Chapter 1912 A Princess And Her Cock:>Ep3

• The Witch herself was the primary source of incongruity. Rather than a hunched crone, she looked like she was barely out of middle age. Her features were soft and pleasant, eyes twinkling with a mischievous gleam. She wore a simple blouse and skirt, the latter bunched and rumpled as if repeatedly hiked up. A gardening trowel and several loose potted herbs told the tale of what she'd been doing before the Princess and her guardian had arrived. Gardening, as opposed to eating children. If this was all a part of some magical glamour, it was a pleasant enough one.
• The matronly woman made wild and enthusiastic beckoning gestures with her whole arms. "Come in, come in! I've been waiting for you, ever since I scryed that you'd entered my forest." She didn't wait for them, entering the slanting shanty herself while leaving the door wide open. Embra and Andrea shared a look that expressed seven flavours of confusion and indecision, before settling on just getting this over with and following the Witch inside. Both had to duck under the door frame.
• As they stepped through the threshold, the hovel changed. No longer a rickety old hut, it had become a luxuriously appointed cottage! It reminded Andrea, albeit faintly, of her Uncle's hunting lodge. A place she'd been dragged to several times for family affairs, though she supposed, was probably burned to the ground by looters by now. Both buildings were built around a central hearth and surrounded by walls lined with all manner of nonsense. This one was spilling over with herbalist bric-a-brac, rather than the many trophies of unsportsmanlike hunts. The Witch was also adept at alchemy, judging by tables covered in glassware and racks of stoppered flasks stacked row on row near the back. Beakers, glass columns, and other distillation equipment sat either in use or in a state of readiness, a dozen different ingredients in tiny phials just a hand's reach away from getting ground up into some kind of distillate or essence.