The Vampire & Her Witch

”...your cousin Eleanor is dead at the hands of the Inquisition, and for a time, your sister was their prisoner...”

The words froze everyone in the dining room. Isabell nearly dropped her tea. It had been less than a month since Eleanor came to her, hoping that she could help Jocelynn to recognize the peril she was in as the veneer of civility that concealed Owain’s cruelty grew thinner and thinner around her young charge. To hear that she was dead...

A few seats away from her, Ignatious’s face grew dark at the news that his former order was responsible for this. There weren’t many things that could cause the Inquisition to turn on other members of the Church, and for a Confessor to die at the hands of an Inquisitor was almost unheard of.

Short of a conviction of High Heresy, or proof that she’d not only consorted with the Eldritch but that her actions had directly resulted in some form of tragedy, it should have been impossible for an Inquisitor to even touch a Confessor without obtaining the blessings of a Mother Superior within their order, and the nearest one of those was all the way in DuCoumont County, across the border in Keating. It should have been impossible for the local Inquisition to do anything to Eleanor, much less to cause her death.

But even more chilling than hearing that the Inquisition had killed a Confessor, to hear that they’d also taken Ashlynn’s sister prisoner... While a noblewoman of her status should be safe in the hands of all but the most senior of Inquisitors, if they were willing to kill a confessor...

”Tell me,” Ashlynn said in a voice that was flat and very carefully controlled. Under the table, she clung tightly to Nyrielle’s hand, and it was clear that she was fighting to keep herself calm, but a storm was clearly brewing in her emerald eyes as she looked at the haggard spy master.

”From what I’ve been able to piece together, it started with Bors Lothian’s madness when he began to mistake Lady Jocelynn for his late wife, Isla,” Marcel said, doing his best to retell the story from the beginning.

The information he’d gathered was impressively complete, and though he was missing a number of details, the general picture emerged quickly as he delivered his explanation. He knew that Jocelynn had been injured by Bors when the delusion broke, and he knew that Eleanor had weakened herself to heal Jocelynn’s injuries, but he didn’t know how close Jocelynn had come to death or where she’d been injured.

”Percivus is a dead man,” Ashlynn muttered when Marcel began to describe the scheme the Inquisitor had used, making everyone believe that Jocelynn was simply confined to her chambers when he’d taken her to the Lothian dungeons to torture alongside her cousin Eleanor.

Ashlynn had already been planning on attacking Maeril to force Owain’s hand, but now, she found herself wanting to assault the Abbey of the Inquisition in Maeril directly. Now. She wanted to tear the place apart, brick by brick, if that’s what it took to root out the man who had dared to lay a hand on Jocelynn, but...

”Indeed, he is,” Marcel said. ”That’s part of the latest news. Owain had him and his acolytes arrested and dragged them back to Lothian. According to the guardsmen in the dungeons, Owain beat the acolytes to within an inch of their lives and intends to have them paraded through the market square this morning at sunrise.”

”As to Percivus,” Marcel continued, drawing a deep breath and choosing his words with care. ”Owain brought your sister to the dungeons to handle him. When your sister left Percivus’s cell, she was covered in blood and the guards who had to take Percivus’s body away said that it looked like he’d been stabbed dozens of times before he finally died.”

”Jocey,” Ashlynn said, her eyes going wide and her face draining of color as she imagined her sister participating in such an act.

From the sounds of it, Jocelynn had endured torment that was every bit as harrowing, if not worse, than what Ashlynn had suffered when Owain beat her half to death and she was buried alive. Only, when it had happened to her, it had only hurt her... Like Ashlynn, Jocelynn had come through her ordeal alive, but she’d lost Eleanor in the process.

Ashlynn barely knew her cousin Eleanor. The two had only met a handful of times when her cousin accompanied Ashlynn’s mother back from one of her visits to the convent. In Ashlynn’s memory, Eleanor had a severe demeanor and a soft, kind heart. She’d always been happy to follow her younger cousin around Blackwell Manor as Ashlynn showed her around the secret hiding places she’d found, or, later on, the gardens she’d begun to cultivate.

For the Inquisition to kill her sparked almost as much fury in Ashlynn’s chest as the notion that they’d harmed Jocelynn, and she could only imagine how hard on Jocey it must have been to lose Eleanor... After all, even if Jocelynn and Eleanor hadn’t been close a year ago before Ashlynn’s wedding to Owain, in the time since Ashlynn’s ’death’, Eleanor had been Jocelynn’s near constant companion.

To Ashlynn, Eleanor’s loss felt like being thrown from a horse. The impact was sudden, jarring, and her first, simplest desire was to lash out at the source of that pain... But to Jocelynn, it must have been a dozen times worse, and for Owain to bring her into a dungeon with Percivus...

It didn’t take much for Ashlynn to imagine what would have happened next. Her sister, hurt and grieving, in a room with the man who was responsible for it, and Owain standing ready to put on a show for her. Only, it seemed like Owain would rather put the knife in Jocelynn’s hands, to let her have her vengeance herself...

”There’s more,” Marcel said softly, pulling everyone out of their thoughts. He didn’t want to press forward so quickly because he knew that news like this couldn’t be digested easily, but dawn was rapidly approaching, and there wasn’t time to be as gentle as he wished.

”Owain has been planning a ’Grand Ceremony’,” Marcel explained once the eyes of the room had gathered on him once again. ”Because of the raids against Hanrahan and Dunn, along with the attack on the Summer Villa, he isn’t willing to space out his father’s funeral and his own coronation. He intends to do both on the same day, so that he can order the barons to summon their armies to counter-attack.”

”But there’s one other thing that he intends to accomplish on the day of his ’Grand Ceremony’,” Marcell said, looking directly into Ashlynn’s emerald gaze. ”He’s already announced Ashlynn’s ’death’ in the battle at the Summer Villa. Tomorrow, Jocelynn will hold a private memorial for Ashlynn at the Temple in the morning. In the evening, he will announce that Jocelynn has agreed to marry him in order to maintain the alliance between the Blackwells and the Lothians.”

”Ashlynn,” Marcell said softly. ”In four days, on the night of the winter solstice, Owain intends to marry Jocelynn as part of his coronation.”