The Vampire & Her Witch

It took several minutes for the room to find anything resembling calm.

Below them, they could hear the muffled sounds of Marcel and Sir Carwyn carrying Cian down the narrow stairs, his thin, pained whimpers mixing with the heavier tread of boots on old wood until a door closed somewhere on the ground floor and the tavern settled back into the heavy silence of a winter night.

When the last echo of his voice was gone, the quiet that remained felt less like peace and more like the hush that preceded the breaking of a dam.

Ashlynn stood in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides, and she couldn’t quite make them stop trembling.

The rage had passed through her like a summer storm, fierce and sudden and devastating, and what it left behind was the wreckage. The hot, sticky feeling of Cian’s blood drying on her cheek. The taste of copper where his spittle had caught the corner of her mouth. The phantom pressure of Eira’s slender fingers wrapped around her wrist, holding her back from one of the worst things she’d almost done.

She had nearly killed him. Not in defence of Cerys, not to protect her plans, but because a boy in crimson robes had stared at her with the same righteous conviction she’d seen in Owain Lothian’s eyes on the night of their wedding, when he looked at her and saw a monster instead of a woman. The combination of that look and Cian’s betrayal of his sister had snapped something inside her like a ship’s rigging pushed past its limits in a gale.

If Eira hadn’t stopped her...

Ashlynn closed her eyes and drew a slow breath through her nose, holding it until the trembling in her hands eased from a shudder to a faint vibration and then, finally, to stillness. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was Cynwrig.

The knight had moved to the washstand. He didn’t say a word as he lifted the ceramic pitcher and poured a measure of water over a clean cloth that he found folded beside the basin. He wrung the excess water from it with steady, practised hands, and then he crossed the room and held it out to Ashlynn.

He didn’t presume to wipe her face himself; she was neither his child nor his wife to be so intimate with. He simply offered the cloth with the quiet courtesy of a man who understood that the woman standing before him had just saved his wife’s life and nearly taken another in the same breath, and that the least he could do was make sure she didn’t have to face whatever came next with blood drying on her skin.

”My Lady,” Cynwrig said gently.

Ashlynn looked at him for a moment, and something in her chest loosened just enough to let her breathe properly. She took the cloth and pressed it to her face, feeling the shock of the cold water against her flushed skin as she wiped away Cian’s blood and spittle with hands that were steady now, or close enough to steady that no one would notice the difference.

”Thank you, Sir Cynwrig,” she said. The words came out rougher than she intended, scraped raw by everything that had just passed through her, but the cool, damp cloth helped to restore some of the composure she’d lost.

When she lowered the cloth, there was a smear of pink on the white fabric that she stared at for a moment longer than she should have before folding it over and setting it on the washstand. She’d worn other people’s blood before. Broll’s. Kaefin’s. The Tuscans who had killed Andrus. The blood of men who had earned what came to them.

But this was the blood of a boy who was barely older than Ollie. A boy who had done a monstrous thing because monstrous men had taught him that monstrosity was holy, and the weight of that sat differently in her chest than the blood of those knights and warriors.

On the bed, Cerys hadn’t moved from where she’d pressed herself against the headboard. Her good hand was still clamped over her mouth, and the tears on her cheeks had dried in tracks that caught the candlelight like lines drawn in salt. But her eyes, when they finally lifted from the floor to find Ashlynn’s face, were no longer the eyes of a woman lost in shock.

They were the eyes of a woman who was trying to find words for something that no tutor had ever taught her how to express. ’Thank you’ felt far from adequate after what had just happened here, and if she started there, she was afraid that Lady Ashlynn wouldn’t understand what she was so grateful for...

”You spared him,” Cerys said at last. Her voice was quiet and strained, as if she was afraid that just speaking would jostle her broken arm and bring on another wave of pain, but she made herself continue nonetheless. ”He tried to... He would have... He said... And still, you spared him.”

Ashlynn met her gaze, and for a moment, the careful masks that both women wore, the witch’s composure and the noblewoman’s dignity, fell away, and what remained was simply two women looking at each other across the wreckage of a broken family.

”I almost didn’t,” Ashlynn said honestly. There was no point in pretending otherwise. Cerys had seen the emerald light in her eyes. She’d seen the killing blow pulled back and ready to fall. She’d heard Eira’s desperate plea and watched the fury drain from Ashlynn’s face like color bleeding from a wound.

To lie about it now would be an insult to both of them.

”My sister, she... she did something like that too,” Ashlynn said, biting her lower lip as she struggled to organize her thoughts amidst the maelstrom raging in her heart. ”She told Owain about my mark and he, he tried to kill me for it.”

”It’s not the same,” Ashlynn said. ”But I hope... I want to believe that, even though she did what she did, she still loves me. I don’t know if I can forgive her,” Ashlynn admitted. Her left hand formed a small fist over her heart, and for a moment, she drank in the strength of the echo of Nyrielle’s heartbeat within her chest, secure in the knowledge that she wouldn’t have to face that question alone.

”I don’t know if I can forgive her,” she repeated. ”But I hope that we can find a way to love each other again. At least, I’m going to try,” she said with growing conviction. ”My sister didn’t understand Owain when she told him, and she didn’t understand how much stronger people of the frontier feel about witches and the Eldritch,” she explained as she looked into Cerys’ tear-filled eyes.

”I can’t speak for your brother,” Ashlynn said. ”But I’ve learned more about the Church than most people know. Secrets they only share with the highest ranks of the clergy, and some that are likely known only by the Saints and the Exemplars. The Church is very good at twisting a man’s heart,” Ashlynn said, hoping Cerys would understand. ”And distorting his view of the world.”

”You’re saying that it’s the Church’s fault that he... that he tried to kill me?” Cerys said as her hand drifted from her mouth to her pendant, and the gesture that followed was so small and so quiet that Ashlynn almost missed it.

She didn’t clutch the pendant. She didn’t grip it like a lifeline or press it into her palm like a shield. She simply rested her fingers against it, lightly, the way you might rest your hand against the door of a room you weren’t sure you wanted to enter anymore.

”I’m saying that maybe, just maybe, he thought he was doing the right thing, even though it was something unbearably cruel,” Ashlynn said softly. ”You don’t have to forgive him for that. If he can’t find his way free of the web of lies he’s become tangled in in order to make amends...”

”Just like Jocey and me,” Ashlynn said. ”I don’t know if the two of you can ever be family again after tonight. But... I can at least try to give you that chance.”

”Thank you,” Cerys whispered. ”For my life, and for his. Even after what he did. Even after what he tried to do to me. Thank you for letting him live.”

The words settled into the room like ash after a fire, and Ashlynn let them rest there. She didn’t trust herself to respond to gratitude right now, not when the memory of how close she’d come to earning the opposite of thanks was still burning in the pit of her stomach like bad wine.

She’d managed to hold herself back this time, but only because a woman the same age as Jocelynn had been willing to risk everything to hold her back. If there wasn’t someone like Lady Eira or someone else at her side next time... she shuddered to think about what might happen.