The Vampire & Her Witch

She was young. That was the first thing Cerys noticed, and despite the fact that she’d known Ashlynn Blackwell was barely into her twenties when she married Owain Lothian, somehow the notion of a young ’Ashlynn Blackwell’ had been completely overridden in her mind by the ancient power of the mighty ’Mother of Trees’.

Yet her eyes didn’t lie to her. The woman who stepped into the candlelight couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, with pale blonde hair that fell loosely past her shoulders and a face that was far too delicate to belong to the fearsome witch who had conquered one barony by force of arms and brought Baron Loghlan Dunn to kneel with an offer he couldn’t refuse.

She wore a simple peasant skirt of dark green wool and a cream colored blouse with sleeves that had been rolled to the elbows. In fact, the only adornment she carried was a belt of deep ocean-blue leather from which hung a sheathed sword whose hilt caught the candlelight in flashes of silver and pale blue stone.

The hilt of the sword was carved from something pale, bone perhaps, with deep spiraling flutes and threads of silver wire wound through it, and the guard was shaped into a pattern that made Cerys think of a flooding river crashing against boulders.

It was not a peasant’s weapon. Whatever else the woman chose to wear, the sword announced her as clearly as a herald’s trumpet.

Cynwrig was on his feet before Cerys could draw her next breath, rising from his chair with the practiced instinct of a knight who recognized authority when it entered a room, regardless of how it was dressed. He inclined his head, his right fist moving to his chest in a formal greeting that confirmed what Cerys already knew.

This was her. The Mother of Trees. The woman who had captured Liam Dunn only to send him back along with Sir Ollie to forge an alliance, and whose name was spoken in whispers among the Baron’s inner circle as if even saying it aloud carried a risk.

”My Lady,” Cynwrig said, and his voice was steady, but Cerys could see the tension running through the line of his shoulders like a bowstring drawn taut. His whole body trembled, and for a moment, Cerys wondered if he was going to drop to one knee before the mighty witch.

”As we’ve been summoned, so have we come,” Cynwrig said formally. ”Please forgive my wife’s inability to rise,” he added with a sheepish glance toward Cerys.

”It’s fine, I apologize for the wait,” the woman said. Her voice was calm, clear, and unhurried, and it filled the small room the way sunlight filled a window, not by force but simply by being the brightest thing in it. ”Ollie needed my attention, and I couldn’t leave his side until I was certain his wounds were healed.”

Her emerald eyes swept the room in a slow, deliberate arc. They lingered on Cerys for a moment that felt far longer than it was, taking in the sling, the swollen ankle, the pale face, and the pendant she clutched in a white-knuckled fist. Then they moved to Cynwrig, to Eira by the door, and finally to Cian in the corner.

In that brief glance, something flickered across her expression when she looked at the acolyte. Not surprise, exactly. Either Diarmuid or Marcel had informed her about his presence, but there was something about seeing an Acolyte of the Inquisition that made her expression harden while her hand drifted ever so slightly closer to the hilt of her sword.

Cian felt the weight of those eyes settle on him and resisted the urge to straighten his posture. He was accustomed to being examined by powerful people. Abbot Recared had a gaze that could strip the varnish from a pew at thirty paces, and the senior Inquisitors who visited the Abbey had a way of looking through you rather than at you, as if they already knew all of your secrets and were only waiting for you to confess to them.

Then her eyes moved on, and Cian released a shuddering breath that was far louder than he’d intended.

”Sir Cynwrig,” Ashlynn said, turning her attention back to the knight. ”Did Marcel explain his reasons for bringing you here to meet with me?”

”He said that he’d found a path for us to make right our wrongs,” Cynwrig replied, keeping his voice careful and measured. ”If we were brave enough to walk it. Beyond that, he wasn’t generous with the details.”

”No,” she said quietly, as a ghost of something that might have been amusement crossed the witch’s face. It was there and gone in an instant, but Cerys was certain she’d seen it. ”Marcel rarely shares more than he needs to.”

From the corner, Cian watched this exchange with narrowed eyes and a rigid stillness that had replaced his restless pacing. He didn’t know this woman. He had never seen her face, never heard her voice, and whatever title Eira had used when speaking of her earlier, it hadn’t been a name that Cian recognized. But he was trained in the art of observation, even if his training was incomplete, and what he observed now set the fine hairs on his arms standing upright beneath his robes.

His brother-in-law, a knight of Dunn Barony, had risen for this woman the way he would rise for a baron’s wife. The girl by the door had bowed her head in a gesture of deference that went beyond mere courtesy. And the way Cynwrig said ’we’ when he spoke of making right their wrongs told Cian that whatever had brought them to this room, his brother-in-law was already complicit in it.

Cian’s fingers found the sunburst medallion on his chest and held it tightly as he fought to keep his heartbeat from racing and his breathing even. Something felt wrong here... Wrong and dangerous.

The woman pulled the room’s only other chair from beneath the washstand and set it facing the bed where Cerys sat. She didn’t sit immediately. Instead, she stood behind it with her hands resting on its back, and when she spoke again, her voice carried the quiet authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed.

”I know that it isn’t easy for you to be here,” she acknowledged after taking a deep, steadying breath. Her knuckles grew white on the back of the chair, and for a moment, Cerys thought she heard the wood cracking beneath the young woman’s fingers before she forced herself to relax.

She drew another deep breath and sat down with a relaxed posture that suggested she was just as tired as Cerys was, though even the visible signs of fatigue couldn’t diminish the quiet authority she radiated.

”Lady Cerys,” Ashlynn said in a tone that was almost... matronly, and remarkably similar to the tone Cerys herself used when Dalwyn had gotten into trouble. Again. ”I dislike pressuring people unfairly, but time is limited tonight, and I won’t mince words with you.”

”You’re here because you betrayed the trust that Ollie placed in you,” Ashlynn said bluntly. ”And not just his own trust but your own promise to keep certain things secret. Whatever your reasons, when you took your son and fled from Loghlan Dunn’s camp this morning, you put hundreds of lives in danger, including your own family,” she said in a voice that grew colder and harder the more she spoke.

In the corner, Cian went very still. Cerys could feel the shift in him, the way you could feel the temperature drop when a cloud passed over the sun. Cynwrig had told him that she had been injured in a demon trap during a morning ride along the river. A simple accident. A terrible misfortune.

But this woman was describing something else entirely. Not a morning ride but an escape with her son? And a betrayal? Just what was going on here?

And somewhere, deep within Cian’s heart, an icy hand clutched his chest as another thought occurred to him. Just how much trouble had his sister gotten their family into?