The Vampire & Her Witch

The inner bailey of Lothian Manor opened before them like a killing field.

It had been years since Ollie played on the grass of the open yard as a child, waving around the sword his father had carved for him and dreaming of becoming a hero like the knights of the Lothian Court. It had been eight months since he last walked through these gates, following Head Cook Otis to the Summer Villa in order to prepare for Lord Owain’s visit with the woman pretending to be Ashlynn Blackwell.

Now, he’d finally come home again, and he really was a knight. The weapons at his waist might not be swords, but they were even more deadly.... It’s just that he felt like anything but a hero after knocking a pair of hapless guardsmen aside in order to breach the gate, and he felt even less like one as he emerged from the gatehouse at the head of Ashlynn’s assault force.

The walkways atop the outer wall were manned. He could see figures moving up there, their silhouettes sharpening as they turned toward the noise at the gatehouse. The sound of the gate fight had carried, and the men on the walls were already reaching for their bows.

Ollie’s hand tightened on Frost Fang’s hilt. The last time he’d crossed open ground beneath archers on a fortified wall, it had been the assault on the Summer Villa, and the arrow that punched through his mail had buried itself so deep in his side that he’d needed to see Heila for real healing once he returned to the Vale of Mists.

The wound might not pain him anymore, but the scar beneath his ribs was a constant reminder of what would happen to him if he were too slow, or if he reached for the wrong sort of witchcraft in the heat of battle.

He couldn’t be too slow tonight. Not with Samira behind him, heavy with the child she carried. Not with Morwen, who was too petite to have fit into even the smallest of gambesons that Lady Ashlynn brought with her from the vale. And even with armor, the arrow that had parted the links of Ollie’s coat of mail had taught him painfully well that nothing short of a knight’s full plate could allow a man to wade through a storm of arrows with relative impunity.

Thankfully, he’d learned his lessons well. Before anyone else could emerge from the gatehouse, he reached out to the power of the world and prepared to bend it to his desires.

For a heartbeat, there was a temptation to reach beyond the powers of the world. He could feel the Void at the edge of his awareness, dark and vast and whispering. The dark winds of that place could do more than just deflect arrows.

The winds that howled from the Void could terrify the archers on the walls into throwing down their bows and fleeing for their lives, filling their ears with the wailing of something that lived beyond the boundaries of the world. Something that no amount of prayer or armor could protect them from.

But Ollie had come too close to the Void too recently. The memory of its pull was still fresh, along with the sensation of standing at the edge of an abyss that wanted to swallow him whole, and he wasn’t confident that he could touch it again without losing himself to it. Not here. Not now, when Lady Ashlynn was depending on him.

Instead, he reached for the pure wind that whispered through the branches and leaves of distant trees.

The words rose from his lips before he’d made a conscious decision to speak them, shaped by instinct and the deep, thrumming power of the Blood Acorn that still coursed through his veins.

”Wind through leaves of standing wood,

Breath of cypress, pure and good,

Shield those who shelter beneath the bough,*

Guardian wind, protect us now.”

Ollie spoke, and the wind answered.

It didn’t come as a gale or a storm. It rose from between the leaves of grass in the bailey as though it had been sleeping beneath the frost and Ollie’s words had simply given it permission to wake.

A steady, shifting turbulence filled the space above the yard, catching the torchlight and making the flames gutter and dance in their iron sconces along the wall. It was the kind of wind that moved through the canopy of a forest, bending branches without breaking them, strong enough to scatter leaves but gentle enough to let a bird keep its perch.

It was enough.

The first arrow came down from the eastern walkway, and the wind took it like a hand swatting aside a gnat. The shaft veered left and clattered harmlessly against the flagstones a dozen paces from anyone who mattered. A second arrow followed, this one from the western wall, and it fared no better, its flight path bending in the shifting air until it buried itself in the side of a water trough with a dull -thunk-.

It cost him. More than it should have. Maintaining the wind was like holding up a stack of sacks full of flour that wanted to come crashing down on top of him. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t as easy to command the wind as it had been before Lady Ashlynn used the Blood Acorn to restore him.

It required a steady flow of concentration that dulled everything else just to ensure that the winds always carried arrows away from them instead of toward them, no matter which direction the arrows came from. The sounds around him grew muffled. The cold of the night air lost its edge. Even the familiar weight of the darksteel cleaver at his hip seemed to recede into the background of his awareness as the wind claimed the foreground.

But beneath the concentration, deeper than the witchcraft, something else stirred. The Blood Acorn’s power hummed in his veins like a furnace banked for the night but never fully extinguished. The Ancient Oak’s fury was there, coiled and patient, and with it came the fragments of memories that weren’t his own: the sound of axes biting into living wood, the sight of sap running like blood, and the smell of a sacred tree burning while men in Lothian yellow and blue watched and laughed.

He pushed it all down as much as he could. The Ancient Oak called out for vengeance and bloodshed, but the soldiers on the walls weren’t much different than his own father, who worked in the stables. They weren’t the knights and lords whose ancestors defiled the Ancient Oak’s descendants for glory and trophies. They weren’t the men who couldn’t wait to repeat their ancestors’ heinous crimes.

They were just common men who needed work, and even if some of them were brutes, that didn’t mean they had to die or that their deaths would in any way slake the Ancient Oak’s desire for revenge.

As the group moved into the bailey, Ollie’s eyes found the stables. The heavy wooden doors were closed against the cold, and no light showed through the gaps in the planking. His father had worked in those stables for more than twenty years, tending to the horses of Lothian lords, sleeping in the quarters above the stalls when the nights were too cold or the work ran too late to walk home to the small room he shared with Ollie’s mother in the servants’ wing.

Was his father there? Had Sir Cynwrig found him in time and brought him to the safety of the guest chambers? Or was his father huddled in the dark above the stalls, listening to the sounds of fighting and wondering what was happening to the world outside his door?

Was he in danger of being struck by one of the arrows that Ollie’s wind had blown away from the people he needed to protect?