The Vampire & Her Witch

”So what makes you think you can lead the charge to transform Aleese into a county when even Lord Templar Caleb failed?”

The faint smile on Reynold’s face melted like frost in the morning sun, and his dark brows lowered over his stormy eyes as he looked at the young lord from Leufroy who had posed the question.

The core of the question wasn’t an issue. If the young man had just asked him how he intended to expand the Aleese domain further to the south, that would have been an easy question to answer. The problem was in the way Tulori had framed his question, asking how Reynold would succeed where Caleb Lothian had failed.

It instantly created a rift where there hadn’t been one, and anything Reynold said, Tulori was certain to bring back to Lord Owain’s ears, filtering it through his obvious desire to curry favor with the incoming Marquis.

The trap was obvious and poorly laid, but it was no less dangerous for having been set by an amateur. If he was confident, then he was looking down on the Lothian lord who Owain was said to have patterned his own swordsmanship after. If he said little, then he was clearly keeping secrets, perhaps conspiring against the Lothians. There were very few ’good’ responses when even silence could be interpreted negatively.

”How much do you know about the forces of the Horse Lord, boy?” Reynold said, throwing the question back in the young man’s face while he thought about how he wanted to respond. ”I know you’ve never fought them, so what have your books taught you?” Reynold asked, loading the word ’books’ with enough scorn to make his rebuke clear, even to an idiot like Serge Otker.

”As much as anyone else,” Tulori said, refusing to accept the rebuke. ”They’re savages who live in tents. They have lower bodies like horses, covered in fur, and the torsos of men. They roam the grasslands hunting the herds of horned beasts. They destroy any settlement that tries to establish itself south of the River Tuilig.”

”They’re cowards,” the young lord added with a glance at Baron Erling Fayle. ”They rely on bows that shoot fast, and they’ll pelt you with arrows, both as they charge toward you and as they run away. They refuse to stand and fight unless you corner them.”

”Don’t underestimate the bows of the Horse Demons,” Erling said, holding his bow up to give the young lord a good, long look at it. ”The draw is heavier than you think, and with the right bodkin, fired from close enough range, you can pierce chainmail with one of these. Brigandine, too, if the plates are thin enough,” he added.

The bow that Erling carried had earned him a great deal of scorn from many of the Lothian Court’s noblemen. At one point, the fact that he carried a bow fashioned in the same style as the ones used by the Horse Lord’s demons had even attracted the attention of the inquisition.

His reasons for using the bow had been innocent enough to begin with. He was too short, especially as a young man just learning to hunt, to manage a longbow that was powerful enough to hunt larger game. His mother had been the one to suggest adopting a recurve bow in the style of the Horse Lord’s demons, and she’d been right that it made up for his deficiencies in height.

But when the Inquisition took it as a sign that he was engaged in some form of heresy, he’d needed to go even further to deflect their Inquisitors. His original bow had been an imitation of the bows carried by the Horse Lord’s demons, but if he carried a trophy instead, a bow made from the horns of defeated demons, then he could transform his ’heretical bow’ into a visible symbol of his commitment to slay demons.

It had been one of the riskiest things he’d ever done as a young lord, but he turned to the famed Black Merchant in Lothian City for help obtaining the horns of demons he couldn’t hunt himself. The merchant’s representative, a man named Marcel who looked like he was only a year or two older than Erling had been at the time, had been reluctant to supply him with any horns until he explained that he needed them to throw the Inquisition off his trail.

Once he’d explained what he needed, Marcel hadn’t just furnished him with the horns; he’d found someone to fashion them into a powerful horn bow that was every bit as lethal as the ones used by the Horse Lord’s demons. Whoever had fashioned the bow had even gone so far as to inlay a silver pattern of stars, matching the constellation of the Ascended Archer on one of the bow’s dark horn risers.

When Erling presented the bow to the Inquisitor as a trophy of his first demon kill and claimed that he’d been using the wooden replica until he was strong enough to draw the powerful bow, the Inquisition had accepted his answer and told him that they looked forward to seeing more demon horns adorning his great hall in the years to come.

”Even if their bows are powerful,” Tulori replied. ”They’re still cowards who refuse to stand and fight. If it wasn’t for the fact that they breed as fast as rabbits and can overwhelm our soldiers with their numbers, they’d have been defeated long ago.”

”As is, they aren’t capable of anything more than raiding our villages, attacking when they have an overwhelming advantage, and running away before our armored knights can get close enough to kill them,” the young lord said confidently.

”Heh,” Reynold said with a light chuckle. ”When you understand so little about your enemy, how can you expect to understand the ways to defeat them, boy? You’re making the same mistake that everyone else does. You think you already understand them, so you don’t bother to study them.”

”That’s why it won’t matter how many soldiers you hire from across the seas,” Reynold concluded. ”If you don’t understand your enemy, and you barely understand the men you’ve packed your army with, then the only thing you’ll find on the battlefield is defeat.”