The Vampire & Her Witch

”The far side,” Jocelynn said carefully as she listened to Charlotte talking about people finding work in the storehouses at the opposite end of Otker Canyon. ”That’s where the barges are? On the DuCoumont side of the border?”

”On the Keating side, yes,” Charlotte said, nodding. ”The canyon itself is impossible for river traffic. The rapids and the waterfalls make it too dangerous for anything larger than a canoe, and even those tip more often than not. Everything has to go overland through the canyon before it’s loaded onto barges on the far bank for the journey downriver into Keating Duchy and DuCoumont County.”

It was painful for Charlotte to see people who had built their whole lives in Otker Barony turning back to Keating just to find work. Already, familiar faces were vanishing at an alarming rate, and no matter how much her father insisted that it was just a few old folks looking to retire somewhere where life was easier than the frontier, Charlotte knew better.

It might be an old pensioner who moved, but as often as not, that pensioner’s adult children followed after in order to support their parents. She’d seen families of three generations loading themselves up into wagons and turning east to find a better life because her father had done nothing to make it seem like continuing to struggle in Otker would be worthwhile.

”How long does the overland passage take?” Jocelynn asked, taking a small sip of wine to wet her lips as she brought the conversation around to details that were truly important.

”It depends on the load,” Charlotte said. ”A heavy wagon filled with valuable stone might take four or five days if the weather holds. Lighter goods, two or three. People on horseback can make it in a day and a half if they push, though the road is steep in places and it’s cruel to the horses to work them so hard.”

”And on foot?” Jocenlynn asked, raising a brow and doing her best to keep her voice light and conversational.

”Three days, perhaps?” Charlotte replied, cocking her head slightly as she thought about the families she’d seen moving through the canyon over the summer. ”Four if you’re moving slowly or with children. The road is well-maintained, at least. Father has always insisted on that.”

Serle Otker might curse at every gold sovereign he had to spend maintaining the road, whether it was repairing damage from autumn floods or staffing the waystations and lookout towers, but he still spent them. The day that people didn’t feel like they could trust his routes through the canyon was the day a river of gold stopped flowing into his treasury, and he refused to let that happen.

”Your father sounds like a... practical man,” Jocelynn said carefully. Her own opinion of Serle Otker wasn’t very high, but it wouldn’t do her any good to disparage the man in front of his daughter. Not when she had something she needed from the Otkers.

”He is,” Charlotte said warmly, accepting the compliment without questioning it. ”He’d like you, I think. He always admired people who thought about how things connected rather than just how they worked on their own.”

Jocelynn nodded absently while her mind worked rapidly to calculate the details. Everything from the travel time to the out-of-work carters, the travel times, and most importantly, the barges on the far side, ready to carry goods or people, downriver into DuCoumont County, where Uncle Dylan’s lands began. And, if she was very lucky, where the people who followed her could find safe harbor and passage the rest of the way home.

”You know,” Jocelynn said, as if the thought had only just occurred to her. ”Before Marquis Bors passed, I proposed something to him that I’ve been thinking about lately. A carriage service between the baronies. Something regular and reliable, the way the ferries run between the islands back home in Blackwell.”

”A carriage service?” Charlotte asked, her eyes lighting up at the notion. She’d seen carriage services in the larger towns of Keating when she visited, but whenever she asked about starting one in Lothian, her father claimed they were too expensive. A carriage service had to be reliable, with carriages that kept to a schedule whether they were full of passengers or not.

Too often, a trip cost more money than it made in fees, and no one in Lothian seemed to be willing to bear the costs.

”Regular routes, scheduled departures,” Jocelynn said, warming to the subject because it was easier to talk about infrastructure than to think about what she actually needed the infrastructure for.

”In Blackwell, the ferries are what hold the county together,” she explained. ”Every island has a schedule, and people plan their lives around it. Goods, passengers, even letter carriers. Everything moves on the same boats. I thought something similar could work here, especially through Otker Canyon, where the road is already maintained, and the traffic is steady.”

”That would be wonderful,” Charlotte said, clapping her hands in excitement at the idea that something so useful might finally make its way to the march. ”The carters are all independent right now, each one negotiating their own contracts, and half of them sit empty on the return trip because there’s nothing coming back the other way. If you organized it properly...”

”You could fill the wagons in both directions,” Jocelynn finished. ”And the older carters who can’t handle heavy stone could run passenger routes instead.”

”Yes!” Charlotte was leaning forward now, her handkerchief forgotten, her tears forgotten, everything forgotten except the elegant simplicity of the idea. ”And if you extended it to DuCoumont, you’d connect the whole eastern half of the kingdom.”

”The baronies are too isolated,” she added, thinking once again about the people who had left and weren’t likely to return if nothing changed in the march. ”Families get separated, workers can’t travel to where the work is, and messages take weeks when they should take days.”

”Exactly,” Jocelynn said, and for a moment, the conversation felt real. Not a cover for intelligence gathering, not a thread in an escape plan, but a genuine vision for something that could make life better for the people who lived in these rugged, rolling hills. The kind of thing Ashlynn would have designed, sitting behind the walls of her tower in Blackwell Manor with her charts and her books, finding ways to help people she’d never meet.

The thought stung, and Jocelynn took a careful sip of wine to cover it.

”We should discuss it properly sometime,” she said. ”If you aren’t too busy tomorrow, I could introduce you to Captain Devlin,” she suggested, casually bringing up one of her most loyal followers. ”His ship wasn’t a ferry, but he knows a good deal about managing routes, and he might be able to help come up with a few things we could do to test how it could work, even in winter,” Jocelynn suggested.

Of course, Jocelynn hadn’t told the good captain what she planned. No one knew, and the only person she might once have trusted with her intentions had died in the Lothian dungeons. But she could tell Devlin that she intended to escape and to take her people with her. She could help him refine the plan, even if she didn’t intend to escape with him.

And, most importantly, she could ensure that he had allies who could help him along the way. Allies like Charlotte Otker.

”I’d love that,” Charlotte said, beaming. ”I’ll find some time tomorrow in between all the other preparations, and we can have tea. Maybe Adala can join us, too,” she said, giving a warm smile to the young lady sitting next to her.

”Hmm?” Adala said, caught momentarily off guard by the suggestion. ”I’d be happy to,” she said quickly, covering her surprise by reaching out for one of the jugs of wine to refill her cup.

Charlotte hadn’t noticed the specificity of Jocelynn’s questions, or if she had, she considered them part of a normal conversation about a business venture or public service. Adala, however, saw something else entirely.

She saw a woman mapping an escape route with the systematic precision of someone who had already decided to run, and she filed it alongside the foot that had shifted toward the pyre and everything else that she’d noticed since the memorial began.

Perhaps she’d been wrong about Jocelynn’s willingness to die to obtain the vengeance she wanted. If she was looking for an escape route, then she might be intending to survive after all. And if Jocelynn was going to survive whatever her plans were, then perhaps... Perhaps it really would be worth helping her achieve them.