The Vampire & Her Witch

”Have you and the rest of the staff already recovered the bodies?” Owain asked as he stepped carefully across the charred threshold. His boots crunched on debris that mixed ash with fragments of broken earthenware, burned wood, and even bits of melted pewter candlesticks and ornaments.

The acrid stench of smoke still clung to everything, mingling with the sour smell of wet ash and something else, something that had been alive once and left an unpleasant scent that made his nose wrinkle in distaste. Cold rain dripped steadily through the collapsed sections of the roof, creating dark puddles that reflected the gray sky above and turned the ash into a black, greasy mud that clung to his riding boots and stained the hem of his fur-trimmed cloak.

What had once been the great hall’s oak high table now lay in charred ruins, its thick planks split and blackened beyond recognition. Scattered around it, Owain could make out the twisted remains of cheap, pewter candlesticks and the blackened remnants of what might once have been silver serving plates, now reduced to misshapen lumps of metal embedded in the debris.

A child’s wooden toy horse lay half-buried in the ash near what had been the hearth, its horsehair mane and tail had burned away, but its carved body was still recognizable. Nearby, the leather binding of a book had somehow survived despite the fact that its pages had become nothing more than gray flakes that crumbled at the slightest touch.

The walls that still stood were blackened with soot, and tapestries that had once displayed scenes of the Pyre family’s accomplishments in battle now hung in charred tatters. Where the floor hadn’t collapsed entirely, the wooden planks felt soft and spongy under his feet, as if they might give way at any moment.

”We haven’t managed to recover all of the bodies as of yet,” Philder said in a tired, defeated tone. ”The blaze may have started in young master Tonnis’s chambers, or his Madame Rosie’s. The upstairs floor collapsed in the fire, and the roof came down on top of it. We, we haven’t been able to dig them out yet,” he said, wringing his hands as if he was afraid that Owian would strike him.

”That’s fine,” Owain said, giving the old man a smile that would have looked more reassuring if his impatience wasn’t showing through in the way his eyes constantly roamed over the damage. As he moved deeper into the ruins, picking his way carefully around a collapsed section of the upper floor, Owain’s boot struck something that clanked metalically against the stone.

Kneeling down, he brushed aside wet ash to reveal a pair of small, blunted practice swords, not unlike the ones he and Tommin had used to train together in their youth. Nearby, the charred remains of two small shields looked like they would shatter under the slightest blow.

”Who’d you find to train with your son, Tommin?” Owain wondered idly as he looked around at the other odds and ends lying nearby, from a child-sized, heavy leather training doublet to a cracked and broken miniature lance, it was clear that his former guard’s son was trying to follow in his father’s footsteps.

But now that Tommin was gone, who was training the boy? Was Tommin cozying up to one of the other noble families of the march? Or perhaps Loman had arranged something for Tommin in an effort to keep the freshly minted Templar more firmly in his camp now that Loman himself was poised to leave the Church.

”I believe it was the son of one of the soldiers, your lordship,” Philder said, mistaking Owain’s introspection for an actual question. ”If it’s important, I can find out his name for you.”

”No, it’s not important,” Owain said as he stood and dusted ash from his gloved hands. He had to suppress a snort at the notion of a proud son of the Pyre family reduced to training with a hired servant. If Tommin hadn’t turned traitor, perhaps his son could have come to train with the children that Owain planned to father once he was finally able to wed Jocelynn.

The boys wouldn’t be as close in age as he and Tommin had been, but that hardly mattered. If not for Tommin’s selfishness, Owain might even have taken Tonnis under his wing to help him become a knight worthy of protecting Owain’s own sons. Not that any of that would have been possible even before the fire, he thought as he headed deeper into the burned-out ruin. Tommin had burned those possibilities to ash months ago when he abandoned Owain.

The smell where the fire had started was worse than it had been near the entrance, thick and cloying, mixing burnt wood with the smell of feather mattresses and down comforters consumed by fire. His gloved fingers came away black and gritty when he touched a support beam, the wood so thoroughly charred that it crumbled like a soft cheese under the slightest pressure.

”Someone must have poured lamp oil on the flames for it to burn so hot and so quickly on this side of the manor,” he said as he wiped his hands on a cloth. Lamp oil or something else to intensify the blaze, he thought as he compared the devastation to the demon villages he’d burned to the ground, the most recent of which had happened just a few months ago.

The demon huts had been slow to burn until he commanded his men to begin pouring oil on their roofs. Once they’d done that, the flames spread much faster, and stout roofs that had held for decades collapsed in a matter of minutes. The parts of the demon’s huts where oil hadn’t reached, however, looked like the table leg he’d inspected at the entrance, scorched on the outside but still largely intact.

”Someone started this fire deliberately,” Owain said with a growing sense of conviction. If the blaze had started in the kitchens where there was cooking oil that could burn like this, he might have believed it was an accident, or if it had consumed the storehouses where there were casks of oil for the lamps, or even if it had come from the stables and the coal of the ferrier’s forge...

But here, in the wing of the house where the Pyre family’s quarters were, there simply wasn’t a reason for there to be so much fuel to burn the house down so quickly.

”I, I agree with you, your lordship,” Philder said carefully. ”I’ve spoken to a few of the staff who are still here, your lordship, but a few of them are missing. We thought they were burned in the fire, but...”

”But maybe they were responsible for this,” Owain said bitterly as he swore under his breath.

He wanted to turn around and take his carriage home as soon as he’d finished paying minimal respects to the dead. Part of him wondered if Tommin’s wife or son had been responsible for the blaze, setting their own home on fire in the madness of the Spider Demon venom, but he didn’t think it was likely.

His father was resting in bed more often than not, and Tommin’s family had been poisoned even earlier. He doubted they’d have the strength to cause such a conflagration. And even if it had been an act of poison-induced madness, he could hardly offer that up as an explanation for the inferno without exposing how he knew that they’d been afflicted by the poison of a rare, nearly extinct kind of demon.

”Send someone to fetch the constable, Philder,” Owain said grimly as he stood. ”It seems like I’ll be spending a few days in Hurel until we find answers about who did this,” he said darkly.

With Tonnis’ death in what looked like a deliberate fire, this turned from a tragedy into a high crime that had ended the bloodline of a noble family, and a lord would need to be present to dispense justice. Since Hurel Village owed fealty directly to the Lothians, Owain couldn’t even summon one of the local barons to preside over things, he would have to do it himself.

”And when we do, I promise you, I’ll save you a space up front to watch them swing from the neck,” he said firmly.

After all, someone had ruined his plans. Now, even though the bitch and her brat were dead, Sir Tommon would never know the sting of betrayal when the Church refused to summon one of their great healers just to save the ex-wife and abandoned son of one of their templars. Instead, it would become another tragedy that would doubtless spur Tommin to even greater acts of selfless heroism...

No, someone had spoiled his efforts to torment the man who betrayed his trust after spending most of their lives facing danger together... and when Owain got his hands on that person, they would consider a public hanging to be a mercy!