It was an ambush.

Joan is pretty sure of that, even though her thoughts are all muddled and sticky now, like fingers wet with honey, with ashes and dirt and drying blood.

An ambush.

They had been... on the road, before.

She remembers horses, the clop-clop-clop of their hooves, their panicked whinnies and the smell of wet fur as the skies opened up above them.

She remembers flashes like lightning, like fire on steel, like a hand full of magick.

She doesn't remember where they were going, though, or who they were, in the first place. (Her family? Strangers? Simple travel companions?) What were they to her, and what was she to them? (Who is she?)

She doesn't remember anything, other than her name and how much everything hurt (and still does), in-between those flashes of too-sharp senses, of hyper-focus on sound or smell or sight, and pain, pain, pain.

An ambush. But why?

Joan swallows, and her mouth is dry, her throat raw, and her own screams echo in her ears.

It is quiet now, and the sun is going down.

Twilight birds chitter, now that the danger has passed.

(Has it?)

Joan dares to move, to pry open her heavy eyes — and rues it immediately.

She's not alone.

Or maybe she is. She can't quite judge which of the bodies around her are still breathing and which ones aren't.

There's so much blood.

She will remember that, after, more than anything.

The smell-taste of it is so visceral, so far-fetching and all-encompassing, almost overwhelming. The red-red-red of the blood, pools and lakes and oceans of it, it seems like, is nauseatingly bright as the orange-yellow-purple of the sunset-drenched storm clouds reflect in it.

It's almost beautiful in its horror, almost poetic that it serves as a mirror of the sun's own death.

Joan's world is pain, and her mind is heavy, and she's afraid of her own thoughts.

There is so much blood, and Joan's hands are covered in it.

There is a man lying right next to her.

His eyes are dull and gray as they stare at her, and his hand reaches out in her direction, desperate and futile. His short white beard is smeared with (red-red-red) blood and dirt, his hair tangled, and a dozen arrows stick from his back.

Joan blinks at him, uncomprehending of how death stares her right in the face. Something — a pull in her chest, a hitching breath, an unnamed quantity of grief — compels her to reach out to him, too.

She startles when a ring on her thumb catches the last ray of the dying sun, a blinding flash of molten silver.

The engraved crest matches the crest stitched onto the chest of the man's surcoat; crunched up and just barely recognizable as it is with him lying half on his side, arm stretched out across.

This man may be her father.

(May have been her father.)

Wetness drops from her cheek and onto her lips, and she licks it away.

It tastes of iron and salt and dirt.

It tastes of an ambush and enemies jumping out of trees and thwaps of arrows and a blow to her head and her father dying (being killed) right in front of her eyes.

It tastes of anger and desperation and the kind of hopelessness that makes survivors out of victims.

The birds stop singing eventually.

Silence falls as the sun slips beneath the horizon and the colors fade from the sky. Darkness encroaches.

Joan crawls forward, every movement a symphony of agony in her body; her head throbs and her fingers cramp.

She (gently, oh so gently) pries her father's sword from his death-grasp (a sword that was useless against arrows, against cowards hidden in the trees), and takes it into her own hand. She presses a kiss to her fingers and closes his eyes.

Joan moves away and lies down again, head turned to the side to watch the tree line; one leg bent, the other stretched out, the balls of her feet buried in the muddy grass, her muscles tense and ready.

And then she presses her cheek against the blood-soaked ground, her fist wrapped tight around the sword, and she prays that the dead bodies will cover her scent.

The vampires are on the hunt, and she won't go down without a fight.

///

She won't go down without a fight.

But go down she does.

Her prayers are not enough, or maybe no god cares to listen.

Her trick is not enough, the vampires' senses too sharp to be fooled, too perfectly honed.

Her fight is not enough.

But of course it's not — how could it be?

Her father had not managed it, after all, and their guards hadn't managed it, either, and she is not even trained. She never even stood a chance.

It's over almost embarrassingly quickly — too quickly, really, if Joan could have stopped to think about it.

Or maybe not quickly enough. It would have been so much faster, had they fought to kill.

(They hadn't.)

And then there she is. Out of the shadows she comes, on her white horse, in her violet dress and dark silver coat, and on her head there sits a crown that isn't hers.

Cecily.

