The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1569: Leverage (Part One)

Jocelynn’s testimony washed over the Great Hall like a flood, forcefully dragging people along with it and making it impossible to remain unchanged by its passing. Rumors were one thing, especially when they bubbled up from gossip among the household staff. Hearing it directly from one of Percivus’s victims was something else entirely.

At the High Table, Tosha Saliou pressed a trembling hand to the strand of glittering jewels at her throat, her fingers curling around the polished stones as though someone might tear them away at any moment. She’d heard Jocelynn’s words clearly enough, stripped of her clothing, forced to trade her rings and jewelry for scraps of meat in the dungeon, and the image that settled in Tosha’s mind wasn’t of Lady Jocelynn’s suffering but of her own jewels sitting in an Inquisitor’s palm.

"How dreadful," she said to old Baron Preden beside her, her voice pitched to carry just far enough to be heard by those nearby. "To think that a lady of her station was reduced to bartering her own jewelry for scraps of food. It’s unconscionable. The pieces Lady Jocelynn brought from Blackwell must have been worth enough to buy a whole farm and yet..."

Preden gave her a sharp look, and Tosha fell silent under the old man’s disapproving stare, though she continued to turn her jewels between her fingers anxiously as though she were afraid that someone was going to come and snatch them away from her.

Melsinde Otker’s reaction was nothing like Tosha’s.

Charlotte’s mother sat very still in her chair, staring at Lady Jocelynn across the hall, but from the look on her face and the ways her eyes kept sliding to the Otker table, it was clear that she wasn’t entirely thinking about Jocelynn.

Charlotte and Jocelynn were nearly the same age. They had spoken at length during the memorial, and afterwards they’d begun discussing cooperation between the march and the Otker family. They weren’t close yet, but the seeds of friendship were clearly beginning to sprout.

At the same time, Melsinde had watched Charlotte come home from her recent meetings with Jocelynn, carrying a burden that she hadn’t been ready to share. Her normally energetic and gregarious daughter felt like she was grappling with something much larger than herself. Milsinde hadn’t asked any questions or pressed for answers; she preferred to wait until Charlotte came to her for help rather than to assume she needed it, but still, it was in a mother’s nature to worry.

Now Melsinde understood what her daughter had seen in Lady Jocelynn. The wounds of her recent ordeal were still fresh and raw, even if the Church had tended to her body, and the things that had been done to her...

The thought of Charlotte in that dungeon, Charlotte with her gentle bubbling laugh and constant efforts to find ways to help people who were struggling, Charlotte who still read fairy tales at night when she finished her studies and slept with the stuffed bear her father had given her more than ten years ago, was enough to make Melsinde’s stomach turn to ice.

She reached beneath the table and found her husband’s hand, and when Serle glanced at her, the look in her eyes was harder than anything he’d seen from her in more than twenty years of marriage.

"Serle," she whispered. "Whatever you’re calculating right now, stop."

"What makes you think that I’m calculating anything?" Serle said quietly. "I just..."

"Twenty-three years," Melsinde said quietly as she squeezed his hand, pushing his knuckles painfully against each other for a moment. "But I swear to you, if you think there’s more profit to be had from cooperating with these monsters..."

"That isn’t it," Serle said, placing a hand on top of hers and giving her a pat that was meant to be reassuring. "I’m just... Calculating the costs of speaking up," he said, glancing toward the center of the table where Owain sat. "Let me, let me think for a moment," he said softly. "There may not be a need to take the risk."

At the center of the floor, Recared had gathered enough of his composure to mount what passed for a defense. He was the Abbot of the Inquisition in Lothian March. He held just as much power as any of the barons sitting in judgment of him, if not more, and he refused to be cast as the villain of this piece for losing control of his protege.

"Everything I did," the Abbot said, forcing his broken voice into something that approximated the practiced authority he had wielded for decades, "I did in service to the Holy Lord of Light and the protection of this march."

He coughed, and a thin line of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth, but he pressed on regardless.

"The Inquisition bears a burden that no lord or lady in this hall truly understands," Recared continued, raising his chin high enough that it felt like he was looking down on the men and women sitting at the High Table even though he was sitting on the floor.

"We stand at the edge of the darkness," Recared said proudly. "We face the demons that your soldiers cannot face alone. We burn the corruption that festers in the shadows of your villages, and we do it without thanks, without glory, and without the wealth that the rest of you take for granted."

His good eye swept the High Table with a contemptuous gleam in his eyes and a sneer on his lips.

"If, in the course of that sacred duty, some men needed to be... convinced to fulfill their obligations to the march and to the Holy Lord of Light, then so be it. I won’t apologize for providing that conviction."

"We are called by the Holy Lord of Light to bear his flames against those who would plunge his chosen people into darkness," Recared said. "The lords of men have no right to judge what we do in His name. You do not understand," he said, doing his best to sound righteous, though he only managed haughty.

"You do not need to understand our methods," Recared added. "You need only understand that, in the Holy Lord of Light’s grand design, we serve to protect you from the demons outside the walls, and the ones that infect the hearts of men, and we will burn away both to protect the Holy Lord of Light’s chosen people. To protect all of you," he said, looking out towards the people still sitting at the tables of noble families.

"If that is a crime," Recared said, "then I am guilty. But I am guilty of doing what no one else had the courage to do."