The Vampire & Her Witch

Once Ollie left, everyone settled into a semblance of a normal family dinner. Maela dutifully sampled each dish, starting with Snow on the Sea, and praised each one in turn.

She would have done so anyway, even if the fish had been raw in the center and the bread were blackened on the bottom, but there was no need to give false praise to the quality of the feast that Ashlynn and Jocelynn had set before her.

”I don’t understand,” Micheline said after savoring the complex combination of flavors present in Maela’s favorite dish. ”Ashlynn, I remember you saying that you’d learned a little about cooking to learn how the vegetables in your garden were prepared. But this,” she added, gesturing at not only the fish but everything else on the table.

”Cooks train for years to prepare food like this for a High Table feast,” Micheline said. ”It’s not enough to just follow the recipe. Master Roch says it’s also about learning the hearth and the pots and adjusting in the moment while things cook and countless other things. How do you cook so well after just a few months of learning?”

”That’s getting a little bit ahead,” Ashlynn said with a slight, secretive smile and a twinkle in her emerald eyes. ”And it has more to do with vampires than witchcraft. I’m cheating a little,” she admitted. ”I won’t pretend that it didn’t take hard work, but I have advantages that an ordinary cook never would.”

”I do want to hear how you came to be involved with vampires,” Maela said in as neutral of a tone as she could manage. ”And what possessed you to send a man like Mister Marcel as your messenger? It’s been a long time since anyone toyed with me like a child who didn’t need to know what the adults in the room were up to, but that man,” Maela said, her voice trailing off as she shook her fork for emphasis.

”I’m sorry, Mother. I know Marcel can be a little, um, playful,” Ashlynn said carefully. ”But he really was the only person I could send who had a hope of reaching you in time. Wolstan hadn’t made it back from the Southern Steppe yet, and the only other person who could match his speed would have started an even greater panic.”

”If that’s how it is, then I won’t fuss over him too much, but you should have words with him about keeping secrets from your mother,” Maela said before returning to the delicate, slightly nutty fish. ”But I do still want to hear how you became involved with vampires in the first place.”

”It’s not a bad place to start,” Ashlynn said between bites of the slightly wilted, warm cabbage salad. ”I can’t tell the whole story; we don’t have enough time tonight. When the sun sets, we’ll need to leave for a duel to settle matters between the Aleese family and the Southern Steppe. Or at least I’ll need to go. If you two would prefer to stay here with Jocey, that would be fine too.”

”You’re not getting away from me that easily, Miss Empress Ashlynn,” Maela said. ”I only just arrived. I understand you have official duties now,” she added, sounding slightly defeated. ”But unless you need to send me away for them, I’d prefer to stay with you.”

”You get the short version of some things then,” Ashlynn said. ”Starting with what witchcraft is and how it helped me survive Owain, and then we’ll see how much time we have.”

Ashlynn didn’t hold back any of the details of what happened on her wedding night. From Owain’s beating to clinging to life while Sir Broll and Sir Tommon took her to the edge of Lothian to bury in a shallow grave in the middle of a storm, she laid out every bit of it.

”Witchcraft is about desires made manifest,” Ashlynn explained. ”At the time, more than anything, I wanted to live. I didn’t want things to end like that. So, even though I didn’t know how to use the power of the world, it responded to my desire.”

”And when they buried me, it was the same. The roots of the trees helped to pull me out of my grave,” Ashlynn told her mother, whose fork hung frozen in the air, halfway to her mouth with another morsel of fish. ”After that, I made a decision. I didn’t know who had revealed my mark to Owain, but I didn’t think I’d be safe making my way to human villages with nothing but a bedsheet to cover me,” she said.

”I, I imagine not,” Maela said, shifting uncomfortably in her chair and glancing briefly at Jocelynn, who simply nodded to confirm that Ashlynn knew the truth now. Her discomfort only grew as she imagined the reaction of any of the villages of the frontier to a woman bearing the mark of a witch and claiming to be the wife of the marquis’s son.

Almost any village would have reacted poorly, from casting her out to murdering her themselves, but the closest village to Ashlynn would have been Maeril, where the Inquisition was stronger and more influential than anywhere else in Lothian March.

Ashlynn would have been doomed the moment she reached a place that would have offered shelter and aid to any other noblewoman in similar circumstances.

”So you sought out the vampires of the Vale,” Micheline said, nodding at the logic of it. ”I suppose it’s the only place you could have gone...”

”I was lucky,” Ashlynn added. ”I don’t know how long I wandered in the dark. Every now and then, I managed to pull a little strength from the trees by the road, but... I didn’t know how to use my powers. I’d never used them before, and I was barely aware of using them then. But then Nyrielle found me, and she offered to save me.”

”But vampires don’t have healing powers, not really,” Ashlynn said, looking directly into her mother’s eyes. ”So she offered me the only thing she could: a way to share her strength and recover on my own using her power. It’s something that only a few, very special vampires like Nyrielle are capable of.”

”That night, we formed a pact of blood that bound our lives together for eternity,” Ashlynn said. ”Without it, I might not have lived to see the dawn...”