The Vampire & Her Witch

As the flames burned higher, they banished the cold from the courtyard and brought a warm light to the space that took the place of the rising sun, still hidden behind the clouds. There was only one final thing that needed doing, something that had hung heavy in Jocelynn’s heart ever since Eleanor’s funeral.

Ashlynn needed a song to see her on her way... and this time, Jocelynn knew just the one.

Jocelynn opened her mouth, drawing a deep breath, but for a terrible moment, nothing came out.

Her throat was raw from weeping, her chest was tight, and the words she’d practiced in the dark of her chambers felt impossibly far away, as if the song were trapped behind a wall of grief that her voice couldn’t breach. The heat of the pyre pressed against her face and the smoke stung her eyes, and for a heartbeat, she thought the flame had taken her voice along with everything else.

Then the wind shifted. A gust moved through the courtyard, pushing the smoke sideways, and for the space of a breath, the heavy clouds above them thinned just enough to let a shaft of pale gold light fall through the gap. It wasn’t much. A sliver of warmth, gone almost as quickly as it arrived. But it touched the smoke rising from the pyre and turned it gold for a fleeting instant, and something in Jocelynn’s chest snapped into place, like sails catching the wind to carry her voice forward.

She sang.

Her voice was thin and unsteady, rough from the morning’s tears. It wasn’t a performance. It was an offering, carried on a melody that belonged to the harbor and the tide, built on the slow, steady rhythm of oars striking dark water in the hour before dawn.

”When cold light breaks o’er Blackwell Bay,

The tide begins to turn.

The iron bells toll out the day,

While harbor beacons burn.”

The first verse hung in the courtyard like smoke, fragile and solitary. In the silence that followed, Jocelynn could hear the crackle of the pyre and the faint whisper of the wind through the courtyard walls, and nothing else.

Then, as she drew another breath for the second verse, a voice joined hers.

Captain Devlin stepped forward from the wall where he’d been standing, his weathered face tight with emotion, and when he opened his mouth, the voice that came out was deep and rich and steady. It was the voice of a man who had sung this song a hundred times on the deck of the Blue Gull as the morning tide carried him out of Blackwell Harbor.

He didn’t look at Jocelynn. His eyes were fixed on the pyre, and he sang for the woman whose things were burning there, because that was what a sailor did when the sea took someone home.

”The hempen lines and heavy masts,

They catch the wind’s first breath.

The gold of dawn on canvas cast,

Defies the shade of death.”

Devlin’s voice anchored the melody the way a keel steadied a ship, and on the third verse, others found the courage to join as well.

Sir Elgon was first among the knights, his voice as rough as the sea on the rocks but just as fierce and determined. A heartbeat later, the men beside him followed in ones and twos until the ranks of knights and Templars were singing together. Sir Beathan’s voice cracked on the first line, but the Templars at his shoulders caught him and carried him forward, their voices blending into a sound that was more prayer than song, low and fierce and unashamed.

”The captain calls, the anchors rise,

The oars bite deep and free.

And those on shore with salt-stung eyes,

Give over to the sea.”

By the fourth verse, the household staff had joined, and the courtyard filled with the sound of more than forty voices lifted together. Mary and Anne sang quietly, their voices thin but present, and the guardsmen and maidservants behind them added what they could, some barely whispering the words, others singing with a fullness that surprised even themselves.

The sound swelled and echoed off the stone walls and the mosaic tiles until the small courtyard rang with it, a chorus that was ragged and imperfect and raw... And more beautiful for being all of those things.

”Gold sails upon the water’s rim,

Pale shapes within the dawn.

I’ll watch until the sight grows dim,

And the last of you is gone.”

The verse ended, and the echo lingered in the stone, fading slowly like the last light of a lantern carried out to sea.