The vampire queen, the dark witch, the monster in human skin.

The lie-whisperer, the devil, the most beautiful woman alive.

People have many names for her, when they dare to talk about her.

Joan knows her as her father's opposition, the contender for the throne.

She did not feel any particular way about her, had only caught glimpses of her before and knew from her own experience that the people who called her murderer and monster were some of the nastiest people in the kingdom, terrible liars, silver-tongued and charming, but only spewing venom.

Joan had been intimidated by her beauty, maybe, by her cold confidence and the way she could cut deep with both her words and her blades.

Joan knows now that the liars hadn't lied.

Cecily is a monster and her father's murderer, and Joan hates her.

"What is the meaning of this?" Cecily asks, when her horse stops just shy of the first pool of blood.

The royal carriage of Joan's family is on fire some way down the road, and the flickering flames cast eerie shadows on Cecily's face and the battlefield she stands before. Not that it had been a fair battle, mind.

The man holding Joan on her knees is the one who answers, and the hand in her hair grips tighter; the other one, holding her father's sword against her throat, twitches, nicking her skin. The droplet of blood trickles down the side of her neck, warm against her wind-chilled skin.

Joan isn't sure if that is meant as some kind of deliberate warning for her to keep quiet, or if the vampire is just nervous to be faced with his queen. Then again, it doesn't really matter, because it's not like she's in any position to struggle either way.

There's a long gash down her thigh that slowly drenches the ground she's kneeling on with even more blood. Her bare arms are full of scratches from the vampire's claws, and from trying to defend herself against his small dagger. An arrow sticks from one of her shoulders, and her head wound has reopened, probably. There is blood dripping down into her eyes, in any case, even though she isn't quite sure if it was her own or not.

Joan is pretty sure that even if she behaves as docile as a lamb right now she might still die even before she's led to the slaughter.

In her contemplation of her wounds and impending death she completely misses her captor's explanation of the 'meaning of this'.

Damn. She'd wanted to know so desperately.

Maybe they'll show mercy for a little while longer, if she asks nicely.

"Could you repeat that, please?" The sound of her own voice makes her wince, raw and scratchy with a feeling like liquid fire down her throat. Evidence of the smoke that drifts down the road, and of the countless hours she's spent screaming.

Cecily raises a hand and effectively cuts off the vampire's responding snarl, and his grip in Joan's hair loosens a fraction.

"Why?" the vampire queen wants to know, as if it isn't obvious.

Joan debates how to word her answer, but the heavy fog in her mind makes it difficult to think — and the searing pain of her injuries makes her unwilling to be polite anyway. "Because it would be nice to know why I died today. I'm sure you understand."

"You're not going to die."

Joan barks a laugh at that. If she didn't know better she'd say the queen sounds surprised, baffled even, about why Joan could possibly think that. As if they aren't surrounded by the corpses of her family and their guards and innocent servants, as if their blood and deaths don't stain the queen's men's hands, as if Joan isn't the last thing standing (kneeling) in her way.

Anger stirs its wings in her ribcage like a trapped seagull, a wild and foreign beast. It makes her dizzy, or maybe that's just the blood loss.

Joan laughs again, and isn't ashamed to admit that it sounds more than a little crazy. "You're going to have to actively stop me from doing so, then."

It is the horse that gives away Cecily's reaction this time, the one that the queen is still sitting atop of, looking down at them from up high. It takes a startled step forward and throws its head back anxiously. She doesn't say anything, though, just gets it back under control with a few precise movements, and then fixes her (startlingly brown) eyes on the man at Joan's back.

He only shrugs. "She's not wrong."

And then Joan understands on a much deeper level why people call her "monster in human skin", for Cecily's eyes turn black as she processes this, and then her irises glow a (startlingly accurate) blood-red, her pupils mere slits. She snarls, and her fangs have grown an inch.

In a flash, she leaps from the horse's back, and stands right in front of them before Joan can even blink.

Joan feels the blood drain from her face as she suddenly stares up at the vampire queen from so close, her beauty so much more terrifying and captivating than ever before. Her skin glows like bronze when the fire flickers, her dark locks billow around her (too symmetrical) face like a crown on their own, and her eyes shine.

"We do not kill, Aran," the queen says, quietly. It's almost a whisper, backed by steel.

