The Witch's Daughter (The Witch's Daughter, #1)

by Paula Brackston

She could taste the woodland on her tongue: the moss, the silver lichen, the rising sap of the trees.

Imbolg is my favorite time of year to find a new home, signifying as it does looking forward to rebirth and renewal.

There is comfort to be had in the company of wild things and delight to be found in their trust.

The heavens know I am accustomed to keeping my own company; it cannot be said to be an unfamiliar state for me. Nonetheless, there is but a spasm between solitude and loneliness.

I was enfolded in her limitless motherly love, and I would breathe in her own sweet smell. She had such patience. Such tenderness. Such determination to teach me all that she knew, to share with me all her wonderful knowledge. It is the cruelest of the torments of my great age that grief does not abate, not beyond a certain level. It merely continues, my only companion across oceans of time.

Holly is one of the most protective plants to set about a garden, and I would not be without it.

She loved the woodland and yet had always the sense that in stepping into its leafy embrace she was entering another realm. Here things were hidden and secret. All manner of possibilities dwelled in the tangled roots and verdant undergrowth. The trees provided a place unknowable and mysterious for shy and mythical creatures to abide in. It was a place of fairies and sprites and wood nymphs. A place of magic.

The winds of political change had buffeted it this way and that, and throughout it all, the village and its people had seen survival in acceptance and flexibility.

Although she would not dare voice such thoughts to a living soul, Bess herself could not see evidence of all this love. Where was it to be found? Not in the poverty and hunger that afflicted everyone if the crops failed and the harvest was bad. Not in the cruel stamp of disease as it strode through families, crushing the weak and the old beneath its feet. Not in the agonies suffered in childbirth nor the grief of losing children.

“We have to keep her alive in our hearts, Bess. That is where she truly dwells now, not in the earth, in our hearts. In us.” Anne’s gaze fell upon John’s grave. “They are all safe in our hearts.”