“I form’d them free, and free they must remain” (John Milton, Paradise Lost)

Each morning, before the sun rolls out of his shadowy mountain bed to stretch his golden limbs across the sky, a witch walks down the winding paths of her beautiful high-walled garden. While the swallows whistle their haunting tunes, she plants and prunes, hollowing out wombs of soil to nourish her seeds and cutting back wild limbs and weeds. Beneath her weathered fingers, her garden grows like a child, blooming in scents and colors so precious that world-weary people gather at its eastern gate in pilgrimage, seeking solace in the swaying leaves. The witch, whose ancient heart has known both joy and despair, welcomes all into her garden, so they may find comfort as they nurse at the tangled vines of paradise. 

***

The witch had spent her childhood free as a bird in the high-walled garden, until that terrible day when her own godmother, a renowned wise woman and the most powerful witch of them all, had locked her in a tower. The tower was in the middle of the forest, a day’s journey from the lovely garden. On blustery days, the western wind had carried the smell of the garden to the lonely girl so that her tears mingled with the fragrance of jasmine, lilacs, and lily of the valley. 

She had begged to run barefoot through the wooded paths and feel the silky kiss of petals upon her skin once more, but her godmother had only looked at her with disdain. The girl’s slender body was beginning to curve like ripening fruit. Her golden hair unfurled around her waist in long, ivy-like tendrils. 

“A seed grows in darkness and isolation,” her godmother had said, silencing the girl’s pleas for freedom with a powerful wave of her hands. “So it must be for you.” 

When the girl first saw the prince standing beneath her window, she believed she must have cast a spell to manifest him, pollinating her own loneliness like the purple slipper orchids pollinated themselves during years of severe draught when insects were scarce. If not for the weight of his body as he slowly climbed her long, plaited hair, she would have thought him an apparition, the ghost of a fallen warrior whose sword and shield shone silver in the moonlight. 

The first time the prince had crossed the threshold of the tower’s stone casement, the girl had cried out in fear, but when he spoke to her with kindness, she felt herself open to him like a morning glory unfolds to the greet the light of dawn. His cheek, furry like the gray-green leaves of African violets, brushed close to hers. His hard muscles pressed against her as she wilted into his arms. 

Even now, after dozens of years, she can still close her eyes in the solitude of evening and feel the phantom heat of him against her. She can still smell the damp odor of forest foliage clinging to his half-discarded clothes. She still smiles at the thought of their secret nights together, still shivers at the memory of his calloused hands caressing her rounding belly, but then her dreams dissolve into the sharp bite of shears scraping against her scalp, her golden curls spilling over the tower stones like sheaves of harvested wheat. She awakens to the sound of her own heart-wrenching scream as she remembers falling toward the thorns. 

She must remind herself that she and her prince did find their happily-ever-after, even though it was tainted by her loss of the only mother she had ever known. Her godmother did not attend her royal wedding, where bouquets of white flowers flowed from every surface in the grand banquet hall of the king’s castle. Her godmother never met her daughter or her son, who proudly escorted her down the candlelit aisle where she pledged her eternal love to their father, the prince. Her godmother never walked through the palace rose gardens where riotous swirls of ruby red bushes, carefully stripped of thorns, bloomed each year to mark the couple’s summer anniversary. She was not there when the prince, who had become a beloved king, succumbed to an infectious blight. She did not help her widowed goddaughter plant her husband beneath the hallowed ground of the castle’s graveyard. She never met her goddaughter’s only granddaughter, whose beautiful blonde ringlets bounced like sunlight frolicking through fields of gold. 

Her godmother had never asked for forgiveness, but, in the end, the girl, by then a crone and a powerful witch herself, chose to forgive her anyway. She had returned to her tower prison in the forest to find the stone walls covered in mold. The stench of rot and mildew hung in the air. Her dying godmother said nothing to her, but she lifted a gnarled finger to caress the shorn hair that her goddaughter had always worn as a battle scar.

The witch buried her godmother in the high-walled garden, beneath the fat pink peonies they had planted together on her seventh birthday, one of the few happy memories that still flowered among the weedy recollections of her adolescent imprisonment. The land had been neglected for years, but the sorcery of her godmother, whose love of the earth had once birthed the garden into being, seeped from the grave like compost, and the garden began to bloom again. Word spread of the garden’s beauty, and pilgrims flocked to the eastern gate once more, eager to breathe in the healing scent of the hyacinths, suck the sweet nectars of the orchard fruits, and taste the elixirs brewed from the herbs and flowers that flourished in the rich soil. 

The witch, whose children were now busy with kingdoms of their own, decided to stay and look after the garden where her life had begun. Her cropped hair grew as quickly as the vegetation, and soon silvery white locks danced around her thick waist like swirls of falling winter snow. 

Some of the villagers thought the witch was the same sorceress who had first planted the garden. Others thought she was a fairy or a goddess who had tended the plants with her magic for thousands of years. No one realized that only a few short decades before, the witch had been a helpless and forsaken child, discarded for and named after the curling green leaves of lettuce that grew in profusion along the garden’s western wall. 

***

As the witch walked down the winding path of the garden one autumn morning, she noticed strange footsteps in the mud. They were in the far section of the garden where measured rows of rampion and evening primrose ran through thick hedges of mugwort, wormwood, and scotch broom. Beyond tall stalks of sorghum and clusters of yarrow were stinging nettle and deadly nightshade, plants which could bring about pain and death as surely as they could provoke pleasure. 

