Chapter 785: Returning to the Summer Villa
In the early morning light just before the sun broke over the eastern hills, Ashlynn stood at the edge of the forest with Ollie, Virve, and the looming figure of Captain Ipiktok. The air was chill enough to turn their breath into small white clouds and a layer of frost covered the tall, swaying grass of the hillside leading up to the Summer Villa.
The Villa itself was exactly as she remembered it and for a moment, Ashlynn and Ollie exchanged a brief look and a slight smile as they remembered the time they spent together in the kitchens here. Despite everything that had happened during Ashlynn’s brief visit to this place half a year ago, something wonderful had begun here.
Now, as they gazed at the curtain wall that wrapped around the hilltop like a discarded scarf made of stone and the grand manor beyond it an entirely different set of feelings slowly took hold. Slowly, their expressions hardened as they counted the men moving up onto the walls, extinguishing watch fires and torches and preparing for a day spent staring nervously at the forest.
"I count twenty men on the walls," Ashlynn said, using vision keener than any human’s to pick out the figures of men half hidden behind the crenellations. "Ten more from the night watch that just stood down. Likely at least another twenty within the walls."
"Who does the banner belong to?" Ollie asked, pointing to the dark green banner flying from the gatehouse towers.
"Sir Cathal Wynn," Ashlynn said as she examined the figure of a mounted knight beneath an apple tree that adorned the banner. "He was here the last time I was," she reminded Ollie. "He fought as one of Bors Lothian’s captains during the War of Inches," Ashlynn added with a glance at Virve.
"Then his life belongs to me," Virve growled, flexing her hands in her darksteel fighting gauntlets. Were it not for the thick leather War Hat on her head, wrapped with a hatband studded with acorns, she wouldn’t have looked different from any of Nyrielle’s other guardsmen, dressed in her familiar armor and carrying the same weapons she had for decades as she protected the Eldritch Lady of the Vale.
Ollie, on the other hand, had changed considerably from the last time he’d been here. Like Ashlynn, he wore a coat of chain mail over a heavy, padded gambeson, but unlike the Mother of Trees, he wore a jade-green tabard over his armor, bearing the symbol of a large iron pot in front of a cypress tree.
Ashlynn had suggested he use his butcher’s cleaver or a chef’s knife as part of his sigil, but Ollie refused. He became a knight by feeding people and he never wanted to forget his days as nothing more than a kitchen boy, no matter how high he rose in the future. Besides, he’d said, the iron pot could be taken as a witch’s cauldron just as easily, making it an emblem that represented both his past and his future.