The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1506: The Bride’s Last Goodbye (Part Two)

While Anne set the final hairpin in place, Jocelynn looked down at her lap, where her hands lay folded. They were perfectly still. She marveled at that, because everything inside her was anything but still.

Beneath the layers of cerulean silk and the rigid whalebone of her bodice, strapped high against her inner thigh by a leather sheath that Albyn had fashioned to imitate a pearl diver’s rig, the knife waited.

She could feel it with every breath. The hard edge of the hilt pressed into her leg when she shifted, the faint tug of the strap when she moved too quickly. She’d practiced drawing it in the privacy of her chambers until the motion felt as natural as reaching for a hairpin. That had been another reason for the armor-like design of her dress. The ’tessets’ of cerulean fabric not only masked the shape of the knife, but they also concealed the slit she’d cut in their folds to allow her to draw the knife without removing the dress.

The blade was short and curved, a sailor’s fighting knife meant for close work in cramped quarters below deck, where a long sword was more hindrance than help. It was a weapon that demanded getting close to a person’s opponent, which was perfect because Jocelynn knew that her only chance of taking Owain’s life would require being close enough to kiss.

It wasn’t a lady’s weapon. It wasn’t any kind of weapon she’d been trained to use. But it was sharp, and it was hidden, and tonight, when Owain dismissed the guards and closed the doors of his chambers behind them, it would be close enough to reach before he could stop her.

"There," Anne said, stepping back once she’d completed her work. "You’re ready, my lady." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Jocelynn stood and turned to face the looking glass.

The woman who looked back at her was beautiful in the way that a ship is beautiful on the morning it sets out on a voyage from which everyone knows it will not return. The cerulean gown caught the lamplight and shimmered like deep water, and the pearls at her throat and ears lent her a timeless elegance that felt as old as the sea. Her golden hair was immaculate, her skin was pale but clear, and her seafoam eyes held a steadiness that had no right to exist in the face of a young woman who was walking toward her own death.

For a moment, she saw Ashlynn standing beside her in the glass. Not the Ashlynn who had married Owain and walked into the nightmare that followed, but the Ashlynn from before. The Ashlynn who had brushed Jocelynn’s hair when they were girls and told her stories about the sea captain who ventured beyond the horizon to find a love that neither time nor tide could wear away.

The ghost vanished when she blinked, and Jocelynn was alone in the glass again, wearing her dead sister’s pearls and carrying a knife she intended to use to murder the man who had killed her.

"Thank you," she said to both maids, turning from the mirror. "For everything. Not just tonight. For staying when you didn’t have to. For being here when everyone else has gone."

"Where else would we be, my lady?" Mary said, and if her eyes were brighter than usual, neither of the other women was unkind enough to mention it.

"Will you do something for me?" Jocelynn asked, looking between them. "After the ceremony. Go to the kitchens and have a meal. A real meal, not the scraps from the feast they send to the staff. Find Master Jean and tell him I sent you. He’ll take care of you."

Jocelynn didn’t know if it was possible for Anne and Mary to escape now that Captain Devlin and Sir Elgon had already left with the rest of the staff, but she hoped that Master Jean would have a way. Even if he couldn’t get them home, he might at least be able to hide them away until people stopped looking for a pair of common handmaidens.

"My lady, we couldn’t possibly..." Anne started.

"Please," Jocelynn said, and the word came out softer than she intended, so soft that it sounded almost like a prayer. "I need to know that you’ll eat well tonight. That you’ll be warm. That someone will look after you," she said, adding extra emphasis to the last sentence.

The silence that followed was heavy with the things none of them could say. Anne and Mary exchanged one of those brief, worried looks that passed between them like a current beneath still water. They didn’t know the details of what their lady intended, but they could feel its shape in the air between them, the way sailors felt the air change before a storm blew in from over the horizon.

"Of course, my lady," Mary said at last, bowing her head. "We’ll do as you ask."

