The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 1792: The Missing Man (Part Two)

The light outside was blindingly bright, reflecting off the snow that covered the inner bailey. After so many days in the dark, it hurt to look at, and Valeri squinted his swollen eyes until they were nothing more than slits. He was free, or close enough to it. He could see the gate, just a hundred paces away, looking like a doorway to the Heavenly Shores bathed in the light reflecting off the snow.

Then, mere moments later, the soldiers flung him through it. He came down hard on his injured foot, and a broken cry escaped his battered lips. He staggered for half a dozen paces before he caught himself against a cart wheel, clinging to it to stop himself from falling all the way down.

If he fell down now, he didn’t know if he had the strength to rise again. For a moment he only breathed, gathering what strength he had left to run.

And as the breath returned to him, so did the fury.

They thought they had broken him. Telent with his show of great reluctance and feeble ’help’ in Valeri’s most desperate hour. Brighde with her honeyed words and veiled threats, and that nameless creature who’d handled him like a butcher dressing a sow... They all believed a shaved head and a ruined face and a few days in the dark had made him theirs. They expected him to duck his head like a grateful little urchin and accept whatever kindness came his way from Brighde’s powerful cousin.

They would learn otherwise. Let them play their little games for now. He’d endured as bad and worse at Lord Bors side during the War of Inches. He wasn’t a soft, unblooded lord like Telent, or a squeamish woman like Brighde. They’d underestimated him because they couldn’t understand a man who’d been forged and tempered in battle. He wasn’t just a lord; he was a knight, and a knight did not forget injustice, nor would he forgive them for what they’d done.

Valeri might not have many friends left beyond the march, especially not after this winter. But the few he still had were exactly the right sort of friends; men who traded in whispers and kept long memories. There was no house so comfortable that the right whisper couldn’t set it ablaze.

The Rundels would learn what it cost to humiliate a baron who had made an ally of the Inquisition. He would see Telent’s lands burned, and Brighde’s honeyed words curdle to vinegar in her mouth, and as for the servant... He was certain that the Inquisition would loan him a man who matched the late Percivus’s talents once he revealed to them everything he knew.

Then he saw her.

Beyond the gate, in the plaza, a crew of servants swarmed over a half-built platform of raw timber, hammering and hauling it up toward the pale sun. Overseeing them all with a slate in her hands and a stub of chalk in her fingers stood a silver-haired woman in spectacles. She was murmuring something to a carpenter, and so far, she hadn’t looked his way.

But Valeri knew her. Every lord of the march knew her now. Master Isabell. The Hemlock Witch.

And just like that, every grand and vengeful thought drained out of him like wine from a cracked cask. The Rundels, the servant, his allies outside the march, and most importantly his flames of wrath burning in his heart... It all guttered and went cold, and in its place he was left with nothing but frigid fear and the certainty of what would happen if she, of all the people he could have run into, discovered that he was here.

His bowels turned to water. If those spectacled eyes found him, no pouch of silver or baron’s signet with promises of future favor would ever save him. He turned, swallowing the whimper that clawed at his throat as his body protested the sudden movement, and forced himself to flee into the churn of the crowd where he could disappear among the masses who had already begun to gather in the great plaza outside the manor...

Meanwhile, in a warm, well-lit sitting room high in the manor, Baron Telent Rundel poured two cups of mulled wine and said nothing until the door had closed.

"It’s done," the servant told them. "He ran the moment he saw Master Isabell. He won’t stop until he reaches Keating, if he reaches it at all."

"He’ll reach it." Baroness Brighde sat by the fire, her long, golden hair done up in intricate braids to keep it out of the way as she worked at a delicate piece of embroidery. "A rat with a hole to run to always finds it. That is rather the point of him."

"And the letter you gave him?" Telent asked as he sipped his mulled wine. "Will it actually help him or is he bound for more of the same once he arrives?"

"I wouldn’t take risks with this, Telent," Brighde said, furrowing her meticulously plucked brows at the implication that she would have jeopardized her scheme in order to kick Valeri while he was down.

"The letter will attest to his identity," she explained, gesturing to the servant as if she expected something from him. "He has his signet ring for that, and he knows enough to prove himself even if he showed up in a beggar’s rags. Beyond that, I included my own observations about ’Her Dominion’s’ forces. Rumors are certain to reach my cousin’s ears soon, and when they do it will be important for him to have an unexaggerated view of Lady Ashlynn’s limited forces."

The servant crossed the room and set a small wooden box at her elbow, which she acknowledged with only the briefest of nods. When he looked inside, Telent found a row of colorful wax blobs, nested in wool, each one bearing the same crisp impression; the apple tree and lake of House Leufroy, pressed perfectly and cleanly, a dozen times over.

"So this is why you asked to borrow his ring?" Telent asked, raising an eyebrow at his wife.

"It seemed like too good of an opportunity to miss," Brighde said, not bothering to look up from her needlework. "You’d think that you’d have learned by now not to let even the smallest of opportunities slip through your fingers, much less an opportunity this large."

"And what does one do with a dozen perfect seals belonging to a baron who’s fled the march in the dead of winter?" Telent asked as he held one of the blobs of wax up to the firelight, inspecting how cleanly it had been removed from whatever surface it had originally dripped onto.

Brighde set her needlework aside at last and took the disk from his fingers, turning it over briefly and looking thoughtful.

"I have a few ideas. No firm plans, it’s still early yet," she said as she settled it back into its nest of wool and closed the lid with one finger. "But the roads are long, the times uncertain, and a fleeing man looks guilty of a great many things. It never hurts to be prepared." A small smile. "Should we ever need to discover some... evidence... about the absent Baron Valeri Leufroy...."