The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1047: Betrayal’s Rewards

An hour later, Eleanor lay alone in the darkness of her cell. For the first time in several days, she was warm and the thin mattress that had been returned to her felt like the finest, most luxurious feather bed underneath her stiff, aching body.

The oil heater had been returned to the room, and she could no longer see her breath in the air of the dungeon cell. Her belly was full of warm, creamy stew that contained plenty of meat, carrots and peas. Compared to how she’d been living for the past few days, it was paradise.

Iron shackles still bound her wrists with a bar between them to prevent her from clasping her hands in prayer. Percivus had looked almost apologetic when he informed her that it wasn’t time to remove them yet.

He still had more questions and he would be returning the next day to ask more, though he’d told her that he didn’t need any names from her yet, unless she decided that there were names she wanted to share, of course.

The entire time he’d peppered her with questions, she’d struggled to provide either information she knew he could obtain elsewhere or things that wouldn’t hurt anyone for him to discover. But Percivus’s keen mind picked up on gaps in her story far too easily and he prodded anything that seemed to be a contradiction until Eleanor revealed something more, even if it was only a tiny bit of extra information.

"You said that Captain Albyn and Sir Elgon were helping Ashlynn to assess the tithes submitted by the barons, and that they were on an errand to the warehouses the day they went missing," Percivus said with a frown as he flipped through his pages of neat, meticulous notes.

"But I have the statement of two shopkeepers here that they came to purchase goods," he said, raising an eyebrow at Eleanor. "Iron pots, pans, roasting spits, and the supports to use them over camp fires," he said, reading from a list that Samlet had provided him with. "And this one said they were looking for tents for traveling. From the size and quantity, it is enough to sleep fifteen to twenty men. Why would they be doing that when they’re running errands for Jocelynn?"

It was a question that was all but impossible for Eleanor to answer without exposing their plans to escape from Lothian March and she’d been forced to think quickly to provide an answer that would stop the flame-haired Inquisitor from asking any more.

"Master Isabell recently visited Lady Jocelynn," Eleanor said carefully. "Then, she left to spend several days searching for suitable lands to establish a village near the mouth of the Vale of Mists," she said, offering up a few pieces of truth that had nothing to do with their escape plans. "Perhaps Lady Jocelynn intended to join her and Master Tiernan?"

"I, I wasn’t able to hear what Master Isabell discussed with Lady Jocelynn," she added hesitantly, as if she was reluctant to admit she couldn’t share the details of the conversation. "But I know that Lady prays for Master Isabell’s safety and her success."

"But according to the Marquis," Percivus said, leaning forward in his chair. "Jocelynn was proposing that the Guild Masters should receive lands from the Dunns. She wanted the Dunns to consolidate their larger hamlets into new villages for the Guild Masters to administer, and to cede that land to the Lothian family until the Lothians succeed in becoming a Duchy during the upcoming Holy War."

"So why would Jocelynn want to visit Master Isabell near the mouth of the Vale if she has other plans for the Masters from Blackwell," Percivus asked, refusing to let go of the seeming contradiction.

Through the fog and haze of hunger, cold, and fatigue that haunted Eleanor, her mind failed to offer up anything she could say that wouldn’t betray things she had to hold secret, and for several moments, she sat there with an increasingly troubled expression on her face.

"It may be that she wanted to visit with Master Isabell near the mouth of the Vale of Mists," Percivus said as he leaned back in his chair, adding a few spoonfuls of the hearty stew to Eleanor’s bowl. "But now the Guild Masters have gone missing, along with Sir Hugo Hanrahan and Sir Rain Aleese, at the same time as the demon attacks began."

"So was Jocelynn intending to join the Guild Masters in meeting with her demon masters?" Percivus asked. "Or was she going to play at searching for her lost friends from Blackwell City? It’s fine if you’re not ready to tell me yet," he added when he saw Eleanor continuing to hesitate. "You’ve already given me several pieces of useful information," he said with a faint smile that seemed almost genuine.

"I’ll have a great deal more to talk about the next time I speak with Jocelynn," he said as his quill pen scratched additional notes onto the parchment in front of him. "For now, I have other questions," he said, before moving on to another topic entirely, taking Eleanor off guard with his line of questioning.

He worked like this for a full hour, and as the hour went by, he found additional opportunities to ’reward’ Eleanor for the information she provided. Her bedding was returned to her, along with a soft, goose down pillow that had come from her own bed-chamber, rather than the thin, threadbare one that would have been offered to an ordinary prisoner.

Percivus never pressed too hard when he ran into topics that Eleanor clearly knew more about, yet refused to divulge additional information. He could have turned violent at those points, applying the stick and the carrot in equal measure, but he didn’t. Instead, he left those ’gaps’ in Eleanor’s information for later, or reminded her that he would ask Jocelynn to fill the gap since Eleanor seemed reluctant to.

It wasn’t until afterward, with a warm bed and a full belly, that Eleanor’s clouded mind cleared enough to fully understand what he’d been doing. She’d become compliant, and he didn’t want to do anything that would risk breaking that compliance while he held it. The instant he turned violent again, her defenses would go right back up. Pain would clear her mind in an instant, but it had taken hours for her mind to clear in the comfort she’d been given.

"He’s treating me like a skittish horse," Eleanor said, shaking her head as she realized how thoroughly he’d succeeded in breaking down her defenses. "And it’s working..." she sighed, clenching her hands into fists and slamming one of her tiny fists into her own thigh in a combination of frustration and self inflicted punishment for what she had done.

"If he comes back tomorrow," she whispered to herself. "Can I resist now?" She’d regained a good amount of strength in just a few hours of time, but that was only compared to where she’d been before, teetering on the brink of death from cold and hunger. The strength she found now wasn’t anything like a full recovery, it was just a few steps away from the brink, and she was still far too weak to resist for long if she returned to the intransigent silence she’d used when Percivus wanted a list of names from her.

"No," she admitted, reaching under her shift with one hand and retrieving the small scrap of her Confessor’s robes, clutching tightly to the reminder of who she really was... and the kind of man that Percivus was as well.

She had to be honest, at least with herself. If she allowed herself to sink into delusions and convenient self deceptions, then the Confessor in her would truly be broken and lost, and as strong as she was, Eleanor Blackwell alone couldn’t resist the ephemeral promise of survival that Percivus dangled in front of her for much longer.

Today, she might not have given Percivus anything of great value, but tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow... She could still hold out for a little while, but she’d seen proof today that her days of defiance were coming to an end.

And because she’d been weak today, eager to fill her belly and huddle in the warmth of the blanket that Samlet stole from Lady Jocelynn, she wouldn’t die before she could give up the secrets she held. Percivus had managed to pull her back from the edge of death, keeping her alive long enough to turn into the kind of traitor that Jocelynn had been when she exposed Lady Ashlynn’s birthmark and caused her sister’s death.

"But it doesn’t have to be that way," she said as she clutched the scrap of fabric tightly. Percivus might have broken her body and even her will to resist, but he’d failed to break her faith. As long as that was true, she still had one last, final option left to her. A last act of defiance before the end...