The Vampire & Her Witch

”And? Are you a witch?”

When Isabel spoke, she tried to keep her voice as calm and even as possible, but even she couldn’t help but think of the children’s tales she’d grown up with when it came to the horrors of a wicked witch who could destroy whole towns and armies all by themselves.

There was a reason, after all, why the Inquisition aggressively hunted people on the slightest suggestion that they might be a witch. After all, witches were one of the few threats the Kingdom of Gaal faced that could drive one of the Church’s legendary Exemplars to make a move, though if there were records of battles between the Exemplars and Witches, Isabell had never seen them.

”Isabell, how could you say something like that?” Tiernan asked, twisting in his seat to stare at Isabell as if she’d transformed into a stranger. ”Ashlynn couldn’t be an evil...”

”I am,” Ashlynn said, interrupting Tiernan before he could say anything more hurtful than what he’d started to say. ”I was born this way and my parents have always known that I was different,” she said slowly as she thought back to her earliest memories when her mother had explained to her again and again that no one could ever be permitted to see the mark on her hip.

”My parents thought as you did once,” she said after taking a small sip of wine to steel her resolve. ”They even thought the mark might be an ordinary one,” she said as she turned to look out the window at the trees passing by in the darkness of the night. ”You know, my mother has never had much luck bearing children. By the time I was born, she’d already been through more than one failure to conceive.”

It wasn’t until Ashlynn was old enough to experience her first moonflow that she’d learned from her mother just how miraculous her own birth had been to her parents. Her mother had described what it felt like to miss her monthly flow and to feel her heart begin to flutter with hope only for things to pass several weeks later with pains that twisted her womb and enough blood to fear that the Holy Lord of Light had torn away her ability to bear children.

But then, a few months later, she once again felt the signs of life stirring within her, only to feel it torn away again weeks later and to endure the cycle repeating all over again.

”When I was finally born, it was the happiest and saddest day of their lives,” Ashlynn said softly. ”They finally had a child, but she bore the mark of the witch. Just how tragic must it have been fore them? But they refused to give me up,” she said, biting her lip as a tear rolled down her face.

”At one point, my father, he, he tried to burn off my mark with a branding iron when I was still too young to understand. I’m sure it must have hurt horribly, but afterward the skin healed without a scar and the mark came back as clear as day...” she said, stumbling slightly over her words as she fought back against the flood of tears falling softly onto the lace that trimmed her bodice.

”I’m a witch,” she said firmly, forcing down the sadness and staring directly into Tiernan’s stunned gaze before turning her eyes to meet Isabell’s. ”If I weren’t a witch, I would never have been able to pull myself out of the grave Owain’s knights buried me in. If I weren’t a witch, I wouldn’t have survived even one hour of wandering through the cold rain and darkness of that night.”

”And if I wasn’t a witch...” she added slowly. ”I would never have been rescued at the edge of the Vale of Mists.”

”Rescued?” Isabell asked as her heart began to beat faster within her chest. She’d been preparing herself all this time for the possibility that Ashlynn was truly a witch, but imagining it as a possibility and hearing the other woman confess to it were two very different things.

Part of her mind was already galloping ahead, faster than the horses pulling the carriage, wondering if the coldness she’d seen in Ashlynn when she executed Darragh had been brought about by her witchcraft. She wondered if Ashlynn was slowly sliding into the cruelty, depravity, and madness that the Church so often spoke of when they preached about the danger of witches.

But another part of her clung fiercely to the feeling of Ashlynn’s arms wrapped around her and the soft sobs that shook her body at the joy of their reunion. At that moment, she’d felt like a young woman who had endured too much and been too far from loved ones for far too long. There wasn’t a single thing about her that seemed wicked, cruel, or inhumanly evil!

But an engineer’s mind was the mind of a problem solver, and so she forced herself to set aside baseless speculations and focus instead on what Ashlynn was telling her. She could sift through the truth and lies of the Church’s teaching later and consider them only when she’d heard everything that Ashlynn had to say, starting with her apparent rescue after escaping her own grave.

”I was rescued not far from here,” Ashlynn explained, glancing briefly out the window before turning back to the guild masters. ”By the vampire who rules over the Vale of Mists. You may have heard her called the ’Demon Lady of the Vale’ by the people in Lothian March,” she said with a faint smile tugging at the corners of her lips as she remembered that night.

”But to me, she’s so much more than what people say,” Ashlynn said as she wiped the tears from her eyes with a small silk handkerchief. ”That night, she offered me a bond of blood, binding my life to hers in order to save my life. Given the choice between death and an eternal life with her... I chose life,” she said as she gave the guild masters a gentle, reassuring smile that seemed to suggest she didn’t regret her decision at all.

To Isabell and Tiernan, however, nothing could have prepared them for the shock of what they’d just heard. Sitting only a few feet away from Ashlynn, the two guild masters exchanged a look of wide-eyed shock and behind that, a small measure of fear along with a desperate hope that they’d somehow misunderstood.

Because if they hadn’t, if they’d really heard Lady Ashlynn say what they thought she’d just said, then she wasn’t just a witch, but a vampire as well!