The Vampire & Her Witch

”How many people fell sick after the drought two summers ago?”

Isabell’s question was asked gently enough. There wasn’t any malice in her voice. As she’d said, she was trying to understand the scale of the problem the Dunns were facing. But to Loghlan, it might as well have been a dagger to the heart.

”Too many,” Loghlan said quietly as his hand tightened on the cup of wine. Next to him, Mairwen reached out to touch his arm, giving him a gentle squeeze. ”Too many,” Loghlan repeated after taking a deep, shuddering breath. ”Mostly the elderly or those who were already ill. Some young children,” he added, hanging his head low.

”We lost nearly twenty people that summer,” he said. ”Three of them were children under the age of five. The physicians said it was a stomach sickness brought on by bad water. We begged the Church for help but...” Loghlan’s voice trailed off as he thumped the table softly with a fist.

’Do you want us to pray for rain or to pray for the sick?’ The Head Priest had made it clear that miracles couldn’t solve every problem. They weren’t unwilling to beseech the Holy Lord of Light for help, but there were limits to what they could do. In the end, Loghlan had told them to tend to the sick and ease their suffering while he worked to solve the problem of drinking water.

Praying for rain had yet to produce any results, but if he could save the life of one more child, then he’d happily double his ’donation’ to the Church that year.

”We deepened two of the wells afterward and tried to dig new ones,” Loghlan said. ”But we hit stone before we hit water in most places, and the cost of digging through solid rock...”

”Is prohibitive without the right tools,” Isabell finished for him. ”I know. Liam told me about the failed well near the eastern market. He said the diggers broke three iron bits before they gave up.”

”Four,” Loghlan corrected. ”And each of those bits cost me more than a good milk cow. We couldn’t wait for fresh ones from Keating, and the ones made in Lothian weren’t good enough, so we wound up hauling even more water in carts.”

”I can solve that,” Isabell said simply. ”Not with iron bits. With an aqueduct.”

”An aqueduct,” Loghlan said, staring at her in disbelief. ”In Dunn Barony.”

”You sound skeptical,” she said lightly, taking a sip of her wine.

”I sound like a man who knows what an aqueduct costs, Master Isabell,” Loghlan said bluntly. ”The duchies have them. The great cities along the coast all have them. Dunn Town isn’t Keating, and my treasury isn’t the Duke’s treasury. It’s not a count’s treasury either, especially not one as deep as Lord Blackwell’s.”

”No, it isn’t,” Isabell agreed. ”But your treasury doesn’t need to be. The aqueducts I would build aren’t the monumental stone structures you’re imagining. I don’t build monuments to vanity, Lord Dunn; I build practical solutions that meet your needs. I work in timber, in clay, in local stone, and in the labor of the people who will benefit from the water that flows through them.”

She leaned forward, and the firelight caught the silver threads of her guild’s crest embroidered on her dark tunic.

”There’s a spring-fed stream in the hills northeast of Dunn Town,” Isabell said. ”Your son showed me where it is on our maps. It sits roughly two hundred feet above the elevation of the town center, and it runs clean and cold year-round because it’s fed by snowmelt from the higher ridges. Right now, that water runs down through a series of gullies, picks up soil and animal waste, and joins the River Cledd two miles downstream of your town. It’s wasted.”

”I know the stream,” Loghlan said slowly. ”We’ve talked about channeling it before, but the terrain between the hills and the town is rough. Gullies, loose stone, two ravines that would need bridging.”

”Three ravines,” Isabell corrected automatically. ”Liam’s maps treat the northern ravines as one rather than two, but there’s a small ridge between them,” she said before realizing that she was descending into things that were too granular for the conversation.

”But yes,” she continued as she returned to the main point. ”The terrain is challenging. It’s not impossible. A covered timber channel running along the contour of the hillside, crossing the ravines on trestle supports, feeding into a stone cistern on the high ground at the eastern edge of town. From the cistern, clay pipes carry clean water downhill to public fountains in each neighborhood.”

”But if you used timber for the channel instead of stone, it would rot away within a few years,” Loghlan protested. It would be cheaper and faster in the short term, but they’d constantly be maintaining it, and if it failed or leaked, then just finding the source of the problem while the fountains ran dry would be challenging.

”Have you forgotten, Baron Dunn?” Isabell said, smiling slightly as her silvery eyes twinkled behind her spectacles. ”I’m not just an engineer. I’m the Hemlock Witch. That which I build with timber will stand the test of time. The wood can help to purify the water as well and keep it that way too.”

Isabell was right. He had forgotten that she was a witch. But then, the letter Liam brought him made it clear that Master Isabell would only use her witchcraft for him once. If he asked her to use witchcraft to solve this problem, then anything else she solved for him would have to be solved the ’old-fashioned’ way.

”What would it take?” Loghlan asked as he wrestled with indecision. ”And how long would it last before it needed to be replaced or we outgrew it?”

”Eight months of construction with a crew of forty, using the timber and clay of your barony,” Isabell said. ”I’ve done the calculations. The trestle crossings are the most complex elements, and I’ve built worse over deeper ravines in worse conditions. The cistern is straightforward as well. I built three of them for Blackwell City when I first returned to the county from the Emerald Kingdom, and two of those were still in service fifteen years later.”

”But Lord Loghlan,” Isabell added as she watched him grappling with the scale of her proposal. ”Even if I built you an aqueduct for Dunn Town, I wouldn’t say that’s worth one part in twenty of your treasury. It’s valuable, but it doesn’t solve all of your problems with water.”

”I told Liam that I would collect that fee for each problem I solved,” she said with a slight smile. ”So, tell me about the flooding.”