The Vampire & Her Witch

In her hands, Jocelynn held two small wooden jewelry boxes. There was nothing masculine about the design; they were covered with carvings of bleeding heart, glacier lily, great white trillium, and other wildflowers of the Vale. There was no latch on the boxes, but the joinery and fit of the lid was so precise that they didn’t need one to stay securely shut.

When she presented them to Sir Elgon and Captain Devlin, both men looked a bit puzzled at her choice of gift.

”You both left your wives and children in Blackwell to follow me here,” she explained. ”A father should come home with gifts for his daughters, and for his wife,” she said as she pressed the jewelry boxes into their hands. ”Whatever happens to me, tell them I said thank you, for loaning me their protector.”

For a moment, neither man said anything. Captain Devlin turned the little box over and over in his rough hands, his thumb tracing the carved lid as though he were afraid it might break before he finally opened it, his eyes going wide at the well-made pieces inside.

”Five of them at home, my lady,” Devlin said gruffly. ”Two boys and three girls. The girls will be fighting over these bracelets before I’ve got my boots off. The lads,” he added, pulling out a simple pendant made from black and green granite hung from a leather cord.

”The lads will love them too,” he said. ”And if I hear one peep from them about jewelry being a lady’s thing, I promise to drub some sense into them,” he said.

”There’s one in there for you too,” Jocelynn said with a light smile. ”Tell the boys that their father is one of the bravest men in Blackwell,” Jocelynn said. ”That he evaded the Inquisition on the frontier and stormed a castle to rescue a princess and that he wears a pendant just like theirs.”

”That’ll have ’em fighting over ’em,” he said before he choked on nothing at all, and his weathered cheeks turned a shade of red Jocelynn had never seen on him before.

”I’ll be telling them the castle storming, my lady,” Devlin added in an attempt to lighten the mood. ”But not so much about the hiding from the Inquisition. Their mother will have my hide if I tell them how I managed that.”

Sir Elgon didn’t laugh. He’d opened his box, and he was staring down at the simple silver chain inside while his stormy eyes glistened.

”Daere will say it isn’t half as fine as the pearls I dove for at the Festival of Lights,” Elgon said, his voice rough. ”And then she’ll wear it every day until the clasp wears through. And my little Siriol...” He stopped and cleared his throat. ”Siriol will want to hear everything about the princess who sent it.”

”Tell her the truth,” Jocelynn said. ”The good bits and the bad. There’s no need to make me out to be better than I was,” she said. ”And make sure that you tell her that her father never once left my side.”

”That isn’t a promise I’m finished keeping,” Elgon said. He set one heavy hand on her shoulder, the same way he had when she was small enough to ride on his shoulders through the manor halls. ”One ship, one crew, my lady. Whatever you face tomorrow night, you don’t face it without your crew at your back...”

Giving the gifts was hard enough, but the Day of Farewells was about so much more than just handing out trinkets to people she cared about before facing her Trial of Witchcraft. The tradition, like many of the ones Ollie shared with her, was one that belonged to knights. Unlike the other traditions that related to a knight’s vigil, however, this was one that belonged to knights preparing for war.

Spending an evening drinking and feasting wouldn’t have felt right for Jocelynn, so she took tea with Charlotte and Adala while they talked about anything and everything.

She gave them the combs first.

Charlotte squealed the moment she lifted the lid, and before Jocelynn could say a word, she’d come around the little table and flung both arms around Jocelynn’s neck, nearly upsetting the teapot.

”They’re beautiful,” Charlotte said, already pulling one through her light-brown curls. ”Oh, Jocelynn, you didn’t have to...”

Adala was quieter. She turned her comb over in the light, her sharp eyes inspecting every line of the carving and taking in every detail.

”Oak leaves,” Adala observed as she ran her thumb across the wooden carving along the comb’s spine. ”And tiny acorns. Like the tree that appeared in the Great Hall that night... The one you said you visited yesterday...”

”Are they?” Jocelynn asked innocently. ”I didn’t notice when I bought them. I just thought they suited you more than apple blossoms would have,” she said.

”I don’t believe you,” Adala said, and the corner of her mouth twitched before she slid the comb into the silver-threaded braids at her temple.

For a while, they just talked. About the road that had brought each of them here, and the terrible night in the Great Hall, and how strange it was that they could sit here drinking tea in an Eldritch fortress full of vampires and witches as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

”Have you had any word from your father, Charlotte?” Jocelynn asked delicately. ”Have you seen him in the fortress?”

”Honestly, I don’t even know if he’s here,” Charlotte said, turning her cup nervously in her hands. ”Madame Zedya told me that, if I’m still here when he sets out for the High Fen, after the snows melt and the pass clears, I can send him off. Until then, she said it’s better that I leave him be while she reminds him what it means to be a knight.”

The air around the trio of young ladies grew heavy, and for a moment, none of them could speak. Jocelynn wanted to offer some kind of comfort, but her heart was too full of her own struggles to find the words.

Adala opened her mouth for a moment, ready to offer what comfort she could. After all, she faced a very similar situation with her own father... But then she closed her mouth without saying a word. After all, Adala’s love of her father had been brutally murdered by the man himself, years before he shipped her off across the sea.

Charlotte, on the other hand, had never known about the monster lurking behind her father’s kind, affectionate persona, and now that the truth was out in the open, she was struggling to figure out what he still meant to her...