The Vampire & Her Witch

”Sister, we need to talk,” Aleser said, shifting uncomfortably on his tail as he glanced around the room with his only working eye. The air tasted charged, and his sister’s aura contained fading traces of menace, but as soon as the topic of the arena came up, the air around her acquired a sharp, acrid tang that was unpleasant to tongue and nose alike.

”We do,” Erna agreed as the tip of her tail swished through the marble dust on the stone floor of the workshop. Now that her irritation had returned, the feel of dust beneath her scales and the chill that seeped up from the ground combined to make the space more unwelcoming than she’d realized when her attention was focused on the statue taking shape in the middle of the room.

”Not here,” she said firmly as she pulled the fur-lined winter cloak she wore tighter around her shoulders. ”Join me on my boat, we can return to the palace together, and your man can follow behind us.”

Before Aleser could answer, Erna shifted her gaze to Master Vespert, who had stood very still through the entire exchange between the High Lady and her general, and who had not, to his enormous credit, moved an inch closer to the long stone bench at the back of his workshop or shown any sign of being relieved that Aleser had come to his rescue before matters became dire.

”Master Vespert,” Erna said as she prepared to leave.

”Highest One,” Vespert responded, bowing his head and lowering his tail in an obvious sign of submission. Obvious, at least, to anyone who knew the ways and habits of the Painted Masks Clan as well as Erna did.

”Make them beautiful,” she commanded as she lowered herself fully onto the coil of her tail and turned toward the workshop’s outer archway. ”For any other champion, a monument like this would serve to remind future generations of the champions of ages gone by. This one is different,” she said pointedly.

”Five hundred years from now, you and I will long have turned to dust, ground down to sand beneath the feet of future champions,” she said as she turned her gaze to the block of stone. ”But The Harbinger of Death and the Mother of Trees will reign for a thousand years or more, so long as they can survive the crises at the dawn of their era.”

”This monument isn’t to remind the future that they lived,” Erna said. ”It’s to remind Her Eternity and Her Dominion of the beginning of their journey, and that the High Fen stood with them from the earliest days. I want them to remember that here, they were witnessed for who they truly were. Here, they were understood, and here, they were treasured...”

”I understand, Highest One,” Vespert said as the final piece of the puzzle he hadn’t fully understood settled into place at last.

It wasn’t just the alliance between the Harbinger of Death and the Mother of Trees that Erna was commemorating with this monument; it was the position of the High Fen at the dawn of an era that would be shaped by that alliance. Long after Lady Erna had fallen, she hoped that this statue would remind Nyrielle and Ashlynn to be kind to the High Fen, in the name of the things she did today.

It was a monument that carried tremendous weight and even greater hopes... And once he understood that, he understood why she pushed him so hard on the monument’s design and his work.

”I understand,” Vespert said solemnly. ”And it will be as you require.”

”Good,” Erna said as she opened the shop’s door. ”I will come again to see your progress in a month, but do not worry, Master Vespert,” she said with a hint of genuine warmth in her voice. ”Even if it takes you more than a year to complete and the High Pass opens and closes before it’s done, I will not rush perfection. The place where this monument will stand has yet to be built,” she reminded him. ”So take all the time you need...”

With that, she slipped out of the warm workshop and into the brisk, bitter chill of the evening air.

The cold of the longest night of the year was not a thing that she could easily ignore, and her body registered the danger before her mind did. The slow heavy reluctance of muscle that had been warm in the workshop and was suddenly being told to move through air that wanted to steal her strength away, and the twitch of a tail that rebelled at being forced to slide along the bitterly cold stones of the walkway between the shop and the canal.

She held her head high and forced her tail to glide in the same long unhurried motion she had used inside the workshop, because a serpent who hurried in the cold was a serpent who admitted that she was cold, and a High Lady did not admit to such things in front of her own anyone. Not even in the evening gloom on the night when half the people of the Scaled Clan in the High Fen were tucked up indoors by their hearths, and the ones who weren’t envied those who were.

Besides, if she was slow, then Aleser, gliding along beside her, had to move every bit as slowly, and there was a childish part of her that was still delighted at seeing him suffer, even if only a little bit.

She could see it in the careful tension of his muscles and the slow, deliberate coil of his tail behind him. Like her, he was making the long glide to the canal landing look easy, and just like her, he wasn’t fooling anyone who knew how to look.

The two of them moved across the lamp-lit stones of the narrow walkway and down the wide, shallow steps to the water with the carefully matched pace of two cold-blooded creatures pretending to find the longest night perfectly comfortable.

Her longboat was waiting at the bottom of the steps, exactly where she had left it, with her steersman Hekiet standing at his post and her two armed retainers already settled along the long bench at the stern.

The boat was a small kingdom in itself. Forty feet long and ten feet across at the beam, its long flat bottom drew only the shallowest of drafts so that it could move through the canals at any depth the season offered.

A heavy oiled canvas canopy stretched the full length of it on a frame of polished blackwood, and along the central spine of that canopy, three squat brass braziers hung from chains, each one filled with coals that Hekiet had been tending faithfully since she had stepped off at the workshop. The interior of the canopy glowed with a deep red-orange warmth that Erna could feel pressing against her face from twenty paces away.

She allowed herself, just for a heartbeat, the small private pleasure of looking forward to entering it.

Then she slid down the steps and across the long flat boards of the boat in a single careful motion, and as the warmth of the brazier-heat closed over her, she felt the heavy cold reluctance fall out of her muscles all at once, and a small involuntary hiss of relief escaped her teeth before she could stop it.

Aleser made the same hiss behind her and did not bother to stop it at all.

”Mercy,” he said quietly.

”Mercy indeed, Brother,” she said as she slid toward a comfortable pile of cushions close to one of the braziers.

”This is no night for serpents,” he said as he arranged a loop of his tail near the warmth radiating from the brazier while the rest of his body sank blissfully into the warmth of the cushions.

”This is no night for serpents,” she agreed as she accepted a cup of hot spiced wine from her faithful attendant, who had paused only long enough to pour a second one for her brother when he realized that the general would be joining them.

”Thank you, Hekiet,” Erna said as her tongue flickered through the steam rising from the warmed wine, savoring the scent of cinnamon and clove along with the faintest note of preserved citrus peel that had steeped in the warm wine.

”It is my pleasure, Highest One,” the aging attendant said as he offered the second cup to Aleser.

”Take us back to the palace. The long way,” Erna added as she turned her attention to her brother. ”Down past the Champion’s Plaza and along the Eastern Canal,” she said, hoping the sight of the city’s greatest champions immortalized in marble would help to brighten her mood the way Master Vespert’s work had.

”Yes, Highest One.”

”Now, Brother,” Erna said as she turned her attention back to the man responsible for arranging tonight’s... fiasco. ”Explain to me what went so terribly wrong in the arena tonight.”