The witch dropped to her knees, running her hands across the dirt to feel for signs of disturbances. Her patch of parsley plants, flat leafed and curly, their bright green stalks shining against the woody stems of surrounding thyme and sagebrush, had been viciously uprooted, their fronds ripped apart and their stems torn up from the ground. The savage attack on the garden made the witch feel nauseous, and her fingers touched the parsley shaped birthmark that still blushed pink upon her breast. She had always felt an affinity with the herb her own mother had desired beyond reason, the herb that shared her childhood name. 

That evening, when the sun set below the forest horizon, the witch hid herself in a pool of darkness behind the thick trunk of an apple tree, determined to catch and punish the thief who left such careless destruction behind.  She rolled a fallen apple between her wrinkled hands and waited, her eyes, as keen as they had been in her girlhood, peeled for the first sign of an intrusion. 

It was long past the toll of midnight when a hooded figure repelled down the high wall and dropped noiselessly into the garden. The birds were just beginning to stir in their nests and within hours their warbled notes would pierce the inky dawn, but the air was still hushed enough to hear the labored breath of the cloaked figure as it crouched in the bed of parsley and tore through the leaves with ravenous hunger.

The witch rose to her full height, her long hair blowing wild in the breeze like venomous snakes. “How dare you steal from my garden!” she yelled, her voice stern with fury. The thief let out a cry of surprise and fell backward into the soil.

It was a young girl, with flowing dark hair, shielding her barely rounding womb with her dirt-streaked fingers. Suddenly, the witch understood why the intruder had tried to devour the parsley in such massive quantities. The herb would restore a female’s cycle, but it could have dangerous consequences if ingested incorrectly.

“I’m sorry,” the young girl whimpered, tears streaming down her cheeks. She swallowed hard, opening her lips to explain herself, but the witch stopped her with a powerful wave of her hands. She had heard all the reasons before: “My parents cannot find out.” “We didn’t mean for it to happen.” “I could not stop him.” “We can’t afford it.” “I am sick.” “I will die.” 

None of them mattered.

The young girl tightened her hold on her body as the cautionary tales of her childhood  circulated through her frightened mind. People had warned her of an evil sorceress who would exact a harrowing price from those who stole parsley from her garden. 

“Will you make me give you my baby to pay for what I have taken?” she sobbed, suddenly protective of the life she had been trying to escape. 

The witch wondered if her own mother had looked as scared as this young girl when she had stood in this very garden, her lips stained with parsley juices, bargaining away her only child. The witch felt dizzy with the endless repetition human life, its sunshine and storms returning season after season like the blossoms of a perennial shrub. She had long wondered what she would have done if she had been her mother or her godmother that night so long ago when her own fate had been negotiated between them. She had no power to change the past, but she had a choice in shaping the future.

She chose to kneel on the earth beside the shaking girl. 

She chose to take the girl’s hand in hers.

“What happens to your baby is not my choice to make,” she whispered, the stern tone of her voice melting into kindness, “but you must be careful not to poison yourself by eating too many leaves.” 

A damp breeze rustled in the trees. The crisp scent of apples purled around them. 

The witch had been an unwanted child. She had also been a child so desired that she had been locked in a tower where she might grow up safe from the outside world. She had birthed her twins in pain and fear. She had raised them with happiness and love. She had held the sweet, wriggling warmth of newborn grandchildren in her arms, and she had witnessed the heart-wrenching pain of countless women who had suffered from circumstances so devastating that the heavens themselves wounded the earth with weeping. 

“You are free to make your own choice,” she said, lifting a gnarled finger and slowly caressing the petals of the girl’s silky hair, “and when you are ready, I can help you make sure that your choice is a safe one.”

The girl, who had known only pain and hardship, whose actions had always been met with swift, unyielding rebuke, who had never known a soul in whom she could confide, collapsed in tears of gratitude against the witch’s velvet cloak. The winds circled gently around the pair of women, one young and one old, the witch’s white hair twisting and twirling into the girl’s nut-brown tresses. 

“I don’t know what is going to happen to me,” the girl cried, her words a desperate, human moan.

The witch put her arm around the frightened child. Then she let her healing tears of compassion spill across the girl’s shoulders like life-sustaining rains, nourishing her, and letting her know that she was not alone. 

The women sat, together, under the shades of night, until the fading stars yielded their sky-borne position to the rising sun, and his golden light flooded the earth with warmth and hope once more.

***

In the middle of a dark forest, a day’s journey from a crumbling tower, there stands a beautiful high-walled garden blooming with herbs and flowers. Each morning, a witch, whose ancient heart has known both joy and despair, walks down the winding paths as the swallows whistle their haunting tunes. Although she is so old that no one remembers her name, she still plants and prunes, hollowing out wombs of soil to nourish her seeds and cutting back wild limbs and weeds. Beneath her weathered fingers, her garden grows like a child, organic and free, offering safe haven and sweet comfort to all who seek solace from the world’s endlessly raging storms.

[Kelly Jarvis works as the Assistant Editor for The Fairy Tale Magazine where she writes stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and interviews. Her poetry has also been featured or is forthcoming inBlue Heron Review, Mermaids Monthly, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, The Magic of Us, A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, and Corvid Queen. Her short fiction has appeared in The Chamber Magazine and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/]