CHAPTER 1065: UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS (PART ONE)

When Nyrielle took Thane and Zedya as her progeny, she bestowed the Voice of Command and the Mesmerizing Gaze on them. The gifts had many uses, among them, the ability to pry the truth from even the most unwilling of captives. Over the past several decades, both Nyrielle’s Lord General and her handmaiden had used those gifts countless times to learn secrets that Nyrielle’s enemies would never have imagined that they’d divulge.

But when it came to Marcel, the famed Black Merchant who served as Nyrielle’s Master of Spies, she bestowed the Cloak of Darkness on him. It was a powerful gift that allowed the cunning merchant to travel farther through human lands than most of her progeny dared, and it made him as elusive as smoke on the rare occasions he’d ever been seen where he shouldn’t be, but it did nothing to help him separate truth from falsehood or to open the lips of the unwilling.

To do that, he had to rely on a different set of vampiric gifts, along with lessons born of Nyrielle’s centuries of experience observing people. Under her tutelage, Marcel sharpened his senses to an extreme, learning to hear the slightest irregularity in a person’s heartbeat, to see the shifts not only in the direction of their gaze, but in the size of their pupils.

These and dozens of other physical tells became a guidebook to the human heart, and Marcel had memorized every word of it. After decades of practice, Marcel frequently only needed to ask a question in order to obtain an answer directly from the way a person’s body reacted.

Ashlynn hadn’t come nearly so far in applying those lessons to the enhanced senses she trained in Georg’s kitchen when she became Nyrielle’s Seneschal, but she’d begun to learn. She couldn’t necessarily hear a person’s heartbeat from several paces away, and as sharp as her gaze was, reading a man’s pulse in his neck when he was as scruffy and unshaven as Sir Tommin had become in the days since his defeat was far too difficult for her.

So when Ashlynn knelt before Sir Tommin, placing a hand on his unshaven cheek, she wasn’t doing it to be kind or gentle, nor was she doing it to intimidate him. She touched him because it let her feel the way his heart raced when she asked him what he would have done that fateful night if he’d known she was alive.

Like this, she could feel the muscles in his neck working as he swallowed several times, trying to organize his thoughts. By touching him, she brought herself to hear the catch in his breathing as he confronted the gap between the answer he wanted to give and the truth, and she could see the way his blinded eyes moved behind their lids, betraying the direction of their owners thoughts even after they ceased to help him navigate the world.

Everyone gathered in the courtyard watched as Sir Tommin grappled with Ashlynn’s question, but two of the men in the courtyard found themself grappling with it themselves as her simple sounding question cut to the heart of their faith.

Loman’s answer sprang to mind almost instantly, but, looking at his sister-in-law, returned from the dead and living in exile among the demons, he struggled to accept it. Exemplar Domas Onaitis had emphasized on more than one occasion that witches who were born with the mark of the witch needed to be captured alive if possible, and they must be brought to the Holy City to stand trial for their crimes.

Away from the Holy City, a witch like Lady Ashlynn should only be burned at the stake if there was no way to safely capture them. In truth, however, burning at the stake was reserved for those the Church considered ’hedge witches’, people without marks who learned the dark arts from demons and became a danger to their entire community.

So, when it came to Ashlynn, Loman’s first thought was to do as his teacher had always instructed. If she had been born with a mark, she had to be brought to the Holy City to stand trial before the Saint and the Exemplars. What would happen after that point was none of his business, though Exemplar Domas had hinted that he would learn such things if he continued on his path to becoming an Exemplar himself one day.

But then, on the heels of that thought, came another thought that was deeply uncomfortable. Loman’s one-eyed gaze moved from Ashlynn and Sir Tommin’s kneeling figures to the stump of his left arm. Just days ago, that arm had raised the Bow of Stars, raining down the power of the Holy Lord of Light on demons and defenders alike while consuming the lives of faithful acolytes to unleash its devastating power.

Loman had never questioned the rituals that Exemplar Domas had taught him, just like he’d never questioned the Church’s decree that a witch must be brought to the Holy City to stand trial for her crimes. The result of that unquestioning faith, however, had led to the death of several acolytes, and were it not for the horned witch Heila’s miracle of healing during the battle, would likely have led to the deaths at least three times as many of Hanrahan’s defenders as it did.

During his trial before Dame Sybyll’s court, Loman had been forced to listen as Lord Jalal and Lady Heila described his miracle as ’sorcery’, claiming that he’d been taught poorly and that he wasn’t in control of the forces he used to fight back against the demons. They blamed his teacher for his ignorance and on that basis, argued that his life should be spared.

At the time, Loman protested the idea that his teacher would have hidden things from him that he should have known, or that his ritual had been designed in a way that it invited tragedies and demanded the deaths of the faithful.

Now, however, as he stood beside his sister-in-law, he found himself confronting a question he’d never asked before. What crimes had she committed before his brother tried to murder her? If, as she’d said, she’d never touched the power of witchcraft before her wedding night, then was she really a witch? And if he’d done as his faith demanded, bringing her to stand trial in the Holy City before the Saint and the assembled Exemplars, what would they have done with a woman like Ashlynn?

He didn’t know, but for the first time in his life, he found that he couldn’t plaster over his doubts with faith. As strong as his faith was, it had begun to crack, and those cracks were only growing wider now that he’d arrived in the Vale of Mists to find his sister-in-law waiting to welcome him with a gentle embrace.

His sister-in-law was a witch, and he was a priest, yet she’d still greeted him with warmth and love... In the face of that, could he still say that he was bound by his faith to take her prisoner and force her to stand trial? He knew what he would have done on the night of his brother’s wedding. That night, he wouldn’t have questioned the requirements of his faith. But today... Today he wasn’t so sure.