Chapter 1012: Emerging From Darkness
"Ye think I don’t know what it feels like ta’ yearn fer tha’ gentle touch of a woman who loves ye?" Sybyll said with a soft smile. "I’ve had me heart set on a pretty lass b’fore, an’ we shared many a night b’neath tha’ sheets entwined in each other’s arms. It weren’t meant ta’ last fer me," Sybyll said sadly as her eyes shone with memories of the woman whose death at the hands of a customer had transformed her from a battered survivor into a merciless avenger.
"It weren’t meant ta’ be fer us," Sybyll repeated. "But after two hundred years, me Mistress finally found love in tha’ arms of another woman, an’ I’ve never seen her smile tha’ way she does when her beloved is by her side," she said as she focused her gaze back on the young woman.
"So, I understand if ye havn’a told Cossot how ye feel," Sybyll said. "But ye needn’t hide it anymore," she said as she reached for the lid of her daybed. "I can’a say she feels tha’ same, but she cares fer ye enough ta’ risk herself, just ta’ keep ye safe. Ye should treasure that. So long as ye do, an’ so long as ye wish ta’ stay t’gether, I’ll never pull ye apart," she said as she began to lower the lid of her daybed.
"Wait!" Roseen cried. "That’s it? That’s what you resisted the sun to say to me? It wasn’t something more important?"
Inwardly, her heart trembled with dozens of feelings that her mind couldn’t keep up with after the vampire exposed the secret she’d kept sealed away in her heart since she first realized how she felt about her closest friend.
It happened after Cossot came home from watching Lady Ashlynn’s wedding to Lord Owain. She gushed about how beautiful and magical it was, how pretty Lady Ashlynn looked in her sparkling white dress adorned with pearls from the sea, and how handsome Lord Owain looked when he swore to be her husband to the end of his days.
But more than Cossot’s wild fantasies about having a glamorous wedding of her own one day, it had been the praise her best friend heaped on Loman Lothian that truly shook Roseen’s heart. Never before had she heard such an infatuated tone in Cossot’s voice, as if she’d finally found a man who could move her heart in a way that the young men of Hanrahan Town simply couldn’t.
That’s when she realized that all the fantasies she’d had about becoming a spinster together with her best friend, who never seemed to care for love before, were doomed to be nothing but dreams. It wasn’t that Cossot had no interest in men or in love... it was just that she had her sights set on better men than the ones she could find at home.
"Roseen," Sybyll said, giving the trembling young woman one last, surprisingly tender look. "Ye have a chance ta’ find love, an’ tha’ rules have changed," she added cryptically. "Ye can find a love that can last forever. Ye just have ta be brave enough ta’ try. It may not be meant ta’ be," she added before the young woman’s heart could soar free of her chest.
"But if it is, I promise to help ye both," she said as she retreated to the confines of her daybed. "Ye just have ta’ have tha’ courage ta’ try," she said, before sealing herself away from the sun.
The -CLICK- of the daybed’s locks sliding into place seemed far too loud in the suddenly quiet space of the dungeon, and Roseen felt like she jumped out of her own skin when she heard it. It took nearly a minute of standing still, drawing deep, steadying breaths, and letting them out as slowly as she could before her heart stopped thundering in her chest.
"Cossot..." she said softly when she finally overcame the shock of what Dame Sybyll had said. "I, I can’t keep her waiting," she mumbled under her breath as she started walking toward the stairs leading out of the dungeon. With each step she took, her feet moved faster and faster, and by the time she reached the stairs, she was taking them two at a time in her haste to reach her friend’s side.
She had no idea how to tell Cossot what she felt... or even if she ever would. Dame Sybyll made it sound so easy, but if Cossot rejected her, Roseen didn’t know if she could bear it. It would be better to be her friend forever than try for something more and lose everything they had, or at least, that’s what she’d told herself for the past several months.
But right now, none of that mattered. All that mattered was that Cossot was hurting after doing what Sybyll had tricked her into doing, and now more than ever, Cossot needed to have her friend at her side.
