The Vampire & Her Witch

”You think you can negotiate with me?” Owain scoffed. ”You tortured a noblewoman, and you let her cousin die in these very dungeons. You conspired against my father, taking advantage of his madness to invent a conspiracy where there was none,” he said, calmly listing out the Inquisitor’s crimes.

”You murdered innocent men and tried to coerce my father into giving your order greater power in the March than it’s had since the end of the Second Crusade,” Owain said, referencing the most damning of the decrees he found on his father’s desk after he’d ended the old man’s life. ”The Church has no reason to protect you, and you have nothing to offer me to ’negotiate.’”

”Don’t be so sure, young Lord Owain,” Percivus said, and now that predatory smile curved his lips, visible even in the dim torchlight of the dungeon cell. ”The Church has every reason to protect me, because I’ve been very, very useful to them over the years.”

”You see, your lordship, I am a meticulous man,” the Inquisitor continued, speaking as if he were sitting across the dinner table from Owain rather than chained before him. ”I keep detailed records of everything I discover in my investigations. Not just the heretics I uncover, but the corrupt dealings, the secret vices, the hidden sins of lords whose power and position place them beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Or at least, of our small little Chapter of the Inquisition here on the frontier,” he amended carefully.

”I have years of notes,” Percivus said, his hazel eyes flashing in the torchlight as he met Owain’s gaze directly. ”Everything I’ve done and learned, all carefully documented and securely hidden. Names, dates, and evidence of crimes that would bring down some of the most powerful families in the march. And I’m prepared to offer them to you, for the right terms,” he said.

”Your life’s work,” Owain said, visibly pulling back his anger as he forced himself to consider the Inquisitor’s offer. ”You’re offering up your entire life’s work as an Inquisitor to an outsider. Why should I believe that you would do that? What is it that you know that makes you think I would spare your life just for the contents of your notebook?”

Owain’s eyes flicked briefly over to Jocelynn as he spoke, and he could see the distress building in her body as the conversation dragged on. Already, she’d backed up against the stone wall of the cell, putting as much room between herself and Percivus as possible. Her hands clutched at her skirts, and her seafoam eyes were wide with fear while her chest heaved with short, shallow breaths.

She was getting closer now, Owain thought as he returned his gaze to the Inquisitor. She was starting to understand, but she wasn’t ready yet. But that was fine. He was in no hurry. Like grapes on the vine, this moment would ripen, and when the time came, she would come to him, and he would guide her once again, just like he’d guided her in removing the Inquisitor’s robes. Only this time, she wouldn’t drop the knife after seeing a few drops of blood.

”I collected this information in order to use it, Lord Owain,” Percivus said as a dangerous gleam appeared in his eyes. ”I ask only three things in exchange for turning over all of my notes to you, but the first of them is that you use what I give you. These are wicked men, Lord Owain,” Percivus added pointedly as genuine passion crept into his voice.

”Which of your barons indulges in his desires to touch the flesh of young boys,” Percivus offered as an example. ”And which of them supplies arms and armor to the bandits who prey on his neighbor’s villages. Which knights have sired bastards in the brothels of the march, and which lords have tried to erase all trace that they ever visited one along with the women they visited there,” he added with a pointed look at Owain.

The look on the Inquisitor’s face said that he knew things that no man should know, and the example he’d given at the end had been no accident. It should be impossible, Owain thought. After all, it had been years, more than a decade, since Sir Kaefin took a much younger Owain to his first brothel and taught him how to deal with an ungrateful whore who wanted to spread tales of her night with the future Marquis of Lothian March.

It shouldn’t be possible for the man to have uncovered such an old, deeply buried secret, and yet those eyes, those piercing hazel eyes, said that he knew. And if he knew about that, then what else did those notebooks contain?

”You see, your lordship. The things I could tell you are quite valuable,” Percivus said reasonably, as if they were negotiating the price of grain rather than discussing blackmail material extracted through torture. ”Think of what you could do with such information, Lord Owain. The leverage you would have over your rivals in the Lothian court. The ability to move against your enemies with righteous cause rather than naked ambition. I can give you the tools to consolidate your power in ways your father never could.”

This, after all, was what Percivus had wanted from Bors Lothian. The ability to purge the march of the wickedness and corruption that plagued the nobility of Lothian March like a disease. For too long, the Abbot in Maeril had been afraid to touch the barons and their most favored knights, or the wealthy merchants in the march who grew stronger with each generation of their families who inherited the wealth of their forefathers.

But a fledgling Marquis, one who was coming to power under somewhat dubious circumstances... He was a man who could give Percivus the authority he’d always dreamed of. The ability to hunt down evil men who got away with literal murder because the title they were born with protected them even more than a knight’s suit of armor.

He just needed to get the ambitious young lord to understand what he had to offer, and he’d be walking out of these dungeons before sunrise...