The Vampire & Her Witch

”...the day you were born with the mark on your hip, he should have told me.”

Micheline nodded in agreement, clearly feeling that her aunt Maela had been wronged by her husband, who had kept this secret for so many years. If it had been her, and the man she married started to disappear for weeks at a time shortly after the birth of their child, she would have suspected a mistress or worse.

There’d been no shortage of such scandals in the Royal Capital of Gaalen, and each one had left carnage in its wake when it came to light. Duels had been fought between lords and their vassals and feuds had erupted between rivals in the Royal Court, all because of infidelity on the part of one or both partners in a marriage.

For Maela to remain at Uncle Rhys’s side after so much skulking about and secrecy said a great deal about how much love there was between her aunt and uncle. Because if there wasn’t great love, Micheline couldn’t imagine what else would have held them together through the year her aunt had just described.

”Even if he didn’t tell Mother,” Jocelynn said while leaning back in her chair. ”He should have told you, Ash. If you could have learned any of Phylip’s techniques or rituals, something that would have helped you to protect yourself from Owain,” she said, taking a deep, shuddering breath as she imagined how differently things would have turned out if Ashlynn had been able to use her powers that night.

”Father owed you that kind of help,” Jocelynn said firmly. ”And it’s not right that he didn’t give it to you.”

”I’ve wrestled with whether I wish he’d told me or if I’m glad he didn’t,” Ashlynn said while twirling a goblet in her hand by the stem. She’d limited herself to a single goblet with dinner and switched to light cider after that, but she’d already promised herself that, when the time came that she could relax, she’d open a bottle of thornberry wine to share with her family.

For now, however, she needed to remain clear-headed for the upcoming events of the evening.

”There’s no guarantee that Phylip’s techniques would work for me,” Ashlynn admitted. ”As the Witch of Ebbing Tides, he would have been strongest using the power of water, and as a sailor, I’d be amazed if he wasn’t greatly gifted in manipulating wind.”

”My talents lie in the opposite direction,” Ashlynn explained, since her family had little understanding of witchcraft and what it meant to follow a different Great Witch. ”Wood sings to me. I’m like the ship on the waves or the stones in the breakwater. Phylip would have been the waves themselves and the wind in the sails. I think we’d have been a force to be reckoned with if I’d ever had the chance to fight at his side,” Ashlynn said with a proud smile.

”But if I’d tried to learn from his writings without the knowledge I gained from Amahle and Nyri,” Ashlynn said, shuddering at the thought. ”I might have invited disaster without knowing the dangerous waters I was sailing into.”

”As hard as it’s been,” Ashlynn said. ”I think things worked out in the end. Which doesn’t mean that I won’t be demanding access to the family secrets once I see Father again,” Ashlynn said. ”But I can accept that holding those secrets back from me might have been wise.”

”Well, I can’t accept that he held them back from me,” Maela said with a somewhat sour expression. ”Even if the right thing to do was to hide it from you, that’s a decision we should have arrived at together. Now I want to know what else he was hiding from me all these years. If he was keeping a secret like this, then how many other secrets was he keeping?”

”I don’t think Father held much back from you,” Jocelynn said. ”At least, not much that you would have wanted to know,” she added, looking slightly uncomfortable. ”When I talked to him about my studies, he, um, he said that he rarely discussed issues of trade with you because...”

”Because I have no head for long columns of figures,” Maela said, rescuing her younger daughter. ”And that’s true. When it comes to ensuring that every isle and village is well supplied and cared for, I care a great deal.”

”But when your father pulls out the charts and the tide tables to start working through problems,” Maela added, shaking her head. ”It’s more than I can keep up with. But if I ever asked him to explain it to me because it was important, he would have. There’s a difference between not bothering your spouse with things you know they won’t care about and keeping secrets from them.”

”That’s an important thing for you to learn with your Nyrielle,” Maela said, turning back to Ashlynn. ”If you catch her keeping things from you, you need to set her straight right away. You don’t want to end up like the DuValles in Keating. Poor Countess Flora spends more than a dozen sovereigns a year on spies within her own household and outside it, just to keep tabs on Count Luc and his escapades...”

”It’s not like that with Nyri and me,” Ashlynn said. ”There’s plenty we haven’t shared yet, but only because there’s so much. She’s just a little bit older than I am,” Ashlynn said, pointedly downplaying the gap of nearly two hundred years in age between her and her betrothed. ”So getting through it all takes time.”

”Most of the actual secrets she’s kept from me turned out to be wonderful surprises,” Ashlynn added. ”Like the time she painted a mural of Blackwell Bay in her bedchambers for me so that I had a reminder of home even in the dark, underground chambers where we sleep together, or...”

”Sleep together?” Maela said, raising a brow at her daughter. ”Ashlynn, you said that you were betrothed, and I can accept that I’ve missed that, but some things should wait until after your wedding night,” she said before pausing.

”But then, I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it?” Maela said. ”You don’t need to fear a child born out of wedlock, and you’re already bound to each other,” she acknowledged, though there was still some lingering discomfort in her voice.

”Is she a romantic?” Micheline asked, leaning forward in her chair. ”Painting a mural for you sounds like quite the gesture, even if the painting didn’t turn out very well; just the fact that she was willing to try says a lot about her and how much she cares for you.”

”It’s a very good painting,” Jocelynn said quickly. ”She showed me when I visited. I’ve seen several of her paintings and all of them are masterpieces,” she added, looking up at the painting on the wall of the riverbend at night in a time before Lothian City was built. ”She painted that one, didn’t she, Ash?”

”She did,” Ashlynn said, surprising both her mother and cousin. ”Marcel has a number of her pieces hanging here, painted from her memories of times long ago. I think it was his way of,” Ashlynn started to say, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door.

”My lady,” a light, feminine voice called before the door opened to reveal a petite woman in a brown and copper dress who paused to offer a polite curtsy as she entered the room. Her dress was exquisitely well made with delicate embroidery across the bodice that would have marked her as a person of status in any gathering of ladies that Maela and Micheline had ever attended.

Their eyes, however, were riveted to the wide-brimmed, pointed hat she wore. It was among the most elegant of hats either woman had ever seen, made from rich, chocolatey brown fabric with an intricately embroidered copper hat-band that sported a number of curious ornaments.

Neither woman had seen such an infamous hat in person, but there was no mistaking the hat of a witch, marking the newcomer as a member of Ashlynn’s coven. Beyond the hat, however, their eyes fell a touch lower, locking on the curled horns on the petite witch’s head. Horns that were almost exactly like the hundreds of horns that had been gilded and mounted to the walls of the restaurant where they currently dined...