The Vampire & Her Witch

Elgon swirled the wine in his cup as he watched Adala politely sipping at hers.

The poor girl looked even smaller and thinner in nothing but her wool dressing gown, and Elgon’s heart ached to see her like this. Last night, she’d carried the weight of her family’s honor and legacy when she stood up to denounce her father’s corrupt dealings with the Inquisition, and this morning she’d faced the hammer blows of taking her father’s place at Lady Ashlynn’s table and becoming the first person to receive a private audience with the new marchioness.

It was a lot for a woman of any age, to say nothing of one who had only recently come of age. Despite that, someone had stirred her heart enough that she’d raced back to her chambers to dress up for them on the very day that Lady Ashlynn had granted her freedom to marry as she chose.

”I think my father-in-law, Sir Selwyn, would approve of you,” Elgon said, sipping his own wine as he remembered his earliest meetings with his tyrannical father-in-law. ”At one point, I swore I’d kill him on the dueling grounds if he made one more demand of me,” he said with a hearty chuckle. ”Now, I think I just might steal a thing or two from him when some lad shows up to court my Siriol.”

”What did he do for you to want to duel with him?” Adala asked, trying to imagine how difficult things must have been for the Blackwell knight if things had escalated to the point where he was ready to challenge his prospective father-in-law to a duel.

”You have to understand, my Daere is an islander, from the Stackpole Isles,” Elgon said. ”Women there are already brides of the sea and mothers to the sands before they ever lay eyes on a man to call a husband. It’s a harder life than the one I live ashore, and you won’t hear me making light of it and what it takes to weather seas and storms on a spit of land so small you can walk it from end to end in a day.”

”I met Daere during the Festival of Lights in Blackwell City nearly fifteen years ago,” the old knight continued. ”I’d just stood my vigil the year before, and I was feeling puffed up and proud when I met this salty slip of a girl with hair like honey and a tongue as sharp as a fisherman’s knife,” he said, smiling as he remembered the night they’d met.

”It was her first time in Blackwell City, and she thought she’d been cheated at a festival game,” Elgon explained. ”I thought I’d play the peacemaker and win her the prize she wanted since the hawker refused to give her a refund... I must have spent half my pocket money just to get her a sea-glass bracelet I could have bought for a third the price,” he said with a warm laugh.

”It was worth it though,” Elgon said. ”She followed me to game after game that night while I collected prizes for her, and we stuffed ourselves on mussels and steamed crab until we were so full, we could have floated away on the tide.”

”So that’s when you knew? From the day you met?” Adala asked, looking into her wine cup and trying to remember the first time she’d met Charlotte.

It had been in the gardens of Otker Manor, she thought, and she couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old at the time. It had been summer and dreadfully hot when Adala slipped away from her father and Baron Serle to play in the stream that ran through the garden. There was a small waterfall and a little pond, and she’d slipped on the moss and fallen in.

But Charlotte, who had been too timid at the time to say more than a few words, came rushing to her rescue, not only pulling her out of the pond, but sending servants to fetch towels for her to dry off and... and kissing the bruise on her foot while solemnly swearing that if she kissed it, the pain would all go away...

”I won’t say that I knew from the beginning,” Elgon said as he topped off his cup of wine and Adala’s as well. ”I’d say I fancied her enough to chase her. We wrote letters all through the summer and the winter, but I didn’t see her again until the spring when I went to Red Rock Isle to visit her home and ask her father’s permission to court her.”

”You’ve sailed across the seas, Lady Adala,” Elgon added. ”On your way back, did you ever have a chance to visit any of the Isles of Blackwell?”

”We stopped at Stormwarden Isle on the way back home,” Adala said. ”Only for a single night. I didn’t see much of it beyond the harbor and the baron’s manor. We sailed again on the morning tide. I’ve never seen an island with red rocks though. It must be beautiful,” she said, trying to imagine what an island formed of dark reddish rock like the ones she’d seen in Iriso might look like.

”They don’t call it ’Red Rock’ Isle because the rocks are red on their own, my lady,” Elgon said, smiling as he saw her starting to let go of the tension and the frenzied energy she’d been full of since she opened the door in her dressing gown. ”Sailors can be a bit, um, poetic, when naming places they find. They call it ’Red Rock’ Isle because the shores are rocky and covered with barnacles and clams that will tear a man’s flesh to ribbons if he isn’t careful and if the waves smash you against the rocks, you’re as likely to bleed out as you are to drown.”

”Oh!” Adala said. ”That... Why would anyone want to live in a place like that?”

”Because the island is dotted with sheltered, deep coves and surrounded by smaller little islands where you can dive for some of the best pearls to be found in all of Gaal,” Elgon said proudly. ”And the island itself is large enough to hold a few dozen farms and a good beach or two for launching little boats. I told you, it’s a harder life than we live on shore, but it has its treasures too.”

”Her family must have been very wealthy then,” Adala said, mentally calculating the price of Blackwell pearls and how much more expensive they became the further inland you went. ”Was your father-in-law afraid you were coveting his wealth more than his daughter?”

”No, that might have been easier to handle if it were true,” Elgon said with a snort. ”He was afraid that I was a soft-handed, soft-hearted sluggard who had to be ferried everywhere among the isles... And he didn’t think I treasured his daughter the way he did.”

”The first day I visited, he rowed me out to this little spit of rock in the harbor so we could ’drink a cup and watch the tide come in,’” Elgon said, shaking his head. ”Then he left me there and told me to swim back to shore by dinner or spend the night on the rock because he wasn’t coming back until the morning tide.”

”He what?” Adala blurted. ”That’s too cruel! And dangerous,” she said, remembering what he’d said about the rocks cutting a man’s flesh to ribbons.

”Maybe. Probably,” Elgon conceded. ”But Daere was there, waiting for me on the shore with a bottle of wine to warm my belly and a hearty stew to go with it. We spent the night on the beach under the stars with a campfire to keep us warm, and she wouldn’t let me go back to the manor because she wanted to see her father in the morning when he came to fetch me back.”

”I told you she had a sharp tongue, didn’t I?” Elgon said. ”I think the dockworkers blushed at the words she used on her old man when he showed up in the morning. Her father gave as good as he got, but in the end, he let me spend the spring with them, and the next one after that.”

”I learned not to bring gifts,” Elgon added. ”If I spent gold or silver on something, he’d take it and throw it in the bay. Then he told me to get her a pearl necklace as a betrothal token if I was really serious... Not one I bought, but one I built, diving for every pearl. That’s when I wanted to duel him, especially when he rejected three in five pearls as being unworthy of his treasure...”

”I didn’t understand at first,” Elgon said. ”But in the end, he said that if I couldn’t look at something and decide it wasn’t good enough for Daere, he couldn’t trust that the home I built for her or the food I set on our table or anything else I did in life would show her the care and affection he had for her. I had to learn that it wasn’t just about showing up and putting in the effort; I also had to produce the results, and I had to know when it wasn’t good enough and to keep trying...”

”You ask me about how I confessed to her,” Elgon said. ”But I feel like I confessed to her every time I rowed out on one of those boats and dove beneath the waves. By the time I handed her the necklace, my hands were shaking, and my knees felt like jelly, but all I really cared about was the way she smiled at me... Not the necklace, but at me,” he said.

”I think that’s what love is really like,” Elgon concluded. ”It wasn’t about the grand gesture or the pretty necklace. It was about all the days that I showed up again and again, doing the best I could... for both of us.”

”So, who’s this special someone your heart is set on?” Elgon asked with a wide grin. ”And do you need me to row them across the River Luath to see if they’ll swim back to you?”