The Vampire & Her Witch

”You know, there was a time that I might have agreed with you, Sir Hugo,” Ashlynn said in a tone that could only be called gentle when compared to her voice moments ago. ”But I’ve learned since then the consequences of ignoring warning signs and being blindsided by the treachery of people you should have been able to trust.”

She’d thought long and hard about why someone had betrayed her to Owain. Puzzled for hours and even days over what someone could have hoped to gain from it. Had one of her family’s servants thought that it would be a path to obtaining the favor of a powerful lord? Were they just looking for a purse full of gold?

In the end, she’d decided that it didn’t matter. She’d nearly lost her life, not just from Owain’s beating or Sir Broll’s kicks to ’prove’ that she was really dead, but from shovelful after shovelful of earth piling on top of her broken, battered body. Her life had changed forever, and for all the wonder that she’d found, she couldn’t escape the pain and nightmares that haunted her to this day.

So to Ashlynn, it didn’t matter why someone had betrayed her. She couldn’t think of a single reason that would excuse subjecting someone to what she had suffered. And so, no matter why Darragh had chosen to betray them, it wouldn’t change his fate one bit. There was no need to understand him because he’d crossed one of the few lines that she absolutely couldn’t forgive.

”Sir Ollie?” Ashlynn asked, turning to the young knight with a complicated gaze as she forced him into the position of being the deciding voice. She’d hoped that both Rain and Hugo would agree that Darragh was guilty, sparing her young friend from the burden of casting a deciding vote. But now, Ollie would have to bear the responsibility for determining Darragh’s fate...

”This man was one of your villagers,” Ashlynn said slowly. ”You know him better than any other nobleman here. What say you?”

”Guilty,” Ollie said with much less hesitation than she had expected from the young knight. ”I swore to take Justice as one of my virtues. I cannot call myself a knight who stands for justice if I refuse to call a guilty man guilty, just because he’s one of my villagers or someone under my command.”

”I, I wish I didn’t have to say it,” he added in a voice that felt smaller and more fragile than the one that had pronounced Darragh’s guilt. ”But I’m responsible for hundreds of people in my village. I can’t let one put them all in danger when he’s trying to do us harm. Maybe I could forgive running away, but I can’t forgive poisoning the rest of us.”

”Well done, Ollie,” Ashlynn said quietly, stepping forward to place a hand on his shoulder and giving him a reassuring squeeze while her gaze momentarily softened. ”I know that wasn’t easy to say.”

”Now,” she said, turning to look out at the assembled audience and speaking in a clear, loud voice. ”You have all heard the evidence against this man. You’ve heard how he was offered a good life and the freedom to enjoy it, and you’ve heard how he turned on the people who trusted him, poisoning his companions and fleeing into the night with malice in his heart and secrets on his lips.”

Sitting in the flickering light of the campfire, the assembled soldiers and servants all nodded along with Ashlynn, with some even whispering about the fate the traitor was about to meet.

”He’ll swing from a tree within the hour, mark my words,” one man told his neighbor. ”You think they’ll shove ’im off a wagon to snap his neck or make him dance the hangman’s jig till ’is eyes bug out an he can’t breathe no more?”

”Nah, you heard what Sir Rain said ’bout men who’s drug behind a horse. I say tie ’im up an let the horse drag him till his flesh is scraped to bones. He almost did it to ’is mates, he deserves it!”

Suggestion after suggestion spilled from their lips, and Ashlynn’s enhanced hearing caught every depraved whisper, each one more gruesome than the last. For a moment, she let herself imagine inflicting some of those torturous deaths on Darragh, letting his final moments turn into agonizing torture so that he could understand that some lines should never be crossed.

But what would be the point? Darragh wasn’t her great enemy, he wasn’t even a serious threat. He needed to be dealt with, and dealt with without mercy, but that didn’t mean she needed to let herself descend into cruelty or depravity just because he had betrayed her trust. There were very few people she would let herself inflict true suffering on before she ended their lives and Darragh... Darragh’s deeds came nowhere close to earning him a place on that list.

”Sir Rain,” Ashlynn said, holding an empty hand out in front of the portly knight. ”I shattered my sword fighting in the High Pass and I’m still waiting for its replacement to be forged,” she said, shocking the experienced cavalry man with the casual way she mentioned shattering a weapon. After all, he’d swung his sword from the back of a charging horse and clashed with the powerful forces of the Southern Steppe but he’d never once shattered a sword!

The audience of soldiers and servants, however, were stunned by something entirely different. After all, from the way Lady Ashlynn was acting, she intended to execute the traitor personally! Certainly, they’d all heard of lords that refused to use a headsman, choosing to swing the executioner’s ax themselves when they sentenced someone to die.

But who had ever heard of a woman taking on the role of a headsman? Wasn’t it tragic enough that she’d been forced to kill two men already? How could a woman like Lady Ashlynn ever become a proper wife and mother if she had to hold her children with hands stained with so much blood?

It just didn’t make sense to them why she would want to do something as horrifying as taking another man’s life when there were so many soldiers here and even knights who could swing the sword for her.

”If you can lend me your sword, Sir Rain,” Ashlynn said, staring directly into the portly knight’s dark, deeply set eyes. ”I promise, I’ll put an end to this quickly.”