The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1049: Jocelynn’s Struggle (Part One)

Jocelynn lay quietly on the rough wood and leather frame of the cot in her dungeon cell, her body curled into a tight ball in a futile attempt to preserve warmth. The thin, coarse peasant’s dress they’d given her, made from rough-spun wool that scratched at her skin with every movement, was better than the sodden dress she’d traded for it after her first night in the dungeon cell, but it was still too little to protect her from the bitter cold that poured through the cell’s single window.

The window itself was barely taller than her hand and only slightly wider than the distance between her shoulders, set high in the wall and fitted with iron bars that reminded her escape was impossible, even for a woman as slender as she was.

The window let in the faint light of stars and a sliver of silvery moon, but it also let in the winter wind that cut through the narrow opening like a knife, turning her cell into a frigid torture chamber every night.

Iron manacles bound her wrists, connected by a short length of chain that greatly limited her movements and made even ordinary tasks awkward. Another manacle circled her left ankle, attached to a longer chain that ran to an iron ring set into the stone wall. The chain gave her enough length to reach her cot, the workbench, and the corner of the cell where they left the chamber pot, but not enough to reach the door or the window.

The manacles themselves had rubbed her wrists and ankle raw over the past week, the constant friction of iron against skin wearing away the flesh until angry red sores had formed in several places on her formerly flawless, pale skin.

The left wrist was the worst; the inside of her wrist, where the manacle rested, had developed an open wound that wept clear fluid and stung whenever she moved her hands. Her ankle fared little better; the skin there was cracked and bruised from the weight of the iron and the repetitive motion of walking the few steps her chain allowed.

Beside her cot, a workbench held yard after yard of pristine white fabric that she dared not use as a blanket to replace the one that Acolyte Samlet had taken from her. For the past several days, in part as a ’punishment’ for touching the embroidery hoop that belonged to Bors’ late wife, Percivus had forced Jocelynn to embroider altar cloths for the Inquisition.

Her skills were horribly inadequate for the task. She’d only ever learned enough embroidery to make a few simple flowers on handkerchief squares when she gathered with other young noblewomen for tea, and she did it mostly to keep her hands busy during the long, rambling conversations, not because she had any interest in acquiring the skill.

The crimson and gold suns that Percivus demanded she add to the altar cloth in neat, precise rows, combined with more complex symbols of the Holy Lord of Light and the Inquisition, were far beyond anything she’d ever attempted.

Now, her fingers bore dozens of pinprick wounds from mishaps with the tiny needles. Some of the punctures had become infected, turning into small, angry red bumps that throbbed with pain whenever she had to grip the needle.

Jocelynn had learned the hard way how painful Percivus’s hand-picked lackeys would make her life if she allowed even a single drop of blood to stain the pristine white fabric, or if any of her fumbling attempts at embroidery failed to meet the high standards of the Church for such a sacred item.

The men arrived twice a day with her meals, a pot of thin porridge, and a small loaf of bread with a single cup of water. But every time they found a mistake in one of the crimson and gold suns she’d been commanded to embroider, they removed a spoonful of porridge, a slice of bread, and a sip of water from her daily ration.

At first, she’d barely been able to manage enough food to keep herself going. Her slender, delicate fingers, now stiff from the cold and clumsy from the hunger that ravaged her belly, had made mistake after mistake.

Some days, she’d been left with only a few spoonfuls of porridge and a corner of bread, barely enough to quiet the gnawing in her belly for an hour before the hunger returned to gnaw at her like a starving dog gnawing at a bone.

But the acolytes had other methods to make her work even more difficult. Acolyte Niklas seemed to take particular pleasure in "accidentally" knocking over her spool of crimson thread, letting it unwind and tangle across the floor. She’d have to spend precious time winding it back up, her raw wrists screaming in protest as she bent to retrieve the thread from the cold stone floor, all while knowing that the time spent fixing the mess meant she’d complete fewer suns, forcing her to rush, which inevitably led to more mistakes and less food.

Acolyte Samlet had his own preferred torment. He’d wait until she was halfway through a flaming sun, her stitches finally beginning to look acceptable as she became fully focused on the task, and then he’d "inspect" her work.

He’d hold the fabric up to the window, squinting at it in the dim light, and inevitably find some flaw, whether it was a stitch slightly too long, the angle of a ray minutely off-center, or the spacing between the sun and its rays looking not quite even; he’d always find something wrong.

Then he’d make her unpick all her work, watching with barely concealed satisfaction as she used the blunt end of the needle to painstakingly remove hours of careful stitching, unraveling everything back to the beginning.

"The Holy Lord of Light deserves perfection, Jocelynn," he’d say, emulating Inquisitor Percivus in his refusal to use her title or address her with any of the respect due her station. "Surely you wouldn’t want to offer Him anything less than your very best work?"

The unpicking was almost worse than the original embroidery. Her fingertips had become raw and tender from the constant friction of thread and needle, and the fine motor control required to tease out stitches without damaging the delicate fabric was nearly impossible with hands that shook from hunger and cold.

More than once, she’d accidentally torn the fabric while unpicking, which the acolytes counted as an even worse offense than a simple mistake. The one time it had happened, it had cost her an entire meal so that she would learn that ’a good woman never wastes anything...’