Chapter 609: Jocelynn’s Confession (Part One)
"You, you told Lord Owain that your sister is a witch?" Isabell said, staring at Jocelynn in open mouthed shock.
Marcel had told her when they first met that someone had told Owain about a mark on Ashlynn’s body that resembled the mark of a witch. He’d said that the mark was the reason why Lord Owain beat Ashlynn to death and ordered his nights to bury her body at the edge of the Vale of Mists. But Marcel never told her who had given the information to Lord Owain... perhaps the famed Black Merchant hadn’t even ferreted out this secret.
"I, I didn’t, I didn’t think," Jocelynn sobbed. "I didn’t think that they should be, should be together," she said as she drew a shuddering breath between great, body shaking sobs. Tears spilled from her eyes and her hands clenched at her skirts with enough force to tear loose a spill of delicate white lace from the cerulean blue silk.
"I swear, I didn’t know, didn’t know what he would do," she choked out. "I didn’t realize how much, how much he hated demons or, or how v-violent he could be," she added, unconsciously spilling out every reason why the tragedy that followed might not be, or at least wasn’t entirely her fault.
"What did he do?" Isabell said in a voice that was much softer and gentler than she wanted to be at the moment. She’d taught herself for years to be an open ear for her children, to listen to their entire story before she handed down any judgments or punishments and to give them a safe embrace that would welcome the truth so they never had a reason to lie to her.
Now, as she looked at the sobbing noblewoman, Isabell struggled to reconcile her habits and instincts as a mother with children very near to Jocelynn in age with her loyalty to the woman who Jocelynn had betrayed. While there was a good amount of mercantile self interest in her decision to pursue knighthood in Lothian March and to travel all this way, her loyalty to the Blackwells who had done so much for her and to her friend Lady Ashlynn had accounted for at least half of her motivation in coming so far.
The part of her who had spent months worrying anxiously about Lady Jocelynn’s safety and fretting about Lady Ashlynn’s fate wanted nothing more than to slap the sobbing young girl in her arms, or to shake her violently and berate her for what she’d done, but instead, she clamped down on those feelings and did her best to treat Jocelynn like the young woman she was... one who had made a horrible, perhaps unforgivable mistake and who was clearly still coming to terms with it.
"He, he killed her," Jocelynn said, staring at the floor with blurry vision as she couldn’t bear to look at Master Isabell. The weight of what she’d done crushed down on her more than it ever had before and the knowledge that Ashlynn had tried to arrange a protector for her, someone to protect her from Owain, dragged her down like an anchor chain around her neck.
"He said he did it with a single stroke of his sword," she said as the sobs subsided to be replaced by a growing feeling of having been hollowed out. "But I, I don’t think that’s true," she said quietly. She wanted to believe. Months ago, when he told her in the Summer Villa that he’d ended things quickly, she’d believed every word, but she’d seen more of the Owain beneath the dazzling smile since then and he was never merciful to people who he felt had wronged him.