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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."

According to Amahle, it was rare for her coven to concoct much during the oppressive summer months.

They had settled into a natural rhythm where her coven spent most of the spring and summer harvesting their gardens and foraging in the surrounding wilderness before using the relatively cooler winters to do their concocting for the year.

More than once, Amahle had hinted that Ashlynn should stay through the winter and return to the Vale of Mists when the passes opened again in the spring but the former noblewoman refused to spend so long away from the Vale of Mists.

She already felt an increasing anxiety about what Owain and his family were doing while she was away, being gone even longer would only make it worse.

More importantly, Nyrielle had promised her a trip back to Blackwell County during the winter months when the nights were long.

They would have to move carefully and Ashlynn would need to conceal her identity for most of the journey but once she returned, she would find a way to speak to her parents to discover who had betrayed her and revealed her mark’s existence to Owain.

"What are you concocting this time?" Heila asked as she looked over at the open book on Ashlynn’s workbench. Amahle had instructed them both in the things she considered essential foundations but after that, she’d set them both loose with instructions to make anything they thought would be useful and that they felt confident in attempting.

The Mother of Thorns still visited regularly to check up on them, as did Talauia and Jacques, but for the past week, Ashlynn and Heila had enjoyed considerable freedom in what they made.

"This one is called ’Scholar’s Clarity’," Ashlynn said without turning away from her concoction.

Once it reached the thickness she required, she would need to begin the incantation that infused a combination of wood and fire energy into the thick paste, transforming it from a medicinal paste that any apothecary could produce into something that only witches and a select few sorcerers or artificers could make.

"You rub it into your temples and it banishes the fatigue and headaches that come with studying and helps to strengthen your ability to remember what you’ve read," Ashlynn explained. "We’ve both been reading so much, I thought it would help, especially when the heat makes it so hard to think."

"Ashlynn, you..." Heila said, her voice trailing off as her hands paused in gathering herbs.

Ashlynn had taken to the heavy studying load like a fish to water.

She’d spent so many of her formative years in the Blackwell library and under the guidance of tutors that studying under Amahle felt almost like a return to her younger days as a student before she began preparing for her marriage to Owain.

Heila, on the other hand, had grown up in a common family in the Vale of Mists.

She’d followed her mother into service in the castle as a common maid until Zedya picked her to be Ashlynn’s attendant.

While she’d learned to read and write along with other servants in the castle, she had never spent much time on books and learning beyond the basics that everyone was required to learn.

In order to keep up with Amahle’s rapid pace of instruction, Heila had taken to staying up late at night, using a potion called ’Essence of Sleep’ to spend as little as two hours a night actually sleeping while she dedicated the rest of her time to reading by lamplight.

But even though the potions could provide the energy of a night’s sleep to the body, they did little for the fatigue of the mind.

"You think I didn’t notice how late your lamps have been lit at night when you go back to your hut?

" Ashlynn teased lightly. "I know it’s been hard," Ashlynn said in a gentle tone. "Honestly, I think we’re both working too hard right now, but we only have so much time here before we have to go home and I’m afraid that with a war coming. .."

"That’s why I won’t tell you that you shouldn’t do what you’re doing," Ashlynn said solemnly. "But, I don’t like to see my friend suffer. Since this potion requires a bit of fire magic ’to spark insight’, I thought it would be best if I made it.

And really, it’s for both of us, so you don’t have to give me that look," she added with a gentle smile.

"No, you’re right, but," Heila said haltingly as she tried to sift through the many emotions Ashlynn’s potion had stirred within her petite chest for the words she wanted to say. "Thank you," she said, choosing the simplest expression of gratitude for what she felt.

There were many thoughts and feelings she left unsaid behind those simple words.

Heila’s world had changed almost as much as Ashlynn’s had in the time since they met and at moments like this, the diminutive horned woman wondered what her parents would think of the way that she and Ashlynn were currently trading expensive potions as if they were sweets from the kitchens.

For Heila, brewing a batch of cooling drops to help Ashlynn resist the summer heat felt natural, like something she should do.

The fact that Ashlynn reciprocated with a concoction of her own to help Heila study still felt like an overwhelming honor, but slowly, that feeling was beginning to wear away, replaced by a more intimate friendship where the two women were much, much closer to equals than Heila had ever imagined they would be.

For the Mother of Trees, or the Seneschal of the Vale of Mists to bestow a gift on a lowly servant would carry a weight heavier than gold.

But slowly, Hiela felt less and less like Ashlynn’s servant and more like a part of her family.

And for family to gift each other with a few useful items.. . That was only natural, right?

Since it was only natural, Heila smiled to herself as she returned to her own preparatory work.

She had her own end of the potion trade to keep up, and she refused to let Ashlynn down.

Not because she was Ashlynn’s lady-in-waiting, but because they were family and she wanted to be family that Ashlynn could depend on.