Joan is quietly impressed that she didn't lisp with the size of those fangs, and then less-quietly terrified when she thinks of how much practice that must have taken. And then she's furious with her own skewed priorities, with the way every thought comes sluggish and blurry, out-of-focus next to the sheer presence of the dark witch, the devil, the lie-whisperer.

The lie-whisperer.

There is a knife strapped to her thigh. Father wouldn't let her leave the house without one, ever since Cecily had publicly declared her intention to vie for the throne.

There is a knife strapped to her thigh, and there may be a chance for revenge.

Joan's mind may be muddled and sticky-slow, but there's a plan forming, and it might just work.

Aran jostles her when he gives a shallow bow to his queen, but doesn't otherwise respond to her earlier quiet statement.

(Doesn't respond to the whisper-quiet lie.)

(What game do they play?)

And Joan takes the opportunity given by the ungentle jostling, and hisses her pain out through her teeth, bends forward to press her hand to her thigh, apparently heedless of the blade still at her throat.

She counts on Aran's vampire-quick reflexes to take the sword away in time, to avoid going against his queen's direct wishes a mere moment after she'd explicitly stated them (whisper-lied) — not that those words meant much, really.

Bad idea. Oh, such a bad idea.

Well, her throat isn't slit, so that's a good thing: the first step in her plan that worked out. But now her shoulder is on fire where it has only been dully throbbing before, and although pressing against the wound on her thigh serves to stem some of the bleeding, it also hurts like all the levels of hell.

At least she doesn't have to rely on her meager acting skills now, and is bent over her thigh in very much real pain, gasping a breath and willing the tears to stop. Blurry vision is just about the last thing she needs right now. Somehow, through the white-hot agony and the blaze in her mind, she manages to reach under her ruined dress and get a shaky grip on her knife. She tugs it free from its strap, and then she waits.

"On whose authority?" Cecily is asking, when Joan is able to focus again through the forest fires of her pain.

"Sir Gregory told us to make sure no one survived, my queen."

A low growl makes the hairs on Joan's neck stand up. "And you followed through?"

Aran sounds distinctly uncomfortable now, and Joan may have sympathized, had he not killed her father. "We thought it was strange, going against your usual policy like that, but yes. We thought you had simply grown weary of the negotiations."

"Killing your enemies is never the answer," the queen says, and Joan can't help but laugh.

"It certainly worked out for you so far." The words slip out before she can stop them, and Joan immediately braces for retribution, both for her brash words and the interruption, but silence is the only thing that falls.

The fire crackles, the horses whinny, and the birds still don't sing.

"That was not my intention," the queen says, eventually. Joan watches her carefully, and sees the color of her eyes fade back to brown. In a swirl like smoke, the fiery-red goes out, the black disappears, and on the next blink the slitted pupils are round once more. "This was not supposed to be a battle to be won with a fight."

"No," Joan agrees, quietly. "This was a slaughter."

She explodes upward like a handful of gunpowder thrown into open flames, knife clenched in her fist and aimed true; they collide like two stars, and burn out.

When Joan comes to, she's lying on her back, still winded. Cecily's knee digs her stomach and her own knife is aimed at her throat. This kind of position is starting to feel familiar, as is the pain.

"Lie-whisperer," Joan accuses, and she feels faintly surprised when the word doesn't come out quite right, when it drowns in the blood that stains her lips and drips down her chin.

Oh.

The arrow in her shoulder is not just in her shoulder anymore.

The cold-sharp heat of the blade disappears from her neck, and Joan's eyes finally manage to focus.

The queen looks different again, from even closer.

There are freckles on her nose and a scar in the corner of her lip. A beauty mark to the side of her eye, some hairs stuck to her cheek.

Joan can hardly breathe.

"It was not supposed to be like this," the queen says, again. Her teeth are still sharp, and they gleam in the light.

Joan gurgles.

"I will explain," the queen says. "I will not let you die," she swears.

Joan laughs, and coughs blood.

"I will repay my debt," the queen vows. "Do you accept?"

Joan laughs, and the fire blazes, and the stars are so much closer now.

She jerks her head up, down again.

Anything to make this stop.

The stars swirl, and the queen smiles.

And then everything is bright, bright, bright.

