The Vampire & Her Witch

”Nyrielle and I are betrothed.”

Five simple words shocked both guild masters with a statement that defied all conventions of propriety in the Kingdom of Gaal. But when they looked at her, Ashlynn’s face held the shy smile and faint blush of a young woman who was helplessly in love. But even as she admitted to a relationship that would have been kept queit among the nobility of the kingdom, her voice was clear and pure without the slightest hint of evasion or shame.

Tiernan’s cup slipped from his numb fingers, clattering against the carriage floor before rolling underneath the seat where the swaying of the carriage tossed it back and forth in an ironic approximation of the whiplash the guild master had felt ever since entering the carriage. His mouth worked soundlessly for several moments before he managed to croak out a question.

”Betrothed? To the... to Lady Nyrielle?” He asked as he reminded himself for what felt like the dozenth time that he shouldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, refer to Ashlynn’s vampire partner as the ’Demon Lady of the Vale.’

Isabell’s reaction was entirely different as she examined Ashlynn’s face, reading the young woman’s reactions the same way she’d learned to read her younger sister Jocelynn.

”Is this another political marriage?” Isabell asked carefully, discarding the notion immediately as she saw the way Ashlynn’s expression darkened at the faintest suggestion that her union had been politically motivated.

”Or... is this love, Ashlynn?” Isabell asked as she took off her silver-rimmed spectacles to look directly into Ashlynn’s emerald eyes. ”All the way out here, living among the dem, the Eldritch. Have you really found true love?”

Isabell’s question broke off suddenly, leaving the second part unsaid but it still hung in the air between the occupants of the carriage along with the heady aroma of wine and the more subtle scents of leather upholstery and freshly polished wood.

”It’s real,” Ashlynn said with a gentle smile on her lips and a softness in her eyes that suggested she understood the other woman’s skepticism. ”We made our announcement at the banquet last night after Sir Ollie was formally knighted. We won’t marry until we can hold a proper ceremony and I hope you’ll both attend,” she said quickly.

After all, she’d arranged to meet them tonight, after the betrothal banquet, because she needed the cover of the raids to account for their disappearance. But even though it was a necessity, she didn’t want them to feel like she had kept them away from the celebration because she didn’t value them as friends. If she could have, she’d have prepared a place for them at the table for guests of honor along with Heila’s parents and Ollie’s friends from the Heartwood Clan.

”But we still have so much to do before we can invite my parents and everyone else who should attend so it may be some time,” Ashlynn added a touch wistfully. ”Whether we have a ceremony or not, it won’t change anything between us. I belong to her and she belongs to me,” she said as she placed a hand on her chest, directly above her heart where she could feel the echo of Nyrielle’s heartbeat within her own chest. ”Now and for as long as we can resist the pull of the abyss.”

”But isn’t that too fast?” Tiernan blurted, no longer able to hold his words in. ”You courted Lord Owain for two whole years before you married him and he was, wasn’t so, so... different from you,” he said as he pushed through the warm, pleasant fog of alcohol that wrapped itself around his mind like a soft, cottony blanket keeping the sharp pains of sudden revelations at a more comfortable distance. ”Do you really know her well enough to say that you’ll, um, that you’ll really marry her?”

Was it even possible for two women to marry? Tiernan didn’t know but he was certain that the Church would have something to say about it... But then, did that even matter? Lady Ashlynn was a witch and this Lady Nyrielle was a Vampire so the Church wouldn’t approve of anything they did to begin with.

But then, if they announced to the world that they were married to each other, wouldn’t that just give the Church yet another reason to call them heretics? The more he thought of it, the more his heart filled with a deep sense of forboding and his head ached with the thought of how many different people Ashlynn would provoke with her simple statement about who she intended to mary. And that was without considering the fact that she was still technically married to Lord Owain!

”I do,” Ashlynn said, with a warm, gentle smile on her lips. ”I know her better than anyone, and she knows me just as well. Loving a vampire, any vampire, is different than loving someone else, but it’s especially different when it’s love between a witch and a vampire,” she explained.

”Heila is already learning what it’s like with Sir Ignatious, but once you share blood, you form a bond that is much, much deeper than even the bond a normal person would feel when they offer their blood to a vampire.”

”It’s stronger for Nyri and I,” she admitted. ”Because I’m her Seneschal and we already have a bond of blood, everything has been twice as intense, if not more. But between a witch and a vampire, we share so much more than just blood,” she explained.

”When we sleep, we can share each other’s dreams,” she said. ”Not just dreams, but bits of memory as well. Nyri and I have had a picnic on the cliffs overlooking Blackwell Harbor because I remember the place so well. And we danced in the great hall of her ancient fortress to music that was played more than a century ago before the Lothians burned Vale City to the ground and murdered her parents and her grandsire.”

”Maybe it feels sudden from the outside,” Ashlynn admitted. ”But in just half a year, I’ve shared more with Nyri than I’ve shared with Owain in two whole years. For all the festivals and feasts Owain and I attended while we were courting, we were never really close and we never opened our hearts to each other the way that Nyri and I have.”