Chapter 634: The Brother She Needed
Ashlynn smiled warmly as Thane took his place on the opposite side of Nyrielle before she returned her attention to the people gathered in the great hall. "When I arrived, Mistress Nyrielle entrusted my training to Sir Thane, trusting that his years of experience could help me to draw out the greatest benefit from the gift she’d bestowed on me," Ashlynn explained. "But Sir Thane refused to be a simple tutor to me," she said, startling some in the crowd who wondered how one of Lady Nyrielle’s progeny would dare to defy her will.
"I have lived my whole life in the company of knights," Ashlynn continued. "Whether they were my father’s vassals, or the vassals of his vassals, there were always men of virtue and valor gathered under the Blackwell banner, ready to fight and die to protect my father and his family if the need should ever arise," she said with eyes that grew briefly distant as she remembered the members of her father’s court that she’d left behind when she moved to Lothian March.
The distance between the young Ashlynn Blackwell and her father’s knights was much greater than the distance between her sister Jocelynn and those very same knights, but that didn’t mean that Ashlynn was unaware of the men who defended her family’s lands and her very own home. She had always respected and admired the gallant nobility of her father’s knights, and she found them to be gentlemen worthy of that respect in almost every instance.
It wasn’t until she began interacting with Owain’s knights that she realized that not every knight was cut from the same cloth. The frontier prized martial prowess over courtly conduct, and the men under Owain’s command were sometimes little better than brutes in expensive armor with fancy titles. They were mighty and commanded a different form of respect than she was accustomed to, one based on the number of ’demons’ they’d slain rather than their acts of kindness and generosity or their more courtly virtues of dispensing justice in their villages or protecting the peace in their domains.
"I have known knights of every sort you can imagine," Ashlynn continued as she turned her gaze back to Thane’s handsome figure. "But I can think of no man who better exemplifies the virtues of Duty, Courage, and Honor than Sir Thane," she praised without the slightest bit of exaggeration in her tone. "But when I arrived in the Vale of Mists, battered and alone, frightened beyond words and without even the clothes on my back to call my own, it was his other virtues that I needed the most."
"Sir Thane is a man of unquestionable Loyalty," she explained. "And more importantly, he possesses a heart filled with Compassion. The night he took me under his wing, he refused to be my tutor and instead offered to be my elder brother. He helped me to find my strength while he helped me to find my way, and for that, he has my everlasting gratitude," she said, offering a deep curtsy to the charming vampire.
When she arrived in the Vale of Mists, she was more than just lost and confused. Her entire world had been shattered in Owain’s brutal beating, and while Nyrielle offered her strength and power, she didn’t yet know how to offer her a feeling of safety and security.