The Vampire & Her Witch

”Why does he work so hard and give so much for a stranger like me?”

Eira didn’t try to answer Princess Jocelynn’s question immediately. It wasn’t that she didn’t have thoughts of her own about the Cypress Knight. She had several. But if today had taught her anything, it was that the simple, humble knight who had once been a kitchen boy defied being put into easy categories.

She hadn’t understood that at first, but today taught her that she’d been wrong about many of her initial impressions. It was only toward the end of the day that she found something that felt like a piece of common ground with the young witch. One that left her feeling both sad and worried for her friend Morwen, who hoped to attract Sir Ollie’s affections.

”I think that Sir Ollie is more complicated than he appears to be,” Eira said after several moments. ”Not because he plots and schemes the way noblemen do, but because he slices up the world like a pie, and he’s not the same person in every slice.”

”You’re saying that he’s duplicitous by nature?” Jocelynn said. She gave Eira a skeptical look and shifted in the bath, sending ripples across the surface of the water as she focused on the lady who had been recruited as her ’squire’ for the day. ”To what end?”

”Survival, Your Highness,” Eira said. ”I don’t think he’s conniving or spying. It isn’t that kind of a thing. But Sir Ollie comes from a different world than we do, and he lives in a different world now. All of those worlds touch each other, but there are lines between them, and he can’t be the same person every time he crosses a line.”

”I lived my whole life in one little slice of the pie,” Eira said as she stood up from the stool she’d been sitting on beside the tub to fetch a different soap from the one she’d used on Princess Jocelnn’s hair, along with a cloth to help the princess wash her back.

”The lines were well defined for a knight’s daughter in Lothian March,” Eira said as she returned to the wooden stool. She dipped the cloth and soap in the bathwater just enough to wet them and began working up a lather while she spoke.

”I was trying hard to cross one of those lines,” Eira continued. ”Not because I had any great ambition. I didn’t want to become the next Baroness of Dunn because I wanted wealth or power... It’s just that, no one moved my heart the way Lord Liam did, and if I wanted to attract his gaze, I needed to become a woman who was worthy of his affections.”

In the bath, Jocelynn shifted uncomfortably at the direction Eira seemed to be taking the conversation. She knew all too well the pain of trying to become ’worthy’ of a man that the world treated better than her, and Bors Lothian hadn’t been shy about telling her how short of his standards she fell. She’d worked hard, for months, to prove that she could be a worthy Marchioness and a good wife to Owain, and in the end, she’d never gained Bors’ approval.

It was only afterward, after the delusions brought on by Nightweaver venom convinced Bors that she was his late wife, Isla, that Jocelynn began to understand the standard by which she’d been measured. A standard set by a dead woman that no one living could ever match up to. She’d been a fool for trying.

”Crossing that line,” Eira continued as she began to lightly scrub Jocelynn’s back and shoulders. ”From a lesser noble family to a greater one felt daunting. Lord Liam attended the academy in Keating, and my parents could never afford to send me, not with two younger brothers to raise behind me,” she explained.

”Still, I studied hard, and I did my best to win over Lord Loghlan and Lady Mairwen,” Eira said. ”I think I succeeded there, to an extent. Not enough for them to arrange a betrothal, but enough that they wouldn’t have broken us apart if Lord Liam came to favor me. Lady Mairwen even created opportunities for me to spend more time with Lord Liam...”

”What about Liam, then?” Jocelynn asked. She closed her eyes and sank into Eira’s touch, allowing the combination of warm water and gentle pressure to ease the ache from her muscles. ”Did he ever come to fancy you?”

”No,” Eira said with a sigh. ”There was a woman he fancied. A commoner. His parents didn’t approve. I’m sure they had their reasons. Then, last spring, she went missing and Lord Liam spent several months searching for her. It created a small scandal in Dunn,” she said, pursing her lips as she recalled the rumors that had flowed through the barony over the summer.

”When Lord Owain called for knights to ride with him after Sir Kaefin and Sir Broll’s deaths, Liam should have gone with him,” Eira explained. ”The fact that he didn’t go worked out for the best, but at the time, it reflected very poorly on his father.”

”I remember,” Jocelynn said. ”I met Lord Liam not long after that,” she said. ”He, he mentioned that the woman he fancied resembled my sister,” she said, feeling like the conversation was taking an awkward turn.

She hadn’t realized at the time how significant Owain’s raid against an Eldritch village would prove to be. That raid had prompted many of the outlying Eldritch villages to abandon their homes, and it had been Sir Ollie who took those villagers in, building new homes for them in the Vale of Mists.

The success of that raid had also placed pressure on both Liam Dunn and Loman Lothian. In order to make up for missing the raid, Liam had launched an aggressive campaign against the Eldritch villages later in the summer, and Loman had joined that campaign to bolster his standing as a contender for the Lothian throne.

The Eldritch hadn’t done anything to deserve what happened to them. Owain burned a village because Ashlynn killed two of his knights. Liam attacked more villages because his search for a missing loved one had embarrassed his father.

And in the midst of that, Eira had been stuck watching from the side, pining for the affections of a man who might never return her feelings...