Chapter 664: Bottomless Grave (Part Two)
How long she sat in the forest, staring into the bottomless pit, Ashlynn couldn’t say. The sun had been slipping toward the horizon when she wandered into the woods in search of this spot, and the darkness of a moonless night had enveloped the forest for quite some time before the soft crunch of foot falls on fallen branches and the soft golden light of a lantern disturbed her spiralling thoughts.
"My Lady?" Ollie called as he navigated his way through the forest to find Ashlynn sitting at the base of a cedar tree. Ever since becoming the Cypress Witch, he could feel her presence and her proximity even if they were leagues apart so it hadn’t been difficult to find her, but when he did, he momentarily wondered if he should have... or if he should have just waited for her to return to the hastily established camp.
"What is it Ollie?" Ashlynn asked in a tone that was much lighter and clearer than her heart felt. "Has Marcel already arrived?"
"Not yet, my Lady," Ollie said, dropping down to one knee in the soft earth of the forest and bowing his head deeply. "My, lady," he said stiffly. "One of the men I brought from the village has gone missing. Darragh, one of the hunters you captured when you defeated Sir Broll," he explained. "I, I think he’s trying to escape from the Vale."
"Oh? And why would he be doing that?" Ashlynn said, looking up at Ollie with puffy red eyes and tearstained cheeks. "I thought that he was living well with everyone in the village."
"I thought he was too," Ollie confessed, as he tried and failed to suppress the look of shock and concern that flickered across his face when he saw Ashlynn’s distraught visage. "My lady, are you well? This place," he said, glancing at the shallow pit that seemed just large enough to hold a person’s body.
"I’ll be fine," Ashlynn insisted as she brought a silk handkerchief to her eyes and rubbed the tears away. "You don’t need to be so formal with me when it’s just the two of us Ollie," she added as she tapped the ground next to her, gesturing for Ollie to take a seat. "All of the courtly manners, the ceremonies, those things are performances for the audience witnessing formal events and sometimes the people in the middle of them."
"Between a knight and his liege lady, there’s no need for all of this," she said, giving him a gentle smile as he joined her sitting at the base of the cedar tree. "Besides, you’re not just my knight. You’re part of my coven and that makes us family. So please," she said, leaning her head on his shoulder and slumping against his strong torso as she continued to stare at the shallow grave. "Please, don’t be too formal with me when it’s just the two of us," she said softly.
"All right, Ashlynn," Ollie replied, stumbling only slightly at using her name without a formal title, though he still wasn’t sure what else he should say. After yesterday’s festival, followed by his formal knighting and the bestowal of his surname, his mind was still grappling with all of the different nuances to their relationship. He felt closer to her now than he had before she returned to the Vale, but that closeness kept getting tangled up in his desire to be a ’proper’ knight and he din’t want to fall short of her expectations of him after last night’s ceremony.