The Vampire & Her Witch

”Your men speak highly of Inquisitor Percivus,” Diarmuid told the battered Abbot lying slumped against a chair. ”They tell me that he was your protégé. That you took him in during the War of Inches and trained him personally. It seems like everything he became, everything he did, was the fruit of the lessons he learned at your hand.”

Recared’s good eye flickered toward the Inquisitors who had spoken, and for a moment, his eye burned with the righteous fury that his gaze had held years ago, when he rallied men to fight against the demons of Airgead Mountain, shaming cowards into returning to the front lines as the Holy Lord of Light’s chosen warriors...

During the War of Inches, he’d seen broken, defeated men on several occasions. Men who would betray anything and anyone if it meant they could escape the torment of the situation they found themselves in. Now, he saw the same look in his own Inquisitor’s eyes... and the person they’d chosen to betray was him.

His hand twitched at his waist as his fingers moved instinctively toward the lash he always carried. But the lash wasn’t there, the heretic masquerading as a Templar had taken it from him... and his arm wouldn’t have had the strength to use it, even if he hadn’t.

”Percivus was a talented young man,” Recared said carefully. ”He was an orphan; he came from nothing. He had no patrons, no family to curry favor with, no wealth... He had nothing but faith and devotion to our mission.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but it might as well have been. The only family Percivus had that Recared was aware of was an older brother who had cared for him after their parents died. When Percivus fled from their home in the stables of a lord’s manor in order to relieve his brother of the burden of caring for him, it had formed a rift between the two that had only grown wider over time.

In the end, it was his brother’s failure to accept Percivus’s calling that had pushed Percivus fully into the arms of the Inquisition, freeing him of worldly constraints. When the time came, Recared had even bestowed a new name on his young protégé, one that obscured his origins as the humble orphan from the stables called ’Percy,’ and allowed him to more easily move among the noblemen Recared had shaped him to hunt.

”I saw his potential, and I nurtured it,” Recared said, as though he’d only provided the occasional scrap of wisdom or advice. ”Anyone in the order would have done the same. But at times, Percivus could be... Excessive.”

”Those excesses were his own,” the abbot said in an attempt to put some distance between himself and his protégé. ”I taught him the fundamentals of what any Inquisitor should know. What he did with those tools after he left my supervision is not my...”

”The methods your men just described,” Diarmuid interrupted sharply as he listened to the truth twisting in the abbot’s mouth as though he had a serpent for a tongue. ”Stripping away a person’s identity. Working on their fundamental needs for food, warmth, and comfort. Breaking them down to what your man called their ’purest form.’ Are you saying that Percivus invented these techniques on his own?”

”I taught him the principles,” Recared insisted. ”The applications and methods he used...”

”Were they the same principles you applied when Percivus was sent to investigate Lady Jocelynn Blackwell?” Diarmuid asked. ”When he stripped her of her clothing. When he made her embroider with bleeding fingers, only to unpick her work and make her start again.”

”Were they your teachings he was following when he fed her the tongues of the men he had executed?” Diarmuid said, leaning over the battered abbot until he was close enough for the older man to feel the heat of Diarmuid’s breath on his swollen cheek.

Diarmuid hadn’t wanted to believe what he’d heard when Marcel returned from wherever he had gone the night they arrived in Lothian City. Rumors were one thing, and Diarmuid had long ago learned to be mistrustful of rumors. But it seemed like Marcel’s nephew, Jean, had been running his own investigation in Lothian Manor since he took over for the former Master of Kitchens, and the things he’d learned from the household staff had been more than merely disturbing.

They were the things of nightmares, and when Diarmuid confronted Recared about them, the Great Hall made a sound like the sea pulling back from the shore before a wave.

Many in the hall had heard rumors about what had been done to Lady Jocelynn during the Inquisition’s investigation. Owain himself had addressed Percivus’s crimes during his eulogy at the Great Temple, though he had been careful to avoid the worst details. But hearing the specifics laid out in Diarmuid’s sharp, clipped tone, in front of the woman who had endured them, was something else entirely.

All along the High Table, heads turned to look in Jocelynn’s direction. Some faces wore pained expressions of pity or even a bit of guilt that she had to relive such a horror now. Others had slack jaws and eyes that were wide in disbelief.

”It’s true,” Jocelynn said, standing up from her seat. Her eyes were fixed on the abbot, but her voice was loud and clear, audible to everyone in the hall. Next to her, Isabell reached up to hold her hand, offering a quiet, supporting strength that felt like a mighty tree Jocelynn could lean against, but the strength in her voice was all her own.

”Percivus didn’t just feed me the tongues of men he killed,” Jocelynn said. ”He made me pay for them. I, I didn’t know what they were, but after spending a night in the dungeons, cold and wet, he offered me morsels of ’meat’ if I would give up my rings and jewelry.”

”He treated me like a horse to be broken,” she said, turning her gaze to meet her sister’s smoldering emerald eyes. ”But he was even worse to cousin Eleanor. Eleanor wasn’t just a Confessor, she was the kindest, most gentle, most forgiving woman I ever knew, and he stripped her robes from her and burned them...”

”When, when I found her body,” Jocelynn said. ”She was still clutching the last remnant of her robes. He took everything from her, and he tried to take everything from me... He would have taken everything from me if not for Captain Albyn,” she said, nodding to the man sitting among Owain’s knights like a seal among the sharks.

”That wasn’t me,” Recared protested in a tone that, for the first time, seemed to contain genuine distress. ”Percivus went too far. I didn’t permit him to question a Confessor like that and...”

”You sent him,” Diarmuid said. ”You assigned him to Lothian Manor, knowing full well what his methods entailed. Are you telling this court that you expected a man you personally trained in the art of breaking people down to their ’purest form’ to suddenly exercise restraint when you pointed him at a noblewoman and a Confessor? And is your only regret in this that we lost one of our own sisters to his ’excesses’?”

”Because if that’s all you have any sorrow for,” Diarmuid fumed. ”Then even the Holy Lord of Light Himself won’t be able to save you from your fate.”