The Vampire & Her Witch

At the same time that Hugo was taking charge of securing the town itself, a train of carts and wagons emerged from the wilderness, bringing with it the servants and attendants who accompanied the Second Army and all of the supplies they had brought to assist Dame Sybyll in recapturing her home.

Under Heila’s watchful eye, they transformed the bailey of Hanrahan Keep into a tent city, starting with large tents placed as close to the baron’s grove of fruit trees as she could set them before filling the tents with folding wood and leather cots to keep the wounded up off the cold ground.

Heila might have cursed and sworn a bit when the wounded soldiers from the Temple Guard and the Lothian army limped into the tent city. Emmie swore that she heard her lady muttering about taking a lash to the priests at the temple who turned wounded men away. Still, she made space for them nonetheless, ordering more cots to be brought out and thick blankets to lay on the ground in makeshift beds if they ran out of cots to lay the injured on.

In the middle of what felt like endless rows of cots filled with wounded soldiers, a strangely well-dressed figure knelt down next to a man from the Temple Guard, reaching out with practiced fingers to unfasten the straps of the injured man’s armor.

”Lord, Lord Liam?” the soldier asked, blinking in surprise as he vaguely recognized the man tending to him. ”What are you doing here?”

”Right now, I’m tending to you,” he said as he pulled the padded gambeson aside and lifted the torn and bloodstained tunic to reveal a side that was a mass of bruises and a long, ragged cut that was studded with bits of broken chain links. Only the strength of the man’s armor and the blessing of Heila’s magic had preserved the man’s life, but the wound was still one of the more frightening ones he’d seen tonight.

”One of the Iron Tusk Clan got you with an axe, didn’t he?” Liam said as he carefully inspected the wound. The young lord was no stranger to the healer’s tent; he’d spent plenty of time in one visiting his injured men while Lord Loman tended the wounded during the summer campaign, and even landed there himself a time or two during his first campaigns against the Eldritch.

Only, this was the first time he’d ever found himself doing more for the wounded than applying a hasty bandage on the battlefield, and he was rapidly coming to possess a new respect for the work done by the healers who fought against a very different enemy within the four canvas walls of their tents.

”Two of ’em at once, your lordship,” the guardsman said, wincing in pain as Liam probed at the wound, checking to see if the wound that had been sealed by Lady Heila’s witchcraft had reopened since the soldier left the west gate plaza. Marching from the plaza to the Temple at the center of town had already put an incredible strain on the bodies of the injured, but to be forced to march yet again, this time all the way to Hanrahan keep, was more than many of the men could bear.

Already, Liam had seen several wounds reopened, and they’d been forced to summon Lady Heila to save the life of a man who had bled so much that the tabard stuffed into his wound dripped like a sodden towel by the time he arrived.

”You’re lucky your armor took as much as it did,” Liam said before he stood up, searching among the figures moving about the wounded for the shortest, smallest one in the room. ”Squire Emmie,” Liam called. ”Can you come take a look at this man with me? I don’t know if the unguent you gave me will be enough for a wound this large...”

Once the tents had gone up and Lady Heila had seen to the worst of the injured, she’d withdrawn into the small grove of trees to rest and recover from everything she’d done in the course of the battle. When she did, she put her squire in charge of tending to the wounded using the vast reserves of potions, salves, and remedies she’d prepared before the battle began.

When Emmie asked what she should do with the human lord she was supposed to be watching over, her teacher’s answer was four simple words. ”Put him to work.”

At first, Emmie was afraid that the puffed-up human lord would be useless in the healer’s tent and that he’d only get in the way, but Liam Dunn was slowly proving her wrong. He had a soldier’s understanding of battle and injuries, he was adept at helping even badly injured men out of torn and broken armor, and he knew enough about wounds to know the difference between something that needed a healer’s attention and something that needed several days of bed rest and a diet of thick broth or thin porridge.

”Oh, that is bad,” Emmie said, startling the injured guardsman when the ’squire’ Lord Liam called for turned out to be a horned demon who looked startlingly young, given her diminutive stature. ”The bones may be broken under the bruises,” she said as she inspected the wound. ”And there are bits of metal lodged in the wound because no one took them out before Lady Heila healed everyone.”

”Ha ha ha,” the soldier chuckled as he heard the childish voice’s very serious pronouncement. ”So is that it? I’m dead after all? Just when I thought I’d convert to worshiping a tiny horned pagan goddess,” he joked.

”Don’t worship her, she won’t like that,” Emmie said firmly while she dug in the pouch at her waist for a small, sharp knife and a pair of iron tweezers. ”Here,” she said, presenting the tools to Liam. ”You just need to cut the skin enough to pull out the bits of metal, and then you can rub the unguent on it. It should be fine then,” she said before turning to look at the disbelieving face of the wounded soldier.

”We don’t have much Sweet Sleep,” she said, referring to a potion that Lady Heila said could allow even people who had lost a limb, like Lord Jalal, to sleep peacefully through the night. ”So you’ll have to be brave and tough it out tonight. But I promise, you’ll have a good scar from this,” she said, as though it was the most important part of the healing process. ”All the women who see it will know how strong and brave you were and your name will echo off the walls when people hear how hard to kill you are, so hang in there tonight and think about the fame you’ll have when this is all over,” she said before patting him gently on the shoulder and heading off to see the next patient.

”Lord Liam,” the soldier asked, his wound temporarily forgotten as he stared at the strange, horned girl. ”Did that just happen? Or am I dying and this is all just a dream before I reach the Heavenly Shores?”

”It’s not a dream,” Liam said, shaking his head while he fetched a stool so he could sit next to the man and cut the broken bits of armor out of his wound. ”Her father is some kind of hero to the Eldritch across the mountains. He fights in front of crowds for spectacle and entertainment. You probably saw him fighting one against two against the Templars during the battle.”

”I don’t pretend to understand them,” Liam admitted to the incredulous soldier. ”A few days as their captive isn’t enough to come close to understanding them. But if I’ve learned one thing after all of this, it’s that I never want to be their enemy again,” he said firmly as he took up the small knife and the iron tweezers.

Whether Lady Heila intended this to be another of her ’lessons’ for him or not, Liam was getting an up close and personal look at exactly what Lady Ashlynn’s army was capable of doing to the knights and soldiers of the Dunn Barony, and the young lord shuddered to think what would happen if a man like Emmie’s father, Kurtz, was ever set loose on the field of battle to crush the only ’worthy opponents’ for a Champion of the Arena.

Liam thought he understood the Eldritch. He thought that he was ready to lead the Dunn Barony to glory in the Holy War to come and that one day, he or his father would become the first Count Dunn, serving under the first Lothian Duke.

After tonight, he no longer harbored any such delusions. As soon as he was allowed to return home, he intended to do whatever it took to convince his father to accept Lady Ashlynn’s offer of an alliance as her vassal. The alternative would be to share the fate of Hanrahan Barony, and Liam had no doubt that there were plenty of strong, capable warriors like Kurtz whom she could place atop a throne if she wished.

Soon, he knew he would bear witness to the execution of a baron who would never submit to Eldritch rule... one who wouldn’t even be given the chance to submit. Once, he thought that witnessing such a thing would galvanize his resolve to fight back and defend his people against the ’murderous demons.’

But now that the moment was upon him, all he could think about was how to prevent this kind of tragedy from playing out in his own hometown, and how he could save his father from the fate that Ian Hanrahan was about to suffer...