The Vampire & Her Witch

At first, Eleanor thought that she could handle Percivus and his questions. After spending months with Jocelynn, accompanying her nearly every day since they left Blackwell County, she thought she understood her cousin well enough to know what Jocelynn would and wouldn’t have said.

Even though her mind was hazy with fatigue and her stomach gnawed at her with hunger, she felt confident that she wouldn’t betray her cousin and that she could find a way to win a small victory for both of them.

So long as Percivus kept to his promise about the food, that was. If he was lying to her, then nothing she did would matter, but she chose to believe there was a scrap of honor buried within the Inquisitor’s black heart somewhere that would still bind him to his promises... Or, perhaps he would keep to his promises out of a twisted desire to ’win’ using the rules of his own game.

The game was a trap to begin with, and Eleanor knew it... But refusing to play would only result in more punishments, and she didn’t know how much longer her body could endure. At least this way, she would have a chance.

”S-samira is one of the s-servants sent to the Summer V-villa,” Eleanor started, keeping her eyes on Percivus’s face and hoping for the slightest twitch of his mustache or shift of his eyes to indicate how he responded to the answer she gave him. Unfortunately, the flame-haired Inquisitor remained passive, with one hand holding his quill pen, ready to take notes if she said anything of worth and patiently waiting for details as if he had all the time in the world.

”L-lady Jocelynn t-took a l-liking to her while we w-were there,” Eleanor added, exposing a bit of harmless truth in the hopes that she could explain why Jocelynn would have been concerned for the young woman at the villa. ”She, she t-tutored her in r-reading a-and other th-things, t-to p-p-pass the t-time.”

”That’s curious,” Percivus said, punctuating his statement with scratching sounds as he made careful notes. ”I would think that Jocelynn would spend most of her time with her sister. What was it about this servant that made her worthy of tutoring? Was she special in some way?”

”It, it isn’t p-possible for L-lady Jocelynn to be c-close t-to her s-sister r-right now,” Eleanor said, momentarily grateful for the shivers that wracked her body and helped cover for her need to choose her words with exceptional care. ”I, I shouldn’t s-say,” Eleanor added, appearing to pause before revealing something secretive.

”B-but L-lady Jocelynn was v-very j-j-jealous of her s-sister,” Eleanor continued, revealing something that was true but would certainly be misunderstood by the Inquisitor. ”She, she re-resented L-lady Ashlynn f-for her wed-ding to L-lord Owain. C-count Rhys a-always s-s-said he w-wanted to w-wed Jocelynn t-to a G-guild M-master and n-not a l-lord. S-so y-you can un-understand why a y-young w-woman would s-struggle to b-be with her s-sister a-after the w-wedding.”

”S-samira, she resembles L-lady Ashlynn a b-bit,” Eleanor added when she saw Percivus furrowing his brow at her statement. ”S-so s-she f-felt c-comfortable with her w-when she c-couldn’t be with L-lady Ashlynn.”

Speaking so much after days with so little to drink strained Eleanor far more than she’d realized it would, taking far more effort to get the words out than she imagined and leaving her body spasming with feeble coughs as her throat protested the abuse, but she hoped that Percivus would believe what she’d told him, and misinterpret the rift that separated the sisters as one of petty jealousy instead of the gulf between life and death.

The question was, how much had Jocelynn told him about Samira? Surely Jocelynn would have admitted to the woman’s identity as a servant, perhaps even mentioning that she’d been tutoring her. After all, it would give Jocelynn a believable reason to be concerned for an ordinary servant. But would she have said more? Would she have invented a fiction that she was considering taking Samira on as a lady-in-waiting?

Jocelynn had been trained by her father to negotiate with merchants and prey on people’s self-interests. She was good at saying the right thing to nudge a person’s thoughts in the right direction, but she rarely abandoned the truth to do so... If she’d done so now, however, if she’d told Percivus some lie that she thought the other man would find believable, then Eleanor might have just doomed the woman she was trying to help.

”That’s interesting,” Percivus said, shaking his head in disappointment at Jocelynn’s behavior. ”I’ll have to remember to teach Jocelynn a lesson about treasuring her family before this is all over. You never know how suddenly you can find yourself bereft of parents, or siblings, when tragedy strikes,” he said, pursing his lips together as he forced down memories of the tragedy that claimed the lives of his parents when he was still just a boy.

If it hadn’t been for the care and protection of his older brother, he never would have survived those first few years as an orphan. In the end, however, when he saw how much his brother was struggling to care for both of them, he ran away to Maeril in the hopes of joining the Inquisition and finding a way to pay his brother back for all he’d done for him.

At the time, Percivus had been too young to join Bors’ army for the War of Inches, but he was old enough to be an acolyte in the temple, and the coming war was exactly the opportunity he needed to reinvent himself from orphan stable-boy into something greater...

But he’d never forgotten where he came from. He never let himself forget how much his parents had struggled to provide for their children, or how much his brother had struggled to care for him when it felt like it was the two of them against the world.

He would have thought that, as two strangers to Lothian March, Jocelynn would have clung to her sister to help Lady Ashlynn face the struggles of becoming a mother in a strange new land, but clearly he’d overestimated the love that noblewomen could feel for each other.

Instead, it seemed like they were too busy feuding among themselves for status and husbands to leech off of to show any real affection for each other. It was shameful, and it was something he would have to find a way to correct before he was done with the young woman in the cell at the opposite end of the dungeon...