///

And on the heels of bright, bright, bright follows the dark, dark, dark.

It is an impenetrable darkness, the kind that clings to your skin and weighs down your heart, that pulls on your limbs and douses your skin in fire and ice and nothing at all.

It's nice, for a while, to let her thoughts drown in darkness and not have to try to make sense of things.

It's nice, to just exist, floating, and not have to feel pain.

It's nice, so of course it doesn't last.

Joan is pulled from the darkness eventually. A phantom-hand that clings to her own, that pulls her up and up and up, out of the pure-black nothingness and into the shadows. Where light exists, again, somewhere closer than before.

There's the taste of dirt on her tongue.

After all the darkness and the shadows, the dirt is the first thing she notices. Grave dirt and a tang of iron, not steel but blood.

The realization makes her shiver in her skin, and there's the horrible feeling of knowing what had happened, but not knowing why or how; fearing the answers.

There are voices and whispers, a crescendo of noise.

One stands out against the lot of them, and it calls to Joan like a phantom-hand, like a shadow in the dark.

She sits up, and the noise shatters.

Everything is dark again. At the second first, everything is dark.

It's not the heavy living kind of darkness from before, this just is, but it feels worse in the cold uncaring existence of it.

Joan opens her eyes, closes them again.

The darkness persists.

Her body is heavy like lead, like water-soaked fabric and a thousand stones.

Her bones are sore, and her muscles feel cramped, her skin tight, as though it can't contain everything that she is now.

Everything is dark, even as she crawls from one end of her cell (for that's what it is, where she woke up in) to the other.

Light can't reach her here.

She isn't sure whether she's supposed to feel grateful for that or not.

She might be more inclined towards such a positive feeling if there was anything soft down here, anything other than the cold damp stone and unforgiving walls. (Anything other than the cold dead darkness.)

She'd wanted to panic, at first.

She's caught, after all, kidnapped and locked away, and no one knows to search for her, because everyone is dead.

But her emotions are dulled, her thoughts slow like molasses, the darkness overwhelming.

And then, as the minutes and hours and days pass, the dark becomes less.

Her stretched skin settles, her muscles relax, her bones don't ache quite so much anymore.

There still isn't any light, but the change has kicked in, and Joan's eyes adjust.

Her hearing becomes sharper, too, and she learns about the shift of guard outside of her door, and smells it, now, whenever they know (think) that she's sleeping and know (think) that it's safe to bring in the new goblet.

Her thoughts are racing, much quicker in forming and disregarding plans, almost like before.

But with the dissipating darkness, her emotions press much closer to the surface, and the anxiety shivers under her skin like a nest of bees. Angry, confused, desperate to get revenge on those who've set their home on fire. Powerless to do anything without sacrificing themselves — not that Joan still cares overly much for her own life, not that she wouldn't gladly lay it down for some semblance of justice.

But rushing into it headlong wouldn't do her any good.

No, now it's time to lie low and wait, and wait, and wait.

(She suspects that she has a lot of time to kill, now.)

(An eternity of it, maybe.)

The guards are becoming predictable.

The goblets, the only meal that she gets down here, filled to the brim with fresh blood, come frequently, and they serve well to help build up her strength again.

Three more (days? Or weeks?) — three more goblets, and she'll be ready.

The cell is dark, and light never reaches her, but she doesn't need light to see, not anymore. She's fast, and strong. She survived.

Two more goblets.

Joan has pulled up stones from the hard-packed dirt floor, and they lie heavy in her hands. They'll make good weapons, even crude as they are.

One more goblet.

Joan can feel it in her bones. This time tomorrow (or next week?) she'll be free. She'll leave the darkness behind, and always carry it in her heart.

No more goblets.

It's time.

///

It's time.

She's ready. This time, she thinks she might actually be ready for the fight, for the escape.

The gate clatters.

Footsteps pound down the stairs, three pairs of them.

A fourth follows after them, slower, each step deliberate.

Joan frowns.

This is not supposed to happen.

The swords of the first three guards clatter against their belts with every stair they take. They haven't drawn them then, as usual.

That is good.

Less good is that Joan can't hear any such thing from the first person.

There are a lot of stairs, Joan knows.

They feel particularly endless today.

