The coffin was the first thing Rowena Thorne ever opened on purpose, and it was empty. She was sixteen years old, standing in the churchyard at Hexham in the raw damp of 1581, in a borrowed black gown that did not fit at the shoulders, and the whole village of mourners stood around her in a silence that had gone slightly wrong. The bearers had felt no weight. The priest, or the curate who did priest's work in that poor parish, had said the office over a box that held nothing but a folded blanket and a stone. No one could say why. No one wished to say. Rowena, alone among them, looked at the ground, saw the drag of something in the frost, and understood, in the way that a person understands a sentence in a foreign language they did not know they spoke, that this was hers to follow.
She had been born in Hexham in 1565, in Northumberland, close by the great priory church with its Saxon crypt and its Percy tombs, in a town that had spent three centuries as a garrison and a market at the mercy of the Scottish border. Her people were Thornes, of the old reiving stock of the Northumbrian marches: cattle-lifters, feud-keepers, watchers of the fells, who lived by the sword and the sheep and had no more loyalty to the English crown than the crown had to them. The House of Thorne was known along the Tyne and the Rede for its hard riders and its long memory, and one of its habits was to keep an eye on the dead. Rowena's parents are not named in the record, and her line of descent is only the Thornes as a whole. What is certain is that she grew up in a household where the doors were barred early, the horses were kept saddled at night, and children learned to sleep with one ear open.
Hexham in the 1570s was a rough, poor, watchful place. The Border Laws of the Middle Marches were enforced, when they were enforced at all, by wardens who were often as bad as the men they hunted. Raiders came down from Liddesdale and Tynedale to lift cattle and burn steadings, and the Northumbrian gentry raided back in kind. Plain people paid protection to whoever was stronger that year. A girl in such a place learned quickly how to read a stranger, how to hide a loaf, and how to keep her tongue behind her teeth, and Rowena, who was clever with her hands and not much given to talk, learned it better than most.
She was set to needlework, which was one of the few trades open to a girl of her standing. In Hexham a woman with a needle could earn her bread as a seamstress, a mender or a maker of shirts and shifts, and Rowena's aunt, who had a small business, took her in as an apprentice. She learned to cut cloth without waste, to set a sleeve so that it lay flat, to stitch a seam that would not fret, and to sew a hidden pocket into a hem so that a woman could carry a knife where no searcher would find it. That last skill would have surprising uses. She grew skilled, and by twenty she was known in the district for the quality of her stitching and the neatness of her work, and had more orders than she could fill.
Meanwhile, the calling had made her something else. Within a year of the empty coffin, she had been drawn into the shadow world that her family half-knew about and half-refused to discuss. The old Thorne hunters taught her what she could not have learned on her own: how to read a grave, how to track something that left no footprints, how to wait for hours in the dark without a sound. Rowena became a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne, taking the alias The Grey Sentinel after the colour of the hill mists in which she worked, and her craft, called Mist Walking, was her own. Rowena could move through a fog or a low cloud as though she belonged in it, keeping the pattern of the ground in her mind so that she never stumbled, and appearing beside her quarry as if the mist itself had put her there. She worked as what the trade called a mercenary, taking commissions from villages and holdings that could pay in coin or kind, and moving on when the job was done. She carried a matchlock pistol, heavy and slow to prime, and a bundle of hawthorn stakes which she wrapped in a length of her own linen.
In her twenties she moved south, following the work, and eventually settled in York. The city offered more than the border ever could: guildhalls and wool markets, a great minster with a shadow that fell across half the town, and a dressmaking trade that paid handsomely for good work. She took rooms in a lane near Stonegate, set up as a dressmaker to the wives of merchants and lawyers, and did well. Her hunting she kept for the nights. In the Armada summer of 1588, with beacons lit along the coast, she was on the road between York and the sea, and her ledger entries for that season, sparse but exact, note the taking of three creatures in the fog off the Wolds and one in a ruined chapel near Bridlington.
She had one child, a son, Ross Thorne, born in 1590, whose father the record does not name and whom Rowena, if she ever spoke of him, never spoke of in front of the boy. Ross grew up with a needle in one hand and a hawthorn stake in the other, which was how his mother thought a child ought to be raised. He was called in his turn, and became a slayer of the House of Thorne, born and trained in York, and Rowena taught him what she knew: the mist, the gun, the knife in the hem. In 1617 he married Katherine Proctor, of the Proctor family of Yorkshire, and it was through this marriage that a Thorne mercenary's blood was joined to the White Ledger. Rowena, then fifty-two, made the wedding dress herself.
Her later years were quieter. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 had ended the border reiving in the north, and the Thorne hunters of her youth had scattered or settled, and she thought of Hexham less often than she once had. The old rivalry between the Faulkners and the Proctors did not much concern a Thorne, and she treated it as the private business of two families with time on their hands, though she was fond of Katherine and cautiously interested in the Proctor ledger. She kept working, sewing and hunting by turns, into her sixties.
She died in 1627, aged sixty-two, of old age, in her rooms in York, which for a woman of her line and trade was an unusual way to go. Her son Ross followed a year later, in 1628. The Slayerverse holds her among the Thornes who carried the border into the town, The Grey Sentinel, who walked in mist and could stitch a hem tight enough to hide a stake.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
