The Vampire & Her Witch

At the Aleese table, the reaction was considerably less united than the reactions of Erling Fayle or Loghlan Dunn’s forces.

Baron Tybal Aleese had gone rigid in his chair the moment the doors opened, his broad hands gripping the edge of the table with a force that turned his knuckles white. His eyes swept the hall with the sharp, suspicious assessment of a man who had built his career on never being caught unprepared and was now confronting the fact that he had been completely blindsided.

His gaze found his son first.

”Reynold,” Tybal said, his voice low and tight. ”Did you know about this?”

Reynold Aleese, who had been staring at the blood-soaked knight with a feeling of deep unease, forced himself to look away even as every instinct in his body screamed at him to draw his sword and take a stand between any danger and his parents.

”No,” Reynold said. ”Father, I swear, I had no idea. Did Baron Dunn tell you anything? Did Lord Erling?” Those two seemed to have moved the quickest, and looking at their men now, armed with swords meant for fighting rather than for show, it was clear they’d prepared for this moment. Wes Iriso’s men, however, seemed to be following along without knowing to prepare themselves for a fight in advance.

”Loghlan told me nothing,” Tybal said, and the bitterness in his voice was the bitterness of a man who had just watched two of his peers commit to a course of action without so much as a whispered warning. ”Nor did Erling. Which means either they didn’t trust me enough to include me, or they didn’t know themselves until tonight.”

”Should we send our men?” Peigi asked, glancing between Lord Owain’s face, which was growing more furious by the second. Given the choice between a man like Owain, whose motives in rushing his coronation and wedding to Lady Jocelynn only looked more suspicious now, and the wife he’d evidently betrayed, she knew where she preferred to stand, but the decision would ultimately rest with her husband.

”The others have already committed,” Peigi prompted. ”If we wait too long...”

”No,” Tybal said firmly. ”Not until I understand what’s happening. Loghlan and Erling may have decided to gamble everything on a dead woman’s word, but I won’t risk our family on faith alone.”

Reynold’s jaw worked. He looked at the armed men in the aisle, then at Erling’s knights standing shoulder to shoulder with Loghlan’s men, and something in his expression said that his father’s caution felt less like wisdom and more like cowardice with every passing moment. But he held his tongue, because he was his father’s son, and the Aleese family didn’t make a move until they understood the board.

Most of the barons seemed to echo Tybal Aleese and Serle Otker’s decision. Some muttered about open rebellion being expected from the Dunns, while others commanded their men to remain where they were lest they provoke either side of the conflict that had just exploded in the middle of the wedding.

Valeri Leufroy, however, knew exactly where he stood, and he didn’t hesitate to issue his orders.

”Go protect Lord Owain!” Baron Leufroy hissed at his men. ”Before he’s completely outnumbered.”

”Father, don’t,” Adala said as her eyes swept over the room. In her eyes, making any move right now, before they understood what was happening, was the height of foolishness.

Lady Ashlynn had carved a bloody swath through the heart of Lothian power to get here, and she had at least two baronies armed and waiting to welcome her once she arrived. That might look like three against six odds, but the Blackwell knights represented a force just as powerful as the knights of any barony, plus the Templars and the Inquisitor...

That brought the odds closer to five against six if every single remaining baron pledged themselves to Lord Owain, and from the way so many lords seemed inclined to sit on the fence, it didn’t look like they could count on the rest of their peers to back them.

”We don’t have the numbers,” Adala hissed. ”We...”

”Enough,” Valeri said, thumping the heavy wooden table with a fist and glaring at his willful daughter. She spoke her mind far too freely since coming back from the Iron Kingdom. If there was one thing he expected her to understand, it was that there was a time and a place for intelligence, discussions, and reasoned debate.

He was willing to give her some room to share the fruits of her incredibly expensive education in the privacy of his own study at home, but a lord’s word was law on the battlefield, and this wedding had clearly just become a battlefield.

”I will not see our house tainted with the stain of treason!” Valeri hissed. ”Now go,” he ordered his knights. ”Protect the marquis!”

Adala looked like she still wanted to protest, but she stilled when Tulori put his hand on her wrist and gave her a stern, warning look. She could see that her brother had his own calculations in mind, running rapidly behind his eyes, and the sight of it was enough for her to snatch her arm away from her older sibling in disgust.

Tulori, it seemed, was betting on Lady Ashlynn... Not because he believed in her, but because he bore some grudge against her father that she didn’t fully understand. Tulori wasn’t hoping that Lady Ashlynn would win; he was just hoping that their father would lose.

The notion that their father’s loss would result in any kind of positive outcome for his children was beyond foolish, but Adala had long since given up hoping that her brother could see beyond his own self-interest.

Instead, her gaze wandered from the powerful, striking appearance of Lady Ashlynn to the much softer, gentler experience of Lady Charlotte Otker, trapped at a table with her own indecisive, calculating family. Their eyes met across the Great Hall, and there was a sadness in both of them... They were trapped here on the sidelines, and neither one of them agreed with the way their fathers were responding to this moment of crisis, but they were utterly powerless to do anything about it.

It was one thing for Baron Leufroy to give the order for his knights to protect Lord Owain; it was something else entirely to follow it. Most of the knights who had accompanied the aging baron were men like him, older, seasoned knights who had fought in the War of Inches. They all had their own memories of Bors Lothian, and Valeri wanted to ensure they all had a chance to say farewell during his old friend’s funeral.

Now, however, four knights in their forties and fifties made for an uncertain honor guard at best as they made their way around the far side of the great hall, intending to circle around Lady Ashlynn’s forces to join Lord Owain at the dais. The templars standing along the wall made no move to block their way so long as they didn’t attempt to leave the Great Hall, but by the time they reached Lord Owain, it might already be too late.

At the base of the dais, High Priest Aubin stood with his ceremonial staff trembling in his aged hands and tears running freely down the deep lines of his face.

He didn’t try to stop the tears. He didn’t try to wipe them away or compose himself or maintain the dignity of his office. He simply stood there, an old man in white robes, watching a miracle walk down the aisle of a hall where he had just been praying for one.

He didn’t understand how this was possible. He’d seen the body that Inquisitor Diarmuid and Sir Tommin brought back from the grave where Sir Tommin and Sir Broll had buried Lady Ashlynn. He’d been privy to the truth of her death for nine long months, and he’d long ago accepted it as fact.

Aubin didn’t understand where Lady Ashlynn had been or how she had survived, but the pastor in him, the man who had sat with Jocelynn while Eleanor’s body burned and who had chosen a hymn tonight to remind a tyrant that even crowns must kneel, didn’t need explanations. He needed only to look at the woman walking standing before the dais to recognize that she was the answer to a prayer he hadn’t dared to believe would be heard.

’Perhaps this is the great change I’ve seen coming,’ he thought. ’And if that change means that Jocelynn, who has suffered so much, can see her sister again in this life, then nothing in this world or the next could be better.’

Beside him, the young woman whom Aubin had spent the past several days fretting over trembled like a leaf in a winter storm.

It wasn’t possible. After everything she’d been through, everything that had happened.... It wasn’t possible. And yet, when she looked at the woman dressed like she belonged on the quarterdeck of the flagship of her father’s fleet, staring down Owain Lothian like a vengeful wraith returned from the grave...

Jocelynn couldn’t deny the truth before her eyes, and a single word slipped past her lips, pulled from her heart like a fervent prayer.

”Ashlynn...”