The Vampire & Her Witch

"You helped in the kitchen? Now this, I have to see..."

Maela wasn’t the only one surprised that Jocelynn had been working in the kitchens. Micheline had always thought of her younger cousin as someone similar to herself, informed enough about the inner workings of the kitchens to oversee a Master of Kitchens and manage a household, but incapable of producing even the simplest of dishes.

But perhaps, Micheline thought, the frontier was different. If noble ladies out here were expected to roll up their sleeves and work alongside limited, poorly trained, and barely educated staff, then it might make sense that Jocelynn had needed to learn her way around a kitchen since coming here.

"Ash did most of the work," Jocelynn said modestly. "I mostly helped with the peeling, pounding, straining, and stirring."

"You caught the prize fish for dinner after I snapped my line," Ashlynn countered, unwilling to accept all the credit her sister was giving her.

"We were up before dawn today," Ashlynn told their mother. "Out on the river in this tiny fishing boat, and Jocey pulled in one of the biggest river fish I’ve ever seen with nothing but a hand line," she said, holding out her hands to give an impression of the size of the fish.

"She worked hard today, Mother," Ashlynn added, smiling as she watched her sister’s face warm with pride.

"It sounds like you both worked hard," Maela said, giving Jocelynn’s hand a brief squeeze as she smiled at her daughters.

"Jocey," Ashlynn said. "Why don’t you show Mother and Micheline to the dining room upstairs? Ollie," she said, turning to the flame-haired knight. "I could use your help carrying everything up before you head back to the manor."

"Sure," Ollie said easily, rolling up his sleeves to reveal strong forearms that were marked by the faint scars of burns from working close to a hearth for most of his young life.

"This way," Jocelynn said, gathering her skirt in one hand and leading them out of the foyer.

Micheline had expected a restaurant. What she found when she stepped past the foyer felt more like the great hall of a hunting lodge.

The common room of the Gilded Horns ran the full depth of the building, its ceiling held up by timber pillars thicker than a man, and every one of them had been carved for its entire length. Micheline slowed without meaning to.

A hunt wound its way up the nearest pillar. Hounds, riders, a stag with its head thrown back, just like any nobleman’s hunt. And then, three feet higher, the hunters chased something else: a horde of demons, some shorter with curled horns, while others were taller, like bears walking upright and wearing armor.

The horns of the demons had been laid in gold leaf. So had the claws of the bearish ones, as if the artisan who crafted the pillars wanted everyone to know which parts of each demon would be most prized.

"Is there really no one here at all?" Maela asked as they walked through the space.

"Ash has the whole building," Jocelynn said, hesitating slightly as if she wasn’t sure what she should say. Her feet slowed, and for a moment, her gaze grew distant as she looked at the low fire burning in the common room’s hearth.

"Percivus executed the previous Master of Kitchens in Lothian Manor," Jocelynn said, swallowing heavily and clenching one hand into a fist as she confronted memories that were clearly painful. "Owain asked Master Jean to take over the kitchens after that, and this place has been closed ever since."

"So he was willing to loan it to us because he’s been elevated to a position in the manor?" Micheline said as she tried to imagine the sort of man who would design such a place.

"It doesn’t belong to Master Jean," Jocelynn said, shaking her head as she started moving again. "It belongs to his uncle, or great-uncle, Marcel," she said with a slight smile. "Ash says there are secret chambers underground and that half the staff who worked here were Marcel’s spies or smugglers."

"Now that she’s taken Lothian," Jocelynn concluded. "This place doesn’t have the same purpose anymore, but it has kitchens where no one would bother about the Evergreen Empress and her sister cooking a meal, and dining rooms that are comfortable enough for us to spend a few hours."

"Careful on the stairs," Jocelynn warned, knowing full well the effect that spending several days in a carriage could have on a person’s legs. "They’re steeper than they look."

The staircase rose along the western wall in polished walnut, and Micheline’s opinion of the place, which had been climbing steadily since the foyer, ran directly into the banisters.

They were mounted with horns.

Not carved horns. Real ones, sawn from real skulls and gilded, one at every post, the way a lesser house might mount candle sconces. There must have been a hundred of them ringing the entrance outside; she had counted past sixty before she made herself stop, and here were more here, worn smooth and bright where a thousand hands had run down them on the way to dinner.

Vulgar, she thought, pursing her lips as she looked at the ostentatious display. No house in Gaalen would do this. A great family displayed its history in stone and glass and the quiet assumption that everyone already knew it. It didn’t nail its kills to the furniture.

Then she put her foot on the first step and heard nothing at all.

Micheline stopped. She pressed down deliberately, heel and then toe, and the stair gave back silence. The carpet running up the center of the staircase was thick enough to swallow a footfall whole, and its pattern of interlocking rings in goldenrod and indigo, the dye still deep after however many years of boots, was unmistakably from the eastern duchies. No craftsman in the frontier could possibly make something so fine.

It was luxurious and expensive enough to grace the foyers of noblemen’s guest houses in Gaalen, and here she found a runner of it on every step of a staircase in a frontier restaurant that let rooms to demon hunters while serving as a cover for Marcel’s spies and smugglers...

Micheline climbed the rest of the way in silence, and not only because of the carpet...

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