The Vampire & Her Witch

”I can kill this man for you, my lady,” Sir Rain said, hopping off the tailgate of the wagon and drawing his sword. He’d already been shamed once tonight when Marcel snuck up behind him with a knife to his throat and another to his back.

Now that there was a bit of extremely dirty work to be done, the last thing he was going to do was let a woman like Lady Ashlynn dirty her hands with it when he was there to do a knight’s duty. Even if he hadn’t been a knight, he still had enough pride as a man to stop a woman from having to kill a man for his crimes. It was already bad enough that, as the most senior noble present, she had to be the one to pronounce the sentence, there really was no reason to make her do this part too.

”Step back and I’ll take care of this,” he offered, trying to sound both gentle and gentlemanly as he made the offer, as if he was relieving her of a great burden by taking it on himself.

”No,” Ashlynn said, placing her open hand in front of him before he could take a step toward Darragh’s kneeling figure. ”All I need is your sword,” she added, looking up at him with those frozen emerald eyes in a way that he was only finally beginning to recognize.

He had to remind himself that Lady Ashlynn had taken both Sir Kaefin and Sir Broll’s life and this wasn’t her first time killing a man. At first, he’d thought that she might have killed Sir Kaefin by accident in a struggle and fled the Summer Villa in a panic. By the accounts he’d heard tonight, she’d only defeated Sir Broll by some strange miracle that Eamon attributed to divine providence.

But when he looked at her now, he realized that her eyes were just as hard and cold as Lord Owain’s... The two men she’d already admitted to killing weren’t the only lives she’d taken and the man she was about to kill wouldn’t be the last.

He’d been mistaken, he realized. He’d treated the real Ashlynn Blackwell like she was the giggling imposter he’d met when he visited the Summer Villa with Owain. He’d thought that she was a simple woman, enamored of tales of heroism the way her younger sister Jocelynn often was, and naive about the ways of the world.

The reality, however, was that as much as she might resemble her younger sister or the imposter in the Summer Villa, the real Ashlynn Blackwell was cut from an entirely different cloth. This was a woman who, according to the tale she told, had crawled out of her own grave and then snuck into the Summer Villa in order to find proof of her husband’s infidelity and whatever else she’d been able to learn while she was there.

The more he’d heard tonight, and the simple fact that Lady Ashlynn was here and the woman in the Summer Villa was an impostor, was all the proof Sir Rain needed to understand that Owain still didn’t trust him with all of his secrets. Sir Kaefin would have known a great deal, however, and that might very well be the real reason that Lady Ashlynn had killed him, And then, when Owain unleashed his soldiers and one of his best knights on her, she killed her way out, even spending an entire day evading the pursuit of her husband’s personal huntsmen before killing that very knight in a trial by combat.

No, Lady Ashlynn might resemble her younger sister, but it would be the gravest mistake of his life to treat her like the two women were remotely the same.

All of that flashed through his mind in the instant that he met her frigid emerald gaze as she held out her hand, waiting for him to surrender her sword, and this time, Sir Rain couldn’t summon the slightest objection to what she asked. Inwardly, however, he couldn’t help but wonder... between her and her husband, which of the two was truly more deadly... and what would happen to the world if they ever reconciled their differences?

”Of course, my lady,” Sir Rain said as he knelt formally before her, drawing his sword and offering her the hilt. ”I should warn you, my lady, I use a heavy blade, and it’s made for someone taller than you,” he said. ”If need be, I can still...”

”There’s no need,” Ashlynn said calmly as she accepted the sword from his hands, picking it up as if it weighed no more than a slender branch of wood rather than being a piece of steel nearly as long as a man was tall.

To Ashlynn, however, with the strength she’d gained from her bond with Nyrielle, it really was much lighter than the darksteel falchion she was accustomed to, and without the mystical ’weight’ of a weapon like Ignatious’s Holy Flame Blade, it really was light in her hands.

”Stand him up,” Ashlynn said, drawing a deep breath as she came to stand before Darragh.

Still soaking wet from the river, his dark hair hung limp over his brow while his eyes were wide and shockingly white in the flickering firelight of the campfire. On a cold and moonless autumn night, the whole world felt distant, as if little existed beyond the circle of light that danced across the camp, casting deep, flickering shadows across the ground and across Darragh’s body as Eamon and Daithi hauled him to his feet.

The young hunter’s face had turned a red so deep and dark that it was nearly purple as he struggled against his bonds and shouted into the gag that kept his cries muffled and indistinct. The wet ropes that bound his feet and legs bit deeply into his flesh, and blood trickled between his hands as he made a last, futile attempt to escape his bonds. None of it, however, made the slightest bit of difference.

”Mister Darragh,” Ashlynn said formally, speaking loudly enough that her voice silenced the onlookers who wanted to see and hear every moment of the spectacle that was about to unfold. ”I do not know if the Holy Lord of Light offers any mercy to traitors. If he does and you find yourself walking the earth again, I pray that you remember this lesson.”

”There is only one fate in this world for people who betray the ones closest to them,” she said as her frozen eyes erupted with a blazing emerald glow. Hot fury spilled from her heart, filling her body with the strength of countless cedar trees as her long-suppressed bloodlust found a worthy target at last.

With a sudden surge of strength, she stabbed forward, wielding the large, two-handed blade as though it were a much lighter rapier, piercing Darragh’s heart and pressing forward until her hand shivered with the impact of the cross guard against his chest and several feet of blade protruding from his back.

”If you’re going to betray someone,” Ashlynn said as Darragh’s struggles stopped at last. ”Then make sure you kill them and everyone who cares for them. Because if you don’t, I promise you, vengeful ghosts will find you and you will never know a moment’s peace until you they grant you the only reward a traitor deserves,” she said, twisting the blade sharply as she watched the light fade from his eyes.

”This is the only fate that awaits people who betray their close ones,” Ashlynn said loudly enough that everyone in the camp heard it. Placing her hand on Darragh’s chest, she gave his lifeless body a firm shove, pulling back on the blade to rip it from his chest and allowing his body to fall to the bare earth in an undignified heap.

The audience of soldiers and servants stared, some of them in open-mouthed shock when they realized that Darragh had still been wearing his gambeson and Lady Ashlynn had pierced both the front and back of his armor cleanly, along with his entire body, with no less resistance than a knife piercing bread. Others wondered if they’d actually witnessed a flicker of green light in her eyes before she struck or if they’d simply imagined it when her eyes caught the firelight of the campfire.

But at the edge of the shadows, Ashlynn’s words echoed again and again through Isabell’s mind as she clutched nervously at the dark fabric of her skirts.

If this was the only fate that awaited those who betrayed their close ones, then... what would happen when she found out that Jocelynn had been to tell Owain about her mark?