The Vampire & Her Witch

Several hours had passed, and the moon had made its way down from the top of the sky.

It hung low over the western mountains now, close enough that its lower edge had begun to kiss the peaks, and the light it threw across the training yard had gone long and shallow and blue. The torches and braziers had burned down to sullen orange hearts, and nobody had thought to feed or replace them in some time.

Seven lances lay along the rail where Cossot had piled them, though calling them lances was a generous word for what was left at this point. They had been shafts of good seasoned ash twelve feet long, and now they’d been reduced to kindling, split along the grain, shattered a foot back from the point, one of them broken clean into three pieces. Each had lasted two passes. A few had lasted three.

Seven lances. Two or three passes apiece, and all of them belonged to Sybyll. Anyone who cared to do the arithmetic could count what the night had cost, and the three shields propped against the shed wall finished the sum. Two were cracked through the rim, and the third had its iron boss driven back through the boards and out the other side, leaving the leather straps hanging where they had been cut away from an arm that could no longer work the buckles.

At the far ends of the list, two horses turned toward each other, resetting their positions and beginning a dance that had begun to feel as familiar as the dance between a groom and his betrothed.

The chestnut stallion came around first, sixteen hands of him, blowing hard with the white blaze on its forehead shining like silver in the moonlight. Star Chaser’s sides were sheeted with sweat that steamed in the cold winter air. Two hundred paces away the black mare wheeled without being asked, dropped her head once before she came off the mark like a stone out of a sling.

Nobody on the benches said a word.

Liam Dunn had stopped keeping count somewhere around the fifth lance. Virve had stopped taking wagers a good while before that, and the apple she’d been eating sat half finished in her hand.

Roseen stood very still with her hands folded, wearing an expression of increasing worry as she looked from the charging horses to the bright-eyed Cossot who seemed unwilling to blink lest she miss a moment of the action.

Even Thane, who had been a steady, commanding presence for most of the night, had gone quiet and simply watched.

One question occupied every mind in the training yard even though no one spoke it aloud. It wasn’t a question of whether Reynold could win or not. There was no winning when he didn’t even hold a lance in his hand. The question everyone wanted an answer to was what exactly kept Reynold in his saddle after all this time, pass after pass, without ever giving up.

It wasn’t strength. That had gone somewhere in the second hour. Perhaps it was determination, or maybe it was pride; the plain stubborn refusal of a man who had never yet been carried off a field and did not intend to start. The honest truth was that Reynold Aleese couldn’t have told them which, because he had stopped being able to tell the difference a long time ago.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

Reynold saw Sybyll coming.

He saw the mare’s head go down and the crimson shape settle low over her neck, and he counted the strides the way he had counted them all night. The pair of them moved like a creature with a single mind, charging down the list with a grace every bit as beautiful as Poppy’s rider, though Reynold’s admiration of the beauty of their movement had cracked several times under the force of repeated blows from Dame Sybyll’s lances.

He shifted the angle of his shield ever so slightly, moving the rim of the shield three fingers to the left at most, and he held it there. And then, a mere half-stride from the impact, he tapped the point of his sabatons against Star Chaser’s ribs, asking for the tiniest bit of a pivot.

For one clean fraction of a heartbeat, he knew, knew to the depths of his bones that he finally had it right...

-CRACK!-

The lance struck his shield harder than anything Reynold had ever felt, and it went all the way through; through the boards and through the strapping and into his forearm and up through the elbow and the shoulder and across his spine, and by the time the force of the blow reached his hips it no longer felt like a blow from a lance. It felt like he’d run into a stone wall at a gallop and the wall always won.

Star Chaser galloped on down the list.

Reynold did not.

There was a moment with no ground in it, and it lasted several heartbeats longer than it should; then the moon swung across his vision like a lantern on a chain, and frozen earth came up and took him in a clatter of splintered wood and armored limbs.

The impact drove the air from his chest, and his helm rang like a struck bell with his own skull inside it. The world lost its sound in an instant, but not before Reynold heard a sickening -POP- from his left shoulder, accompanied by searing pain that turned his whole world red.

”...old! Reynold, are you...” A distant, tinny voice shouted, though Reynold could hardly hear it over the high-pitched ringing that filled his ears.

Screwing his eyes shut against the pain, Reynold strained with his right arm, raising it up high enough that everyone could see that he was still alive. Unfortunately, the move placed even more pressure on his left shoulder, and this time his red-edged vision turned black as unconsciousness blissfully carried him away.