“Wait, what?” Anetta said, taken aback. “What are we going to employ her as?”

“What do you think?” I silently answered. “She knows more than either of us about the practical side of magic. And besides, she is sure to know a lot about what is happening in the area. She seems to have been very liberal in her use of charm. I need information. For a sleepy forest village with only dirt paths snaking around the trees leading to it, there seems to be an awful lot happening in and around it. I’ll have her teach me what she can and find out what the hell is happening here, so I can make informed decisions on how to proceed. Delegation is the mother of productivity. I can’t be skulking around the inn and piecing everything together from bits of overheard conversations.”

“You want to be my employer?” Vianna’s voice sounded almost derisive. “What are you going to pay me with? Dancing lessons?” she nodded at the mess we’ve made in our brief fight.

“That could be a part of the deal,” I nodded, my tone flippant. “You could use them.”

Vianna flinched, as if slapped. Ok, I touched something deep there. Noted.

Before she could respond, I continued. “But for the most part, I intended to lend you my aid with Yalla’s case. Would that buy me some of your aid?”

Vianna’s fury melted away in an instant. Her face growing pale.

“How do you…”

“It was obvious.” I lied shamelessly.

I only suspected the connection between the two. Yalla, the unfortunate musician, who was about to start being made to provide night-time entertainment for the patrons, seemed to be somehow tied to this place. If I had to guess, Vianna was here for her. Though that’s all it was for now, an educated guess. After all, the first thing Vianna did to me was try to blind me with indignant fury about Yalla’s mistreatment.

As for the Vianna’s role in this whole mess? I wasn’t sure just yet.

My best guess was that she came to rescue Yalla but failed, digging herself deeper with each misstep. Instead of reassessing her approach, she piled on half-assed lies and relied excessively on charm magic to patch the cracks. It was a house of cards ready to collapse. Needing to invent a ‘cousin’ as her ‘purity guardian’ and that odd remark from the innkeeper about calling him ‘father’ were telling signs. Incredibly, she even managed to lie her way into an engagement. How does one stumble so badly that they end up engaged?

“But if I’m going to help you with Yalla, you need to tell me your story.” I said, my tone earnest.

Vianna gritted her teeth, making another half-hearted attempt at testing her bindings. But then seemed to have reached some sort of decision.

She fixed me with her uninjured eye. “I’ll…I’ll tell you, but only because I’m out of ideas that wouldn’t implicate the entire coven.” She sighed.

Vianna’s voice softened as she began her tale, memories recalled plainly visible on her face. “I met Yalla for the first time when I was eight. I have been an apprentice to the ‘Ashmoon Coven’ for two years by then. I was considered a golden child, a true prodigy among young witches of Sylvaranth woods. However, Yalla was in the league of her own. She was smarter, more skilled, more diligent and, worst of all, helpful and humble about it. I resented her for all of it.”

She frowned, likely reliving a particularly raw memory.

“As ugly as my sentiment towards her was, nothing special grew out of it. We clashed, we made up, we studied and grew together. Even developed something close to a healthy rivalry. As we developed as women, I grew more beautiful than her, more graceful, which somewhat placated my frustrations with her superiority in matters of magic. As vain and stupid as that sounds.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“What a bitch,” Anetta observed.

“Let her continue,” I said. “She does sound petty, but it’s nothing either of us haven’t seen before.”

“Then, Yalla’s mother died. Weeping fever. Just took her away, overnight. Yalla petitioned the ‘sisters’ to let her leave the ‘circle’ for a full moon’s cycle to grieve her mother properly. The leave was granted. But after more than a moon’s cycle, Yalla hasn’t returned to the fold. The ‘Ritual of seeking’ showed her to still be in her village. ‘Velithorn’,” she nodded her head in the direction of the window. “It’s not far from here.”

Vianna’s face contorted in a hateful grimace, her one good eye narrowing into a slit, her lips curled into a sneer. The tension in her jaw and the flushed cheeks barely containing her fury.

“Grieving her mother drove her into the arms of the ‘Radiant Church,’ guided by a childhood friend who’s now an acolyte of that wretched institution. To make matters worse, she’s become one of their ‘penitents.’ It made me want to scream. All the love and training she received from the sisterhood—all that potential—discarded over an impulsive decision made in grief. That little piss-stain of a priest deliberately targeted her at her weakest moment.”

