The Vampire & Her Witch

Once Juhel returned to his seat, the hall didn’t stay quiet for long before a woman in her middle years stood up from her place beside one of Tybal Aleese’s knights.

”Sir Berian Taaffe was my father,” the middle-aged woman, Lady Loann, said as she looked around the room seeing so many familiar faces now scattered across the room instead of clumping together the way they usually did. Many of her oldest friends were closer to her in this seating arrangement, where before, there had always been a wide separation between the southern families like the one she’d married into and the northern families where she’d been born.

It was better this way, and she drew strength from her friends now as she spoke of the man she’d once reviled for trading her away in exchange for three good horses and a few dozen bales of grain.

”He was my father, and he was stubborn, and he always thought he knew better than me,” she said. ”But he was right about the most important thing,” she said, reaching down to rest a hand on her husband’s shoulder as she smiled at the children sitting close to them. ”My Malaric might not have been a rich man when we married, but he was a good man, and he’s always been good to me... Good in ways a younger, pettier me couldn’t see,” she admitted in much the same way the young squire before her had spoken of his shortcomings.

Sir Malaric Barzic was everything the men she’d grown up around weren’t. Loann had spent much of her adolescence visiting places outside the march, whether that meant venturing north to the baronies in Crew or, more often, following the River Luath east where she and many of her friends attended banquets and balls as far away as the grand city of DuCoumont.

She’d been courted by the sons of river barons and she’d seen the wealth of the duchies up close, so when her father betrothed her to a man who smelled of horses and leather and spent more time in his saddle than he did in his manor, with rough hands and a face full of stubble, she’d shrieked at her father and claimed she’d rather die than marry a brute.

But Sir Malaric was anything but a brute, and by the end of her first winter in Barzic village, she’d begun to see the sort of man she’d married.

”Come ride with me,” Malaric had said on the first day when the snow stopped falling and the skies were bright and clear. She’d protested; she hadn’t wanted anything to do with the cold, bitter winds that rolled across the wide open grasslands, but he’d brought her not only a new wool cloak, but a saddle he’d tooled himself, marked with her favorite camellia flowers and a dappled mare that he promised was as mild-tempered as milkwater...

He hadn’t said much that day, or any of the next several days that he asked her to join him for a ride, and when she finally asked him why, his answer had taken her breath away.

”Out here, there’s no one to hear what you have to say,” he said, gesturing at the wide open grasslands that were still slumbering under a layer of bright, white snow. ”I know you don’t like me, and I know you bottle it up at home so the servants don’t hear,” he said with a sad, fragile smile.

”Out here, you can say what you want, and I promise to listen,” he said. ”And if you don’t have anything to say, I’ll listen to that too, until you do.”

”So you brought me out here in the cold, just so we could have a fight?” Loann said.

”No,” her husband answered. ”I don’t go looking for fights; I look for friends. I don’t expect you to love me when you don’t even like me. I can’t love you either if I don’t even know you. But out here... if you want to talk, I’m ready to listen. We can work on the knowing, and then maybe find a way to get to liking and after that, you let me know if there’s any chance of loving...”

It had been the strangest courtship she’d ever heard of, one that started after the wedding day instead of before, but Malaric had never pressed her, never taken advantage of her or claimed his ’rights’ as her husband. It took two years of rides with him, in good weather and in bad, for the snow to melt from her heart, but once it did, it was because he’d filled it with so many precious moments and so much warmth that she couldn’t help but love him.

”I should have visited my father more,” Loann said as she continued her story. ”I shouldn’t have made him ride so far to see his grandsons, no matter how proud I was of the home we’d made. I kept saying that we’d visit next year, when the boys were a little older, or... or whatever excuse offered itself that year. I, I thought we’d have more time.”

”Father always said that the saddest day in a father’s life is the day he hands his most precious treasure to another man to cherish and protect,” Loann said with a sad, wistful smile. ”And the hardest choice he’d ever make was who to trust me to...”

”But he did right by me, before I even knew,” she said, squeezing her husband’s shoulder before returning awkwardly to her seat.

By now, half the hall dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs and several people reached for the hands of their loved ones, seeking to reassure themselves that the people they held most dear were still there beside them. But not everyone grieved in the same way, and for some, hot fury was the only thing keeping back grief’s cold pain.

”This is wrong,” a deep, masculine voice said, cutting through the soft sobs around him as he stood up from his overly comfortable seat. Sir Hunold Sayer, the son of Sir Aron Sayer, was a mountain of a man who resembled a pot-bellied wood-stove in armor and looked little different from one without it.

His face was rough with dark stubble, and his long hair had been tied back into the simplest of ponytails as if he couldn’t be bothered to make himself presentable today, but it was his dark, smoldering eyes that drew the most attention from Ashlynn and the others at the Center Table. Those eyes that swept the room as if they were searching for a target to lash out at before they settled on the white-haired figure of High Priest Aubin, where he sat not far from Lady Ashlynn.

”This is wrong,” Hunold repeated. ”Acting like they were old men who passed in their sleep. My father was murdered! He was murdered by dark witchcraft! Isn’t this what the Church was supposed to keep us safe from? Isn’t this what the Inquisition was here to protect us from?” Hunold fumed.

”But we locked up the Inquisition before they even had a chance to save us,” Hunold said, his voice growing louder and louder as he built momentum. ”And when the evil throne revealed itself, what did you do, High Priest? You did nothing!”

”So I refuse to stand here to ’remember’ my father,” the knight said, turning to face Ashlynn. ”Lady Ashlynn, your Grace,” he corrected himself quickly. ”I demand justice for my father!”