The Vampire & Her Witch

By the time the final members of Dame Sybyll’s impromptu court were seated, everyone in the hall realized that something even more unprecedented than the fall of a single town was happening here.

An Inquisitor sitting next to a Witch, whispering to each other as if they were finding common ground. The heir to the Dunn Barony sat next to the one-armed Demon Lord of Airgead Mountain, not just civilly, but offering to pour wine for the Cat Lord and performing the etiquette of the most junior lord present.

By the time Lord Hugo ascended the dais, the people were sitting on the edges of their seats, paying attention to every single word and gesture as though it might hold a clue to their fates.

”You heard?” Roseen whispered to Cossot as the two women stood beside the dais, awaiting any instructions Dame Sybyll might have for them. ”They called him ’Sir Hugo’, not ’Lord Hugo.’ Why would they do that if Dame Sybyll was still going to embrace him and call him ’cousin’?”

”I told you, Roseen,” Cossot whispered in an exasperated tone. ”You should have paid more attention during etiquette lessons. Remember what Dame Sybyll called Ian Hanrahan at the start of the night, when she challenged him from outside the city?”

Cossot had already put the pieces together hours ago, which was why she didn’t refer to Ian Hanrahan as ’Baron’ anywhere that Dame Sybyll could hear, but it seemed like her friend was dangerously slow in doing the same.

”She called him a murderer, didn’t she?” Roseen said with a puzzled frown. ”She accused him of murdering Baroness Caitlin.”

”Before that,” Cossot sighed. ”She called him the son of a usurper. She’s saying that Aiden Hanrahan should never have been Baron, which means Ian’s claim to the throne isn’t legitimate at all, which is why Hugo can’t be a ’Lord.”

”But she still called him ’Sir’ Hugo, didn’t she?” Roseen asked. ”If he can’t be a lord...”

”He’s still a knight,” Cossot said, looking at the graceful, alluring figure of the woman sitting on the throne as though she was beginning to understand a small piece of the woman who had taken a hapless young nobody into her service.

”Dame Sybyll was very, very insistent about being addressed as ’Dame’ because she’s a knight... and I think she really means it,” Cossot said as a seed of admiration began to sprout within her heart. ”She’s not a knight like Bastian, who was only knighted because he was a lord’s son. She’s a knight in the old way. I bet she stood vigil and swore the oaths and everything...”

Sitting on her gilded throne, Sybyll smiled at the brave young girl she’d kept running all night long. No matter how quiet the two young women were, it was impossible for their words to escape her sensitive ears, but what she heard raised her estimation of young Cossot even further. Now, however, all of the pieces were in place, and it was time to move the evening along.

”I have a story ta’ tell,” Sybyll said, speaking loudly enough to be heard all the way at the back of the crowded hall and over the low hum of whispers and murmurs that sprang up after she’d embraced her cousin Hugo. ”It starts years ago, on tha’ knight me father was drunk wit’ joy to learn his lady love were finally wit’ child...”

The story she told was one that Hugo had heard before, about Aiden Hanrahan’s treachery and his fear that Baroness Caitlin would give birth to an heir who would inherit the throne in place of Aiden’s son Ian. And even if Brighton Hanrahan’s child had turned out to be a girl, it was still proof that Caitlin wasn’t barren... she might still bear another child.

It was a story that sounded all too familiar to Inquisitor Diarmuid. A murder over jealousy and the desire for the throne. Quickly arranged cremation to prevent the spread of the ’illness’ that claimed the life of a loving husband, wife, and their unborn child.

All that was missing was a ’clever’ attempt to blame the whole thing on demons to resemble half a dozen of the cases Diarmuid had investigated in his long career. Only, Aiden Hanrahan was clever enough to avoid such an obvious lie because he must have realized that blaming the death of his brother’s family on demons would only invite more scrutiny. Better, in the end, to let people believe it was a cruel disease than the cruelty of demons.

Sybyll’s story was a familiar one, but it diverged sharply from the usual script when she spoke of her mother’s harrowing escape.

”I’m a strong woman,” Sybyll said, clenching her fist for emphasis as she told her tale. ”But I’ve nowhere near tha’ strength me mother had. I carry an axe that weighs as much as five men, but me mother, she carried me in her belly, wit’ a broken leg an’ battered body.”

”I’m a strong woman,” the Crimson Knight repeated. ”But me mother were stronger than anyone I know. She carried me away, all tha’ way ta Aleese Barony an’ I were born in a village there.”

When Sybyll had spoken of her father’s murder, her voice was bitter and sharp, tinged with a sense of longing for the parent she’d only known in the stories her mother shared with her as a child. She hated Aiden Hanrahan for taking her father from her, but Aiden was long dead and buried, and she was never able to avenge her father’s murder. So when she spoke of him, her voice held bitterness... but it held very little pain.

When she spoke of her mother, however, it was much, much harder to keep her voice calm and steady. The aura of strength and invincibility that surrounded the Crimson Knight fell away bit by bit, leaving behind a young woman who had watched her only parent suffering far too much for far too long.

”Those early years were hard,” Sybyll said after collecting herself. ”Aiden hunted us like foxes wit’ his knights an’ hounds. Each spring, mother packed me up an’ fled ta another village. What couldn’t come wit’ us in a hand cart, she left behind. Her leg were crippled an’ just walkin from Ribsti ta’ Horl took three days or four instead o’ two, but she always kept us two steps ahead.”

In the rows of benches, Madam Cordelia’s eyes grew too misty to see as she imagined her beloved Baroness Caitlin reduced to nothing more than a beggar with a hand cart, carrying her child from village to village. In her mind’s eye, she imagined the beautiful, elegant woman in the oil painting growing gaunt and thin, doubtlessly saving what scraps of food she had for the daughter she’d risked everything to save.

The pain alone of walking so far with a crippled leg must have been agonizing, and with Baron Aiden’s men hunting her, she must have lived in constant fear of the day she and her daughter were finally captured.

Dame Sybyll said those years were ’hard’ but ’hard didn’t begin to describe what Baroness Caitlin had suffered... and strong felt like far too feeble a word to describe the woman who endured it all, just to give her daughter a chance at life.