Vianna’s story faltered as tears of rage streaked down her flushed cheeks, glistening like molten silver in the dim light. I grabbed a rough cloth napkin from the nightstand, the fabric scratchy against my fingers, and gently dabbed at the wet trails on her face. Her sobs were muffled, her shoulders shaking with the force of her emotions.

‘Anetta.’ I thought.

“Yes, Ryder.”

“Did you manage to dig anything up about Radiant Church from the ‘library’?”

“Some, yes.”

“Give me everything you have about them, and the witches, too. I am lacking context here.”

“You got it.”

The influx of knowledge, while less jarring than the previous experience in the woods, still made my head throb with the intensity of its breadth. I winced involuntarily at the prickling at my consciousness, and covered the reaction with a controlled, discreet cough.

As the knowledge settled, a flurry of realisations hit me one after another.

Yalla really did make a terrible call, if it was indeed hers. Radiant Church had a rather complex doctrine, but most of it was irrelevant to the current situation. Though when it comes to witches in particular—they hated them. What I found particularly distasteful is that the entire beef originates from a set of written anecdotes about one of the earliest church leaders being killed by a vindictive coven of witches. Which was most likely untrue.

They can’t prosecute witches openly, due to some of the old witch covens being immensely powerful, rivalling most anything the church has in store. But under the guise of enforcing local law, they’ll happily use any pretext to capture, or kill a witch, or an entire small coven wherever they find them. The only way for a witch to become ‘good’ in their eyes is to become one of the ‘penitents’.

Which is a miserable existence. Beyond typical things, like regular prayers and religious observations, the ‘penitent’ witch has to be bound to a ‘Moral Custodian’. Which can be any man in good standing with the church. The binding isn’t just pomp and ceremony, either. It has a real, magical component to it. It suppresses the witch’s magic and lets the keeper of her binding have a limited control over the witch. Though the details about that were unclear.

My thoughts drifted back to Jarkon.

Disgusting creep has been using his church bullshit to try and prostitute the young woman. It gave a new dimension of awful to his earlier proposition. This was what I always despised about organised religion. Even with the best intentions and doctrine one can imagine, people will find a way to use it as a tool for stepping over others while feeling smugly superior and self-righteous about it. How hateful.

“Let me guess,” I said, disgusted by my realisation. “The childhood friend and acolyte, you mentioned, is Jarkon’s son.”

"Laron." Vianna nodded, her eyes red and puffy.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Anetta sounded equal parts furious and scandalised. “The son of the greasy creep downstairs has used the girl’s grief and probably guilt for not being there for her dying mom to sweet-talk her out of her coven and into what is effectively magical slavery. Then he proceeded to have his church bind her to his disgusting slob of a father, who then wanted to make her a trade-good in his dump of an inn.”

“Seems so.” I said.

“I want that sack of shit, and his spawn slowly roasted to death!” Anetta screamed in fury.

Anetta’s anger kept infecting my own emotions, making me grind my teeth. “Come down, Anetta. I can’t think when you are flooding me with anger.”

For a few moments, Anetta went deathly quiet before speaking again. “Cold anger, not a hot one, right, Ryder? Promise me that you will—”

“I promise.” I said, a sinister grin stealing its way to my face. Helping those in need is fulfilling, seeing the guilty punished, cathartic. And I have always so enjoyed catharsis.

“The detachment of ‘Radiant Vanguard’ that is on its way.” I told Vianna. “Jarkon’s son is among them, right? It’s what made you throw caution to the wind and start pulling reckless moves? You are running out of time. You wanted Yalla out of here before they arrived?”

“I couldn’t think of a good way of pulling Yalla out of here without causing a mess that would get people killed.” She admitted, her voice self-deprecating. “You were right earlier. I made so many mistakes…”

A soft knock on the doors echoed through the room. That was likely Yalla, bringing in the food we were promised.

I turned to Vianna. “Lucky for you, I have a couple of ideas. Now, how about it, employee, will you do your part?”

Vianna’s lips curved into the first genuine smile I’d seen from her since our initial meeting. Even with the bruises and floor-dirt marring her once-pristine appearance, the smile lit up her face with a warmth that momentarily softened her features, revealing a glimmer of hope and gratitude.”

“Yes, Boss.” She said, meaning it.