The Vampire & Her Witch

It took time, but Rhys explained almost everything to the men who had come to answer his call.

”I never expected that the tales my father told me would come to life one day,” Rhys started. ”Or that I’d find myself caught in the middle of them. I thought I would do as he had done, ruling as best I could and keeping the traditions and the promise alive for a day that would never come...”

Things had changed since the days when Phylip and Oisin Blackwell had sworn to hold these lands in trust for the Eldritch so they could return to their homes one day. Charles the First, the Church’s puppet king, had waged a ruthless war that shattered the domains of countless colonists from the old countries, and the survivors who bent their knees and backs to his crown carried bellies full of resentment.

The fledgling Kingdom of Gaal seemed doomed to fracture and fall within a generation or two, and even if the Eldritch people who fled their isles with Phylip ahead of the Church’s advancing armies wouldn’t live to see their homes again, then their children certainly would.

But things hadn’t worked out that way, and as the years rolled on and the Church launched its Second Crusade, it seemed like the time to honor the promise the Blackwells had made would never come.

”Everything changed when Ashlynn was born,” Rhys said in a voice that was rough with the emotion it struggled to contain. ”She bore the same mark as the one Phylip had drawn of Clair DuGaal’s. A mark of a witch, a Great Witch.... As soon as I saw it, I set sail for the Isle of the Drowned, and I lit the beacon to summon Her Dominion, the Mother of Tides, or her coven, but... no one came.”

The people in the hall watched with heavy hearts as Rhys described the efforts he’d gone to to find a way to protect his daughter, from his attempts to burn the mark away or hide it under a brand to his repeated, desperate attempts to light the beacon on the Isle of the Drowned, he told them everything.

”In the end, I believed we’d been abandoned,” Rhys admitted. ”That the old oaths no longer held. Perhaps the Mother of Tides had finally died. Phylip believed she would live at least five hundred years, but who knew if he was right?”

”I never meant to betray our promises,” he said, hanging his head low. ”But when Bors Lothian came to me seeking a marriage between Owain and Ashlynn and an alliance to support the Church’s Holy War... I had a glimmer of hope that we could find a way forward for my daughter.”

”I hoped that, in the frontier, she might find her way to reach out to the Eldritch, to learn from a teacher the way Claire had learned from Phylip,” Rhys said. ”Maela held a different hope, that if Ashlynn could support Owain in the war and bear him a strong heir, the Church would ignore her mark. I had my own selfish desires as well, that Ashlynn would send back one of her sons to take up my throne when the time came, to continue Phylip’s unbroken line,” he said, hanging his head in shame.

”All those hopes died on my daughter’s wedding day, when Owain Lothian tried to murder her...”

”No!”

”Why?”

”How dare he!”

”Tried? He failed?”

”Where is Lady Ashlynn? Is she safe?”

”So it’s war with the Lothians...”

The reactions exploded through the hall, and it took several moments for Rhys to quiet them down so he could explain, but eventually, he told them everything... Or, almost everything.

He explained how Owain had reacted to discovering Ashlynn’s mark and that she’d been buried in the wilderness. He told them how Bors had threatened him and demanded Jocelynn’s hand for Owain to keep their bargain intact. He explained the lie Bors had concocted and the imposter he’d found to make it seem as though Ashlynn had simply withdrawn to the Summer Villa...

But he couldn’t tell them that it had been Jocelynn who exposed Ashlynn’s secret. That, he kept for himself as a matter for his family alone. Everything else he’d learned from Esselk’ti, the Witch of the Deep Currents, he shared without reservation.

”As your lord,” Rhys concluded as his fingers began working at the buttons of his doublet. ”I’ve failed you in every way. I put myself before my crew, and I turned away from our oath to deal with the Church,” he said as he shrugged out of his doublet to reveal a torso that had never held the strength of a true warrior and had gone even softer now.

”Baron Mervyn Stormwarden,” Rhys said to the dark-skinned baron who possessed the greatest strength of everyone sitting at the High Table. ”I’ve failed both ship and crew and betrayed their trust,” he said as he retrieved a whip from a side table where it had sat beneath a cloth the entire evening.

”A captain is not a king,” he said firmly. ”I will take a lash from you and any man here who feels aggrieved by what I’ve done...”

For a moment, the entire hall held its breath. Rhys stood there, stripped to the waist like the humblest of deck hands, ready to stand before the captain’s mast and receive the punishment of his crew. But Rhys was no sailor, nor was he a young man to shrug off pain.

Nearly every man in the hall tonight had seen a sailor flogged for his transgressions. Five lashes were a punishment, and ten could cripple a man, while twenty or more put even a hearty young lad’s life in danger.

But Rhys had just offered a lash to every man in the hall... more than a hundred in all, and he’d done it mere moments after confessing to have made enemies of the Crown, the Church, and perhaps even the old countries across the sea.

He may very well have doomed them all, and now that they knew, he might not survive to leave this hall.