The Vampire & Her Witch

In the Great Hall of the Frost Walker’s frozen fortress, Odette stood nervously on the first step of the great dias, watching as countless servants swarmed over the hall, ensuring that everything was in place for the trial that would begin once the sun slipped beneath the clouds that blanketed the pass beneath the fortress.

The passage of time had been kind to Odette, once considered a great beauty among the Frost Walkers, traces of her former splendor remained in her lithe, powerful figure and the graceful aura of soft snow that enveloped her.

While her strength had begun to fade with the advancing march of years, like her husband, she carried herself with the quiet dignity of one who had fought for the right to marry the strongest Frost Walker of her generation and now possessed the wisdom that came with the fading of that power. In the fading evening light, her pure white horn pulsed with a quiet anxiety as she fretted about the final arrangements taking place under her supervision.

As Lord Ritchel’s wife, she wanted nothing more than to rush back to his chambers and sit at his bedside while the healer’s tended to his wounds. The Thistle Witch might have withdrawn her poison, but the battle she’d fought with the Frost Walker lord had been so intense that he had consumed one of the Blood Vitality Crystals that Lady Nyrielle gifted him, just to have a chance of surviving.

Now, while he looked healthy, young, and as full of vigor as he had on the day of their wedding, his body was riddled with needle thin wounds that pierced his veins, tore at his ligaments and crippled his muscles.

Already, one of the best healers among the clan was at his side, but even the best among those who possessed a pale green horn could only manage to prevent Ritchel’s body from deteriorating further. If he wasn’t truly healed by the time the Blood Vitality Crystal wore off, no one knew if he would ever walk again, much less return to his throne.

With her husband in such dire straits, Odette wanted to remain close where she could help tend to him, even if she could do nothing more than what was already being done. But she wasn’t just Lord Ritchel’s wife, she was also the Mistress of the Castle.

As such, responsibility for arranging tonight trial fell on her slender shoulders, pressing down on her like she was trying to carry the mountain itself. The presence of four towering Tuscans and more than twenty Golden Eyed soldiers from the Black Wolf Brigade made it impossible for the Frost Walkers to ignore the fact that their fortress had been thoroughly conquered.

The banners hanging in the great hall made it even clearer that the Frost Walkers would have little say in this evening’s deliberations. The stark red glyph on a black field that represented the Harbinger of Death was one that most people in the High Pass would recognize.

When she’d first seen it years ago, Ritchel told her that Lady Nyrielle’s glyph was shaped to resemble a raven’s wing on one side and the blade of an ax on the other. Perhaps the only surprise she felt at seeing it was that there weren’t any drops of red to symbolize the blood she spilled in her days in the arena of the High Fen.

It was the other banner, however, that felt very strange to her, and Lady Nyrielle’s soldiers had hung just as many of the stange banner as they had of the familiar one.

”Is that the banner of the Mother of Trees?” Odette finally asked after staring at the banner for a number of minutes. Standing not far from her, looking like an ink-stain in the midst of the icy white and blue setting of the Great Hall, a sorcerer from the Dark Feathered Clan supervised the work of Lady Nyrielle’s people as they made their own preparations in the hall.

”I’m told that it’s made in the human style,” Master Aspakos said as he turned away from the servants to join the agitated Frost Walker. ”Each color and symbol is supposed to cary a meaning of its own but it all feels rather busy doesn’t it?”

”It does,” Odette said. ”I can understand why the Mother of Trees would represent herself with a mighty tree on her banner, but why are there flowers around the base of the tree? And the blue and green,” she added, frowning at the banner. ”If the blue is the sky and the green is the earth, then I understand, but the colors aren’t divided across the middle like that, they’re divided diagonally, and the border is silver? Why so many colors?”

”I think, perhaps, only Lady Nyrielle and a few of their inner circle truly know,” the broken beaked sorcerer said with a twitch of his feathers. ”Lady Ashlynn had several of these made in High Fen City and I’m told that Lady Nyrielle is very pleased with their design. From what I’ve learned of Lady Ashlynn, however, each choice is made carefully and I believe that she’s doing it to honor Lady Nyrielle and her place in the Vale of Mists.”

”Oh?” Odette asked, grateful for the distraction from the preparations, even if it was over something relatively trivial. ”There is neither a wing nor an ax on the banner, so how is she honoring Lady Nryielle and the Vale of Mists?”

”I can’t say for certain,” the old scholar said, refusing almost reflexively to speak in absolute terms when he lacked a proven answer. ”But Tausau of the Mongrel Horde mentioned that the flowers on her banner were favored by Lady Nyrielle’s mother. The blue and the green are also interesting if we assume that the blue represents Lady Nyrielle and the green represents Lady Ashlynn.”

”Lady Ashlynn is Lady Nyrielle’s Seneschal,” Odette said with a frown. ”Since she’s a subordinate, shouldn’t the green be completely beneath the blue? Or contained within it like the way the silver wraps around the whole thing?”

”If she was an ordinary Seneschal, perhaps,” the sorcerer said, now speaking completely as an academic who had studied countless cultures and their rituals over his many years. ”But Lady Ashlynn is the Mother of Trees. In some places, she has to be able to reach the very top, even if she must yield most of the time. I’ve heard from Captain Lennart that human heraldry is like this, densely packed with meaning that is intended to convey many messages to the nobles and powerful figures of the human world.”

”Perhaps one day,” he added, tapping the vein of gold that welded the shattered pieces of his beak together. ”We’ll find ourselves adapting to customs like this, taking on traditions from those who forge peace with us rather than waging war against us,” he said, giving the Frost Walker a pointed look.