The Vampire & Her Witch

The mention of her father tugged at Ashlynn like an anchor chain cast over the side. She felt the familiar pull of homesickness settle behind her ribs like a second heartbeat, steady and insistent.

For a moment, she would have given anything to hear her father’s boots on the deck behind her and his laughing, boastful voice as he bragged about the fish he’d catch. She’d have given twice as much to see her mother’s figure, standing on the docks and waving goodbye as they ventured out onto the water.

”I miss them,” she said, closing her eyes and letting the tears flow freely down her cheeks.

”So do I,” Isabell said. ”I miss Casquas. If it weren’t for... for everything,” Isabell said with a heavy sigh. ”I can see him holed up in one of the towers in the Vale, writing like mad to keep up with the poetry of this place and the people of the Vale. It’s not like home, but he,” Isabell started, only for her voice to catch in her throat.

”He moved halfway across the world for me,” she said softly. ”And now, I want to ask him to do it again... It’s not fair to him,” she said, shaking her head at how much her husband had given up already to make her happy. ”But I think he’d come to love it here, just like he came to love Blackwell.”

”What about your little ones?” Ashlynn asked, blotting the tears from her eyes with the corner of a sleeve as she turned to face Isabell. ”They aren’t so little anymore. Will they join you here? Or stay at home in Blackwell?”

”I don’t know,” Isabell said honestly. ”Lassian will. He’s not old enough yet to choose, no matter how bullheaded he gets,” she said as she tried to imagine how her son would take the news. He’d hate leaving his friends behind, but... If he met the right people in the Vale, he might just be taken in by it all.

”Issandra is the hard one,” Isabell added. ”I hate to pull her away from her apprenticeship after she fought so hard for it, but... She’ll be happier here. Safer, too, and I want that for her. I want that for all of them.”

She trailed off, and for a moment, both women sat in the shared silence of missing the people they loved. The river murmured against the hull. The fog drifted past in slow, pale curtains. Somewhere behind them, a member of the crew called out a depth sounding, and the steersman adjusted the rudder with a low creak that vibrated through the timbers beneath them.

”I almost lost control,” Ashlynn said quietly when she couldn’t keep the feelings in her chest bottled up any longer. ”With Cian. Upstairs.”

Isabell turned to look at her, wearing an expression that contained far more concern than surprise. She’d felt the flare of power through the bond, along with the surge of fury that had crackled through Ashlynn’s blood like lightning through a tree.

”But you didn’t,” Isabell said firmly in a tone that accepted no arguments. ”Whether you had help from Lady Eira or not, you didn’t lose control the way you did before,” she said sternly. ”That’s the outcome. Focus on the outcomes you achieved, not the disasters you already avoided.”

”Isabell...” Ashlynn started, only to be interrupted by the older woman.

”I mean it,” the older woman said, cutting her off with a maternal firmness that few people could direct towards the mighty Mother of Trees. ”You confronted a zealot who attacked his own sister, you extracted the truth from a terrified woman without breaking her, you gave the Stormbrooks a purpose that serves both justice and strategy, and you came downstairs with a plan that convinced one of the most skeptical lords in the March to commit his entire household to your cause,” Isabell said in a single breath, punctuating each point with a soft tap on the ship’s railing.

”If the worst thing that happened last night is that you killed a man to prevent him from killing someone else, then that’s a very good outcome, Ashlynn,” Isabell said, taking off her spectacles to stare directly into Ashlynn’s emerald eyes. ”Accept it and move forward.”

The words landed on Ashlynn’s heart like an anchor finding the riverbed; a firm, steadying weight that stopped the drift before it could carry her somewhere darker and colder. Ashlynn let out a slow, steady breath and nodded slowly as she accepted the other woman’s words.

”Forward,” she repeated. ”Toward Lothian City.” To Lothian City, where the life she’d known ended as abruptly as if she really had died. To Jocelynn, whom she longed to see despite the pain of what her sister had done to her. To Owain, who had shattered her world when he broke her body... She was going forward, but she was also going back to where everything began.

”Toward Lothian City,” Isabell echoed. ”With a ship beneath our feet and a plan in our pockets and the best allies we could have hoped for sleeping in the cabin behind us. Your father would be proud of you. Your mother would be too.”

”My mother would tell me to eat something,” Ashlynn said, and the ghost of a real smile touched her lips.

”Your mother would be right,” Isabell said, reaching into the folds of her cloak and producing a cloth-wrapped bundle that she pressed into Ashlynn’s hands. ”Hand pie. The tavern’s cook made a fresh batch before dawn. It’s savory, pork, and turnip. Not as good as yours or Georg’s,” she admitted. ”But it will keep the belly full.”

Ashlynn unwrapped the cloth and bit into the hand pie, and for a few minutes, they ate in companionable silence while the cog carried them east through the fog and the bare, skeletal branches of winter trees slid past on either bank like the fingers of sleeping giants reaching toward the gray sky.

Less than a year had gone by, and she was coming back to Lothian City once again. But this time, Owain’s celebration would end very differently from the one before...