The Vampire & Her Witch

”Here,” Sorcha said, reaching across the table for the jug and topping off Jocelynn’s cup even though it was still more than half full. The wine sloshed slightly as she poured, dark and fragrant, and if Sorcha spilled a few drops, she didn’t seem to notice or care. ”You’ll want that.”

Jocelynn looked down at the cup and then back at Sorcha. The older woman settled into her chair, looking comfortable for the first time since the ceremonies began. She drank deeply from her own cup of wine before giving Jocelynn a long, evaluating look.

”I know it’s hard,” Sorcha said, swirling the wine in her cup as she seemed to come to a conclusion about whatever she saw in Jocelynn’s eyes. ”Being swept away from everything you knew with no one but strangers around you. I might not have left home the same way you did, but it was like that for me when Wes stole my heart and carried me off to his father’s hall,” she said in the hopes of finding a way to build a bridge between them.

Charlotte leaned forward slightly, her red-rimmed eyes brightening with interest. Even Ragna, who clearly knew this story already, settled back in her chair with the quiet patience of someone who didn’t mind hearing it again as she slowly sipped her wine.

”Wes stole your heart?” Jocelynn asked, grateful for a chance to shift the topic of conversation away from herself and Ashlynn for a moment, though there was a catch in her voice at the end. Owain had stolen her heart. It was only later that she realized he didn’t see it as a treasure to cherish but a prize he had won. A prize to be put on a shelf and admired... Or one to be discarded once it loses its luster.

”He did,” Sorcha said with a smile that transformed her plain features. ”Though he’d probably say I stole his first,” she added with a faintly mischievous twinkle in her eyes. ”And he’s not entirely wrong.”

The story, as Sorcha told it, began in the Shattered Hills.

The eastern reaches of Iriso Barony were rough, rugged country, filled with bare, stony peaks, deep, narrow ravines, and stone so old that the settlers had taken to calling the mountains the Bones of the Earth, even though the highest peak in the range couldn’t compare to even the shortest peak to the west of Lothian March.

Thirty years ago, there had been nothing there but demons and wild goats, but after Marquis Bors cleared the worst of the demons from the region, Baron Maston Iriso had seen an opportunity in the hills to transform his struggling barony in a way few would have imagined.

”You have to understand that the granite of the Shattered Hills is truly special,” Sorcha explained, reaching into the pouch at her waist to pull out a small bracelet of polished stone beads that she’d put away during the memorial.

Each of the stones in the bracelet was vibrant and colorful. Some were dark blue and shot through with veins of lighter blue and white speckles, while others were dark enough that they seemed black with flecks of iridescent, mossy green.

”This is granite?” Jocelynn asked, picking up the bracelet with a delicate touch when Sorcha slid it down the table. The stones were smooth and cool in Jocelynn’s hand, and much heavier than she originally thought.

”I’ve seen granite before,” Jocelynn said as she examined the bracelet. After all, granite was common enough across the kingdom of Gaal, and many wealthy merchants in Blackwell used it for flagstones in impressive halls when they couldn’t afford more expensive marble. ”But I’ve never seen granite that could rival gemstones for their beauty.”

As a piece of jewelry, it was strikingly beautiful, but as soon as Jocelynn paired the word ’granite’ with it, she realized the problem the Irisos must be facing. Granite was priced as ornamental stone, and it was most highly valued when the pieces were large and intact... A bracelet like this, as pretty as it might be, was unlikely to be valued by noblewomen competing to display their status and prestige.

At most, the bracelet would sell for a few snips at market, making it an excellent piece for common folk, but the wealth that such beautiful granite would bring to the Irisos paled in comparison to the value of the real gemstones of Airgead Mountain.

”It isn’t just the granite that’s precious,” Sorcha continued. ”Though we’re hopeful that one day, it will become well known enough for the Royal Court to take notice of it for furnishings in a palace. Until then, we also find these,” she said, retrieving a simple pendant necklace from her pouch and passing it down the table. The leather cord of the necklace was nothing fancy, nor was the silver wire that wrapped around the pendant itself to secure it to the leather.

The pendant, however, was an impressive crystal point of quartz so clear and perfect that for a moment, Jocelynn wondered if she’d been casually handed one of the largest diamonds in the Kingdom of Gaal.

”We haven’t become famous for our stones yet,” Sorcha said with a rueful smile. ”But we haven’t given up hope either. The quality is there, we just need to pull enough of it from the earth to place it before the right eyes.”

She spoke as if it were just a matter of time, but the reality of building a quarry from nothing in formerly demon-infested mountains had been harder than anyone anticipated. Maston Iroso sank everything he had into the village he named Silver Bluff for the way the cliff faces caught the morning light, and for fifteen years, Marquis Bors had the grace not to demand a single silver penny in tithe.

Neither did Baron Maston, who poured every gold sovereign he earned back into the settlement, expanding the roads, reinforcing the mines, and paying the soldiers who kept the remaining demons at bay.

”My father came to Silver Bluff when I was a girl,” Sorcha said, sipping at her wine as she continued her story. ”He used to be the best quarry master in Keating Duchy, or so he always claimed. He wasn’t far wrong. He knew stone the way your ship captains know the sea. He could look at a rock face and tell you where the color ran deep and where it would give way to plain grey, and he could split a block along a seam so clean you’d think it had been cut with a knife.”

”It’s just... he thought he’d have more time to do things the right way,” Sorcha continued, gazing deep into the dark red wine in her cup. ”But when the tithes finally came due, the work was slower, more dangerous, and less productive than everyone had hoped. The best stones are all locked deep in the hills, in places that were difficult to reach and harder to work safely. The expenses kept coming, but the profits never did, and people... People started getting hurt.”

Sorcha’s father had become desperate. He was determined to meet the barony’s expectations, and he began pushing his crews harder, taking risks with unstable pits and overworked men.

”There was an accident,” Sorcha said, and her voice went flat in the way that voices did when they were describing something that still hurt. ”A whole side of the quarry collapses. Three men were killed outright and my father was buried for most of a day before they dug him out.”

”He lived,” Sorcha added quickly. ”But his back was never the same. He couldn’t work in the pits after that, and without him leading the crews, everything slowed to a crawl.”

They’d barely been scraping by, selling what little they could to families like the Lothians, who were sentimental, or the Hanrahans, who always had an appetite for fine stone. But even the noble families of Lothian March could only buy so much granite and so many quartz baubles, and when they couldn’t fulfil large orders, the little patronage they had dried up.

That year, the village failed to send its tithe. Baron Maston, old and ailing himself, sent his son, Wes, to find out why.

”Wes rode into Silver Bluff on a magnificent dappled stallion,” Sorcha said, and despite the weight of the story, the warmth returned to her voice. ”He’d just come from a tournament, and he looked like a hero out of the storybooks. Shining armor, a champion’s cloak, and a look in his eyes like there was nothing he couldn’t defeat...”