The Vampire & Her Witch

More than a full day after Sir Ollie’s duel with Sir Rain, Hugo Hanrahan and Carwyn Belvin sat in their luxurious sitting room, staring at the remains of the most sophisticated meal either man had ever consumed while they tried to process the events of the past two days.

Following the duel, Sir Rain had lost his privileges to be treated as a guest. Sir Ollie had apologized more than once but the way he’d explained things gnawed at Hugo, leaving his heart restless and his mind turning over again and again.

”The Eldritch see duels between champions as somewhat sacred affairs,” Ollie said when they asked why Sir Rain would be imprisoned after the duel. ”The Eldritch don’t require loyalty to a lord who can’t prove their strength. It isn’t like it is in the kingdom where you owe a man loyalty because he sits on a chair his father gave him. A lord can be challenged at any time.”

”But Sir Rain didn’t challenge you,” Hugo countered. ”You were the one who issued the challenge. A knight’s challenge. What do Eldritch rules have to do with a challenge between knights over a matter of honor?”

”His disrespect was his challenge,” Ollie said with a sigh. ”If I accept that rudeness from him, the Eldritch would have believed that he was stronger than me. So, whether it was a matter of honor between knights or a challenge to the ruler of my village, we had to fight. But in the Eldritch world, just like it isn’t a crime to challenge a ruler, there are consequences for challenging a ruler and failing.”

”So you’re saying that if he’d won the duel, you might have let him go free?” Sir Carwyn asked, trying to understand the logic of Eldritch honor.

”I can’t do that because he isn’t my prisoner,” Ollie said. ”But if he asked me to bring him to Lady Ashlynn to plead his case, I would have done it. And he may have been granted additional freedom in the castle. It’s complicated. The thing you need to know is that your status and titles don’t work like suits of armor or swords here. They won’t protect you from the consequences of your actions, and you can’t use them against people who have no reason to respect your strength.”

”To the Eldritch, power comes with obligations,” Ollie said. ”The strong must protect the weak. Lady Nyrielle rules here but she must protect the people of the Vale of Mists. If she fails to do so, she can no longer be the Eldritch Lady of the Vale. It’s the same in my village. I need to protect my people,” he said solemnly. ”All of my people. If I don’t do that, I don’t deserve to be their knight.”

Ollie’s words dug their way under Hugo’s skin like splinters, haunting his heart and mind like a pebble in his boot that he couldn’t ignore.

Hugo had seen good men who cared for their people. Sir Carwyn was one of those men. Hugo still remembered his last visit to the young knight’s village when Carwyn had eagerly shown him the new mills they’d built and the excitement in his eyes when he talked about putting an end to lean lean years since they’d be able to ship more of their harvest to market.

Carwyn, Hugo realized, was the kind of knight who would take to the Eldritch ways like a duck to water. He’d placed his life on the line, fighting a duel against another champion to protect the lives of his men. He worked hard to ensure the prosperity of his people. And even now, when they were deep within the territory of their mortal enemy, the first thing he did was to stand up for the son of his liege lord because his honor wouldn’t let him do otherwise.

Compared to Sir Rain, or Owain, or even his own half-brother Bastian, Sir Carwyn and Sir Ollie acted like knights out of story books. Or out of Church scriptures. They were too good and too pure to be real men... and being close to those men made Hugo’s own failings painfully obvious.

Hugo tried to imagine either Carwyn or Ollie breaking down under the constant bullying from Sir Rain and Lord Owain and he just couldn’t. But then, Sir Rain could never bully Sir Ollie because the former could never have overpowered the latter.

But then, when Hugo thought of more subtle things, like being sent into the seedier parts of Blackwell City to find women for Lord Owain or meeting with Marcel to buy poisons to use against a woman and her child... He couldn’t imagine either man meekly submitting to those orders either.

”You seem troubled, my lord,” Carwyn said from the opposite side of their dinner table, pulling Hugo out of his thoughts and bringing him back to the present. ”Is the food troubling you? I didn’t notice anything off but...”

