The Vampire & Her Witch

”I, I don’t know what to say,” Ollie said honestly after another minute of uncomfortable silence, as he listened to her rough, irregular breathing and felt her body quake with occasional tremors. ”I want to help, but I don’t know how.”

”You are helping, Ollie,” Ashlynn said as she gave him an affectionate hug before she pulled back from the young knight and turned her gaze away from the pit for the first time since he’d arrived to look directly into his pale eyes.

”You just being here helps,” she said softly. ”It reminds me that I’m not facing this alone anymore. If you’d been with me back then, you’d have fought off both of Owain’s knights and pulled me from the earth before I even had a chance to free myself, wouldn’t you?”

Ollie might have been intensely stubborn in his trial, but if there was one thing she had come to understand about the young man, it was that he embodied the cypress tree long before she’d chosen it for him. He’d watched out for her when she’d been nothing more to him than another servant in the kitchens of the summer villa, and he watched out for her now.

Even if he couldn’t face the ghosts that haunted her with a sword and shield to defend her, he still did the best he could, and the genuine care and concern in his voice meant much more to her than any polished words would have.

”Of course I would have rescued you!” Ollie said automatically when she posed the question. ”I wouldn’t have let them bury you in the first place,” he added quickly.

”See?” Ashlynn said with a gentle smile. ”Just hearing you say that is helping,” she said as she drew in the feeling of safety and security he radiated to shake off the feeling of weight and oppression that had clung to her ever since she approached the open grave. She couldn’t escape its grip entirely, but with Ollie’s help, she was able to calm herself enough to consider the problem that Ollie had brought to her when he came here in the first place.

”You said that Darragh fled,” Ashlynn said as she worked to recenter herself and focus on immediate problems. Unconsciously, she turned her back to the empty grave, as if to deny it the opportunity to haunt her further while she set aside the feelings it provoked within her. Once she did, it was a little bit easier to approach the puzzle of why one of the men she’d been counting on to support them had suddenly run away.

”Did he have a family that he wasn’t willing to bring into the Vale?” Ashlynn asked as her mind grasped at straws in search of the slightest reason that might excuse his behavior. ”Anything he might be trying to escape to? Or did something happen in the village that he may be running away from?”

”Not so far as I know,” Ollie said. ”Sir Marcel made the offer to everyone after we started planting crops in the village. He said that you had promised them an opportunity to be reunited with their families, but Darragh said he had no one and nothing and that he was just happy to have a place where he could hunt and live off the land.”

Truthfully, when Ollie thought about it, Darragh had been well-liked by most in the village. Even if he tended to keep to himself, there were plenty of people among the Eldritch who valued peace and solitude or time in the wilderness the way the young hunter seemed to.

But whenever he returned to the village, he was greeted warmly by people who remembered the lean days when they had just arrived in the Vale after fleeing their own homes. Often, it had been Darragh and Eamon’s hunting who supported Ollie’s efforts to keep everyone fed and the Eldritch weren’t the sort who would forget that favor easily.

”But, he did more than just run away,” Ollie said as he drew a deep breath, trying to reconcile the man who awkwardly accepted bushels of vegetables in exchange for his extra meat with the actions of that very same man as soon as they had left the safety of the Vale’s curtain walls. ”Eamon is the one who caught it. Darragh crushed flatleaf nettles and put them in the drinking water. A few of the men are already feeling unsteady on their feet.”

Eamon had done more than just catch the poison. He’d noticed the scent almost instantly when he went to refill his water skin from the large barrel on the wagon and he’d gone looking for Darragh as soon as he’d warned everyone that the water in the barrel was tainted and they should refill their skins from the river instead.

Not long after that, he’d approached Ollie with his head bowed low and confessed that there had been a time when he and Darragh had been conspiring to kidnap Lady Ashlynn to return her to Lord Owain.

Eamon’s faith in Ashlynn’s miracles and his constant questioning of her decision to live among the Eldritch had led him to largely abandon that plan by the time refugees began to arrive in the Vale of Mists, but he recounted a story of Darragh collecting poisonous berries to add to Ollie’s cooking in order to strike at the ’demons’ even while they were hunting to supply food to the refugees.

”He what?” Ollie had asked, blinking at Eamon in stunned shock at the idea that someone would do something as cruel as poisoning the food that he prepared for people, including children and the elderly, who were counting on them for support in their moment of weakness.

”We’ve all known that war is coming,” Eamon said awkwardly. ”At the time, since there was nothing we could do to bring her Holiness away from the Vale, I think he was looking for any opportunity he could find to weaken the Vale of Mists before the war began. Maybe he was hoping to be rewarded for our efforts, or maybe it was something else, but...”

”But you stopped him,” Ollie said. ”You stopped him and you made sure that he never acted on those feelings, no matter how much he might have wanted to. You’re a good man, Eamon,” Ollie praised the grizzled hunter.

Now, unfortunately, it seemed like Darragh had revisited the same kind of notion he’d had before, applying his skills once again in order to weaken the forces of the Vale. Only this time, he was doing it in order to ensure his ability to escape from pursuit by Lady Ashlynn’s men while he fled under the cover of night.

And if he escaped, with all the things he’d heard at the banquet the night before and everything he’d seen during his months in the Vale... the damage that Darragh could do to their upcoming campaign was impossible to calculate and dreadful to imagine.