The Vampire & Her Witch

The thought of having the household staff responsible for this fiasco flogged gave Owain a measure of satisfaction, but only a small measure. The real source of his frustration wasn’t the wheel or the road or the incompetent servants. It was the growing suspicion that something larger was working against him, some invisible current that had been pulling at the edges of his carefully constructed plans ever since he’d pressed the pillow over his father’s face and set the wheels of his ascension in motion.

The barons and their insulting eulogies. The missing Hanrahans. Loman’s continued absence. The knights who had turned themselves into useless, hungover wrecks at the Stag Feast. And now the city’s own crumbling roads were conspiring to delay him at the worst possible moment, as if the stones themselves were trying to lash out at him

If he didn’t know better, he’d think his father had cursed him from the pyre. One last act of spite from a man who had spent his final months trying to deny his eldest son the throne he was born to claim.

Owain could almost picture the old man’s ghost perched atop the temple spires, cackling at every mishap and misfortune that had plagued his son’s Grand Ceremony and hurling curses at him the way he’d once pelted his son with anything that was readily in reach and heavy enough to hurt.

Or perhaps, Owain thought, it wasn’t his father at all. Perhaps the curse came from a different grave entirely.

Ashlynn.

The name surfaced in his mind like a bubble rising from dark water, and for a moment, the fury in his chest was replaced by something cooler and more contemptuous. His first wife had always been his greatest source of bad luck, from the moment he’d discovered the mark on her hip to the political catastrophe that had followed her death.

Even in death, she seemed to haunt him, her ghost lurking behind every setback and delay as though she had nothing better to do in the Heavenly Shores than torment the husband she’d been too weak to bring down in life.

She must be laughing at him right now. Watching from whatever dark and joyless corner of the afterlife the Holy Lord of Light reserved for witches and other tainted souls, cackling with delight as her husband struggled through an endless parade of petty inconveniences on the most important day of his life.

Well, let her laugh. Let her ghost pile misfortune upon misfortune until the road itself swallowed his carriage whole. Nothing she could do from beyond the grave would change what was coming tonight.

Tonight, Owain would stand before the Lothian Court and claim the throne his father had tried to deny him. Tonight, he would take Jocelynn’s hand and bind her to him in marriage, securing the alliance with Rhys Blackwell and all the wealth and manpower it represented for the wars ahead.

By tomorrow morning, the March would have a new Marquis, a new Marchioness, and a new purpose that would carry them westward to crush the demons who had plagued their borders for far too long.

And soon, within a few years at most, when his sword dripped with the blood of the Demon Lady of the Vale, the Cat Lord of Airgead Mountain, and the Horse Lord of the Southern Stepp.... Owain would hold another grand ceremony for his ascension to the throne of the new Lothian Duchy.

No cracked wheel, no scheming barons, no traitorous knights, no ambitious siblings, and no meddlesome ghosts would stop him now.

It hadn’t been easy. He’d lost good men along the way, and every attempt to replace them had been an utter failure. Soon, however, that wouldn’t matter. Even if men like Albyn proved too fragile to be used, there would soon be an endless tide of men from across the sea looking to prove themselves to a new master. He would only need to stretch out his hand to have a dozen Sir Rains kneeling at his feet.

”I’ll have to talk to Jocelynn about her ladies-in-waiting,” he mused as he considered the aristocrats who would arrive in Lothian March in the spring and summer, eager to make their mark in the frontier. Some of them were certain to bring their families, and it would be good if Jocelynn could keep her out for appropriately... pliable young attendants among the new arrivals.

It was something else to look forward to once today’s petty disruptions were far behind him.

Outside, the footman’s voice rose in a shout of triumph as the replacement wheel was finally lifted into position, and the carriage lurched as the horses were brought back into their traces.

”It’s fixed, my Lord,” the man shouted eagerly, as if he expected to be praised for his act of minimal competence. ”And I’ve set men to fill the hole before anyone else rolls by, so there won’t be any more delays.”

”Good,” Owain said, nodding in approval at the man’s initiative. There was at least one man, it seemed, who wouldn’t need to be flogged with the rest.

Owain straightened his sash, smoothed the front of his black doublet, and composed his features back into the mask of calm authority that the court expected to see.

The sun had nearly set by the time the procession began to move again, and the gold on the temple spires behind him had faded from blazing fire to a dull, amber glow, as though even the Holy Lord of Light was losing patience with the day.

Ahead, the iron-bound gates of Lothian Manor waited in the gathering dark, and beyond them, everything Owain had worked for, killed for, and bled for was finally within his reach.

Meanwhile, in a small side alley, a young squire dressed as a common laborer pulled back from the crowd and sprinted down the alley, racing toward the Gilded Horns. There wasn’t anything else to delay the procession from here on out, and now that Lord Owain was back on the move, he needed to deliver the news...