Her palms sweat, her fingers cramped around the tight grip she has on her stones. She doesn't dare to let go of them, though, not after all her careful planning. But she thinks she might not be able to pick them up again, if she lets go now.

There are a lot of stairs, but her... visitors are about halfway down when Joan notices that the darkness is becoming less.

It's still cold and uncaring, but there's light, now, just a hint of it. The echo of a flickering flame, a memory of fire.

There are a lot of stairs, and they're about halfway down, but Joan already feels blinded.

A phantom-hand brushes down her forehead and spreads its fingers across her brows; she closes her eyes and the phantom-hand continues down over her eyelids, rests there, softly.

The self-imposed darkness is an instant relief, and it makes panic well in her chest.

She jerks back, away from the phantom-hand and all that it might imply, lands hard on her ass and catches her weight on her hands.

The hands that still hold onto the stones; the stones, which clank against the wall she's been crouched in front of, an unholy noise.

The footsteps paus, halfway up the stairs.

Joan freezes, heart in her throat, biting her tongue.

They run.

Joan stands. She wavers between lying down and pretending nothing happened, and getting ready to attack, like planned.

Only that her plan had involved a lot more subterfuge, and actually being able to surprise her guards: She'd wait for them to enter the cell, to gather up the last goblet, bend down to replace it with the new one. She'd splash the contents into the guard's face with a well-aimed kick, knock him out with a stone to the temple. She'd throw one stone at one remaining guard, and the other at the last one. She'd make use of her newfound speed to get the hell out of there. She'd recoup somewhere save and make a new plan to take care of the vampire queen.

Her plan would have gotten her killed, most likely. If not down in the dungeons, then probably the moment she'd burst through the (locked) gate without any idea where she was, surrounded by enemies.

Maybe this is for the best, then. Improvisation. Maybe she'll even earn a quick death, instead of being left to rot in the dungeons.

Joan stands, and waits.

It doesn't take long to climb down the stairs if properly motivated, it seems.

The mystery fourth person isn't in the same hurry, though. They keep taking each stair with a deliberate care, and hum under their breath, thoughtfully.

Goosebumps chase each other up Joan's arms, across her shoulders and down the knobs of her spine.

It's fear, probably. Maybe dread. Knowing that whatever is to happen now, it will change things up significantly, away from her new status quo.

The guards reach her door, throw it open.

Joan improvises, and throws one of the stones first.

She hides her surprise when it meets the desired target, gets the first guard to stumble.

She hides her fear when he barely takes a second to shake it off and snarls.

His eyes bleed red, and she responds in kind.

It's more of an even fight than before.

It's still three against one, though, so it's over quickly, before the fourth person has even reached the bottom of the stairs.

Joan is on her knees, facing the door to her cell. There's a hand in her hair and another holding a sword against her throat, but at least this time she isn't bleeding, not really.

(She isn't even sure if she can, anymore.)

The light hurts more than any wound, too bright for someone so used to the darkness, so familiar with it.

The guards are silent as the last pair of footsteps approaches, their breaths heavy.

And then there she is. Out of the light she comes, a black candle cupped in her hands, in a star-studded dress gown and not much else, with a crown on her head that had come at a bloody cost.

Cecily.

Of course.

Cecily, the vampire queen, the monster in human skin, her father's murderer.

Cecily, who had gone and turned Joan into a monster, too.

Cecily, and oh, how Joan hates her.

"Cecily," Joan snarls, teeth dripping blood.

She strains against the ropes on her wrists, against the hand in her hair. It earns her a smack against her jaw with the hilt of the sword against her throat.

"The lie-whisperer who actually told the truth," Joan says, and she laughs. "How long until you go back on your word?"

The smile fades from Cecily's face as soon as it has come. A stony mask replaces it, hiding a vulnerable guardedness that does not fit the vampire queen, the dark witch.

"I do not lie," Cecily says, firm.

Joan laughs, the sound grating even to her own ears. "But you do throw people in the dungeons for... how long has it been?"

"Seven weeks is the time required to avoid any light." It's said like an answer, but if so, then Joan doesn't know the corresponding question, because that just makes absolutely no sense.

"You're crazy."

Cecily's body language closes off immediately, at that. Her eyes gone cold, her skin ashen.

Joan fully expects to be made a head shorter right about now.