"Roseen?" a tender, young girl’s voice said as Roseen burst into the hallway on the ground floor of the keep. "You must be Roseen, there’s no one else down there but Dame Sybyll," the young horned woman continued as she gave a brief curtsy to the harried-looking young woman who had just emerged from the dungeons.
When Roseen looked at the diminutive demon, no, Eldritch woman, she reminded herself, she was surprised that she was even smaller than Lady Heila, though she looked very similar to the young woman’s eyes. Clearly, she was younger, and her horns weren’t as large as Lady Heila’s, but if you’d said that she was Lady Heila’s little sister, she wouldn’t have suspected it was a lie.
"I’m Emmie," the young horned woman said, reaching out with a hand to pull the confused Roseen along. "I’m Lady Heila’s squire, and she told me to wait for you so I can show you where Cossot is."
"Emmie? And you’re a squire? I thought only knights had squires..." Roseen said as she stumbled along behind the impatient young woman. "You don’t have to hold my hand," she said as the diminutive young woman led her into a crowd of people who were already hard at work repairing the damage to Hanrahan keep, sweeping away the debris of destroyed statues or cutting timber to length in order to build new doors to replace the ones that Dame Sybyll had shattered in the assault.
"Hmmf," Emmie snorted as she pulled Roseen up a flight of spiral stairs, refusing to let go of her despite the other woman’s protest. "Lady Heila is a Champion of the Arena. She fought ten battles in ten days, defeating ten men at a time every day, and the men she fought were all worthy champions," she boasted. "Lady Heila is better than a knight, so why can’t she have a squire?"
"But I thought she was a lady-in-waiting for the Mother of Trees," Roseen said in confusion. How did a lady-in-waiting become a ’Champion of the Arena’? Fighting a hundred men? All by herself? But then, she remembered the moment that Lady Heila had struck Head Priest Germot with her whip, dispelling the holy aura the priest had gathered and forcing him to submit...
It seemed like being a ’lady’ meant very different things among the Eldritch people than it did among humans. And, from Dame Sybyll’s words, the rules about what women could and couldn’t do, even who they could and couldn’t love, were very different as well.
"She is, and she’s the Willow Witch too," Emmie said, interrupting Roseen’s thoughts and puffing her chest out in pride as she led Roseen up to the third floor and down the corridor to the guest quarters where visiting noblemen would usually stay.
"This is our room," she said as she pulled Roseen into a luxuriously appointed sitting room. "Lady Heila is using that one," she said, pointing at a door that led to a room that would have a stunning view of the lake beyond the walls of Hanrahan Town. "Cossot said..."
"Roseen!" Cossot interrupted as she stepped out of one of the smaller rooms that shared the central sitting room. They hadn’t been separated long, but it had been enough for Cossot to wash the blood and grime of the dungeon from her body and to change into a soft, silky-looking nightdress that made her look more like a young noblewoman preparing for bed than the simple merchant’s daughter she actually was.
"I said you could share a room with me," Cossot said, taking hold of Roseen’s hand and blushing slightly at the way her words sounded. "I, um, I didn’t want to be alone," she added quietly, though she was half convinced that Emmie heard her anyway. The Eldreitch all seemed to have keen senses.
"I understand," Roseen said, wrapping her arms around her friend, relieved to see that she seemed much less fragile than she had in the dungeon. The tightness with which her friend hugged her back made it clear that she wasn’t completely recovered from her ordeal but...
Cossot seemed to be recovering more quickly with something to focus on beyond just what had happened in the dungeon, even if the way Dame Sybyll had gotten her there still made Roseen’s stomach turn.
"I’ll stay with you," Roseen said, squeezing Cossot back just as tightly as the other woman held her. "For as long as you want me with you, I’ll never go away," she promised softly, coming as close to expressing her feelings as she dared.
"Thank you," Cossot whispered, hugging her friend fiercely before her grip finally loosened. "Let me help you wash up," she said as she led Roseen into the room that the two of them would share until they made their decisions about serving Dame Sybyll... and perhaps long after that as well.
As the sun rose outside the keep, neither of them knew what would happen in the days to come, but one thing was clear. Whatever came their way, they would face it together...