The Vampire & Her Witch

”How, how can it be?” Elgon said numbly as he stared up at the woman whose memorial he’d attended just the day before. ”Lady, Lady Ashlynn,” he breathed. ”Is it, is it really you?”

No one in the room moved. The servants pressed against the walls barely dared to breathe, and even Sir Beathan’s sword had drifted downward. The young Templar’s fierce conviction crumbled into the same stunned bewilderment that had seized every other person from Blackwell.

Elgon’s sword was already sheathed. He couldn’t remember putting it away, but his hands were empty and trembling at his sides as he stared up at the woman on the landing. His eyes, sharpened by years spent watching the horizon for the first sign of pirate sails, swept over the woman claiming to be Lady Ashlynn with a mix of desperate hope and deep distrust.

She was different. The way she carried herself had changed in ways that went deeper than posture. The Ashlynn he remembered had been graceful in the careful, practiced way of a nobleman’s daughter who had been taught to move through a room without drawing too much attention to herself. At home, she had been easy to overlook in any gathering of more than a dozen people despite her natural charm.

This woman stood the way a ship’s captain stood on the quarterdeck in a gale. Her feet were planted firmly on the floor yet her weight was balanced and ready to shift in any direction. There was a sword at her hip, and despite the elaborate hilt, she didn’t wear it with the awkwardness of someone carrying an ornamental weapon. Combined with the dark breeches tucked into rolled down boots and the loose, cream colored blouse she wore, she looked like a woman ready to stride across a gangplank to take command.

But beneath all of that, beneath the breeches and the sailor’s boots and the sword and the quiet authority that radiated from her like heat from a forge, the face was the same. The pale blonde hair. The emerald eyes that caught the firelight and held it. The delicate line of her jaw that she’d inherited from her mother, Countess Maela, and the slight way she tilted her head when she was being patient with someone who hadn’t caught up to her yet that reminded him so much of Lord Rhys...

He’d watched that face grow from a round-cheeked child into a young woman. He’d stood guard at her door during the first ball Lord Rhys allowed her to attend and he pretended not to notice when she snuck back to the library after her first turn on the dancefloor with her father. He’d carried her on his shoulders when she was small enough to ride there, and he’d stood at attention behind her father’s chair the night Count Rhys announced her betrothal to Owain Lothian, her body go stiff even as she smiled and said all the right things.

He knew that face the way he knew the lighthouse on Prowell Point; by heart, from every angle, in every kind of light, and he could never mistake her for anyone else.

”But, but you’re supposed to be dead,” Elgon managed, his voice rough as the sea on the rocks. ”How are you here? And how...” he swallowed, forcing himself to ask the question that his heart was begging him not to. ”How can we be sure it’s really you?”

Ashlynn descended the stairs with slow measured steps, and the room parted before her as naturally as water parts before a ship’s prow. Devlin stepped aside without a word, his knife forgotten on the floor where it had fallen. Beathan and his Templars lowered their swords the rest of the way, and though none of them sheathed their blades, their eyes tracking between Ashlynn and the Inquisitors as if they couldn’t quite decide which impossibility to focus on.

”That’s a fair question,” Ashlynn said as she reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the common room toward Elgon. Her voice was warm, but there was a steadiness beneath it that hadn’t been there before.

”If you need proof that I’m not an imposter, I’d be happy to introduce you to the one Owain kept in the Summer Villa to take my place,” Ashlynn said with a faint smile and a mischievous twinkle in her eye. ”But Samira is resting upstairs. She’s carrying Owain’s child, and tomorrow is going to be a very long day for her.”

A ripple of confusion moved through the room at the mention of an imposter, followed by startled gasps when Ashlynn claimed that the impostor was carrying Owain’s child. Elgon’s brow furrowed deeply enough that his mustache seemed to bristle, but Ashlynn raised a hand before the questions could start.

”I know this is hard to accept,” she said, her emerald gaze settling on Elgon’s weathered face. ”And your suspicions are reasonable. My father would tell you the same thing.”

Something shifted in Elgon’s expression at the mention of Count Rhys, a crack in the armor of disbelief that he’d been holding together through sheer force of will.

”He’d tell you the same thing he told me,” Ashlynn continued, her voice softening as she recited one of the first lessons that Rhys Blackwell taught her when she started accompanying him to court every month. ”He’d remind you that suspicion is our heart trying to protect us from things we dare not believe. But the truth is that the world is full of things that are both wonderful and terrible, and if we give in to suspicion, we’ll miss the former for fear that we’ve discovered the latter.”

Elgon’s breath caught and his heart shook with the recognition that something wonderful was truly happening here.

”It’s really me, Sir Elgon,” Ashlynn said gently, closing the remaining distance between them and looking up into the older knight’s familiar face. ”You’re safe here. Your people are safe. And this time, I promise you, there really is something wonderful.”

For a long moment, Elgon simply stood there, his jaw working beneath his well-trimmed mustache as he wrestled with something far too large for words. Then, as if someone had cut an invisible mooring line within him, he started to move, dropping to one knee and bowing his head low.

”My lady,” Elgon said, and his voice broke on the second word. He pressed his fist to his chest in the salute he’d given to Blackwells for his entire life, and when he raised his eyes to meet hers, they were bright and brimming. ”I don’t understand how this is possible. But I’ll hear your explanation, because Count Rhys’s daughter would never lie to me.”

”She wouldn’t,” Ashlynn agreed softly, reaching out to take Elgon’s hands and helping him to his feet with a strength that surprised the knight.

”I’ve missed you,” Ashlynn added in a softer, more fragile voice as a tear escaped her best efforts to hold it back, rolling down her soft cheek before she could wipe it away. She didn’t care, however, as she pulled her old protector into a firm embrace that nearly knocked the wind out of the veteran knight as she clung to him like the railing of a ship in a storm-tossed sea.

”I’ve missed all of you,” she added, pulling back from Sir Elgon enough to meet the gazes of everyone else from Blackwell.

It had been close to a year since she’d seen any of these people, and while Sir Elgon had been a more frequent presence in her life than most of the people gathered there, there were very few people in the group she couldn’t name on sight.

Seeing Isabell again had been like a breath of fresh air in her life, carrying the familiar scents of home, but now, standing with Sir Elgon and so many other people from her father’s household, she suddenly understood why even the most stoic of sailors broke down and sobbed when their families met them on the docks and their feet touched dry land again.

She wasn’t home, not really... but for a moment, she let the illusion that she had come home crash over her like cleansing waves, washing away the hurt, the fear, and the fury that lurked in her heart as she opened her arms wide and gestured to the others from Blackwell to join her and Elgon in an embrace...