The Vampire & Her Witch

For a moment, the wind faltered. An arrow came whistling through air toward Sir Elgon and only the man’s many years of experience allowed him to raise his shield in time to stop the deadly missile.

-THUNK-

The sound of a broadhead burying itself into the veteran knight’s shield was enough to snap Ollie out of his worries and bring him fully back to the present. Sir Cynwrig had promised to find Ollie’s parents and to protect them. He’d had an entire night and day to do so. Ollie had to believe that he’d succeeded.

More importantly, whether Cynwrig had succeeded or not, there the wind had to hold. If it faltered, even for a moment, the archers on the walls would have clear shots at every person he’d sworn to protect.

He kept the wind steady, and he kept moving forward.

Marcel appeared at Ashlynn’s side as the group reached the center of the yard. The Black Merchant had moved through the column without seeming to move at all, materializing beside Ashlynn as though the shadows had simply deposited him there. He was dressed in dark clothing that absorbed the torchlight rather than reflecting it, and the only thing that caught the eye was the faint glint of the knives at his belt, visible for just a moment before his cloak fell back into place.

”This is where I leave you,” Marcel said, his voice pitched low enough to reach Ashlynn and no one else. His dark eyes swept the bailey, reading the positions of guards and the layout of passages with the practiced ease of a man who had spent years mapping every route in and out of Lothian Manor. ”The servant corridors will take me to the administrative wing while your friends keep everyone busy.”

”Be careful,” Ashlynn said, though they both knew the word was insufficient for what Marcel was about to do. Infiltrating the private offices of a Marquis during an armed assault was the kind of task that could end very badly if Bors or one of the previous generations of Marquis had left behind traps constructed by the priests of the Church.

No one, not even Nyrielle, had dared to breach the innermost defenses of Lothian Manor since the Midnight Massacre when she descended on Lothian Manor with the surviving members of her first forty-seven progeny to kill Cellach Lothian. Now, Marcel was leaving Ashlynn’s side to do just that.

It was terribly risky, but bringing the march under control wouldn’t just require the administrative records of tithes and deeds. It would require evidence of generations of Lothian schemes to be laid bare before the lords who had been trapped under the pressure of Lothian thumbs since long before they ever sat upon their thrones. It would require the sort of documents that some Lothian loyalist might try to destroy in the chaos that would erupt once Ashlynn ’returned from the dead’ and neither Ashlynn nor Marcel intended to risk that happening.

Marcel could be a powerful fighter at her side and a fierce protector, but the same could be said for Ollie, Isabell, and many others. What the Vale’s Spymaster was about to do, however, was a task that suited him alone.

”I’ll find you when it’s done,” Marcel said, and then he was gone, slipping between the stables and the storage buildings like smoke through a cracked window, heading for the servant entrance that would take him deep into the manor’s hidden passages while everyone else went through the front door.

On the walls, the archers were organizing.

Ollie could feel them through the wind, the way their movements disturbed the turbulence he was maintaining. Individual bowmen loosing arrows on their own initiative were one thing, easily handled by the shifting air currents, but a coordinated volley was something else. Already, the men on the walls were starting to stagger their fire, waiting for one puff of wind to start moving an arrow before the next man adjusted his aim and fired, with each successive shot coming closer and closer to their group.

A voice called out from the eastern walkway, sharp and commanding, and Ollie heard the creak of bowstrings being drawn back in unison.

Isabell stepped forward.

She moved past the edge of the protected group at the core of the advancing column of warriors, past Samira and Morwen and Cadeyrn, and her spectacles caught the torchlight as she raised her right hand toward the archers on the eastern wall. Her face was calm, her lips barely moving, but the words that left them carried a precision that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with intent.

”Yew and ash once served the grove,

Till soldiers named you treasure trove,

Remember now the serpent’s way,

Embrace the ones who made you slay.”

No sooner had the last word slipped past her lips than every longbow on the eastern wall screamed.

It wasn’t a sound that wood should make. It was a high, thin shriek, like the cry of a living thing remembering what it had been before it was cut and shaped and strung for killing. The smooth, polished staves of yew and ash writhed in the archers’ hands, their straight lines bending and curling with a fluid, sinuous motion that was utterly, horribly alive. The grain of the wood rippled like muscle beneath skin, and before the first archer could cry out in alarm, the bow in his hands was no longer a bow at all.

It had become a living serpent, seemingly made of solid wood!

Thick as a man’s forearm, carved from the same yew that had been shaped and seasoned for war, the wooden snake coiled around the archer’s arm with a strength that no living serpent possessed. The bowstring, caught in the transformation, wound itself around the man’s wrist like a garrote, and the archer’s fingers spasmed open as the blood flow to his hand was crushed to nothing.

All along the eastern walkway, the same transformation was taking hold. Bows twisted into snakes that lunged not for the men’s hearts or their bellies, but for their throats. The wooden coils wrapped around necks with the precise, measured pressure of a chokehold rather than a killing grip, squeezing the arteries that carried blood to the brain while leaving the windpipe just open enough to gasp.

Men who had been drawing back to loose a volley clawed at the coils around their throats for a few desperate heartbeats before their eyes rolled back and their bodies went limp, slumping to the walkway in a clatter of dropped arrows and nerveless limbs.

Isabell’s hand shifted to the western wall, and her lips formed the same words again, quieter this time, almost gentle. The bows on the western wall obeyed just as swiftly. Within half a minute, every archer on both walls was either unconscious on the walkway or had thrown himself flat with his hands over his head, praying to the Holy Lord of Light for salvation from the demons below.

Then, as smoothly as they had transformed, the serpents went still. The sinuous coils stiffened and straightened, the grain of the wood settling back into its original shape, and what had been living, constricting things a moment before were once again simple longbows, lying across the bodies of the men they had rendered senseless.

”They won’t be out for long,” Isabell said, lowering her hand and adjusting her spectacles with the familiar, practiced motion that made the gesture seem almost absurd after what she’d just done. ”A few minutes at most. But it should be more than enough time to get inside.”

”Thank you, Isabell,” Ollie said, and the gratitude in his voice was genuine enough that the Hemlock Witch’s composure cracked just far enough to let through a brief, tired smile.

”Don’t thank me yet,” she said quietly. ”We’re still not through the door.”

Ollie let the guardian wind die. The air above the bailey stilled, and the torches on the walls steadied, and for a moment, the only sounds were the ragged breathing of the group and the distant murmur of the feast inside the manor.

But the quiet didn’t last for long. Already, Ollie could hear the sounds of booted feet rushing across the bailey from the barracks where the soldiers were quartered, and unless the long-buried roots beneath the soil were lying to him, the number of men approaching them was anything but small....