The Vampire & Her Witch

”We all know that you’ve spent more time south of the River Tuilig than anyone, Lord Reynold,” Wes Iriso said diplomatically, hoping to ease the tension that was building between Reynold and Tulori.

Not that he would have minded watching the older man giving the young lord the thumping he so clearly needed now that he’d returned to the frontier from Keating City. But there was a time and a place for such things, and the middle of Lord Owain’s hunt, while they waited for an imperial elk with just a handful of men, certainly wasn’t the right time to deliver a physical attitude correction.

”What have you learned about the Horse Lord’s horde?” Wes asked. ”Or about their lands for that matter? I’ll admit, my own lands are even further from the Horse Lords forces than the Leufroy’s, and I haven’t heard much more than the common man has,” he said diplomatically, even though it wasn’t entirely true.

A man didn’t grow as skilled as Iriso was without learning to study his opponents. Once the Church gave its blessings for a Holy War, he’d thrown himself into the libraries of his family’s keep, poring over dusty tomes and family journals about every major battle from the Second Crusade to the War of Inches.

In the past year, he’d learned quite a bit more than he knew before, but there was a limit to what could be learned from the safety of his own fortress, sitting before the hearth and bouncing his son on one knee while he read.

”The first thing you need to know,” Reynold said, sighing as he gave up teaching Tulori a lesson in order to answer Baron Iriso’s question. ”Is that the forces of the Horse Lord don’t breed any faster than cows or horses. They don’t overwhelm us with numbers because they breed faster than we do,” he said. ”And I don’t think they grow up any faster than we do either.”

Few people had encountered the same warband more than once, unless it raided their village year after year, but Reynold had spent years venturing into the vast, rolling grasslands of the Southern Steppe, and he’d learned to recognize the markings of enough demons to see a few grow, year after year.

The demons might mature a few years faster than humans did, but the skills that made them so lethal took time to learn and train. There were no shortcuts to mastering their weapons, even for demons.

”But that’s impossible,” Tulori insisted. ”For every one we kill, they come back with twice as many the next year. There’s no end to them. If they aren’t constantly spawning replacement soldiers, then how can they press us so hard?”

”Because there are just that many of them,” Reynold said. ”All most people ever see are their warbands,” he explained. ”A hundred of them, two hundred of them, and that feels like a lot when every one of them fights like light cavalry or mounted archers. But you haven’t seen the truth of the horde,” he said as his stormy gaze grew distant.

”I spotted one of their herds on the move two years ago,” he said. ”They rode, or marched, I guess, ten to twenty people abreast, and the line of them stretched for three leagues or more. There weren’t hundreds of them on the move; there were tens of thousands of them, enough to shake the earth as they passed by.”

”There aren’t just horse demons in the horde either,” Reynold added. ”There’s another kind, with shaggy fur and horns that...” he paused, looking carefully at Erling’s bow. ”Horns that are long enough to make for a good bow,” he said carefully, wondering for the first time if the young baron’s famed reluctance to venture south of the River Tuilig was as exaggerated as his supposed cowardice.

”Tens of thousands,” Tulori whispered, struggling to believe it. What Lord Reynold had just described sounded like an entire city on the move. There were only twenty thousand or so people in the whole of Leufroy town, and that was if you included all of the little hamlets that popped up when logging or mining camps turned into something more permanent.

The idea of that many demons marching together was... was preposterous.

”So you found the Horse Lord’s full army then,” Tulori said as he tried to compose himself. ”That must have been quite the accomplishment. I’m sorry I didn’t hear word of it when Marquis Bors and the Church celebrated your great deed.”

”You think they let word of that get around?” Reynold scoffed. ”I didn’t find the Horse Lord’s army. I found one of his herds. One,” he emphasized, holding up a single finger. ”I’ve found traces of at least two others that size the same summer, moving in different directions. I’m telling you, there are more of them than you think there are, and the Southern Steppe extends further south than any of us knew.”

”If that’s the case,” Erling asked, furrowing his brows in thought. ”Then we’re right back at the original question. How do you establish a county south of the river when the demons have such an overwhelming force arrayed against us?”

”I told you in the beginning,” Reynold said, as though it were obvious. ”The key is wealth. Wealth and stone. You have to learn from the Dunn’s successes and from Caleb Lothian’s failures, he added.

”You can’t replicate what the Dunns are doing with their hamlets in the west,” Reynold explained, shifting his saddle and turning his horse slightly, pausing for a moment when he thought he heard the sound of baying hounds in the distance.

”The Dunns can build quick, cheap, fortified hamlets because they’re pushing into the forested hills to the west,” Reynold explained. ”Knock a few of these down,” he said, gesturing to the nearby hemlocks and cedars with his spear. ”And you can knock up a palisade wall with a dry moat in a week’s time. It doesn’t take much to fortify against the demons when they try to retake their land.”

”Timber like this is scarce south of the river,” Erling acknowledged. ”It’s south even at the southern border. The trees that grow along the river banks and the creek beds are all thinner, spindlier things that don’t make for strong walls.”

”Right,” Reynold said. ”But if you could hire a small army of quarrymen,” he said, giving Baron Iriso a pointed look. ”Along with masons, engineers, carters, and the like, and you could seize a place to build a real fortified outpost, one with tall walls, battlements, and war machines to place atop the towers, raining fire down on the Horse Lord’s horde,” he suggested.

”The Horse Lord’s raiders are like light cavalry and mounted archers,” Reynold reminded them. ”On the open grasslands, they’re deadly. But they’ll break themselves on the walls if they try to lay siege.”

”I stopped looking for the demons’ farms or villages two years ago,” the future Aleese baron concluded. ”I’ve been searching for a place to quarry stone that’s close enough to a lake or river to build a fortress ever since,” he said with a wide smile. ”And I finally found what I’ve been searching for...”