The Vampire & Her Witch

Once everyone had food and the initial nervousness had begun to fade into the comfort of a shared meal, Ashlynn turned her attention back to Liam.

”All right,” she said, and though her voice was calmer than it had been, there was still steel underneath. ”Tell me what happened. From the beginning.”

Across the table from her, Liam set down his half-finished steak and ale hand pie and took a breath, clearly organizing his thoughts. He’d rehearsed how he would explain this to Lady Ashlynn several times on the carriage ride here, but now that the moment was upon him, he found himself second-guessing the decisions he’d already made.

”It started with my father,” he said, plunging ahead and hoping that she wouldn’t feel like he was trying to pass responsibility for what had happened onto his father. ”When Sir Ollie and I arrived at the camp, and I told my parents that you were alive and reaching out with an offer of an alliance, my father insisted that we share at least part of the story with his vassals.”

”My father doesn’t believe in keeping secrets from his knights,” Liam explained. ”Especially when they’d been searching for me for an entire week. He needed to offer up some kind of explanation, and he thought that I could manage things well enough to satisfy the curiosity of his court without exposing anything ’too shocking.’”

He paused, his expression troubled.

”I should have refused. Or at the very least, I should have insisted on controlling exactly what information was shared and how. But I was...” He hesitated, then continued with clear self-recrimination.

”The things I’d seen were all ’too shocking,’” Liam said, clenching his fist in frustration. ”Even though I didn’t mention that you were a witch, or the Eldritch, just telling everyone about the fall of Hanrahan was enough to provoke so many questions that...”

”Questions that I looked to Sir Ollie for help answering,” Liam admitted. He didn’t want to cast blame on Sir Ollie, not after everything the young knight had done, but it was undeniable that the young witch’s contributions to the events that evening had sent an already difficult-to-manage discussion even further out of control.

”Eventually, things went beyond questions,” Liam said delicately. ”And Sir Ollie gave my father and his vassals a... demonstration,” he said carefully.

Ashlynn’s hand tightened slightly on her spoon, but she said nothing, letting him continue, though her eyes turned to the flame-haired knight sitting next to her. Ollie at least had the grace to duck his head sheepishly when she did, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to nibble on his second hand-pie as if he hadn’t eaten for several days.

”There was a knight,” Ollie said quietly. ”Sir Gavin Ashford. He’d been injured two years ago at one of the Lothian’s tournaments. A shoulder wound that never healed properly despite the Church’s priests doing everything they could. Or everything they would,” he corrected himself bitterly.

”I, I brought him a few meals while he was in the healer’s tent, back then,” Ollie explained. ”Ever since then, he’s lived with constant pain. He couldn’t even raise his arm above the height of his chest, and so...”

”So you healed him,” Ashlynn said, and there was something complicated in her voice, a mixture of pride at his compassion and frustration at his recklessness.

”I did,” Ollie confirmed. ”Completely. The kind of healing that made it impossible to deny what I was.”

Ashlynn set down her spoon very carefully, as if she didn’t trust herself to hold it while processing this information.

”You revealed yourself fully,” she said slowly. ”To a room full of people who’d spent their entire lives being taught that witches were demons. People of strong faith who pray to the Holy Lord of Light for protection against our kind.”

”And not just common folk,” she added. ”But the knights of Dunn who have fought against the outlying villages nearly every year since the War of Inches twenty years ago. The same knights who would have been sent to hunt me down if Owain had known that I survived the beating he gave me on our wedding night. And not one of them would have questioned the need to hunt down a witch,” she pointed out.

”Yes,” Ollie said simply.

”And it never occurred to you,” Ashlynn continued, her voice remaining carefully level, ”that this might cause problems?”

”It occurred to me,” Ollie admitted. ”But Sir Gavin had suffered for two years. And I thought...” He trailed off, then started again. ”I thought that showing them what witchcraft could do for good might help them understand that we’re not the monsters the Church claims we are.”

