The Vampire & Her Witch

”AAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!”

Loman’s anguished cry echoed off the walls of the great hall, followed by a sickening, meaty -SPLAT- as Sybyll dropped his severed arm unceremoniously on the floor.

”Sybyll!” Heila shouted, dashing forward with a horrified look on her face as she realized what the Crimson Knight had meant by inflicting a ’heavy wound’ on Loman Lothian. ”I can’t,” she started to say, only to snap her mouth shut when she realized that Sybyll already knew what she would have said.

Of course, Sybyll intended to inflict a wound that not even Heila could fully heal. A lost eye and severed arm would be gone forever. Sybyll knew that because Heila had told her that restoring Jalal’s arm was out of reach, and was likely out of reach even for Lady Ashlynn by the time they could return to the Vale of Mists.

At the same time, she’d said that there was nothing she could do for Sir Tommin’s eyes, but perhaps Lady Ashlynn could restore his sight since it looked like he’d only been blinded by intense light rather than having his eyes ruptured entirely.

”You knew,” Heila said as her hands worked furiously, sorting through the bottles in the pouches at her waist until she found the ones that would stop the bleeding and prevent Loman from losing his life tonight. ”You knew exactly how far you could wound him,” she said, blinking back the moisture that gathered in her eyes so she could focus on her healing.

She had to remind herself that somewhere, she’d known how brutal Dame Sybyll would be as well. It was why she’d offered to use her whip on Loman rather than allowing Sybyll to mete out punishment with her own hands. She could have inflicted enough pain to be punishment without leaving him so... so completely destroyed. He would have recovered more easily from the wounds she inflicted. But then, it wouldn’t have had the same effect as what Sybyll had chosen to do.

”Cossot, Roseen, come here,” Sybyll called, ignoring Heila’s confusion and summoning the two young women who had stood to the side as observers ever since the townsfolk went home. ”That is, if Roseen can,” Sybyll added when she realized that the shorter woman had fainted dead away at the sight of Loman’s severed limb.

Roseen wasn’t the only person struggling with the sight. Germot seemed to have recovered enough from being thrown bodily against the wall to bear witness to the gruesome spectacle of blood spurting from the wound, soaking Heila’s skirts as she rushed to save the young lord’s life. If the rapidly expanding puddle beneath him was any indication, he likely wished he could faint the way Roseen had.

Liam Dunn had turned away from the spectacle, leaving his chair and walking toward the two young ladies by the wall while muttering that he had smelling salts.

At the beginning of the night, he’d been worried that Dame Sybyll would be injured in her battle against Sir Tommin, or that she might even lose her life in the struggle against the combined forces of the Church. He’d even entertained the fantasy that he could shrink the distance between them if she needed someone to ’make an offering’ of blood in order to heal.

Now, however, he swallowed the lump in his throat and thanked the merciful Lord of Light that he’d never offended the Crimson Knight. He’d been so dazzled by her perfect proportions and enchanting visage that he’d forgotten the title bestowed on her reflected the amount of blood that had splattered on her armor over the long years that she’d fought against the Lothians and any of their vassals who dared to attack Airgead Mountain.

”What... what happened?” Roseen asked, blinking several times in confusion after Liam waved a small bottle of smelling salts under her nose. ”I thought, for a moment, Lord Loman screamed in pain...”

”He did,” Cossot said, taking deep, steadying breaths and trying not to recall the sound of splintering bone and tearing flesh that had preceded Loman’s scream. ”Dame Sybyll, she, she punished him. For his crimes,” she said haltingly as she supported herself on the wall before reaching out a hand to help her friend stand.

”And now she wants to see us. Both of us,” she said hesitantly, glancing at where the crimson-haired vampire stood in the puddle of blood that had formed at her feet.

”A-are you going?” Roseen asked, staring at her friend in shock.

”She called for me, so I’m going,” Cossot said, though she hardly sounded confident in her words. ”Come with me, she wants us both,” she said, waving her hand in front of Roseen’s face until the other woman took it and climbed to her feet.

