The Vampire & Her Witch

Darragh slumped in the back of a wagon as it trundled down the ancient roadway that led out of the Vale of Mists and followed the River Luath toward Lothian City. He never imagined that he’d have an opportunity to escape the Vale of Mists so soon after last night’s celebratory banquet, but at the same time, he wished that he’d been able to get a proper night’s sleep before taking the risk to make an escape.

”You look half dead, Darragh,” Eamon teased him from the wooden bench on the opposite side of the wagon. ”You’re still young, aren’t you? Don’t tell me that you never stayed out drinking the night before Lord Owain summoned us to hunt for him. I won’t believe you even if you say that you didn’t.”

”This is different,” Darragh groused as he pulled the heavy autumn cloak tighter against his body against the damp chill. ”A night drinking with mates is one thing. But dancing? With a snake woman?” Darragh said, shaking his head bitterly at his inability to escape the claws of the demon who held him hostage until the musicians finally stopped and the banquet ended as the sky began showing the first hints of growing brighter.

It was all ’Sir’ Ollie’s fault, the young hunter thought. No one had shown any interest in him or Eamon during Lady Ashlynn’s display of heretical magic when couples flocked to the open areas of the great hall to join the Demon Lady of the Vale in a celebratory dance.

After the dance, a Claw Demon named Georg made a grand show of presenting dishes for the feast, and Darragh hoped that he could quickly devour his meal and then make a polite, or even not so polite, escape when the parents with young children began to leave. Who would have thought that the newly dubbed knight would appear at their table and ask for their help with a sensitive mission for Lady Ashlynn the very next day?

Once it became clear that Eamon and Darragh might be important people of status, men that the famous Cypress Knight would personally seek out for help, the snake women had been all too eager to wrap their tails around the hunters and pull them onto the dance floor for hours of ’entertainment’, broken only by trips back to their table to drink more of the heady, mulled wine or the strangely potent cider that seemed to flow without limit.

Now, he’d barely had any sleep after staggering back to the soldier’s barracks in the ancient fortress, and his head still pounded with the aftereffects of drinking too much. Lady Ashlynn had offered to use a bit of her witchcraft to ease any discomfort the men felt after the night of revels, but Darragh wasn’t about to let her bewitch him the way she seemed to have bewitched others.

Thankfully, she’d accepted his claims that he hadn’t drunk enough the previous night to need her help, and she told him that there would be plenty of time to rest in the wagon before he was needed for any real work.

”They call themselves the Scaled Clan,” Eamon pointed out. ”You know the women we danced with are friends of Lady Heila. It’s not a bad thing that Eusebia took a liking to you. Dalmatia said that they’re merchants and they want to find good investments to make in Vale City or beyond.”

”How do you even know that?” Darragh asked, staring at his friend in shock. ”I couldn’t make heads or tails of what that woman said all night long. I thought the de- the Eldritch had learned the king’s tongue, but she barely spoke a few words of it.”

Not that a lack of common language deterred this ’Eusebia’ from trying to be ’friendly’ with Darragh. Quite the opposite, in fact. It felt like she was trying to make up for the lack of conversation with extra touches, keeping their arms intertwined, caressing his leg with the length of her serpentine tail.... By the end of the night, Darragh thought he finally understood what a mouse felt like when a powerful snake wrapped around it to constrict its prey to death!

”They’re our neighbors,” Eamon said with a shrug as if it was nothing special. ”It doesn’t hurt to learn their language. Even a few phrases can help.”

”But where would you even learn something like that?” Darragh asked as he struggled to imagine having enough conversations with demons to actually learn their language.

”Some of the refugees from the outlying villages speak the original Eldritch tongue,” Daithi said, leaning over crates of supplies in the wagon to join their conversation. ”I’ve been learning because my little one plays with a pair of girls from the Night Weaver Clan, but I’m surprised that you learned it, Eamon.”

”The Night Weavers are even better trappers than the Heartwood Clan,” the grizzled hunter said. ”I picked up a bit once a few of them started getting antsy about receiving our help and doing nothing in return. Good lads with very sharp eyes.”

Darragh gave up on making small talk with his former companions as Daithi and Eamon fell into a conversation about the freshly elevated constable’s efforts to learn the language in order to act as a better peace keeper while Eamon talked about how many different words the Night Weavers seemed to have to describe the tightness or strength of different kinds of rope or string used in setting traps.

Both men had clearly fallen so deeply into heresy that there would be no salvation for them in this life or the next, and Darragh would need to do everything he could to avoid their eyes when he made his escape later today.

According to Ollie, they were meeting with important merchants from Blackwell County, likely traveling under the escort of knights loyal to Lord Owain. From what he could understand of the plans, the merchants must not know they were meeting with heretics who sympathized with demons or he wouldn’t have been present at all.

Lady Ashlynn had left almost all of her witches and demon guards behind, taking only ’Sir’ Ollie from her coven on this mission and Darragh knew all too well how recently the kitchen boy had become both a witch and a knight so he barely considered him a threat.

In place of her normal retinue, Ashlynn had dressed Darragh, Eamon, Daithi, and a few of the other humans who had come to the Vale as guards, offering them freshly made gambesons featuring the same emerald green and midnight blue harlequin pattern as had been painted on the walls in the great hall.

Now, looking like proper soldiers, they were supposed to set up a tent for Lady Ashlynn to receive guests in, ostensibly so she could convince these powerful merchants to join in her heresy before bringing them back to the Vale.

It was a nightmare scenario, but it was also the best opportunity that Darragh was likely to get. Supposedly, the merchants would only be arriving after nightfall, but none of the vampires of the Vale were traveling with them, so it should be possible to slip away under the cover of night.

With only one road leading to the Vale and the place where the meeting would happen, all Darragh needed to do was to race along the road until he could intercept the knights and merchants, preventing them from falling into a demon trap.

If he was lucky, he might even know the knights who were traveling with the merchants, but even if he didn’t, he felt confident that he could convince them to turn back toward Lothian City before they became entangled in the demon’s schemes.

It wasn’t a perfect plan, not yet at least, but Darragh was certain he could find a way to improve his odds, even if it was just a little bit. There were plenty of toxic plants near the entrance of the Vale, and if he could find the right one, he might be able to dose the other men’s water with something that would give them the runs or otherwise impair their ability to pursue him.

Darragh spent almost as much time in the wilderness as he did in civilized places, and if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was how to survive. He’d endured six long months of captivity, acting like a convert to Lady Ashlynn’s insidious heresy and biding his time.

Now, the moment was finally upon him and he would do whatever he had to in order to escape... even if it meant his former friends and mentor would pay the price for it.