In the back of the gathering, Charlotte Otker wept without restraint, her handkerchief pressed to her mouth and her shoulders shaking with sobs she no longer tried to contain. Adala stood beside her with one hand on Charlotte’s arm, her own dark eyes glistening with tears that she refused to let fall, though the careful mask she wore had cracked beyond any hope of repair. Her lips were pressed tightly together, and the slight tremor in her jaw betrayed the cost of holding herself in check.

Ragna Fayle stood motionless, her lean face carved from stone, but the redness around her eyes and the way her throat moved as she swallowed told a different story than the one her posture tried to present.

Ghosts of a different pyre flickered in her eyes, bringing with them memories of the day she stood in a cold field in Fayle Barony with a boy too young to understand why his father wouldn’t be coming home, and of the song she’d been unable to convince the priests to let her sing that day.

Then Jocelynn’s voice rose again, alone once again, but no longer as frail as it had been when she began.

The fifth verse was quieter than what came before, almost intimate after the fullness of the chorus. The others fell silent, not because they chose to stop but because they could hear in their lady’s voice that this part of the song belonged to her alone.

”When my own morning breaks at last,

To meet the rising tide,

I’ll step the mast and bind it fast,

With the sun to be my guide.”

Her voice didn’t waver. For the first time all morning, it was steady, clear, and certain, because these words weren’t a farewell. They were a promise. A promise to the smoke and the sky and the sister she couldn’t see but refused to stop reaching for. The mourners heard devotion. A sister’s pledge to honor Ashlynn’s memory until her own time came to make the crossing.

But that wasn’t what Jocelynn meant, and she knew it, and the knowledge sat in her chest like a stone anchor, heavy and still and sure.

She drew one last breath. The pyre had burned low, the fierce flames subsiding into a steady, glowing bed of embers. The smoke rose thin and pale, carrying the last of Ashlynn’s things toward the grey sky. And Jocelynn sang the final verse with a voice that was raw and open and absolutely unafraid.

”Gold sails beyond the harbor’s ledge,

Where sky and salt-spray part.

I’ll find you past the world’s cold edge,

With a heavy, rowing heart.”

The last note trembled in the cold air, suspended between the stone walls and the winter sky. Then Jocelynn spoke the closing words, not singing them but saying them, her voice quiet and fierce and meant for Ashlynn alone.

”And we’ll row on. We’ll row on... Into the dawn.”

The silence that followed had the weight of deep water. No one moved. No one spoke. The embers pulsed in the iron basin, and the last wisps of smoke curled toward the clouds, and the courtyard held its breath as if the whole world had paused to let a dead woman pass.

Then Aubin stepped forward. He moved slowly, reverently, kneeling beside the iron basin atop the remains of the pyre. With a small brass tool, he carefully gathered the ashes, sifting through the embers with the patient precision of a man performing a final act of service. When he was finished, he transferred the ashes into the clay urn, sealed the lid with wax, and rose to his feet.

He carried the urn to Jocelynn with both hands.

”She’s ready for the journey,” he said simply.

Jocelynn took the urn from him and pressed it against her chest, the same way she’d held the wooden chest all morning. The clay was warm from the ashes inside, and she held it close, feeling the heat through the black wool of her mourning dress, like the last warmth of a hand that had just let go.

She closed her eyes. The smoke drifted above her. The courtyard was still.

When she opened her eyes, the thin break in the clouds had closed, and the pale gold light was gone. But the warmth of the urn remained, and she held onto it the way a sailor held the tiller in a storm, because it was the only thing left to steer by.

”Thank you,” she said, to the courtyard, to the mourners, to Aubin, to the smoke still rising. ”Thank you all.”

She didn’t say goodbye. Not to Ashlynn. Not yet.

For now, she turned toward the side door of the chapel and the room where the wine was waiting, and let her duties to the living carry her back inside.

From here, the gathering would split into two as the common folk accompanied the knights and templars in the chapel. Her presence among them would only serve to still their tongues, and they deserved this moment to remember Ashlynn in their own ways.

Meanwhile, Jocelynn joined the ladies who had come to pay their respects and braced herself for the storm that was sure to come...