The Vampire & Her Witch

”It, it must be hard for you,” Loman said with a bitter, self-deprecating laugh as he realized that he’d been wrong about Ashlynn. She carried scars of her own, they just weren’t as visible as his missing arm or disfigured face.

But more than that, he realized that the scars she carried were from wounds inflicted long before the night she married his brother. Some of them had been inflicted by his brother when they were still courting, and others came from the way the world treated women like her, who were born with the mark of a witch.

”I look so much like my brother,” he said with a smile that twisted off center because of what Dame Sybyll had done to destroy much of that resemblance. But it was still there, and the moment Ashlynn explained how Owain had touched her, to restrain her, he’d realized how much his figure must overlap with his brother’s in her mind.

”How much do I remind you of the man who,” he started before his voice trailed off. He couldn’t make himself finish the statement but Ashlynn knew what he meant.

”You look like him, out of the corner of my eye,” Ashlynn admitted. ”And sometimes, you sound like him. So of course it’s hard,” Ashlynn said, looking into his eyes and searching for the slightest glimmer of real understanding that went beyond social niceties. ”Making peace is hard. Sparing Tommin was hard. Talking to the brother of the man who tried to kill me and treating him like family... it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” she admitted.

”But if I don’t do it, then everything is worse,” she said softly as she helped him to his feet. She had to face Loman, because no matter how hard it was, if she couldn’t, then how could she ask the people of the Vale or the people of the March to do the same?

Ashlynn had given Dame Sybyll her vengeance against Hugo Hanrahan, but she was denying countless displaced villagers their ability to take revenge on Liam Dunn. She told Liam that he had to find a way to make peace with the people he’d displaced if he and his family wanted to continue to live as lords in the kingdom they were building.

She knew full well that he’d lost soldiers and friends in those battles too. He had to find a way to put that aside in the name of something greater. She couldn’t ask those people to accept their enemies as neighbors if she couldn’t find her own way to do the same with Loman.

”So even though it hurts, I’m trying. I’m struggling,” she amended quickly, choosing the word deliberately for its connotations among the faithful.

”And I’m lashing out like a wounded dog,” Loman said bluntly. ”I’m sorry. It’s my fault for losing control of my temper. Please don’t go. I, I really do want to talk to you. And... you worked so hard on a meal to share with me. You shouldn’t have to walk away from it because I’m acting like... like my brother,” he said with a defeated look on his face.

”Please, come sit with me,” he said, gesturing at the table that still held both of their meals, still steaming and hot in the slightly chill air of Ashlynn’s sitting room. ”I promise, we can just talk, like we used to,” he said, looking at Ashlynn with an expression that resembled a pleading puppy who had been left out in the rain.

”Or,” he added. ”If you can’t endure my presence right now, then let me be the one to leave. I shouldn’t drive you from your own chambers when I’m the one who’s done wrong today.”

For several heartbeats, Ashlynn said nothing as she fought to control the pace of her breathing and the beating of her heart. If not for the effort she’d put into grounding herself, she might have stormed away from him as soon as he was back on his feet, but she’d gained enough control of herself to hold back from that.

Loman wasn’t Owain, she reminded herself, and he’d proved it just now. Owain would have laughed it off. He would have said that he hadn’t meant to touch her in a way that bothered her, or that she shouldn’t have been bothered by it to begin with, and then, just as Loman had done, he would have directed her back to the meal she’d prepared. He would have said it would be a shame to waste her cooking.

But Loman had said something that Owain never would. He admitted that he was the one who had done wrong. Whether he meant it or not, whether they were just flowery words that would soothe her heart or a genuine expression of remorse, Ashlynn was too flustered to say. She couldn’t read Loman the way she’d read Tommin, not when she had let down enough of the walls around her heart to be wounded by her brother-in-law’s outbursts.

She couldn’t be sure the apology was genuine, but, she wanted it to be. She wanted to believe that things hadn’t gotten so bad so quickly that they couldn’t share a meal together. So then, once she’d calmed herself, she offered her brother-in-law a fragile smile and turned back toward the table.

”I lashed out at Nyri unfairly when she invited me to dinner on my first night in the Vale,” Ashlynn admitted, offering up the embarrassing memory as a peace offering between them. ”She told me that she hoped I could help her break the stalemate between her and your family after so many years of war and I was upset because I thought she only rescued me in order to make use of my power.”

”She was patient enough with me to put up with my outbursts,” Ashlynn explained. ”Even though I wasn’t showing her any of the respect or gratitude she deserved after rescuing me from the dark and cold of the storm.”

”So, if you can try, I can try,” Ashlynn said as she walked back to her seat at the table. ”And we can both struggle through this together...”