Ashlynn closed her eyes briefly and took a slow, deliberate breath. What Ollie had done made sense in a very naive sort of way, but only because he’d never had to live among ordinary people while hiding his mark of the witch. He wasn’t like her. He hadn’t grown up with a deeply ingrained fear of discovery. He hadn’t been taught from a young age that exposure meant death or worse.

So when he saw a chance to help someone that he had a passing acquaintance with, perhaps even a favorable impression of, he’d done exactly what a caring, compassionate witch should do... he’d helped. But he’d done it without truly understanding the magnitude of his actions, or their potential consequences.

”Go on,” she said to Liam. ”What happened after Ollie healed Sir Gavin?”

”Most of the court was amazed,” Liam said. ”Grateful, even. Sir Gavin could barely hold in his tears, and his wife was the same. They even helped Ollie out to a nearby copse of trees where he could recover, and they met with Harrod and Milo as well. For the most part, it went well,” he said.

”But there was one woman,” Liam continued, choosing his words with exceptional care. ”Lady Cerys, she’s Sir Cynwrig Stormbrook’s wife, and she...” Liam’s voice trailed off as he struggled with how to phrase what came next.

”She was terrified,” he said finally. ”Absolutely terrified. Lady Cerys isn’t just devout. Her younger brother is an Acolyte of the Inquisition, here in Maeril,” he said, glancing briefly toward Diarmuid and Ignatious. ”Lately, she’s been taking on a more... strident interpretation of the Church’s teachings. One that aligns with her brother and the Inquisition.”

”My Lady,” Diarmuid said hesitantly from the far end of the table. ”I know you’re already aware, but the abbey in Maeril is among the more... extreme in our order,” he said, recalling the acolytes who had accompanied him during the summer when he followed Owain Lothian to attack the Heartwood Clan.

”Abbot Recared preaches a form of purity that he believes is necessary for the faithful to survive on the frontier,” Diarmuid explained. ”Strict adherence to the letter of the Great Prophet’s words, or at least, the words that have been passed down,” he said with a dark look on his face. ”Harsh punishments for deviating from the path in life that the Holy Lord of Light laid down for each of us. If Lady Cerys’ brother had fallen under his sway...”

”How many families does your Inquisition need to destroy, Diarmuid?” Ashlynn said sharply as her eyes flashed with an intense emerald light. It wasn’t entirely fair to call it ’your Inquisition,’ not when she knew that he was separating himself from the order that had trained him, but at the moment, she was too angry to exempt him from her wrath.

”It’s not enough to torture and kill my family; they have to sink their claws into the families of their own followers, too? Is there no end to their cruelty?” Ashlynn asked.

Were it not for Isabell placing a hand surreptitiously on her thigh under the table, Ashlynn would have stood up right then and there, ready to charge out into the winter night to destroy the abbey before it could harm anyone else.

Isabell’s touch, however, acted like a taproot, siphoning away the intensity of the rage Ashlynn felt long enough for the younger woman to remind herself that this Abbot Recared had already left for Lothian City. If she wanted to put an end to his wickedness, destroying an empty building would do little beyond giving him a rallying cry to gather even more followers to his twisted cause.

”So, what did Lady Cerys do as a result of this abbot’s ’teachings?’” Ashlynn asked, piling so much scorn and revulsion on the word ’teachings’ that it tasted bitter on her tongue.

”As much as I want to blame the Inquisition,” Liam said after taking a deep, steadying breath. ”I believe that each of us is responsible for our own decisions, and that includes Lady Cerys. My father feels the same way,” he added, waiting for Ashlynn’s nod of acknowledgement before continuing.

”In the morning, before the sun even rose,” Liam said, forcing himself to use the bluntest, least forgiving words he could to describe what had happened. ”She betrayed her husband, my father, and everyone who promised to keep what they’d learned the night before a secret. She took her son and a horse, and she fled from the camp...”