The Vampire & Her Witch

Hugo’s declaration sent ripples of shock through the soldiers sitting on the rough hewn logs and even Sir Rain sat up straight, pushing himself off the side of the wagon and staring intently at the grizzled hunter named Eamon.

The portly knight prodded his tired mind, trying to think if he had ever seen the man when Owain visited Aleese Barony but in truth, he rarely paid much attention to the faces of servants unless they were charming lasses or skilled swordsmen. No matter how much he looked at the veteran hunter, he couldn’t recall ever having seen him but that didn’t mean that the accusation was false.

”My lady, I,” Eamon said, turning to look at Ashlynn with helpless eyes. ”I don’t know what I should say,” he said as all of the attention that had been focused on Darragh seemed to have suddenly landed on him as well.

”Tell them the truth, Mister Eamon,” Ashlynn said. ”Tell them about the night we met and how you and your companions were treated. It’s all right,” she added with an encouraging smile. ”There’s no shame in anything you did that night,” she said, sensing where his discomfort truly came from. ”No one will judge you harshly for what happened when we stood as enemies.”

”Thank you, my lady, for understanding,” Eamon said, slumping in visible relief before recollecting himself and turning to face Sir Hugo and the other knights. ”Just like your lordship said, Darragh and I went ’missing’ after Sir Kaefin died. Lord Owain ordered Sir Broll to take us and hunt up the woman who killed Sir Kaefin and the, um, the kitchen boy who escaped with her,” he said awkwardly.

”Pardon, Sir Ollie,” Eamon added quickly while his hands twisted nervously, clutching at the fabric of his cloak. ”Meaning no disrespect, but those were his words.”

”It’s not disrespectful to speak the truth,” Ollie said with a bright smile on his face as he thought about how far everyone had come since that night in the wilderness six months ago. At the time, he really had been nothing more than a kitchen boy, swept up into something that felt vast and grand as the adventure stories he’d heard as a youth, only it was very clear that the protagonist of the adventure was Ashlynn rather than himself.

He’d never expected then that it was also the beginning of his own tale of adventure, or that he would find himself in a place like this, sitting among other knights as a peer rather than toiling away in the kitchens, afraid they might lash out at him for something as trivial as serving the lamb sauce with the beef or forgetting to add honey to their last cup of wine.

”You hunted us very well that night,” Ollie acknowledged. ”If things had gone even a little bit differently, you would have captured us both.”

”Now wait just a minute!” Sir Rain said, hopping off the waggon’s tailgate and taking several steps back to gain the space needed to draw his heavy longsword. ”Sir Ollie,” he said, glaring at the young knight and gripping the hilt of his sword tight enough for his knuckles to whiten. ”Lord Owain put a bounty of a hundred gold sovereigns on the head of the woman who killed his former Steward.”

”There’s no one in the world Lord Owain wants dead as much as the woman called Lynnda,” Rain said. ”So speak the truth, do you know where she is? Is she hiding in Lady Ashlynn’s service?” he asked, suddenly shifting his gaze to Lady Ashlynn who wore a strange half smile. Looking around, he saw similar awkward looks on the faces of several of her servants and even Sir Ollie himself.

”Lady, Lady Ashlynn,” Hugo whispered as the last pieces of the puzzle fell into place. For a moment, he considered if Ollie and this ’Lynnda’ had run into Lady Ashlynn while Eamon and Sir Broll were pursuing them through the wilderness but he quickly discarded that notion. Lady Ashlynn had clearly asked Eamon to recount the tale of the night when they met, and the way Sir Ollie looked at Lady Ashlynn when he said that Eamon had nearly captured them felt like everything but an admission that Lady Ashlynn had been the person he was fleeing with. But if that was the case...

”Lady Ashlynn, you were the woman calling herself Lynnda,” Hugo said, sounding uncertain at first but growing more certain as he gave voice to his conclusion, the only conclusion that made any sense. ”You, you hid yourself as a servant, as a common kitchen girl and snuck into the Summer Villa,” he said, words tumbling over each other faster and faster as his heart began to race and his hands started to shake.

”But why? Why sneak in there to kill Sir Kaefin?” Hugo said as he realized that assembling one puzzle only opened the door to an even larger, and even less understandable one. ”I don’t understand,” he said, cocking his head to the side and staring at Ashlynn in genuine bemusement.

Hugo had heard a great deal about the late Sir Kaefin from Owain, particularly during their months in Blackwell County as frustrations mounted with round after round of tense negotiations. Every time they came back from a failed negotiation with Master Isabell and her fellow guildmasters, after a night of drinking, Owain would often recount Sir Kaefin’s many virtues just to explain how woefully inadequate he found Hugo’s own service.

Hugo knew that Kaefin wasn’t a ’model knight.’ He knew that the man had taken Lord Owain to his first brothel as a young man and that the two of them had been fast friends in everything from drinking to gambling and carousing with women. Kaefin wasn’t a ’good man’, but nothing that Hugo had ever heard rose to a level so egregious that it warranted what amounted to a covert assassination!

”Gentlemen,” Ashlynn said lightly. ”Have you forgotten who is on trial tonight? Sir Rain, does Sir Marcel need to take your sword from you before you hurt yourself with it?” Ashlynn asked with a brief glance at the vampire who twirled a knife casually between his fingers.

”Return to your seats, gentlemen,” she continued in a sterner, more commanding tone. ”I will answer your questions but only briefly, because our time is limited and the decision we must make concerns Darragh’s fate for his treachery, not my own. Do we have an understanding, gentlemen?”