The Vampire & Her Witch

”Nor can I think of a more worthy successor as the next Captain of your Stone Guard...”

For a moment, everyone stared in disbelief as Aspakos offered the spear of the fallen captain to Reynold Aleese. Even Tybal had no words to describe the turmoil raging in his heart at the audacious suggestion.

Reynold made no move to take the spear that Aspakos held out toward him. It loomed large in his eyes, with his blood staining its tip while the blood of its previous owner still clung to bits of the shaft where it had splattered in Rastlan’s last, futile attempt to preserve his life against Aspakos’s trap.

Behind him, Thane moved silently, placing Reynold’s cloak around his shoulders and hiding the fresh scars on his back from view.

Only then did Dirar break the silence, and when he did, his tone had grown piercingly cold.

”Do you mean to tell me, Sorcerer,” Dirar said as he glared at Aspakos. ”That you killed Rastlan to clear the path for Reynold to take his place? Is that why you were so ruthless?”

”No,” Aspakos said, hanging his head low. ”This is not the path I would have chosen, no matter how bright of a future it leads to. Those who sacrifice others willingly in order to bend the flow of fate will see everything they touch fall to ruin, and everything they treasure will slip through their fingers, no matter how tightly they cling to it. No number of sacrificed innocents can ever create a future worth living in,” he declared.

Behind him, both Ashlynn and Nyrielle nodded in silent agreement. If Aspakos truly had used Rastlan as a sacrifice, expending what remained of the fallen man’s life in a ritual meant to influence Reynold’s fate, it would have betrayed everything the Bloodroot Empire stood for when it renounced the ways of the Church.

As painful as it would have been, an admission to using a ritual like that would have forced them to execute Aspakos, the same way Ashlynn had executed Abbot Recared. Moreover, even if he’d been innocent of any wrongdoing, the stain of benefiting from such a ritual would have haunted Reynold for the rest of his days.

Here, at the very founding of the Empire, when everything was so delicate, it was a blight they might not recover from. Thankfully, Aspakos seemed to understand their intentions and he bound himself to the same standards they held their empire to.

”I will admit to setting a trap for Rastlan,” Aspakos said calmly, raising his gaze and meeting Dirar’s directly, without flinching from the other man’s fury. ”But he stepped into it, and he rejected every chance I offered him to escape it. In the end, his fate was in his own hands. I did not desire his death,” he said. ”But this is how I choose to honor it.”

”If you think it through, you’ll realize that Lord Reynold will make a much better Captain of your Stone Guard than Khorijin would,” Aspakos added. ”And this way, she escapes the tragedy of being pulled away from Lord Erling too soon.”

”Khorijin?” Dirar said, caught off guard by Aspakos’s sudden shift in topic. ”I hadn’t begun to think of who would succeed Rastlan. Why would you think that I would select Khorijin?”

”You hadn’t thought of her yet, but in three days, or five, when you turn away from grief to face the decisions that must be made, hers would be the name you chose,” Aspakos said. ”She’s far from undeserving of the honor, but compared to placing the head of a comet in such a position...” he said, allowing his voice to trail off with the rest unsaid.

”Leave her free to find the fate most suited for her,” Aspakos advised. ”And take advantage of the opportunity before you. Even if Reynold weren’t someone destined to blaze a trail across the heavens, he is still a worthy warrior, and an able leader of his men.”

”He has prepared his whole life for a role like this,” the feathered sorcerer reminded everyone around the stone platform. ”And he has bested one of the greatest warriors within the Stone Guard already. In what way could you find him lacking?”

”Do you understand what you’re asking of me by placing him there?” Dirar said, taking a deep breath as he struggled to untangle his grief and fury at Rastlan’s death from his feelings toward the man Aspakos suggested as Rastlan’s successor.

He genuinely respected Reynold, and everything he had seen from the man since they first met had left him with a favorable impression. When he said he wanted Reynold as his apprentice, it had been more than an empty, political demand. With Reynold to supervise Aleese at the northern end of the Southern Steppe, he could have established an important refuge for the Great Herds as they followed their annual, migratory paths. Having a trusted lieutenant in the north would have been a boon to the whole Southern Steppe.

But what Aspakos was asking went far beyond asking a man to build a seventh great city, far from the sea. What he’d just proposed had the potential to upend the order of the Southern Steppe in a way that even Dirar couldn’t have foreseen.

”In the Southern Steppe, the Captain of my Stone Guard isn’t just the leader of my personal guard,” Dirar said. ”He carries my will wherever he goes, and only the City Lords and Herd Masters may refuse his orders.”

”Had Rastlan survived or triumphed tonight, he would likely have become the Lord General of the Southern Steppe,” Dirar said, shocking many on the Aleese side of the platform who hadn’t realized the significance of Rastlan’s position or the enormity of what his loss meant to the Southern Steppe.

”In another decade or two,” Dirar said, gazing in the direction that Rastlan’s body had been carried. ”If he’d continued on his current path, he might even have earned the right and accumulated the strength to contend for my throne when I step down...”