The Vampire & Her Witch

Jocelynn opened the door to find Captain Albyn waiting in the corridor, and for a moment, she barely recognized him.

The weathered sailor she knew had been completely transformed. The rough stubble that usually shadowed his jaw had been scraped clean, revealing a jawline that was sharper than she’d realized beneath the perpetual scruff. His sun-bleached hair, which normally fell in whatever direction the wind had last pushed it, had been combed back and tied with a cord of dark leather.

Without the stubble and the wind-tangled hair, he looked younger, like a man just entering his thirties instead of a man approaching his forties. He also looked more exposed, like a ship stripped of its rigging, and Jocelynn wasn’t quite certain if the look suited him or not.

He wore a doublet of black wool over a cream-colored shirt with laced sleeves, and the leather of his boots, usually rolled down to just below the knee in the fashion of a mariner, had been pulled up and polished to a shine bright enough to reflect the candlelight of the room. His waxed canvas cloak had been replaced by a short half-cape in the same black wool as his doublet, lined with white silk that showed at the collar when he turned.

But it was the tabard draped over the doublet that caught her breath. The fabric was divided down the center, black on the left and white on the right, and embroidered on the chest in silver thread was the crest that Albyn had chosen for himself: a curved sword hanging above a ship’s oar.

It was supposed to be Owain’s gift to the man who had rescued Jocelynn from the Inquisition. A true knighthood rather than a simple title of knight errantry, with the lands to go with it. Of course, Hurel was a village that sat inland, miles from the nearest river of any consequence, surrounded by ponds and rocky streams that wouldn’t carry a child in a rowboat, but Albyn had insisted on keeping an oar in his sigil anyway.

Sir Albyn Dawnbreaker. He’d chosen the surname himself, after the ship he’d captained before leaving the sea behind to follow her to Lothian March. It was the most stubborn thing he could have done, branding himself with the name of a vessel that would never sail these landlocked waters, and Jocelynn loved him for it in the way that she loved all the people who refused to let this place strip away who they were.

The ceremonial sword at his hip completed the image. It was a slender blade with a polished brass crossguard, more decoration than weapon, commissioned by Owain for the knighting ceremony. Albyn’s own weapons, the falchion with the polished bell-guard and the long, curved fighting knife that was nearly the length of a man’s forearm, were nowhere to be seen. They wouldn’t be appropriate for a ceremony, and Owain would never permit a common-born man to carry a real weapon in the great hall on the night he was elevated to a station above his birth.

Jocelynn knew exactly what the knighthood was. An anchor chain dressed up as an honor, designed to bind Albyn to Owain’s service and distance him from her. But looking at him now, cleaned and polished and wearing the trappings of a station he’d earned ten times over with his courage and his loyalty, she couldn’t help but see the knight he truly deserved to be.

”You look handsome,” she said, and meant it. ”I’m sorry my father isn’t here to see you honored for everything you’ve done. He’d be proud of you, Albyn.”

Something shifted behind his eyes at the mention of Count Rhys, a flicker of warmth that was quickly folded away behind the careful composure he’d been wearing like armor since he’d chosen to stay behind as a fish in the net.

”I’m certain your father wouldn’t spare me a second glance, my lady,” Albyn said with a faint, crooked smile. ”Not when his daughter looks the way you do tonight.” The smile faded as quickly as it appeared, and when he spoke again, his voice was strained by the weight of years gone by, both in Rhys Blackwell’s service and as his enemy.

”He’d want to be here,” Albyn said. ”Both of them would.”

”It’s better that they aren’t,” Jocelynn said, shaking her head softly. ”It would be better if you weren’t here either,” she added softly. ”I’m sorry I got you tangled up in all of this.”

”It’s not the first time I’ve gotten tangled up in something dangerous for a beautiful woman,” Albyn said lightly. ”But this time I don’t intend to let her send me away,” he added in a slightly softer tone. ”For what it’s worth, I’m glad I came. If I hadn’t...”

