The Vampire & Her Witch

”Despite the fact that you ran away from Baron Loghlan’s camp, Ollie chased after you when you met with danger,” the woman said, and Cerys felt Cynwrig’s hand find hers, his grip warm and firm around her cold fingers. ”He was afraid for you and for your son, too.”

”When he found you, you were dying,” Ashlynn continued bluntly. ”Your skull was cracked, your body was broken, and you were bleeding into the frozen ground with your son screaming beside you.”

Cerys closed her eyes. She remembered almost nothing of the fall itself, just the sudden, terrible certainty that the horse was going down beneath her and the desperate instinct to pull Dalwyn against her chest before the world turned to darkness and pain. Everything after that was fragments. Cold air on her skin. The smell of earth and blood. A voice that wasn’t Cynwrig’s offering to help... and her own stubborn refusal to be helped by a ’demon’ or a witch.

”Ollie healed you,” the woman said. ”He carried you into the only copse of trees for a league or more so he could save your life. In order to preserve your life, he had to draw on every tree within the copse. He pulled the life from their roots, from their branches, from every leaf and every seed, and he gave it all to you.”

She paused, and in the silence, Cerys heard the faint creak of the chair as the younger woman leaned forward.

”Those trees are dead now, Lady Cerys, along with every shrub and vine in that forest,” Ashlynn said. A faint flicker of emerald light seemed to shine from her hard eyes, though it could have been a trick of the candlelight. ”He killed an entire forest for you, for a stranger who ran away from him and rejected the kindness and help he offered...”

”And do you know why he did it, Lady Cerys?” Ashlynn asked, sounding both exasperated and proud at the same time. ”He did it because he didn’t want to see your son lose his mother or your husband lose his wife. Because he’s seen too many people grieving for their lost loved ones after senseless battles, and he didn’t want that fate for your family.”

Cerys’s hand tightened around her pendant until the edges left impressions in her palm. She wanted to speak, wanted to say something that would ease the terrible pressure building behind her ribs, but the words wouldn’t come.

The weight of what this woman was describing pressed down on her like a millstone, and beneath it, she could feel the foundations of every justification she’d built for her flight crumbling like the riverbank collapsing during a flood.

”And Ollie nearly died for it,” the woman continued. Her voice remained level, but something harder had crept into it, something that still felt surprisingly maternal, with the sharpness of a mother who hated to see her children suffer.

”If Milo hadn’t been there to pull Ollie back from the edge,” Ashlynn said, biting her lower lip to stop herself from continuing that line of thought. ”If I hadn’t been close by enough to reach him before he could do himself any more harm... Even tonight, we might still have lost him.”

In the corner, Cian had pressed his back against the stone wall, and his fingers were white-knuckled around the sunburst medallion on his breast. His lips were pressed into a thin line, and his eyes darted rapidly from the strange woman with the sword to his sister, then his brother-in-law and back again.

It was impossible. The things this woman was speaking of.... The injuries she described should have killed Cerys. A cracked skull? Even the Church’s best miracle workers would struggle to heal such a wound, but... This ’Ollie’ person had saved her? And he’d killed a forest to do it?

At times, the Church’s healers needed an offering in order to perform a great miracle. A pledge of faith that went beyond simple words. A price had to be paid to the Holy Lord of Light in exchange for his blessings. But that price was paid by people of faith... it couldn’t be paid by, by trees! That wasn’t how miracles worked.

But... if it were witchcraft, Cian thought, maybe it was possible.

And Cynwrig had known. His brother-in-law had sat in that chair and lied to his face about a demon trap, and all the while, he’d known that Cerys had been healed by witchcraft and that the people who had brought them to this room were the very forces that Abbot Recared warned would destroy the Kingdom of Gaal.

”I want you to understand something,” the woman said, seemingly oblivious to Cian’s crisis of faith as she looked directly at Cerys with those vivid green eyes.

”The last time someone accepted my protection and then fled to carry word to my enemies, I executed them for treason,” she said, resting a hand on the bone-hilt of her sword. ”I swung the sword myself, and if I think that you pose a threat to the people I love and what we’re trying to build here... I’ll swing the sword again,” she promised.

Cerys heard her own heartbeat hammering in her ears, felt Cynwrig’s grip on her hand tighten until the bones ached, and for a terrible, endless moment, she was certain that this room above a tavern in Maeril was going to be the last room she ever saw.

”But that isn’t what happened here,” Ashlynn continued, and Cerys felt the air rush back into her lungs in a surge that left her dizzy. ”At least, that’s what I’ve been told. So I’m asking you directly, Lady Cerys, because I’d rather hear it from your lips than from anyone else’s.”

Cerys’ eyes flicked from Lady Ashlynn’s hard, emerald gaze to the sword at her hip and back again as she fought against the fog of pain and fatigue to compose her words. Lady Ashlynn seemed patient, willing to give her the time to compose herself, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see Cian’s face turning darker and darker as he realized what was happening here.

”Your brother is here for his own safety,” Ashlynn said when she saw Cerys’ hesitation, though the look she gave the young acolyte was anything but kind. ”My... husband has already beaten two acolytes of the Inquisition close enough to death that they died after he had them paraded through the market square, and the Inquisitor who ’trained’ them is just as dead,” she said.

”The robes of the Inquisition won’t protect you,” she told Cian directly. ”From me, or my enemies, so be grateful to your sister that we got to you first. Now,” she continued as she turned back to Cerys, placing a hand gently on the arm that wasn’t broken. ”Tell me why you ran away...”