The Vampire & Her Witch

Rosie blinked several times in confusion as she tried to understand where she was and what was happening. From the stone walls and the fine furnishings in the room, she assumed that she was in a great manor somewhere but it clearly wasn’t her home in Hurel Village.

There was a buxom, blonde serving woman giving her a reassuring look even though she looked like she’d just come in from a hard day of labor in the castle gardens. Her tunic still bore the stains of dirt and grasses and the pouches that hung from a belt around her trim waist bulged with whatever odds and ends she needed for her work.

Most concerning of all, however, was the thin rivulet of blood that trailed from the corner of her lip, as if she’d recently been struck and hadn’t been allowed to clean herself up after the blow landed.

Tonnis lay nearby, looking every bit as pale and weary as he had for the past several weeks while the pair of mother and son had struggled against whatever sickness plagued them. His expression seemed more relaxed though, and his breathing was calm and steady which would have been reassuring if it wasn’t for the presence of a strange noble lady sitting next to the bed, softly stroking her son’s sandy hair.

”My lady,” Rosie said hesitantly, ignoring the serving girl next to her and bowing her head to the amethyst eyed woman wearing a dark maroon dress of crushed velvet with intricate silver embroidery. To wear such luxurious clothing even when visiting the sick, the woman was certainly at least the wife of another knight, or perhaps the daughter of one of the barons of the march.

”Thank you,” Rosie said, speaking with some difficulty until the serving girl passed her a cup of cool water laced with soothing mint.

”I’m sorry,” she said after taking a long, slow sip to organize her thoughts. ”I don’t know what happened or how I came to be here... I, I was very sick,” she said, frowning as she realized that her chest didn’t ache and that speaking normally didn’t trigger a fit of coughing.

”You shouldn’t thank me,” Zedya said with a slight giggle hidden behind a hand. Her amethyst eyes sparkled with genuine mirth as she looked at Ashlynn, the powerful Mother of Trees, who was being all but ignored by the woman whose life she’d just saved. ”I only brought you here. If you want to thank someone, you should thank Her Dominion, Lady Ashlynn, for curing you of the poison.”

”Her Dominion?” Rosie said, turning to face the serving girl and staring in confusion. She was the daughter of a knight and had been the wife of another, so she wasn’t a person who was ignorant when it came to courtly manners, but she’d never heard anyone addressed as ’your Dominion.’ A Marquis or Duke would be addressed as ’your Grace’, while lesser lords were addressed as ’your Lordship’, and some high-ranking members of the Church would be called ’your Worship,’ but what kind of person rated a title as grand as ’your Dominion’?

But before her foggy mind could stumble into an answer to the first oddity she’d tripped over, her mind seized on the second thing that the strange lady had said.

”You, you cured me?” Rosie whispered, pressing her fingertips to her lips as she processed the rest of the other lady’s statement. ”And I was poisoned? But, wait,” she said as she looked from the strange woman dressed like a common serving girl to her ailing son and back again. ”Tonnis is still sick,” she said as the blood drained from her face. ”Does that mean, does that mean you weren’t able to cure him?”

”No,” Ashlynn said gently as she took a seat on the bed next to the frightened woman. ”It just means that I cured you first. It wasn’t easy,” she admitted as she wiped the blood from her lower lip and took a sip from her own cup of cool water. ”My teacher once claimed that Nightweaver venom was one of the five most difficult poisons to cure because it’s so tenacious and the longer it lingers in the body, the more difficult it is to heal.”

”Thankfully, we were able to bring you here in time,” Ashlynn said, resting one hand just above the other woman’s knee and giving her a reassuring squeeze. ”Once I’ve had a chance to rest a little bit, I’ll cure your son next.”

As soon as Ashlynn promised to cure Tonnis, Rosie slumped like a puppet with her strings cut, sighing deeply as a weight heavier than the distant mountains was removed from her chest. Her mind was still struggling to keep up with everything, but one of the fears that had briefly flickered into her mind was that the woman who cured her didn’t have enough medicine to cure both of them.

If anything happened to her son because the medicine had been used up to cure her, she didn’t know how she could live with herself, but thankfully, it seemed like her fears were unfounded.

”While I rest, we can talk a bit. I’m sure you have questions. Madame Zedya and I will do our best to give you answers so you can put your mind at ease,” Ashlynn said as she leaned against the bedpost at the foot of the bed, grateful for the little bit of support and the softness of the mattress as she felt the exhaustion from healing Rosie wash over her.

Rosie didn’t immediately ask anything. Rather, she sat quietly for several minutes, sipping the soothing mint-water and gently stroking her son’s soft hair. His skin was still warm to the touch, and the fever that had haunted him for weeks showed no signs that it had weekend, but he seemed to be sleeping more deeply than he had in weeks. So deeply, in fact, that he showed no signs of waking even when she ran her fingers through his hair.

”You said that you brought me here,” Rosie said, looking at ’Madame Zedya’ with deeply worried eyes. ”And that you got to me in time. So, does that mean that you knew that we’d been poisoned? That you discovered someone plotting against us?”

The idea of it froze her heart with dread, and her mind immediately conjured memories of the heated argument she’d had with her husband, Tommin, more than half a year ago.

”I’m sorry, my little poppin, but I can’t stay,” Tommin said with an expression that made it look as if he was suffering the greatest injustice of his life. ”I’ve helped to do a thing that shouldn’t have ever been done, and just knowing that it was done is dangerous. I, I can’t put you in that kind of danger, Rosie. It’s best that I get away from you and Tonnis, before anyone comes to hurt you because of what I’ve done or what I know...”

”Why won’t you tell me what you’ve done?” Rosie pleaded. ”Didn’t we promise each other to face all fortunes together, both good and ill? Didn’t we swear to struggle together for the rest of our days? So why won’t you tell me what we’re struggling against now? Why are you abandoning us so you can hide behind the Church’s walls by yourself?”

She was hurt and angry, and she felt like the man she’d loved ever since she was old enough to feel her heart flutter at the sight of a man had betrayed everything they’d built together for more than a decade. It felt like all of his promises were lies, and his love was the greatest sham that she’d been a fool for believing in.

But now, as she stared at her son’s pale complexion and felt his feverish brow, she wondered for the first time if she’d wronged her husband. Whatever it was he’d done, his enemies, whoever they were, really had come after her and Tonnis... but even if that was true, she still didn’t know who those enemies were, or why they would poison her and their son.

So now that she’d heard the thing she needed to hear most, that the strange woman resting at the foot of her bed could cure her son, the thing she wanted to understand the most was why this had happened to them, because there was something that she was very certain of.

Whoever these people were who had helped her, they were likely opponents or enemies of the people who had poisoned her... but that didn’t mean they were friends at all.