The Vampire & Her Witch

The king’s private audience chamber lay at the end of a short corridor in the king’s own wing, and the door stood slightly ajar when Henri arrived. He pushed it open the rest of the way and stepped inside, relaxing slightly as the familiar warmth and the faint scent of perfumes and woodsmoke wrapped around him.

Some things never changed, and the scents his mother had chosen to perfume his father’s offices and audience chambers with always helped to take the edge off any meeting with the demanding patriarch of the DuGaal royal line.

The room was smaller than most outsiders imagined a king’s private audience chamber would be. There was no ostentatious throne or long table for visiting delegations. A single polished writing table set close to the western wall with four plush chairs of simple, comfortable design. A small chest held bottles of various wines collected from all the corners of the realm and enough goblets to enjoy them when the occasion called for a drink to celebrate or to mourn.

A deep fire burned low in the hearth at the southern end of the room, and a single tall arched window in the eastern wall looked out across the inner gardens toward the city beyond.

A pair of tapestries hung on the walls; one depicting a map of the City of Gaalen in the days when it had been little more than a frontier colony on the edge of the known world, less than a tenth of the city’s current size. The other presented the defeated, bleeding bodies of a demon army trampled beneath a force of knights and priests, a relic of the First Crusade or perhaps something older still.

Two oil lamps had been turned down low on the writing table, while the fire provided the rest of the room’s golden, flickering light.

His father stood at the window, half cloaked in shadows as he gazed into the night.

King Thibert DuGaal, the third of his name, had his hands clasped loosely behind his back while the fingers of his right hand gently spun the well-worn wedding ring on his left in a habit so old it predated Henri’s birth.

The deep blue brocade of his evening coat caught the firelight, where the silver thread embroidered swords looked almost golden in the light. His long light hair was tied back neatly with a black ribbon, not a single strand allowed to slip from his control even at this late hour of the longest night of the year.

On the writing table beside him, spread in a careful fan across the polished wood, lay a number of small, narrow strips of paper. Messages carried by pigeons or other messenger birds, several still curled at one end where they had only recently been unrolled, one weighted with a small brass cylinder to keep its curl from reasserting itself. They had clearly been read more than once.

Beside the strips, set apart from them in a small ordered stack, lay several rolled documents of heavier parchment. Each had been bound with two silk ribbons of the colors of the royal house, and each bore the heavy blue wax seal of a royal decree pressed into the ribbon’s knot. The seals were unbroken. The documents had been drawn up, sealed, and laid out, just waiting for... for what?

Henri stopped exactly three paces inside the door before dropping to one knee. His left hand made a fist at his hip where a sword would normally be, and he pressed his right hand over it in place of the hilt that wasn’t there. No man, not even the king’s own son, came armed into his presence, but manners were manners, and Henri still followed the ancient form.

”As the Crown commands, so this prince obeys,” Henri said formally. ”I came as soon as I received your summons, Father,” he said in a warmer tone.

”How was the masquerade?” King Thibert asked lightly as he turned to regard his kneeling son. ”Did you enjoy yourself tonight with your classmates? Any ladies worth remembering?”

”Lady Alice Teague let her presence and her desires be felt,” Henri said with a heavy sigh. ”And she wasn’t the only one. I find I miss Lady Micheline DuCoumont more than ever. I didn’t realize how much I’d come to value having her at my side.”

”A beautiful woman at your side is the surest way to keep the rest of the flies away,” Thibert agreed as he extended a hand to help his son up. ”Micheline was a rare one for never trying to place herself on your lap or in your bed.”

”She knew her station would never allow a marriage between us,” Henri said with a shrug. ”She was content to be a friend and to seek out a place for her brother. I wouldn’t call her free of ambition,” Henri said as he followed his father to the table and took a seat opposite the older man. ”But she never hid her goals from me, and I can respect that honesty.”

”Be mindful when a lord sends you a daughter he’s raised to be an open book,” Thibert warned. ”Only two kinds of women can truly be open with a king or a prince; one who is completely besotted and in love, or one who knows nothing about the schemes that have placed her in your path. Just because she’s open about what she knows doesn’t mean that her father hasn’t entrusted his greater schemes to his son and heir.”

”You say that, Father,” Henri said, shaking his head as he wondered if his father had inherited a measure of Charles III’s paranoia. ”But Inry has been a good and willing squire since arriving at the academy last spring. I’ve no complaints, and I’ve seen no schemes. He leans more toward the Church than I might like, but that’s more youthful parroting of the things he’s heard than a true believer’s devotion.”

”Hmm,” Thibert said, neither accepting nor rejecting his son’s assessment.

”Well then,” the king said as he swept the narrow strips of parchment up into his hands before depositing them before his son. ”Give these a look, and tell me what you think. No parroting,” he chided with the smallest of smiles on his lips. ”Some things are obvious. Tell me what you see in those messages that isn’t...”