The Vampire & Her Witch

The more Sybyll spoke, the more the people in the great hall found themselves drawn into her story. There wasn’t any sorcery to it, nor any vampire gifts. Rather, it was the most human part of her that was on display, and almost everyone in the room found something about her tale to be deeply moving.

Not everyone, however, was able to put aside the recent hurts or the horrors they’d seen during the battle at the west gate plaza, and Sir Thorryn struggled to see the crimson-haired woman sitting atop the gilded throne as anything other than the demon knight who had cut down templars with her giant axe as though she were felling trees in the wilderness.

”Don’t get too caught up in her words, Drema,” the veteran knight said when he saw tears gathering in the corner of his daughter’s eyes. ”Demons are cunning, ruthless, and vile. She looks soft and tender now, but she was covered in blood just hours ago. She would have killed me if I’d been in her way,” he reminded his daughter with a squeeze on her shoulder, hoping she understood how dangerous this ’Dame Sybyll’ really was.

”But she didn’t want to fight, did she?” Drema countered, blotting away tears and turning to look at her father with large, questioning eyes. ”Didn’t she ask everyone to surrender? Before the fight, didn’t she just want to face Baron Hanrahan?”

”And what did she do when she didn’t get what she wanted?” Thorryn countered. ”People died, pumpkin. No matter what she says, you have to remember that.”

”I’ll remember, Papa,” the knight’s daughter promised solemnly as she turned to look back at the woman on the throne. But when she looked at Dame Sybyll and watched the tears glistening in the corners of her eyes, she couldn’t help but wonder whose fault it really was that people had died tonight.

After all, her father hadn’t been the only one to see the Crimson Knight in her blood-splattered armor during the height of the battle. Drema had been in the great hall when Sybyll shattered the door and tossed aside the barricade like the heavy tables were nothing but kindling.

But she hadn’t made a single move to hurt the people in the great hall. Not one. From the moment she entered, she’d only cared about finding her cousin, the Baron Ian Hanrahan. As soon as she knew where he was, she left without a single drop of blood spilled. Her father said that she was a demon, and that demons were ruthless, cunning and vile... but from where Drema sat in the great hall, it didn’t seem that way at all.

”By tha’ time I were old enough ta’ help, we’d washed up in Leufroy Barony,” Sybyll said, gazing at the portrait of her mother as she continued her tale. ”I weren’t tha’ best daughter ta’ me mother. She said she’d been friends wit’ Baroness Hatilda. I tried ta’ reach tha’ keep, thinking I’d be helpful ta’ me mother an’ get help from her friend...”

”I never made it ’crossed tha castle moat,” she said bitterly, clenching her fist as genuine anger crept into her voice. ”Tha’ guards roughed me up, an’ when I ran back ta’ me mother, they followed to rough her up too. What they took from us...” she said as her voice broke and her fist slammed into the armrest of the throne hard enough to crack and splinter the wood.

Sybyll had never forgotten those men’s faces. It had taken her years to return to Leufroy Barony, and by then her mother was long lost to her. But even without Mistress Nyrielle’s gifts, Sybyll had learned to use her body as a weapon. In the seediest of brothels, she learned how to tempt men into her welcoming embrace where they were the most vulnerable, and then she drowned her hatred in the hot blood that spilled across her body when she slid her knife between their ribs or slit their throats.

”We did it alone, an’ we did it t’gether,” Sybyll said, shaking off the memories of men long dead as she poured out her grievances in her father’s great hall, speaking as much to him and her mother as she was to the assembled people of Hanrahan Town. ”No knight or lord would help us. No friend or kin would recognize us. But I had the strongest mother in all tha’ world by me side, an’ we... we never let tha’ world beat us.”

By now, there wasn’t a woman in the hall who wasn’t clutching at a handkerchief or clinging to a loved one as they imagined what Baroness Caitlin and her daughter had gone through. To the side of the dias, Cossot and Roseen held each other’s hands and stared at Dame Sybyll with eyes that not only glistened with tears but also swam with admiration and sympathy.

Silently, both young women wondered if their own mothers would have had the strength or the skill to take an infant and flee all the way across Lothian March, evading pursuit and caring for their child. Both of them came from wealthy, privileged homes, and their mothers could be called capable in the sense that they managed their household servants well and kept the children in order, but... to strip away everything they had and leave them to provide for a child by themselves? Impossible.

On the dais, Diarmuid scowled as he listened to Dame Sybyll spinning her tale. Everything she said, the horrors she’d seen, the struggles she’d faced... all of it sounded plausible. There was nothing unbelievably grand, nor unbelievably cruel, about what she’d suffered.

After all of the things Diarmuid had seen, the story she told was far too believable. But there was something about that very believability that gnawed at his mind. Something that the Inquisitor in him couldn’t help but doubt, even as the man in him wanted to reach out to offer comfort and whatever solace prayer could provide to the wounded woman.

It was a position he never expected to find himself in, and now that he was here, face to face with a demon he felt had suffered too much, he couldn’t help but look at the witch sitting beside him and wonder... was this the test that she expected him to face?