”I heard yer conversation wit’ Lady Heila earlier,” Sybyll said when the pair of women finally reached her side. Both of them made certain to keep their eyes fixed firmly on the vampire and did their best to pretend that nothing was happening on the floor a few feet away from them, but the sounds of Heila tearing Loman’s robes into long strips to use as a bandage made it difficult to maintain the illusion that he wasn’t there.

”She’s right that I’ve been testing ye t’night,” Sybyll said, looking from the shaky Cossot to the faint-looking Roseen and back again. ”An’ this is a test fer ye now. Take a good long look at him an’ tell me why I’ve done what I’ve done.”

Loman’s severed arm was the first thing either woman noticed. For a moment, Cossot had the strange feeling that she was looking at a chicken leg that had been pulled free of the bird, with a smooth, almost polished-looking round knob of bone protruding from bloody, torn flesh. It wasn’t until she looked closer that she realized the upper part of Loman’s arm had been crushed by Dame Sybyll’s powerful fingers, snapping the bone even as she tore the arm from its socket.

Her eyes flickered away from the arm and to the man himself, but the instant she looked at him, her knees grew weak, and without a steadying hand from Dame Sybyll, she would have collapsed to the ground.

The right half of Loman’s face was still beautiful. He was a handsome man, and his features blended just the right level of masculine sharpness with a gentleness and youth that had yet to melt away. It was a face that Cossot had dreamed of many times since she first met the young Lothian Lord.

Now, however, the left half of his face was a tattered ruin. His neatly shaped brow hung in tatters over an eye that leaked a thick, glistening fluid. His elegantly arched cheekbone looked like it had broken under the force of Sybyll’s sudden attack, and the long, bloody wounds across his face reached all the way to the sweep of his jaw, pulling at his soft lips and leaving them feeling somehow misshapen.

The vampire’s blow had been too fast for human eyes to follow, but the carnage it left behind was as comprehensive as it was gruesome. Lady Heila was sprinkling a series of powders across the wounds, and while neither woman could hear everything that she was muttering under her breath as she worked, they both clearly heard the phrase ’no way to prevent the scars from this’ and ’he’ll be lucky if the muscles in his face still work.’

”So?” Sybyll prompted the young ladies. ”Why did I wound him like this?”

”Is, isn’t it just what you said?” Roseen asked, turning away from the hideous sight of Loman’s wounds to look at Dame Sybyll. ”To stop him from drawing or aiming a bow ever again. You, you didn’t want him to be a danger to anyone ever again.”

”Rosey,” Cossot said, clutching her friend’s arm and forcing herself to look away from the broken man who no longer remotely resembled the man from her dreams. ”It’s more than that. Dame Sybyll is too strong, and she’s too fast. If she wanted to pluck out Lord Loman’s eye and crush it in her hand... she, she could have,” Cossot realized as she looked at Sybyll with dawning comprehension.

”You wanted to leave him scarred and hideous,” she said as something inside her mind clicked into place, and for a moment, she felt like she had grasped onto an important lesson. ”You took away the things that made him dangerous. His eye to aim, his arm to support the bow... and his beauty. He was so handsome and charming that people would want to be near him,” she said.

When she said it, she was thinking of herself and how readily she had been willing to volunteer to work with the sick and the wounded, just because he asked her to. And later on, how willing everyone had been to follow him after he stripped off his lordly tunic and revealed his sculpted, athletic physique before donning his priestly robes. He was handsome and...

”Because he was so handsome, people admired him, and when people admired him, they did as he asked,” Cossot said in a small voice. ”They wanted to do as he asked. So, if he asked for more people to be ’arrows in his quiver’, they probably would. Because he was the kind of man that people want to please, because... because if you can please him by doing what he asks, then he might pay attention to you,” she said in a voice that was very, very quiet.

”Smart girl,” Sybyll said with a smile as she listened to Cossot working out the lesson. ”There’s more ta it than that, but yer close enough ta’ pass this test. But tha’ night isn’t over,” she said as she turned to look at the bound and gagged figure of Ian Hanrahan who had gone as white as a sheet watching Sybyll dismember Loman Lothian.

”I’ve had me appetizer, Cousin Ian,” Sybyll said with a cruel, predatory smile that revealed the full length of her fangs. ”It’s yer turn ta’ reap tha’ reward of all the wickedness ye’ve sown...”