The Vampire & Her Witch

Hours later, as the sun began to slip beneath the western mountains, a carriage bearing Ashlynn and her coven clattered along a recently built dirt road toward the newest village in the Vale of Mists.

”I know it’s a bit rough,” Ollie said as the carriage jostled its occupants while bouncing along the road. ”Most of the roads connecting villages are designed more for carts than carriages, but with so much material to transport to the village, we needed to be at least able to have wagons coming along the road.”

”Then will you let the forest grow back now that you’re done building the village?” Heila asked, gazing out the carriage window at the clear-cut path that had been blazed through the cedar forest to make way for the dirt road. ”It’s a lot of work to maintain a road like this.”

”I think we’ll pave it,” Ollie said, surprising both Heila and Virve with his simple declaration. There were plenty of old ruins of paved roads scattered across the Vale. Still, most of them dated to the days before the Vale of Mists fell to the Lothians, and they’d long ago become overgrown relics of an era that had ended.

”This village is different from the others in the Vale,” Ollie explained. ”You’ll see when we get there, but the people aren’t as separated from each other as the other villages in the Vale of Mists.”

”You sound very proud of it,” Ashlynn said, smiling as she looked at the young man Ollie had grown into while she and Heila were away in the Briar. During the months she and Heila had spent training, she’d occasionally regretted leaving Ollie in the Vale of Mists. If she’d understood about covens before she left, she might have brought him along with her, and then he could have benefited from Amahle’s instruction as well.

But, seeing him now, Ashlynn was glad she had left him here. She never would have expected Sir Thane to suggest that Ollie take responsibility for building a village, but the things he’d learned and the ways he’d grown as he rose to meet that challenge were things that accompanying her to the Briar could never have given him.

”I am proud,” Ollie said in a tone that was neither boastful or humble. ”Look, you can see the dam up ahead,” he said, pointing to a large wooden dam that defined the southern slope of the hillside where an old creek had been blocked to create a large pond for the village. ”The village is still set back a ways from the pond,” the flame-haired youth explained. ”Old Nan says that the pond will keep growing through the winter rains and the spring thaws. We won’t have its full size until next summer, but we’re already starting to stock the pond with trout,” he grinned.

”You’re trying to lure her to visit your village with fresh fish, aren’t you?” Heila teased. ”You know that won’t work. The river Luath flows right by the castle. We won’t ever run out of fish.”

”But I’ll still visit,” Ashlynn said, looking from Ollie to the village that was slowly coming into view through the carriage windows. ”As long as we’re welcome, that is,” she said, giving Ollie a concerned look.

The village was indeed different from any other village in the Vale of Mists and that started with the outer palisade wall. Most villages in the Vale of Mistsl, like Orava, made do with a simple wooden wall that served mostly to keep livestock from wandering away and to keep wild animals from wandering into the village. The Vale’s real defenses, its layers of curtain walls, were at the mouth of the Vale along the river Luath to guard against a Lothian siege.

Ollie’s village, however, was surrounded by a wide moat, and its wooden palisade wall stood atop a steeply sloped earth berm. Flat-topped wooden platforms were spaced evenly around the wall, offering firing platforms for archers or places for lookouts to watch in all directions. The only gap in the wall seemed to be at the edge of the village that butted up against the growing pond, and even there, preparations seemed to be under way to strengthen the village’s defenses.

”Everyone here lost their homes, one way or another,” Ollie explained. ”I wanted to help the people who settled here feel secure about their new homes, so I asked Sir Thane how villages on the frontier were designed when they were worried about fending off attacks from Eldritch nations. This borrows a bit from those designs and a bit from Eldritch traditions as well,” he explained.

”So you aren’t trying to stand apart from the Vale,” Virve said, frowning at the heavy fortifications. ”But you are preparing for the outer walls to be breached in the war to come.”

”I hope this wall is never needed,” Ollie said firmly. ”But, if I promise they’ll be safe and I don’t do anything to make them safe,” he said, stressing the last three words. ”I learned early on that words don’t mean as much to people as actions do. Whether it was cooking meals or retrieving carvings or building this wall,” he said. ”They were all necessary steps to bring everyone together.”

”It’s a little like Crystal Lake City,” Heila marveled as the carriage passed through the village gate, giving them their first look inside the oversized village that hid behind its imposing wall.

Far from the barren, clear-cut stretch of land that Ashlynn expected to find lurking behind a frontier-style wall, they instead found that many of the oldest cedar trees of the forest had been preserved, and in places that had been cleared to bare earth, neat rows of fruit trees had been planted, seemingly belonging to the village as a whole rather than in any one household’s individual garden.

The late afternoon sun filtered through the branches of the mighty cedar trees, casting long dappled shadows across the village and giving the newly built structures a warm amber glow. As the carriage wheels rumbled over the hard-packed earth of the main path, the rich, woody scent of the trees mingled with woodsmoke that curled lazily from stone chimneys.

Somewhere nearby, meat sizzled over an open flame, its savory aroma making Virve’s stomach rumble despite the hearty meal that Georg had treated her and Ollie to after the lighter lunch on Ashlynn’s terrace.

”It wasn’t that long of a carriage ride,” Ollie said, raising an eyebrow at the veteran soldier who would soon become the Oak Witch. ”Don’t tell me that you’re hungry again already!”

”A soldier never misses a chance to eat,” Virve said, adopting the dignified posture of an experienced warrior lecturing a junior. ”But even I know when to stop,” she added. ”And as good as it smells, Georg’s roast tonight felt like it could sustain me for days.”

”That’s part of the point,” Ashlynn said with a smile as the carriage approached the center of the village. ”Even a normal knight’s vigil lasts for a full night and day, from sunset to sunset. A hearty meal beforehand is tradition. But a witch’s trial can last up to nine days, so Ollie will need the strength of that meal if he’s to persevere through his trial.”

”Ah, hem,” Ollie said, his face turning red as the attention of everyone in the carriage returned to him. ”We’re just about to arrive.”