The Vampire & Her Witch

Cerys opened her mouth to speak, but the words tangled in her throat like wet thread on a spindle. The pain in her arm was a constant, grinding presence that made it hard to think clearly, and the fatigue that had been building since she’d woken in the carriage after her fall pressed down on her mind like a sodden wool blanket.

But the young woman’s hand was still resting on her arm, just above the wrist of her unbroken hand, and there was something in that touch that anchored her. Not warmth, exactly, though the woman’s fingers were warm enough. Something steadier than that, as if her touch were helping Cerys to ground herself even as the currents of fatigue and pain threatened to sweep her away.

”I left a letter,” Cerys said at last. Her words came out hoarse and brittle, but once she started speaking, it was easier to keep going. ”For Cynwrig. I wrote him a letter before I took Dalwyn and left.”

She felt Cynwrig shift beside her, heard the creak of his chair as his weight settled, and she knew without looking that his face would be wearing the same expression it had worn when she’d finally woken up with her in the carriage. That terrible mixture of relief and grief and barely restrained fury that only a man who loved his wife deeply enough to be shattered by her choices could produce.

”I didn’t run toward the Abbey,” Cerys continued, and her eyes flicked to Cian in the corner before she could stop them. Her brother stood rigid against the wall, his fingers locked around his medallion, and the expression on his face was one she hadn’t seen on his face since they were both children.

The practiced disapproval of an acolyte correcting a wayward soul who just happened to be his older sister had been replaced by something much more raw. Something that looked almost like fear.

She looked away from him and back to the woman sitting across from her.

”I know that’s what people might think,” Cerys said. ”That I ran to the Inquisition. To Cian, or to Abbot Recared. But I promise I didn’t. I was planning to turn north and east. Toward Stormbrook. Toward my daughter...” she said, closing her eyes as she thought about her youngest child, who had nearly lost her mother, all because she’d been frightened and foolish.

The woman’s thumb shifted slightly against the inside of Cerys’s wrist, settling into the hollow where her pulse beat strongest. The touch was so subtle that Cerys barely noticed it, and if she had, she might have mistaken it for a gesture of comfort.

But Ashlynn felt the rhythm of Cerys’s heart beneath her fingertip, steady and fast with fear but not with the erratic flutter that accompanied a lie. The woman’s breathing was shallow from pain, not from the careful, measured cadence of someone constructing a fiction.

”Gwyneth,” Cerys said, opening her eyes to meet Ashlynn’s gaze and silently praying that the young woman would understand at least a portion of a mother’s fear for her children. ”She’s three years old. I left her with her nursemaid in Stormbrook when we came to join Lord Loghlan’s retinue. She’s been there for several days now, and I just...”

She stopped, swallowing hard as she tried to press forward. Nearby, she saw Cynwrig reaching for a cup of water, but she shook her head slightly. If she stopped, she was afraid that she’d lose her ability to keep going.

”When Baron Loghlan accepted your alliance,” Cerys said, and the words came faster now, tumbling over each other as if she’d held them behind a dam for too long and the stones were finally giving way, ”I tried to get him to reconsider. I told them both that the Church would come for us, that the Inquisition would root out everyone who had consorted with... with your people. That nothing would protect us when they came.”

Her eyes darted to Cian again, and this time they stayed, and there was something in the look she gave her brother that was closer to an apology than an accusation.

”I didn’t go to the Abbey because I knew what would happen if I did,” Cerys said, her voice dropping to barely more than a whisper. ”If I told Cian, or if the Abbot learned what Baron Loghlan had done... They would have burned my husband for treason, Cian. They would have burned Loghlan and Mairwen and every knight who heard the offer Lord Liam brought and didn’t object.”

In the corner, Cian’s face had gone the color of ash. His lips moved without sound, and Cerys could see him working through what she’d just said, turning it over and over in the furnace of his faith, trying to find the flaw in her reasoning that would prove she was wrong.

He couldn’t find one, because there wasn’t one, and they both knew it.

”I was trying to protect them,” Cerys said, turning back to Ashlynn. ”All of them. Cynwrig. Loghlan. Even Cian. I thought... I thought if I could just get to Gwyneth and take my children somewhere far from here, somewhere where the war and the alliances and the Inquisition couldn’t reach us, then maybe...”

Her voice failed her. She pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose, once, twice, fighting for control.

”I thought Cynwrig would come find us eventually,” she whispered. ”Once he saw reason. Once he understood that I was right. I thought he’d choose his family over... over all of this.”

The room was quiet. Ashlynn’s fingers rested against the pulse point at Cerys’s wrist, and the heartbeat beneath her touch was the heartbeat of a woman who was telling the truth. Not the smooth, practiced truth of a diplomat or a spy, but the ragged, exhausted truth of a mother who had weighed the lives of her children against the life she’d known and chosen her children without hesitation.

Cynwrig spoke into the silence, his quiet voice rough with an emotion he was barely keeping in check.

”Everything she’s told you is true,” he said. ”I, I don’t agree with her,” he added carefully, pursing his lips together with an anguished look on his face. ”She wasn’t just afraid of the wars that are coming; she was afraid that... That allying ourselves with you would prevent us all from reaching the Heavenly Shores.”

”I don’t know anything about that,” he said before he paused, and when he continued, the roughness in his voice had settled into something harder and more certain. ”I can’t speculate about the next life, but I understand this one and the choices before us.”

”My wife made a foolish choice, my Lady,” he said, meeting Ashlynn’s emerald gaze with eyes that were fiercely determined. ”But it was a mother’s choice, not a traitor’s. She rode away from the Abbey, not toward it. In her own way, she was trying to save our family, not destroy yours.”

Ashlynn was quiet for a long moment. Her thumb rested against Cerys’s pulse, feeling the steady, rapid beat beneath the skin, and her enhanced hearing caught the cadence of the woman’s breathing as it slowly steadied from the ragged pace of her confession.

No deception. No rehearsed story smoothed by repetition. Just a woman in pain, telling the truth about the worst decision she’d ever made, in front of the person she’d wronged and the brother she’d been trying to protect.

”I believe you,” Ashlynn said.

She released Cerys’s wrist gently, and the absence of contact left a coolness against Cerys’s skin that she hadn’t expected to notice.

”I believe that you were trying to reach your daughter,” Ashlynn continued. ”I believe that fear drove you more than malice, and that you didn’t intend to betray my secrets to the Inquisition. But belief and trust are not the same thing, Lady Cerys, and what I need from you now requires trust. Trust that you haven’t yet...”

”You’re Lynnda.”

The voice from the corner was barely above a whisper, but it cut through the room like a knife drawn across taut silk.

Cian had stepped away from the wall. His face was still ashen, but the fear that had been pooling in his eyes had crystallized into something else entirely. Something bright and fixed and terribly certain.

”The woman who killed Sir Kaefin at the Summer Villa,” Cian said, his voice climbing as the pieces fell into place. ”The kitchen girl who murdered a knight in his bed and then cut down Sir Broll when he pursued her into the woods. The witch that Abbot Recared has warned us about, the one the entire Inquisition has been hunting for months.”

His gaze dropped to the sword at Ashlynn’s hip, to the bone hilt and the blue leather and the silver wire, and something shifted behind his eyes as the final piece locked into place. Kitchen girls didn’t carry swords like that. Kitchen girls didn’t sit in chairs and make knights kneel or speak of executions with the calm authority of a woman who had already swung the blade once before.

”Lynnda isn’t your real name,” Cian said. ”Is it? Who... Who are you really? And what kind of dark witchcraft are you all using on my sister?”