The Vampire & Her Witch

By the door, Lady Eira Wyndan sat on a low stool with her hands folded in her lap and her back straight against the wall. She had not spoken since escorting Cian to the room where his sister was resting, and the more she listened to him speak, the less she wanted to hear.

But Inquisitor Diarmuid had been clear about her instructions; she wasn’t to let the acolyte leave the room until Lady Ashlynn came to speak to Lady Cerys. It was the first chance she’d been given to do something useful for Lady Ashlynn, and she wasn’t about to fail such a simple task. Or, at least, it should have been a simple task.

Her blonde hair was gathered in an intricate braid, and her bright eyes moved between the speakers in the same way that chickens watched a group of foxes walking outside the chicken coop. She was certain that Lady Cerys wouldn’t cause any trouble, but that didn’t mean that the two men in the room wouldn’t, and between a knight and an Acolyte of the Inquisition, she had no desire to find out which would come out on top if things came to blows.

Cerys noticed the girl watching and felt a flicker of unease that had nothing to do with her injuries. Just last night, she’d been hopeful that the young woman would succeed in catching Lord Liam’s eyes during the impromptu feast they held to celebrate his safe return, but now, everything had changed.

When Cerys looked at the way Lady Eira sat by the door, she didn’t see a young woman hoping to attract the attention of a suitor anymore... She saw a jailor standing guard as if the people in the room couldn’t be trusted.

The thought stung almost as much as her injuries because, if she was honest, Lady Ashlynn wasn’t wrong to distrust her, or anyone who was close to her. And perhaps her brother, least of all.

”Cian,” Cerys said at last, though her voice came out thinner than she intended. The pain in her arm had been building steadily since the tallow candles were lit, a deep, grinding ache that radiated from the break in her forearm all the way to her shoulder.

”Please. Sit down,” she said, gingerly moving her legs to the side in order to make space for him at the foot of the bed. She winced in pain as the movement put more stress than she expected on her wounded ankle, but if Cian would calm down, then she felt it was worth the momentary discomfort.

”I’ll sit when I understand why we’re here,” Cian said, though he did stop pacing. He turned toward the door instead, studying Eira with the open suspicion of a man trained to see heresy in shadows. ”You. Girl. When is this lady of yours coming? We were told someone wished to speak with us, and we’ve been waiting for the better part of an hour.”

”She’ll come when she’s ready,” Eira said, meeting his gaze without flinching. Perhaps she would have been intimidated by the robes of an Acolyte of the Inquisition before, but she’d seen what real power looked like, and the woman she was waiting for was said to be even more powerful than Sir Ollie. If she let a small-minded man like Cian bully her, then how could she ever hope to be worthy of Lady Ashlynn’s attention, much less Lord Liam’s?

”You heard as much as I did when we arrived,” she reminded the impatient acolyte. ”Her Dominion is tending to Sir Ollie. She’ll see us when she’s finished, or when she finishes her meeting with Baron Dunn.”

”We’re hardly the most important people for her to give her time to,” Eira added, pointing out that Loghlan Dunn had also been summoned to this tavern to meet with the very same person they were currently waiting for.

Cian opened his mouth to press the matter, but whatever he intended to say was lost to the sound of Cerys shifting on the bed, her breath catching as the movement sent a fresh spike of pain through her broken arm.

The break was in her forearm, midway between the wrist and the elbow, and even though Baron Loghlan’s personal physician had set the bone and replaced the original, crude splint that had been fashioned after Sir Ollie healed her, the splint couldn’t stop the deep, throbbing ache that pulsed in time with her heartbeat or the sharper, uglier pain that stabbed through the bone whenever she forgot herself and tried to use the arm.

Her ankle was nearly as bad. The twist hadn’t broken anything, at least, not according to the physician, but the swelling had turned the joint into a swollen, purple thing that looked like it belonged to a woman twice her size, and she couldn’t put weight on it without the whole leg threatening to buckle.

Between the arm and the ankle and the constant, grinding exhaustion of pain that never quite let her rest once she’d woken in the carriage, Cerys felt like a woman who had been taken apart and reassembled by someone who hadn’t quite remembered where all the pieces went.

No, that wasn’t fair, she reminded herself. Her injuries had been much, much worse, according to Cynwrig. So bad that she’d been on the edge of death and only Sir Ollie’s witchcraft had been able to pull her back from the brink...

It was something she still didn’t know how to feel about. But while her arm and ankle both tormented her, there was no pain at all where her head had struck the stones of the ground when she fell from her dying horse, nor was there any pain from the ribs that had broken and pierced her lungs. What Sir Ollie had been able to make whole had been perfectly restored in a way that even the Church’s miracle workers would struggle to match.

”Cian,” she tried again. ”Please. Just sit with me while we wait. You haven’t even asked how your niece is doing yet,” she said hopefully.

But her brother had already turned his attention elsewhere. He was studying the room itself now, running his eyes along the low ceiling beams and the rough stone walls with the same evaluating gaze that she’d seen him use when inspecting the cells beneath the Abbey, the ones where the Inquisition held people who had been brought in for questioning. The comparison made her stomach clench.

”These walls are thick,” Cian observed, almost to himself. ”And there’s only one door. No window, unless you count that,” he said as he gestured toward a narrow slit in the wall near the ceiling that let in a sliver of cold night air and not much else. ”If this were the Abbey, I’d call this a holding cell, not a guest room.”

”It’s a tavern room,” Cynwrig said flatly. ”It’s a place for tired travelers to get some rest, and it’s quiet enough that the common room won’t bother someone trying to sleep. Not everything is a conspiracy, Cian.”

”Everything is a test,” Cian replied, and the certainty in his voice carried the unmistakable ring of a phrase he’d heard repeated so many times that it had become indistinguishable from his own thoughts. Something Abbot Recared would say. ”The Holy Lord tests us in every moment, brother. Through comfort and through suffering. The question is whether we recognize the test when it comes.”

”This moment is a test for me,” Cian said softly. ”And Inquisitor Diarmuid is here to witness it. It’s a test for you too, Sister,” the young acolyte added in a louder voice. ”You’ve been touched by demonic witchcraft, and you’ve survived it. That means the Holy Lord of Light believes you may reach the Heavenly Shores at the end of this life, but only if your faith survives this trial.”

”Hold fast to your faith, Cerys,” he said in a tone that was likely meant to sound like sage advice but landed like a petulant lecture on manners from a brother who was several years her junior.

Cynwrig said nothing to that, but the tightness around his jaw deepened, and Cerys saw his hands press harder together between his knees. Her husband was a patient man, far more patient than she deserved most days.

But patience had its limits, and Cian had been testing those limits steadily since he’d arrived from the Abbey with the Inquisitor and Lady Eira an hour ago.

Then footsteps sounded on the stairs outside.

Not heavy footsteps. Not the measured tread of a soldier or the confident stride of a nobleman. These were light, almost quiet enough to miss beneath the creak of aging floorboards, and they stopped just outside the door with a pause that lasted exactly long enough for the occupants of the room to notice the silence before a gentle knock broke it.

Eira rose from her stool and opened the door, stepping aside with a small bow of her head to reveal a woman who was nothing like what Cerys expected.