”No, the food is fine,” Hugo said, shaking off his thoughts about Eldritch honor as he looked at the remains of the feast they’d been served.

After the duel, they’d been joined by the guild masters, Tiernan and Isabell while Ollie showed them around the town outside the fortress walls. During that tour, Hugo and Carwyn had their first real taste of Eldritch food prepared by Eldritch cooks. It was a simple dish of stewed fowl in a hearty, slightly spicy gravy, eaten with the softest flatbread that Hugo had ever tasted but unconsciously, the two knights felt the defenses they’d raised against the ’demons’ lowering even further.

Now, at the end of their second day spent touring the Vale of Mists with Sir Ollie and the guild masters, they’d returned to a meal prepared by the Eldritch Master of Kitchens. At first, they’d thought that the meal was meager, consisting of a crisp salad of winter greens dressed in a herby, vinegar sauce and accompanied by artfully presented pheasant legs covered in a sticky, peppery, sweet sauce.

Both men ate every bite but they couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed by the portion size. That was until the door to their chambers opened again with the next ’course’ of a warm broccoli soup served with crumbled walnuts and a small wheel of creamy, pungent goat cheese. When the door opened again to reveal a servant carrying small filets of delicately poached trout covered in a rich, buttery and lemony sauce they realized why the portions had been so small.

This wasn’t just ’food’ that the Master of Kitchens had prepared for them. The word seemed far too limiting. This Georg person was clearly an artist who painted with flavors and textures the way a painter might use pigments. It was an elevation of a meal into a decadent and indulgent experience that Hugo felt wouldn’t have shamed the Marquis even if Lord Bors had been hosting the dukes of the Ruling Council or the King himself. It was just that... sublime.

”The food is fine,” Hugo repeated, resting a hand on his bloated feeling belly. ”It’s just... This place. It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.”

”Wrong, my lord?” Carwyn asked, sitting up straight in his chair. He’d been feeling a growing discomfort with the things he’d learned about ’demons’ as a child and the reality he had been confronted with in the Vale of Mists but he kept his opinions locked tightly within his chest.

After all, if he spoke his mind, he was certain he’d come dangerously close to saying something heretical and he didn’t know young lord Hugo well enough to know if the other man would turn him over to the Inquisition for spreading blasphemy.

”I know we’re only seeing what they want us to see,” Hugo said, gesturing to their luxurious quarters and the remains of their lavish meal. ”And they’re treating us exceptionally well. But I can’t escape the feeling that we’ve misunderstood the dem- er, the Eldritch for a very long time.”

”I, I feel the same way,” Carwyn said carefully. ”I’ve heard of the villages hidden away in the deep forests and steep valleys of the march. The ones no one has been able to dig out despite decades of trying.”

”Whenever one of those villages falls, we hear stories of how primitive they were, living in burrows in the ground like animals or building nests in trees like birds but,” Carwyn said, letting his voice trail off as he sighed heavily. ”If you told me that this fortress had been built by Master Isabell’s guild of engineers, and not by the Eldritch,” he said slowly. ”I’d believe you.”

”It goes beyond that though,” Hugo said as he tried to figure out how to put his feeling of wrongness into words. ”I think it’s the way...”

Whatever words Hugo had been about to speak died on his tongue as the door to their chambers opened with a forceful -BANG-, bouncing off the stone wall and nearly closing itself again from the force if not for the elegant hand that stopped it.

Both men jumped in surprise, turning to look at who had been so bold that they would barge in on the pair of supposedly ’honored guests’ without so much as a knock. That surprise only grew larger when they saw the beautiful vision of a woman with flame red hair and pale, alabaster hair standing in the doorway.

”’Ello, lads,” the woman said in a voice that was rich and a touch sultry. ”I didn’a expect ta come home ta such a lovely welcoming gift,” she said as her crimson eyes flicked from one man to the other. ”So tell me, boys, which one of ya is Cousin Hugo?”