Jocelynn turned to the writing desk where the last evidence of her evening’s work waited. On the desk’s surface lay a folded and sealed document, heavy parchment pressed with the same cerulean wax and Blackwell crest she’d used on the letter that should already be leagues away from Lothian City by now, tucked safely inside Sir Elgon’s coat as he fled toward Otker Canyon.

That letter had been the harder one to write. She’d poured everything into it, her final farewell to her parents, her apologies for the choices she’d made, the truth about Eleanor’s death in the dungeons, and the bloody vengeance she’d claimed from the man who was responsible for hurting one of the kindest, most gracious women she’d ever known. It was the letter of a daughter who expected to die and needed her parents to understand why.

The document sitting on the writing desk was different. This one held a truth that was more dangerous than any confession, and it wasn’t meant for her family, but for a world that would be desperate to understand what had happened on this night, and everything that had come before it to lead her here.

Beside the sealed parchment, resting on a scrap of soft cloth, lay the quill she’d used to write both.

Jocelynn picked up the quill first, turning it in her fingers. The metal tip caught the lamplight, but it was the feather that held her gaze, a lustrous blue-green plume, iridescent in the way that only a blue jay’s tail feather could be, shifting between cerulean and emerald as the light moved across its surface.

It had been a party favor from Young Lady Tise’s coming-of-age feast. Jocelynn had been fourteen years old, and Ashlynn hadn’t been able to attend, so Jocelynn had brought her own favor home and pressed it into her sister’s hands.

"You write more than I do," she’d said, as if it were nothing. "So you should have it."

According to the traditions of the old countries, a lady who kept a diary with a blue jay’s tail feather would never have sorrows to write about. Ashlynn had laughed at the superstition even as she accepted the gift, and she’d used the quill for years afterward, filling journals and writing letters with the same pen that Jocelynn had given her on a warm summer evening when neither of them knew what was coming.

Jocelynn should have burned it with the rest of Ashlynn’s things at the memorial. She should have placed it in the iron basin alongside the book of adventure stories, the cerulean silk scarf, and the box of trinkets from the last time that she and Ashlynn had been truly happy together. She should have let it go with everything else and watched the blue-green feather curl and blacken in the flames while she sang her sister home.

But she’d held it back. One last use, she’d told herself. There was one last thing she needed to write, and then the quill could rest.

She hoped Ashlynn wouldn’t mind.

"Anne, Mary," Jocelynn said, gently wrapping the quill in the soft cloth before placing it atop the sealed document and holding both out to the maids. "I need you to keep these safe for me."

Anne took the bundle with careful hands, but her eyes were on Jocelynn’s face, reading whatever was written there with the practiced instinct of a woman who had once gently chided a much younger Jocelynn for staying out past the hour when proper young ladies should be in bed.

"The quill was Ashlynn’s," Jocelynn said quietly. "It was too precious to burn with her other things, because I had to use it to..." she started to say only for her throat to close up as she tried to speak.

"Keep it safe," she said a moment later. "And the document beneath it..." She hesitated, choosing her words with care. "Don’t open it unless something happens to me. It contains the truth."

"The truth, my lady?" Mary asked.

"You’ll understand if things happen the way I expect," Jocelynn said, and the steadiness in her voice was worse than any trembling could have been. "But if there’s any danger that the Inquisition will take you, then burn it unopened. If they question you about what was inside, you’ll be able to honestly say that you don’t know."

Anne’s fingers tightened around the bundle. For a moment, she looked like she was about to say something, the way she might have once told a younger Jocelynn that whatever she was planning, it was too dangerous, and that she should come inside and let the grown-ups handle it. But the woman standing before her wasn’t the girl she remembered, and the words that might have worked on a child would do nothing to turn a woman who had already made her choice.

"We’ll keep them safe, my lady," Anne said, her voice carrying the roughness of a woman keeping something much larger behind her teeth. "Both of them."

"Thank you," Jocelynn whispered.

A knock at the door broke the silence.

"My lady," a voice called from the corridor. A man’s voice, rough and deep, with the salt of Blackwell’s harbor still clinging to every word. "It’s time."