Chapter 576: Threads In The Wind
While Ollie joined the villagers in a celebration of his transformation into the youngest member of Ashlynn’s coven, the youngest among Nyrielle’s progeny was spending the evening in significantly more solitary pursuits.
The passing of the harvest festival ushered in the beginning of what should have been a quiet, restful winter for Lothian City. Across the frontier, villages checked their palisade walls, patched up their defenses, and prepared to weather not only the heavy snows of winter but also the attacks by demons who raided winter stores and poached from herds of livestock.
In a normal year, business at the Gilded Horns might turn busy as demon hunters filled their purses with gold by hunting down members of Eldritch Clans left so isolated that they had little choice but to become raiders and scavengers to survive a harsh winter. This year, however, the actions of the ’demons’ had been strange as they abandoned their villages one after another, retreating behind the walls of the Vale of Mists and leaving the Gilded Horns far emptier than it might have otherwise been.
Sitting behind a plain wooden desk in an office beneath the cellars of the Gilded Horns, Marcel cared little for the way this year’s events would impact the profits or losses he made on the luxurious restaurant that catered to the most wealthy among Lothian City’s residents. At his age, he’d seen enough lean years and rich years that a single bad year for one of his many investments was of little concern.
The greater concern, in his mind, was the way information dried up when he lost half his patrons and the ability to ply the upper class of Lothian City with enough wine to loosen their tongues. It meant he needed to spend more time lurking on rooftops, skulking about the city’s shadows and listening at chimneys and windows to gain a fraction of the information he could gather from one night spent observing the patrons of his restaurant.
The news he had been able to gather, collected painstakingly like catching loose threads on the wind, left him deeply uncomfortable. On his desk, dozens of slips of paper, each covered with his precise flowing handwriting, had been arranged in a way that made patterns easier to identify.
"Bors is getting ready to make a move," the dark-haired vampire muttered. "At least three of the eastern barons have made arrangements to visit Lothian City for Midwinter’s Night vigils, and another is sending his heir to study with the Templars until the spring..."
The last bit had been the most concerning piece of news to reach Marcel’s ears over the past several days. Midwinter’s Night had long been an important holy day to the Templars and to the knights of the frontier with many of them standing ceremonial guard at the gates of temples or cities across the frontier. While Eldritch raids on Midwinter’s Night were exceedingly rare, the ceremony still had special significance to the most pious of knights.
Seeing young knights or the heirs of barons visiting the temple in Lothian City to make a show of standing a Midwinter’s Night Vigil wasn’t news. Seeing three barons move personally with a fourth sending his heir for an entire season was something entirely different.
"Bors is making his support of Loman known," Marcel mused. "No wonder Owain is so nervous," he said, turning his gaze to three vials of Night Weaver venom sitting on the corner of his desk.
Those vials were the price he paid to gain access to Master Isabell and Master Tiernan before they left on their tour of the march. Three vials of venom that would slowly eat away at a person’s body and mind for months until only a drooling invalid remained, lingering on like a ghost that was neither living nor dead.
Of course, few people could care for someone in such a state, and death followed for most within weeks or months of the sickness reaching its final stage, but for the people Owain Lothian intended to use the venom on... who knew how long the young lord might choose to keep them alive.