The Vampire & Her Witch

While Ashlynn and her coven gathered over a pot of nourishing fish soup to discuss the details of Isabell’s trial and what they could learn from it, a very different conversation was unfolding in the dungeons of Lothian Manor.

Eleanor had been Inquisitor Percivus’s prisoner for nearly a week now, though it felt like far longer. The days had begun to blur together in the perpetual gloom of the dungeon, marked only by the irregular visits from her captor and the slow, relentless deterioration of her body as it failed to recover from the miracle she’d performed to save Jocelynn’s life.

On this particular day, the fourth or maybe fifth since Marquis Bors had ordered her arrest, it was difficult to be certain, Eleanor sat shivering on the bare frame of the wood and leather cot in her cell. Heavy chains bound her wrists and feet, while an iron bar secured between her wrists prevented her from clasping her hands in prayer. She’d been stripped of her confessor’s robes and left with nothing but a thin shift to protect her from the chill of the dungeons, the light-weight material clinging to her slender frame and making her look even more fragile than she already was.

The raven-haired confessor had yet to recover from the price she’d paid to heal Jocelynn, and the days she spent confined in the dungeon had made it increasingly unlikely that she ever would.

Her face looked gaunt and pale, her entire body seeming to have shriveled like a grape left on the vine, as if she’d gone for weeks without proper meals instead of just a span of several days.

But the physical deterioration paled in comparison to what she had learned about Inquisitor Percivus in those days, and now, she had all but given up hope that she would ever see the light of day again.

”You gain nothing from refusing to eat, Eleanor,” Inquisitor Percivus said as he glowered at the stubborn Confessor who sat on the bare frame of the wood and leather cot in the dungeon cell. What respect he might have once held for a sister of the faith had long been worn away by her stubborn intransigence, and he’d long ago ceased using titles or honorifics when he addressed his prisoner.

She was no longer Confessor Eleanor in his eyes; instead, he’d come to think of her by the name she had renounced when she donned the robes of an acolyte. She was Eleanor Blackwell, a woman of noble birth who had attempted to escape the filth and corruption that plagued her kind by hiding herself away within the confines of a convent.

But the past several days had made her true loyalties abundantly clear as she chose kinsmen over clergymen, time and time again, despite his every generous offer to reduce her suffering and allow her a death that would preserve her ability to reach the Heavenly Shores at the end of this life or in the next.

”Th-there is n-nothing for y-you to g-gain from my w-words, B-brother P-p-percivus,” Eleanor said with great difficulty as she struggled just to sit up straight with some semblance of dignity after spending so long in the dungeons.

The first day she’d spent in the dungeons, the flame-haired Inquisitor hadn’t even bothered with her beyond ordering her chained in the cell. She had been provided with simple bedding, a small oil heater to ward off the dungeon’s chill, and even a prisoner’s ration of bread and water. It was meager fare, to be sure, but she’d subsisted on a similar diet of bread and water whenever she fasted to purify herself after receiving a particularly vile confession, so she chose to take the simple meal as a comfort rather than a punishment.

At the time, Eleanor had allowed herself to hope. She’d worked alongside Inquisitors before, good men like Diarmuid who sought truth above all else. Men who understood that the Church’s purpose was to protect the innocent and punish the wicked, not to persecute the helpless or manufacture crimes where none existed.

She was under no illusions that the Church was perfect. After all, the Church had declared Lady Ashlynn to be innocent of witchcraft at the end of Diarmuid’s investigation, but it declined to bring charges against her murderer, preferring to use him as a weapon against the demons rather than exposing his crimes and seeing justice done. Only the Holy Lord of Light was perfect and pure, and many of His servants failed to meet their struggles to live up to His ideals, but on that first day in the dungeons, she’d allowed herself to hope that Percivus would be one of the better ones.

She knew Lady Jocelynn was innocent of any conspiracy to harm the marquis. Her cousin was guilty of many things: jealousy, betrayal, and a foolish infatuation with Owain Lothian that she was only now freeing herself from, but not of plotting against Marquis Bors. Eleanor had borne witness to everything that transpired.

There had been no conspiracy, no demonic transformation, no plot to poison the Marquis. Only a sick old man’s fevered delusions and a young woman’s attempt to care for him. The most that someone could say against her cousin was that Jocelynn had taken advantage of Bors’ delusions to ask him what he thought of her, or to advance some of her own plans to improve Lothian March, but these were hardly high crimes or acts of heresy...

They were ordinary human failings and lapses of judgment that a young noblewoman should be chastised for, but they hardly rose to the level of wrongdoing that warranted imprisonment in the dungeons.

Surely, Eleanor had reasoned, once Percivus questioned her properly and heard the truth, he would see the situation for what it was. The Church valued truth. The Church sought justice. The Church would not condemn the innocent. When she lay her head down on the cramped bed in the cold cell on the first night, she went to sleep believing that she and Lady Jocelynn would suffer a few days of indignity before they could resume their plans to escape Lothian March by fleeing north to the territory of Marquis Crew.

That had all changed on the second day when Percivus finally found the time to address the captive confessor.