He let the rest go unsaid. If he hadn’t, Jocelynn might still be in the dungeons with Percivus, or she might have died there while everyone else believed that the Inquisition was only keeping her confined to her chambers.

She might have traded one prison for another, but at least the one she found herself in now gave her a chance to fight back, or to meet her fate on her own terms.

The corridor outside the guest wing was empty for the moment, just the two of them and the fading light from the narrow windows that lined the passage. The sounds of the ceremony preparations were distant, muffled by stone and heavy doors, carried from deeper within the manor where the great hall waited. But that wouldn’t last.

Soon, the guards would take their positions along the wider corridors that connected the wings of the manor, and every word between them would have an audience.

”My lady,” Albyn said, dropping his voice and leaning slightly closer. His rolling gait brought him half a step nearer, close enough that his words wouldn’t carry past the stone walls. ”It isn’t too late. Jean’s people are still in the manor. I don’t know the full shape of it, but I’m certain they have ways through these walls that Owain’s men have never found. Say the word, and I’ll find him. We can be out of the city before anyone knows you’re gone.”

Jocelynn looked at him for a long moment, studying the familiar lines of his face, the way a captain studied a chart before committing to a course. There was no judgment in his eyes, no reproach. Just the steady, unwavering loyalty of a man who had breached a dungeon to set her free and would do it again without hesitation.

Captain Devlin had made a similar offer in the alcove behind the fish stalls while Jean burned Isabell’s letter to ash. She’d told him then that she wanted to marry Owain, and the lie had tasted like salt water in her throat. She didn’t want to marry anyone. She wanted to bury a knife in the chest of the man who had murdered her sister, and the wedding was the shortest path between the blade and his heart.

But she couldn’t say that. Not aloud... Not where someone could try to talk her out of it. The blade she’d sharpened in her heart was too brittle for that, so she gave Albyn the only answer she could and hoped it would be enough.

”Everything that’s about to happen needs to happen, Albyn,” she said quietly. ”It’s the only way my sister will ever know peace in the Heavenly Shores. And it’s the only way I can make up for what I’ve done,” she said in a voice that was so faint, she wasn’t certain that Albyn had even heard it.

Albyn’s brow creased at the second part, a question forming behind his eyes that he didn’t voice. He wasn’t a prying man. He allowed her to carry her grief in silence, the way a good first mate allowed his captain to stand alone at the helm during a difficult passage, close enough to act if she faltered but never presuming to take the wheel from her hands.

The guilt in Jocelynn’s heart was older than the dungeons, older than Eleanor’s death, older than her arrival in Lothian March. It went all the way back to a drawing room in Lothian Manor, where a younger, more foolish Jocelynn had whispered a secret about her sister to a man she thought she could trust, believing that she was setting Ashlynn free from a marriage she didn’t want.

But no matter how much she’d tried to lie to herself since then, here at the end, she couldn’t escape the truth. She hadn’t been setting her sister free... She had tried to take her sister’s marriage for herself because she wanted the fantasy of the hero and the happy ending so badly that she was willing to reveal her sister’s greatest secret to steal it.

Now, on the night of her wedding to the man she’d destroyed everything to possess, she only wanted to come close enough to him to plunge a knife into his chest... just the way he’d taught her to in the dungeons beneath the manor. After that... she deserved whatever fate befell her.

”I need to do this, Albyn,” she repeated. ”Even if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do.”

”Then I’ll walk you to your battle, my lady,” Albyn said, offering his arm with a formality that was at odds with everything about their relationship except the deep, unspoken respect that ran beneath it.

Jocelynn took his arm, feeling the unfamiliar stiffness of new wool beneath her fingers where she was accustomed to the roughness of waxed canvas. For a moment, her hand tightened on his sleeve, and she allowed herself the brief indulgence of leaning slightly into his strength the way a ship leaned into a steady wind.

Then she straightened, lifted her chin, and together they walked out of the guest wing and into the wider corridors of Lothian Manor.