waters so she could pull the other woman’s head close to her chest. "I just realized something," she said with a slight smile tugging at the corner of her curved lips.
"All this time," Ashlynn said softly as she stroked Nyrielle’s raven dark hair. "You’ve always been the strongest person I could imagine. The wisest, most knowledgeable, most perfect person," she said, leaning down to bestow a kiss on the crown of Nyrielle’s head. "But you’re so, so much more than that."
"You’re avoiding the question," Nyrielle said in a tone that was a touch petulant. Pulling back from Ashlynn, she stared into her darling’s eyes with eyes that had grown red and puffy, something that Ashlynn had never seen from her before and the vampire herself hadn’t felt in countless years. "Why was the seed more important than protecting yourself?"
"Is it for..." Nyrielle started, trembling as a name fluttered through her mind. Ollie, the former kitchen boy, came to mind first, but she quickly dismissed the notion. Her Ashlynn might care for the stray she’d taken in, but did she really have feelings that ran so deep that she would endure such agonizing wounds for him?
Other notions occurred to her and were discarded equally quickly. She had promised to take Ashlynn home to her family this winter, but it felt much too soon to prepare a seed for any of her family members... unless she thought it might resolve her father’s issues with the succession by extending his life? But even then, it didn’t feel like something she would endure so much for when she didn’t know whether her family could accept her witchcraft or not.
And yet, the notion that she might use the seed to resolve a political problem facing her own family triggered a thought that was much, much darker and burrowed into Nyrielle’s mind like the roots of an insidious weed, refusing to let her look away from it once it had slipped into her thoughts. Ashlynn had proposed many methods to build peace with humans, but one thing she had never suggested was repairing her relationship with the man she had married.