Asha

Asha is one of the three witches whose shared quest gives “The Fountain of Fair Fortune” its movement from private misfortune toward mutual aid. She begins hoping that the Fountain will cure an illness beyond the Healers’ power, but the journey brings an unexpected reversal: her tears answer the Worm’s demand, and Altheda’s practical knowledge cures her before she reaches the water. No longer needing the Fountain for herself, Asha yields her chance to Altheda.

Identity and Burden

Asha is introduced among the crowd gathered before the garden on the appointed day, when people of different ages, means, and magical ability hope to reach the Fountain. She is one of three witches who meet at the outskirts of the crowd and tell one another their troubles as they wait for sunrise. Her particular burden is an illness that no Healer can cure; she hopes the Fountain will end her symptoms and give her a long, happy life.

The three women respond to one another with pity rather than rivalry. They agree that, if any of them gets the opportunity, they will join forces to reach the Fountain together. That promise establishes Asha as part of a group whose progress depends on cooperation, even though the Fountain’s annual promise is framed around a single fortunate visitor.

The Attempt to Reach the Fountain

At sunrise, a gap opens in the garden wall and the crowd surges toward it. Creepers reach out from the garden and catch Asha first. She grabs Altheda’s wrist, Altheda holds Amata’s robes, and Amata catches on the armor of a knight on a thin horse. The three witches are pulled through the opening together, with the knight dragged along behind them. Asha’s first place in the chain determines the group’s entry, but it does not give her solitary control of the quest: their fates are physically linked from the outset.

On the way up the hill, the group meets a Worm that blocks their passage and demands proof of their pain. The knight’s attempt to fight it fails when his sword breaks; Altheda throws rocks, and Asha and Amata try spells, but neither magic nor force moves the creature. As the sun rises higher, Asha despairs and begins to weep. The Worm drinks the tears from her face, its thirst is satisfied, and it slithers away. The episode turns her visible suffering into the means by which all four travelers can continue. Her tears are not a deliberate tactic: the obstacle yields after she can no longer hold back her distress.

Cure and Change of Purpose

After crossing the stream by means of Amata’s sacrifice of happy memories, the travelers reach the summit, where the Fountain appears amid rare herbs and flowers. Before they can decide who should bathe, Asha collapses. Exhausted by the climb, she is close to death and in such agony that she begs her companions not to touch her.

Altheda responds by gathering herbs she thinks may help, mixing them with water from the knight’s gourd, and giving Asha the potion. Asha is immediately able to stand, and the symptoms of her illness disappear. She declares that she is cured and has no need of the Fountain, then offers Altheda the chance to bathe. The turn is significant: Asha’s original hope was for a cure and a long, happy life, but the cure arrives through another traveler’s knowledge, before the group uses the Fountain at all.

Altheda, in turn, is gathering more herbs because she sees a way to earn money by curing the disease. She passes the opportunity onward, telling Amata to bathe instead. Asha’s generosity therefore helps set in motion a succession of relinquished chances rather than a straightforward victory by the person who first reaches the spring.

Narrative Role and Significance

Asha’s plot is built around two different responses to suffering. At the Worm, her tears satisfy a demand that force and spellcraft cannot meet; at the summit, her companions relieve the illness that had defined her hope for the Fountain. In both episodes, the group advances not through superior magical power but through attention to need: the Worm’s thirst is answered by Asha’s grief, and Asha’s crisis is met by Altheda’s practical care.

Her decision to give Altheda her turn marks a change from seeking a personal remedy to recognizing that she no longer needs the promised reward. The story does not give Asha a further individual fate in the supplied account, but her cure and choice contribute to its central pattern: the travelers’ troubles are addressed through cooperation, and the Fountain’s value is tested against forms of help they can offer one another.