That's not what happens.

"Fine," Cecily says, her voice lacking any inflection. "Have it your way. Make me your villain."

She meets Joan's eyes, and raises her hands to her face.

She blows out the candle, and darkness envelops them once more.

///

When Joan comes to, the darkness is gone.

Entirely.

Sunlight (real, actual sunlight) stretches tentative fingers into the cell instead, reaching for Joan's ankle where it lies bared in her heap of limbs.

She snatches it out of reach entirely on instinct, and groans when the movement illustrates the rough treatment she'd received, back down in the darkness, and how she probably was tossed into this new cell quite unceremoniously, after she'd blacked out.

She snatches it out of reach entirely on instinct, and then she wonders when that has become an instinct, and why.

Okay, no, she doesn't wonder about the why so much, actually, not if Cecily is the vampire queen and actually did what she vowed to do, and saved Joan's life in the only way she knew how to.

(If this new existence can even be called a life, as such.)

Somehow, Joan still manages to convince herself that it's a good idea to test her theory, to see how far she can resist that instinct.

It's ... a bad idea.

The moment her bare skin meets the unfiltered light of the sun, it burns.

It sizzles.

Joan's scream echoes in her new cell in a way that it hadn't, before (when all sound had been absorbed by the darkness), and someone down the row of cells shouts at her to shut up.

She does, and bites her tongue instead, clenches her fingers around her ankle and crawls over to the opposite end of the cell, presses herself into a corner, as far away from the sunlight as possible.

So. Relying on her instincts is something she should do in the future, then.

If she ever gets out of this cell, that is.

She's stalling. Looking at her ankle is not something she's particularly in the mood for, right now. Not with how it still feels like there's a furnace hidden beneath her skin, like molten gold wrapped around her foot that refuses to cool down.

It's agonizing.

Then again, pain is something that she's rapidly becoming used to.

Something to keep her company in the darkness, and something familiar to hold onto, now that the world is bathed in light again and seems so changed for it.

It's more than a little overwhelming. More than a little disconcerting.

Other people — humans — have become so strange and foreign, in these last weeks, since she'd been one of them herself.

It's weird to hear them whisper amongst each other, half a cell-block down. Weird to know exactly how long it's been since they last bathed, and to find the smell less appalling than she expected it to. Weird to know that there's the warm pulse of blood beating beneath their skin, and to be so completely enticed by it.

It's weird to actually be able to count how the days pass, now, and to still not be able to do anything about it. Weird how the prisoners change, around her, and yet she stays. Weird to realize that she doesn't even know what she's here for, but unable to even begin questioning it.

It's weird to absentmindedly make a note of what everyone else is here for and how long they stay (arrested for stealing, bad-mouthing the queen, raising a fist to the royal guard, pissing in the town square, a drunk scuffle in a pub) and to keep that knowledge alive much more easily than she would have been able to, before. Weird to realize that even though she differs so much from the other prisoners now, she's treated exactly like them. Human jailers that toss in their rations of bread and water, and not a single goblet (or even fellow vampire) in sight.

It's weird (but probably not entirely unexpected) to notice how the lack of blood starts affecting her. It's interesting, really. A much more close-up experience/study of vampire physiology than she'd ever dreamed of learning about before, but interesting still.

And then, just when the hallucinations start becoming unbearable (showing her her mother, of all things, her mother who—), just when she starts debating the merits of trying to get to another prisoner to feed on, a goblet of blood appears, along with a sneering guard. He tells her to drink up, and to make herself presentable.

The queen will be by the next morning.

The next morning, there's a familiar face at the door of her cell.

It's not the queen.

It's Aran, instead.

Aran, whose hands are actually the ones drenched in her father's blood, and not just metaphorically.

"Come to gloat?" Joan doesn't know just what possesses her to openly taunt this man, this very powerful vampire, who has so much power over her at the moment, when she can barely even lift her head.

But he doesn't snarl, doesn't rip open the door to come in and punish her properly. Instead there's a smile on his face, weird and wry and even smug, somehow.

"No," he says, in a tone that doesn't say very much at all. "I've come to make an offer."

And ... Joan listens.

And accepts.

(The life of the queen, in exchange for her freedom, and her revenge.)

(Blood for blood.)

(A life for a life.)