The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1023: Isabell’s Mark (Part One)

Isabell needed to lift her skirts almost all the way to her hip in order to reveal the dark green mark in the shape of a tree that had formed on her hip over the course of her trial.

The base of the three rested just above her knee on the outside of her leg. From there, the tree’s trunk stretched upward, almost a third of the way up her thigh before a series of branches appeared. The ’branches’ of her mark weren’t very wide, less than a handsbreadth across at their widest and they tapered sharply to an arrow-like point at the top of the tree, stretching two thirds of the distance from her knee to her hip.

Going the other direction, the tree seemed to possess five ’roots’ that meandered downward, but one of those roots was very different from the others. Most of the roots were short and fairly stubby, though two of them were clearly longer than their two shortest peers.

But the root at the center of the tree wrapped all the way around her leg, as though it were choking off the other roots before it plunged further down her leg, only stopping when it was half way down her calf.

"I knew it would be different," Ashlynn breathed softly as she inspected the mark. "I just didn’t expect it to be that different," she said as she tried to process what she was seeing. She expected the shape of her friend’s tree to be different from the others in the coven, after all, both the Oak and the Cypress tree were fairly well rounded and even the Willow tree had a strong sense of duality to it.

But Isabell’s mark went far beyond the sort of variations that Ashlynn had expected to see when she selected the Hemlock tree for the Master Engineer, and the things that made Isabell’s mark unique were so shocking that Ashlynn’s hand froze on the iron crank as she momentarily forgot to keep rotating the spiced fish by the hearth.

"Is there something wrong with it?" Isabell asked. Of all of the changes in her body, this was the one that she had the most apprehension about. She might have left the Church behind long ago, in the days of the bloody civil war of the Emerald Kingdom, but some teachings were buried too deeply to easily set aside, and the nearly instinctive horror and fear that came with seeing a mark of the witch was one of them.

More than that, the mark was a sign that she’d crossed a line that she could never come back from. Now, like Ashlynn, there was something visibly different about her that, if the Church ever saw it, would be an automatic death sentence for heresy. She could hide it, just like Ashlynn had for her entire life, but she could never scrub away the mark that proclaimed her new nature to the world.

As soon as the mark appeared on her skin, whether she learned to use her power or not, whether she did anything that could be considered a crime or not, she was a witch, and the Church would treat her as one.

"There’s nothing wrong with it, necessarily," Ashlynn said as the sizzling sound of juices from the roasting fish falling onto the stones of the hearth prodded her back into action. The intensely savory aroma of garlic, thyme, and peppers filled the air, wrapping around her like a warm reminder of the days when she’d discussed the future of her coven with Amahle in the Briar.

"Could you bring me a book?" Ashlynn asked, pointing at the shelf on the opposite side of the large, circular room. "’A History of Forest Witches’, has information about my predecessors and their covens, including information about their marks. I want to be certain before I say anything."

"There’s nothing wrong with it," Ashlynn repeated quickly when she saw the increasingly worried look on her friend’s face. "You’re going to be a very skilled, very powerful witch in the future. It’s just that, the way your root is twisted... I’m sure I’ve seen something about it, but I can’t remember what."

"All right," Isabell said, crossing the room quickly to the bookshelf. When she arrived, however, she stopped and stared at the thick, leather-bound tomes in confusion. There were a few books with titles she could read: ’Plants of the Vale of Mists’, ’Heraldry of Gaal’, and some that looked like copies of much older tomes, like ’Þæt Cōd of Cnihtas’, which, if Isabell remembered her lessons, meant ’The Codes of Knights.’

The rest of the books, however, were a complete and total mystery, covered with angular characters that bore no resemblance to the familiar letters or numbers she had learned, and they comprised a majority of the books on the shelf.

"And the Church has been calling the Eldritch ’uncultured savages’ all this time," Isabell said with a bitter chuckle. "Ashlynn, this book... It’s written in the Eldritch tongue, isn’t it?"

"Oh! I’m sorry, yes," Ashlynn said, standing quickly and rushing across the room to retrieve the book. "It’s this one," she said, selecting a thick, leather-bound tome that looked like one of the newest ones on the shelf.

"Talauia made this copy," Ashlynn said with a warm smile as she ran her finger down the spine of the thick book. "I spent hours going through it with Amahle before choosing the willow tree for Heila, and I’ve gone back to it every time I choose a seed for someone else. Not everyone will use the power of their tree the same way," she added as she brought the book over to the hearth and gestured for Isabell to tend the spit while she thumbed through the pages of the book.

"Heila is a very different Willow Witch from her most recent predecessor," Ashlynn explained, pausing to linger on the familiar pages about the different men and women who had borne a willow seed over the years. "In the end, all of this just represents possibilities. Things that have come before and might come again. Whatever it says about your mark in here, it hints at possibilities, but remember, only you can decide how you’ll use your power. All right?"

"I want to say, ’just tell me and get it over with, I’m a big girl now,’" Isabell said, staring at the book in a mixture of wonder and apprehension. "But I appreciate you for helping me to prepare myself for bad news."

"Still," she said as she took a deep, steadying breath. "Like I’ve always told my little ones, once you know something bad is going to happen, you can make plans to handle it. So, tell me, how bad is the news, and what can we do about it?"