The Vampire & Her Witch

Behind Ollie and Isabell, Sir Beathan had stopped moving.

The young Templar stood with his sword half-raised and his sandy hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, staring up at the walls where the archers lay draped unconscious over their bows. His face was the color of old parchment, and his jaw worked beneath his lips as if he were chewing on something that tasted of ashes.

He’d watched Sir Ollie’s prayer with uncertain eyes, telling himself that the words might have been nothing more than a local superstition or a soldier’s prayer. Men in the marches prayed before battle all the time.

The fact that the wind had seemed to answer could have been a coincidence, or the Holy Lord of Light extending protection to the faithful, or any of a dozen explanations that didn’t require him to confront the possibility that the flame-haired knight he’d been fighting alongside was something other than what he appeared.

But there was no explaining what Master Isabell had just done. There was no prayer that turned longbows into serpents. There was no miracle of the Church that choked men senseless with their own weapons and then released them, unharmed, as if the whole thing had been nothing more than a bad dream.

That was witchcraft. And the woman who had done it was standing a dozen paces from him, adjusting her spectacles and telling the witch-knight that a few minutes should be more than enough time for them to cross the rest of the bailey and breach the heavy, ironbound doors of the Lothian fortress.

”Beathan,” Devlin said sharply, appearing at the Templar’s side with the quiet efficiency of a man who had been watching for exactly this reaction. The sailor’s weathered face was hard, and he held a curved sword in one hand while the other carried his long fighting knife, though not in a way that suggested he intended to use either of them on the bewildered Templar.

”Don’t tell me you didn’t start to suspect when you saw her face,” Devlin said, keeping his voice low enough that only Beathan could hear. The master engineer’s youthful appearance had been a shock to everyone who remembered her from Blackwell, and Devlin had seen the way Beathan’s eyes had lingered on Isabell’s impossibly smooth skin and bright, glossy silver hair during the gathering at the Gilded Horns.

”You can have your doubts about her later,” Devlin said sharply. ”Right now, we need your sword and shield.”

Beathan’s jaw clenched. His eyes moved from Isabell to the unconscious archers on the walls, and then to the doors of the manor where the fight was about to continue.

”Inquisitor Diarmuid,” Beathan said under his breath, and it was clear from the way he said the name that this wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed his mind. He’d already asked the hawk-nosed Inquisitor to talk to him about how men of faith had come to be aligned with the dem-er, the Eldritch, and Diarmuid had promised to give him honest answers when the time was right.

Now, it seemed like that conversation would need to cover a great deal more than Beathan had originally anticipated.

”Later,” Beathan said, echoing Devlin’s word. He raised his sword, set his jaw, and fell back into formation with the rest of the column.

The moment passed. But Morwen, who had watched the entire exchange from her place beside Samira, noticed that when Sir Beathan moved forward, he positioned himself on the opposite side of the column from Isabell, and his eyes never quite settled on the master engineer for the rest of the crossing.

The way to the manor doors was nearly clear. Soldiers were pouring from the nearby barracks, alerted by the commotion at the gatehouse if not by the archers’ muffled struggles. They came in a ragged rush, more than a dozen men with swords drawn and shields raised. Some of them had managed to buckle on armor, whether it was a thickly padded gambeson or a coat of mail worn over a nightshirt, while others had managed to find little more than their boots and breeches before taking up their weapons and rushing out into the cold night air.

But all of them, each and every man among the defending soldiers, wore the same grim expression as they glanced between the enemies who were already past the outer gate and the Great Hall where their lord was preparing to marry his bride. None of them wanted to die here, and few of them wanted to charge a column that included at least five knights, four templars, and two Inquisitors...

But if they died here, at least they would die a clean death. If Lord Owain found out they’d cowered in their barracks instead of rushing to defend the manor, the fate that awaited them was worse by far.

Sir Elgon met the first of them before the man had even set foot on the flagstone path leading from the gatehouse to the manor’s main entrance. The veteran knight’s sword swung in a powerful arc, knocking the guardsman’s spear aside to create a gap that Elgon could step into. The panicked guardsman tried to get his weapon back into line, only for the spear’s shaft to slam into Elgon’s raised shield.

A moment later, Elgon thrust out with his sword. Decades of practice made it painfully easy to find the gap between the guardsman’s hastily donned hauberk and the coif lying loosely atop his head. There was a brief moment of resistance when the point of his sword pierced the other man’s throat, followed by a solid -thunk- that sent a shiver along the length of the blade when the tip struck bone.

A spray of hot blood spurted from the dying man’s neck like a fountain, but Elgon had already turned away, wrenching his blade free to face the next guardsman before the first one finished falling.

Devlin was only half a step behind, his curved fighting knife singing through the cold air as he caught a second guard’s wild swing on his sword and buried the knife in the man’s side below the ribs. The sailor’s face was as cold as the winter night around them, and when the guard fell, Devlin stepped over the body without breaking stride.

”Throw down your weapons, and you won’t be harmed!” Ashlynn called, but her words fell on deaf ears. Fight, and maybe they would live. Surrender, and they would only die an even more gruesome death at Owain’s hands.

More than a dozen men had rushed Ashlynn’s column, but within the span of a dozen heartbeats, two dozen at most, all of them lay dead or unconscious, strewn across the flagstone path like broken, bloody dolls. A lucky few had collapsed when Ollied slammed an armored fist into their helms, but the rest would never rise again.