The Vampire & Her Witch

”Sir Gilander,” Owain said as he carefully evaluated the old knight’s attitude. There was no guile in Gilander’s eyes, nor cunning in his voice when he changed the way he addressed Owain. Just a simple acknowledgement of the reality that one marquis had fallen, and the next would soon take his place.

”I need you to bring High Priest Aubin here,” Owain said, nodding slightly in satisfaction when he saw Gilander presenting himself the way a loyal vassal should. He’d been concerned that the old knight might be troubled by the circumstances of Bors’ death, but it didn’t look like the man harbored any suspicions in his heart, only grief for the lord he’d lost. ”My father’s rest shouldn’t be disturbed, but he needs to be brought away to the Temple so we can prepare for the funeral.”

”Yes, your Grace,” Gilander acknowledged. The death of a marquis would echo across the entire kingdom, and messages would flow to every corner of the realm. Every lord who could reasonably arrive within a few days would rush to Lothian City to pay their respects to both the fallen lord and the next one.

”Your Grace,” Gilander said hesitantly. ”May I... May I stand guard over your father while he awaits his funeral? I know it will take several days before we can light the pyre to guide him to the Heavenly Shores and I...”

”Say no more,” Owain said, raising a hand to interrupt the aging knight. ”He was my father, but he was your friend, wasn’t he?” Owain asked lightly with a ghost of a smile on his lips that never reached his eyes. ”Of course, you can accompany him to the Temple. Once word spreads, I’m sure that Baron Leufroy will want to join you as well,” Owain added, thinking of the other men who had been his father’s close companions during the war.

”Before you leave the manor,” Owain added as his hand reached for one of the decrees he’d set aside. ”Send Captain Albyn to see me. My father left behind a few very unusual decrees,” he said as he handed one of the rolls of parchment over to Gilander to inspect. Unlike most of the decrees on the desk that were adorned with yellow and blue sealing wax and silk ribbons, this one paired Lothian blue and yellow with the crimson and gold of the Inquisition.

”Your father spent a great deal of time with Inquisitor Percivus in his final days,” Gilander said with a frown as he inspected the document before his eyes opened wide in shock. ”This... This can’t be. Your father would never,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief as he examined the decree.

Bors had spent much of his rule working to restrain the power of the Church within his march. He ruthlessly separated the Inquisition from the Templars, refusing to allow the Church to quarter both of its mightiest warriors in the same place. In practice, the Abbey of the Inquisition of Maeril was less than a full day’s ride away from the Templars stationed at the Temple in Lothian City, but that distance was enough to prevent them from forming into a cohesive force that could easily overwhelm the Lothian Army if Bors ever found himself at odds with the Church.

There had been other rules over the years as well. Rules that restricted the Church’s priests to the towns held by barons, forcing the Church to send their acolytes into the villages of the march in place of true priests, and preventing them from stationing templars in a village for more than a single season. After all, a Templar was a knight empowered by the Holy Lord of Light, and such men could easily overwhelm the authority of a village’s own knight.

Bors understood well that the Church’s power in Lothian March had grown considerably over the years, starting with the bargain Cellach Lothian struck with the Church in the waning days of the Second Crusade. In order to gain the Church’s support to avenge his father’s death at the hands of the vampires of the Vale of Mists, Cellach had allowed the Church to establish a fortress temple of their own in the very heart of Lothian City, and he’d pledged that his second son, Leon, would enter that very temple as a priest.

At one point, the Lothian family had become so entangled with the Church that the king himself grew alarmed that the Church would convert an entire march into a Holy Principality like the ones that could still be found in the old countries, with the vast wealth of the frontier flowing directly into the Church’s coffers.

Bors understood all of this, and so did his closest advisors, so when Gilander held a decree inviting the Inquisition to establish a Chapterhouse in each barony, emphasizing that they were to root out demonic influences among the knights and lords who protected the people, even a straightforward and honorable man like Gilander could tell that someone within the Inquisition had to be scheming against his fallen lord.

Whether they were simply taking advantage of Bors’ illness and his occasional moments of confusion in his final days, or they contributed to it, Gilander couldn’t say, but just seeing the decree was enough to banish the grief within his heart and replace it with a rage he had not thought himself capable of feeling since he left the hot headed days of his youth behind.

”I want Captain Albyn to capture Inquisitor Percivus and his acolytes,” Owain said fiercely as genuine emotion crept into his voice. ”And I want the Inquisitor’s rooms searched for anything he could have used to cloud my father’s mind in his final days. This,” Owain said, pointing to the decree in Gilander’s hands. ”This cannot be allowed to stand!”

”No, your Grace, it cannot,” Gilander agreed, setting down the decree and saluting the future Lothian Marquis with a fist to his chest. ”I’ll send Captain Albynn to you at once, your Grace, and I’ll let High Priest Aubin know that you believe your father may have been... manipulated by the Inquisition. He’ll know what to do.”

”I’m sure he will,” Owain agreed. ”I’m sure he will...”

Of course, Owain would still need to make a few moves himself for everything to line up properly. He still had half a vial of Spider Demon Venom after all, and he needed to make sure that Captain Albyn would ’discover it’ when he searched the chambers that had been provided to Inquisitor Percivus.

Owain hadn’t expected to frame an Inquisitor for his father’s poisoning when he held on to the remainder of the deadly venom. He’d thought to use it against Baron Leufroy or another member of the Lothian Court, either directly to remove an obstacle or to discredit any faction that formed around them when he started to put his own plans into motion.

But Inquisitor Percivus had moved against Jocelynn, and that moved him to the top of the list of men that Owain needed to handle personally. Even as a marquis, it would be difficult to execute an Inquisitor, but if he could ’prove’ that the Inquisitor had been dosing his father with Spider Demon Venom in order to secure lands and power for the Inquisition, then the Church would fall all over themselves to cast the dangerous lunatic out, disavowing the man and his actions lest they provoke the lords of Gaal to turn against them.

It might not be the best use of his remaining Spider Demon Venom, and he might come to regret it when he started working to bring the Lothian Court to heel, but at the moment, Owain didn’t care. Percivus had signed his own death warrant when he co-signed the decree; he just hadn’t known it at the time.

Now, however, while Gilander rushed to execute his new lord’s orders, Owain turned his attention to the remainder of the decrees. Some of them would never be read before the court, either because they were clearly the product of madness or because they conflicted with Owain’s own plans.

Others, however, clearly supported the plans that Owain had been building with Jocelynn, and it was clear that she’d used his father’s delusions to convince him to support many of the things that she and Owain had been proposing in order to ’prove’ to his father that he would be a worthy heir.

”It would be a shame if none of these were read,” Owain said with an anticipatory smile on his lips as he realized how many of his plans his father had come to support. ”Let’s see how the old bastards of the Lothian Court object to the final decrees of their beloved, fallen lord,” he said with a mocking sneer.

There were other decrees in the pile that would be useful as well. Bestowing lands on loyal retainers or absolving the debts of bondsmen who had been among Bors’ staunch supporters over the years. Things that were clearly the work of a man who saw his death approaching and wished to put his final affairs in order.

Owain would have these read out along with the others, creating a story of honoring his father’s final wishes that would be difficult for anyone to resist in the days and weeks immediately following Bors’ death.

”You really did prepare a way out for me, Father,” Owain said as he retrieved the decrees about Gawain Prescote, carrying them over to the hearth and flinging them into the fire. ”It just wasn’t the one you thought it was...”