The Vampire & Her Witch

”Send me to the Mother of Tides?” Ashlynn said, staring at Wolstan in disbelief.

Never in her life had her father mentioned... any of this. Not one word.

He had never told her that their founding ancestor was a witch. Not merely a sorcerer, but an actual member of the Mother of Tides’ coven and perhaps the first human to be a member of any coven since the fall of the Empire of Endless Waves.

With a history like that, her father’s fierce refusal to believe what the Church said about witches suddenly made a great deal more sense. And yet, he’d never told her. How different would life have been if she’d had a hero she could look up to, a member of her own family who was the same as her, who had used his powers to help his ship and his crew?

”I don’t know your father,” Wolstan said as he watched a ripple of emotions flickering across Ashlynn’s face. ”Esselk’ti said he tried to help you, and that he thought the Mother of Tides broke her pact with Blackwell first, because the beacon failed.”

”It’s a hard thing for a man to do, to send his family away where they’ll be safe,” Wolstan said, offering words that were meant to be comforting in a tone that was leached of most of its feeling. ”If I’d sent my family away, they might have lived. They wanted to stay. I thought I was respecting their wishes. Don’t judge your father too harshly for wanting to send you to safety.”

”No, I, that’s not it,” Ashlynn said, blinking back tears as she struggled to recover a sliver of her normal composure. Clearly, whatever the Witch of Deep Currents had told him about her father’s situation had touched some parts of Wolstan’s private pain, but she had no room in her heart at the moment to offer him comfort, not when she felt the very foundations of her world crumbling like a sandcastle on the shore.

”I’m sorry, Wolstan,” Ashlynn said. ”Was there anything else? Any more to the message and the story of how it reached you?”

”Nothing important,” Wolstan said.

”In that case,” Ashlynn said, taking a deep, shuddering breath. ”Can you... can you tell Nyri that I need her here tonight? Ignatious already removed the wards; nothing is stopping her from coming here...”

”Mmm,” Wolstan said. ”I can do that,” he said as a dark, inky blackness enveloped him once again, this time swirling into a smaller and smaller cloud until, within a few heartbeats, she found herself looking at a dark raven once again.

”Wolstan,” Ashlynn said before he could take flight. ”Thank you,” she said, swallowing back the sobs that wanted to burst from her throat. ”For bringing his message and everything else... Thank you.”

”I live to serve,” the raven said, ducking its head before it flapped its wings and launched itself into the night.

Ashlynn could have called out to Nyrielle directly through their bond, and Nyri would have come. She would always come. But right now, before Nyri arrived, Ashlynn just wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

”He lit the beacon when I was born...” Ashlynn said, staring out into the night without really seeing the snow-covered garden she was sitting in.

”Did mother know that you wanted to send me away?” Ashlynn asked the darkness of the night. ”After everything she went through, would she have let me go?”

There was no way for her to know, not until her mother arrived, assuming that Marcel was able to convince her to leave the convent and come to a nation ruled by ’demons.’

When Ashlynn wrote the letter to her mother, she held back so much because she was afraid that her mother would reject her before she had a chance to explain. Once she was able to introduce her mother to Nyri, Heila, and the others who had come to mean so much to her, she was certain that her mother would accept them.

It might take time, but once she was here, she wouldn’t run away, especially when she saw how much her daughters needed her right now.

But would her mother have sent her away, as an infant, to live with the Mother of Tides, halfway across the world? And if she had, would she still have loved her daughter the same way, or would Ashlynn have become dead to her, a witch that she was free of...

”Would you have been happier without me there, Mother?” Ashlynn wondered. ”If you didn’t have to hide me away and live in fear... Would you have been happier? Would Jocey?”

If Jocelynn had grown up without her sister’s shadow, living the life of the Blackwells’ eldest, or rather, their only daughter, would things have been better for her? Their father could have arranged a marriage to another noble family, just as Jocelynn had always wanted. There’d have been no talk about placing her with the merchant guilds.

Maybe Jocelynn would have married Owain in the end... The only reason that Ashlynn had been the one to marry him was because she was the eldest and the Lothians wouldn’t accept the notion of ’marrying down’ to wed their heir to a second daughter. It would have been a tragic ending for Jocelynn, but perhaps she could have escaped it by following paths that had been closed to her.

Jocey could have been like their cousin, Micheline, attending the Royal Academy and making all manner of friends and connections. A marriage to Owain Lothian might not have been the best offer available to the woman Jocelynn could have become if her family hadn’t been forced to avoid the attention of other powerful families in the royal court.

”You’d have liked that, wouldn’t you, Jocey?” Ashlynn said, imagining her sister excitedly boarding a ship for Gaalen in the fall and coming back in the spring, filled with stories and gossip and all the things she’d learn from the best teachers in the kingdom...

Would her father have missed her? Or would the ache of giving her over to the Mother of Tides have faded away when his next daughter was born? Would he come to regret the decision he’d made?

And if, one day, she’d made her way back to the family of her birth, would any of them be grateful for her return? Her father, it seemed, would accept her as a witch, but would he embrace her the way he had every time she came home from visiting Lothian March while Owain was courting her, or would they have been little more than strangers to each other?

She didn’t know, but the more she imagined how things might have been different, the more her heart sank as she tallied up all of the things that protecting her secret had cost her family... and all of the ways they’d have been better off without her there.

For several minutes, or perhaps even an hour, Ashlynn sat in the cold, snowy garden, sinking deeper and deeper into what might have been until, finally, a familiar voice pulled her out of her thoughts.

”Ashlynn,” Nyrielle called as she landed just a few paces away before rushing across the snow to take Ashlynn in her arms. ”I’m here, my darling,” Nyrielle said, wrapping her wings around her lover the instant she realized how cold Ashlynn felt after sitting outside for so long.

”I’m here,” Nyrielle repeated, pulling Ashlynn in close and gently kissing the crown of her head. ”Tell me what’s wrong...”