The Vampire & Her Witch

”You look surprised, Diarmuid,” Ignatious said as he watched the Inquisitor’s eyes tracking the fast-moving conversation rolling up and down the table. ”Is it disorienting, being on this side of conversations about the conflict between our peoples?”

The information that Marcel had been able to gather about Inquisitor Diarmuid had been fairly limited. It was well known that he’d come from the Holy City, and very few of his actions since arriving in Lothian March had escaped the Black Merchant’s notice, but there was a limit to how much Nyrielle’s spymaster could learn about a man who had spent most of his life so far away.

Ignatious didn’t know whether Diarmuid had spent considerable time in the other marches, fighting against the Eldritch, or if he’d been focused on the work of the Inquisition within the duchies, discovering corruption concealed behind accusations of heresy. All he knew was that the man seemed like a genuine seeker of truth, and he’d been willing to take a stand against Owain Lothian to protect Sir Ollie’s parents from becoming convenient scapegoats following Ashlynn’s first visit to the Summer Villa and the subsequent death of two of Owain’s knights.

”It’s not that,” Diarmuid said as his face heated in slight embarrassment. ”There are two or more sides to every conflict, and each side has its own view of the truth. It isn’t surprising to hear that there are subtleties to the skirmishes in the south that most people wouldn’t have considered,” he said generously.

Further down the table, Loman was clearly nursing wounds from his recent defeat that had stemmed largely from failing to understand the Eldritch side of this long-running conflict. The number of assumptions they’d made that were clearly wrong was enough to make an Inquisitor hang up his robes and retire, and Loman had borne the consequences of those misunderstandings more than anyone else.

Diarmuid didn’t want to imply that Loman, and by extension, his family, should have possessed a better understanding of their opponents after so many years fighting against the Eldritch forces, but he felt compelled to be honest as he heard from the ’other side’ of this conflict.

”I hope, for everyone’s sake, that Lady Ashlynn is successful in minimizing the loss of life on both sides,” he said, even though the words would have been considered heretical in the halls of the Inquisition. ”I’m just...” he started to say, only to trail off when he couldn’t find a polite way to express the things that had surprised him.

”I suppose I’m still mired in what I thought I knew about the Eldritch and about vampires,” Diarmuid said after taking a moment to compose himself. ”I read your writings, High Inq-, er, Ignatious. The notebooks and journals you left behind before you, um...” he said, trailing off once again as he found it difficult to describe what had happened to Ignatious. Before he became a vampire?

Before he was captured and tortured? There was no easy way to say it, but Diarmuid didn’t want to prod at old wounds, even as he desperately wanted to understand how the vampires before him could be so different from the ones that Ignatious had written about more than eighty years ago.

For a moment, all of the vampires at the table paused, with all of them but Lennart sharing a stillness that was deeply unsettling, as if they’d forgotten to breathe while they considered Diarmuid’s words. Clearly, the Inquisitor had touched on something sensitive, and for a moment, none of the vampires were entirely certain how they should respond to him.

”I know what you’re asking about, Diarmuid,” Ignatious said carefully after several moments of thought. ”None of us are like the vampires I captured during the Brothers’ War,” he admitted. ”Some of that is because we were created differently. Back then, Mistress Nyrielle needed to raise a force that was powerful enough to retake the Vale of Mists from Cellach Lothian as quickly as possible, and the progeny she created lacked the individual care that each of us received in the years that followed,” he explained.

”But there’s more to it than just that,” Thane said, coming to his younger sibling’s rescue. ”You may learn those secrets one day, Inquisitor, but it won’t be today unless Mistress Nyrielle and Lady Ashlynn decide to bring you into their confidence. Even though we’ve all benefited from their gifts, some secrets aren’t ours to share,” he said diplomatically.

”It’s love,” Heila offered as she snuggled up close to Ignatious. ”There’s more to it than that, but at the end of the day, the thing that binds us all together and makes us different from what you’ve heard of before... It’s just love.”

”It’s true,” Isabell said with an amused smile on her lips as she joined the conversation. ”I’m still adjusting to it myself, Diarmuid,” she added lightly. ”But Lady Ashlynn has been working hard to nurture a sense of family in the Vale of Mists. I can’t describe how she does it, and I won’t pretend that there’s no witchcraft in it. She has a way of breaking down the walls between people that goes far beyond anything her father ever taught her...”

”She makes it impossible to hide from the contents of your own heart,” Ollie added as he thought back on the trial he faced when he received the Cypress Seed from Ashlynn.

Before he’d faced the Purgatory of Two Suns, he’d confronted a vision of Ashlynn wearing the sort of light, breezy styles that were essential in the heat of the Briar and she’d chastised him for his inability to look past his baser instincts as a man, to see her as family instead of as a beautiful woman and an object of desire.

It had been deeply uncomfortable, but it had also helped him to recognize that the greatest barrier to closeness between them had been his own tendency to perceive her kindness as romantic affection when it had been nothing of the sort. Once he faced that, they were able to become much closer, in a way that felt more like she was his protective older sister than anything else, and their relationship was both stronger and deeper for it.

”Witches are creatures of desire,” a soft, musical voice said from the door. ”It shouldn’t be surprising that we nurture deep feelings wherever we go,” Ashlynn said as all eyes in the room landed on her and the woman beside her, with several pairs of eyes going wide as they watched Nyrielle wrap an arm possessively around Ashlynn’s slender waist.

”Heila’s right that it’s love,” Ashlynn said with a warm smile as she looked out over the people who had gathered in the brightly lit formal dining room for a dinner unlike any other. ”And in the presence of great love, everything else must give way...”