Chapter 705: Deconstructing Faith
Isabell thought she’d prepared herself during the carriage ride. She thought that she was ready to enter this world of Eldritch people and witchcraft. Last night, despite everything she’d seen, from the strange sham of a tribunal for the traitor to the calm, matter-of-fact way that Ashlynn had revealed the truth that Marcel was a vampire, she felt like she was ready to approach Ashlynn’s world with an open mind.
Now, however, with an Eldritch woman in front of her, a witch no less, holding out a goblet of.. Of a potion that the woman insisted would help her, she found it difficult to make a move.
"Would it be easier if I left it for you and gave you time alone?" Heila asked, sensing the other woman’s reluctance. "I won’t take offense. I still remember how Lady Ashlynn was when she first woke up here. I looked after her then, and that’s why she asked me to look after you now, but I won’t force anything on you."
"No, it’s fine," Isabell said, taking the goblet from the diminutive, horned woman’s hand. Thinking of it as medicine helped, and when she remembered how often she’d told her children to drink their medicine down and how exasperated she felt when they wined and pleaded about the bitter taste of herbs, she found her resistance crumbling. After all, what kind of parent would she be if she didn’t do as she told her children to?
Keeping the image of her children’s faces as they pleaded not to drink their medicine firmly in mind, Isabell raised the cup to her lips and drank it all down, imagining herself to be setting an example, even if the person who needed the example set was herself.
The greenish liquid wasn’t thick the way she’d expected, nor did it have the same bitter taste as the medicine prepared by the apothecaries she was used to visiting. Instead, it was light and sweet, like the juice of freshly squeezed cucumbers, with only a faint taste of fresh, minty herbs and the slightest hint of very weak wine.
"How long does it take to," she started to say, only to trail off in amazement as she felt a soothing coolness spreading through her body, from her throat and her stomach until it reached the top of her head and the tips of her toes.
The feeling of salt in her eyes and the tight, squeezing pain that gripped her head faded away like fog in a stiff breeze, leaving only the barest memory of discomfort behind. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought she hadn’t drunk a single drop last night, to say nothing of drinking Ashlynn’s potent wine until she was close to blacking out.
"That, that is amazing," Isabel said, marveling as she stared at the goblet in disbelief. "It feels... fresh. Natural. Is all witchcraft like this? Does it require some kind of sacrifice to make it? ’One must suffer so another can heal?’" Isabell asked, thinking back over everything she’d heard from the Church about witchcraft over the years.
The potion didn’t feel evil, it was completely the opposite. Or, not exactly opposite, she corrected herself. It didn’t feel evil, but it didn’t feel holy either. Natural really was the best word to describe what it felt like, as if it was simple and ordinary, formed of things grown in a garden instead of the result of ’demonic’ or ’dark magic.’
Perhaps there was something insidious about having witchcraft feel like part of the natural, living world, but as Isabell struggled to think of the sweet-looking young woman in front of her as being somehow insidious. Rather, between what Ashlynn had said last night and the woman in front of her now, it was becoming easier and easier to regard the Church’s teachings as suspect.
Isabell had never been particularly devout. Years of bloody civil war in the Emerald Kingdom had eroded her faith in a way that few people in the Kingdom of Gaal ever experienced. To her countrymen, fighting against the demons was natural and holy. It was a clash between those who were clearly good and ’creatures’ that were ’twisted by their own evil.’