The Vampire & Her Witch

Owain’s carriage hadn’t moved in nearly a quarter of an hour, and his patience was a fraying rope that wouldn’t hold much longer.

He sat with his back pressed against the padded bench, his arms folded across the blue sash on his chest, and his jaw clenched tight enough that he could feel the muscles in his temples throbbing with each heartbeat. The curtains of the carriage were drawn; he’d closed them himself after the third time a child had scampered past the guards to try to glimpse the heroic demon-slayer, and the only light that reached him was the fading amber glow of the setting sun filtering through the heavy fabric.

Setting. The sun was already setting, and he was trapped in a broken carriage like a merchant whose cart had thrown an axle on a country road.

Through the curtains, he could hear the murmur of the crowd outside, the stamping of restless horses, and the voices of the men who had been sent to assess the damage. A sinkhole had opened beneath the left front wheel, they said. The cobblestones had collapsed into a cavity in the road, probably an old drainage pipe or a buried stump that rotted away, long forgotten when the street was paved over.

It was just bad luck that the horses ahead of him had finally broken the roadway, and the wheel of Owain’s carriage had dropped into the gap hard enough to crack two of the spokes and split the iron rim.

They were working on it, they said. They’d sent for a wheelwright and a spare wheel from the manor, they said. It would take time, they said.

”How much time?” Owain had asked through the curtain, and the footman responsible for the carriage had given him the kind of answer that men gave when they wanted to sound helpful without committing to anything that could get them flogged.

”Difficult to say, my lord,” the man said as he clutched his wool cap in his hands. ”If it’s just the wheel, then as soon as the men get here with the replacement, the old one will come right off, and the new one will replace it, and we can be on our way. But...”

”But what?” Owain growled.

”But, if the axle is cracked, we’ll have to patch it up so it holds long enough to get back to the manor,” the man said in a quiet, mouselike tone. ”It doesn’t have to hold for very long, we’re only half a league away, so even if it isn’t a pretty repair...”

”I don’t care about how ’pretty’ an axle is,” Owain had said in a voice that was quiet enough to make the foreman lean closer and cold enough to make him wish he hadn’t. ”I care about how long I’m going to be sitting here while every lord and lady in the march watches my carriage rot in the middle of the street.”

The footman stammered something about doing his best and retreated to shout at his men with renewed urgency, and Owain had closed the curtain and settled back to wait, his fury building with each passing minute like the pressure in a tea kettle.

He could get out. He could dismount from the carriage, call for a horse, and ride to the manor like the warrior he was, instead of sitting here like an invalid being ferried to the baths. The thought had crossed his mind more than once in the past quarter hour, and each time, he’d rejected it for the same reason.

It would be beneath his dignity.

A Marquis didn’t abandon his carriage on the side of the road like a man fleeing a sinking ship. A Marquis sat where he was and waited for the problem to be solved by the people whose job it was to solve it, and when the problem was solved, he would arrive at his destination exactly as he intended: composed, unhurried, and in complete control.

But the sun didn’t care about dignity. It was sinking beneath the western wall of the city with the indifferent certainty of a force that answered to no lord, and the shadows stretching across the boulevard outside his curtains were growing longer by the minute.

First, the eulogies. Two hours of his life that he would never recover, squandered on the self-important ramblings of old men who couldn’t resist turning a funeral into a stage for their petty grievances with his father. Loghlan Dunn’s endless, barbed tribute. Valeri Leufroy’s combative rebuttal. And then every other baron in the room scrambling to prove that his grief was deeper, his memories fonder, and his loyalty to the fallen Marquis more sincere than the man who spoke before him.

And now this. A hole in the road. A cracked wheel. His grand procession was reduced to a spectacle of incompetence while the common folk of Lothian City lined the streets and watched their future Marquis sit in a broken box on wheels.

Someone was going to answer for this. The footman. The road crew. Whoever was supposed to inspect the route before the procession departed. And the staff in the carriage house who had failed to ensure that the carriage was properly maintained... The springs should have been checked, the wheels examined...

This had been his father’s carriage, painted with the crossed axes and the setting sun of the Lothian Marquis. Even if his father hadn’t used it for months while his health declined, the household staff should have made certain that it was ready to be used at a moment’s notice. If even one of them had done their job, the wheel might have survived the sinkhole instead of shattering like pottery.

He’d have them flogged, he decided as he stewed in the confines of his broken, wooden box. Every last one of them. After the ceremony, after the wedding, after Jocelynn was his in name and body, he would line them up in the courtyard and teach them what happened when their negligence embarrassed the Marquis of Lothian March!