The Vampire & Her Witch

”I think he’d be very proud of the woman you’re becoming,” Isabell said, setting a hand on Ashlynn’s shoulder and guiding her to a seat on one of the comfortable sofas facing the fire. Rather than taking a seat on the opposite sofa, Isabell sat directly next to Ashlynn, ignoring any sense of etiquette or distance between their positions in order to stay close and comfort her friend.

”Truthfully, I think that if he could see you now, he’d curse the King himself and petition the Ruling Council for permission to pass his throne to you,” Isabell said as she looked at the young lady. There was a great deal of Count Rhys’s strength and determination in her bearing and she was clearly comfortable making the sort of heavy decisions followed by committed actions that had characterized her father’s rule.

Neither Count Rhys nor Ashlynn seemed like the type of people who would shy away from something just because it was hard. Nor were they the sort of people who would force others to suffer to escape making sacrifices themselves.

”I think you learned more from him than he realized,” Isabell said gently. ”And he would be happy to see you become the next Countess Blackwell instead of,” she started to say, only to trail off as she became uncertain of the truth of what she’d been about to say.

”Instead of living out here with the ’demons’?” Ashlynn said, raising an eyebrow at Isabell when the older woman hesitated to put her thoughts into words.

”I was going to say ’instead of suffering a marriage to an abusive villain like Owain,’” Isabell said, pulling back slightly at the feeling of barbs hiding in Ashlynn’s words. ”But... I don’t know if that’s actually true or not. Count Rhys would cut off his own arm for the sake of Blackwell County. For a man who would sacrifice so much,” she said, allowing her voice to trail off toward the end.

”I know,” Ashlynn said softly. ”He, he never spoke about it, but, I think that Father knew the sort of man that Owain really is. Owain isn’t skilled enough at hiding it when he thinks he’s around people who are ’on his side,’ and Father is too good of a judge of people to have missed the signs.”

”You seem to take after him in that respect,” Isabell said carefully as she searched Ashlynn’s eyes, wondering if the young woman already understood who had betrayed her secret. ”How well did you understand Owain before you married him?”

”I knew him better than I let myself admit,” Ashlynn said slowly. The signs had been there all along, after all. She’d just told herself that he wouldn’t direct his cruelty at her, that he valued family and would fight to protect her and their children once they were born. She’d told herself every reassuring lie she could in order to go forward with the marriage her father had arranged to secure their family’s future.

”I, I wanted to make things work out so badly,” Ashlynn admitted. ”After everything that Mother had suffered trying to bear an heir for Father, and everything my parents did to keep me safe despite the mark of the witch on my body, I felt like I owed it to them to make things work out, somehow.”

”Especially for Mother,” Ashlynn added softly, closing her eyes as she blotted away tears with a handkerchief. ”She tried so hard for Father and she did so much to care for me and keep me safe. I just... I just wanted to take over some of her burdens.”

All her life, Ashlynn’s mother had called her a miracle child, and she’d done her very best to give her eldest daughter a good life. But she was also a pious woman of deeper faith than her husband or Ashlynn herself.

The countess had told her daughter for as long as she could remember that Ashlynn would need to work twice as hard to earn the Holy Lord of Light’s favor because of the mark she bore. She told Ashlynn that the only way she could balance the weight of her mark was by becoming a person who brought about a great number of good things for her people.

”It seems silly now,” Ashlynn added with a wry smile. ”But I think that I had started to believe some of the things Mother said about needing to redeem myself for bearing the mark of the witch. I thought, if I could help someone like Owain who seemed to live for fighting ’demons,’ maybe I could make up for the ’sin’ of my birth and convince the Holy Lord of Light to stop tormenting my mother for sparing my life.”

She hadn’t understood when she was younger, but when she looked back on things from the outside, it was clear how much her mother’s faith hollowed her out each time she failed to conceive a child. Year after year of suffering had left the countess shaken and weak, wondering at times if she had been cursed by the Holy Lord of Light to suffer for some sin committed in her previous life.

It had been so bad that, during her pregnancy with Jocelynn, she’d gone to live in a convent with one of her husband’s cousins until Jocelynn was born. But even retreating to the convent wasn’t enough to allow her to give birth to a son, and when her last child was stillborn, Ashlynn felt like a piece of her mother’s heart had broken forever.

Her mother might never have said the words, but for the past half year, Ashlynn had wondered if somewhere, deep inside her heart, she’d blamed Ashlynn for the ’curse’ that left her unable to bear the son that Rhys so desperately needed to inherit his throne.

After all, Maela had given birth to one of the great witches who could threaten the entire Kingdom of Gaal. Worse, she had been unwilling to do what a good woman of faith should, surrendering her infant child to the Church so they could deal with the demonic influence before she could ever grow into a force that could topple their Kingdom and their Church.

So when Ashlynn thought about the people in her family who might betray her, her mother was the first one who came to mind...