The Vampire & Her Witch

The cleaver was still in his hand, and the Ancient Oak’s rage was no longer something he could push down. The memories had teeth now, sinking into his thoughts the way Owain’s fists had sunk into Ashlynn’s body, and the fury that coursed through him had grown past the point where he could tell the difference between his own anger and the Blood Acorn’s borrowed hatred.

He could turn away from the men who had thrown down their weapons, though he had to fight to ignore such tempting, easy targets. The men who clung to their weapons still, however, including the sergeant who led the group of men, received no mercy from him.

Ollie charged forward, ignoring the desperate, frightened thrusts of halberd points that skittered along his mail and only taking interest in the guardsman’s weapons when a heavy pole-axe slammed into his shoulder with enough force to finally spill blood. Any other man would have lost an arm to the blow, but for Ollie, whose skin had become as tough as ancient bark, it only bit into his flesh enough to dye the sleeve of his gambeson red before Ollie was on the man like a wild bear mauling its prey.

Ollie’s cleaver swung in a vicious arc, mirroring the axe-man’s own strike and aiming for the shoulder. But unlike when the axe struck Ollie, the darksteel cleaver parted links of mail like linen and hewed through bone with the same ease that an ordinary cleaver would crush the bones of chicken or goose.

"AAAAAARRRGGGHHH!"

–THWUMP–

The man screamed in agony as his severed arm fell to the ground with a wet, meaty sound. His axe clattered uselessly to the ground an instant before Frost Fang’s point found his throat, silencing him forever.

"Sir Ollie," Morwen whispered, pressing her hands over her lips as she watched the kind and gentle knight laying into the remaining soldiers with the fury of a berserker, staining his tabard with blood as men fell broken at his feet.

Her attention was so focused on the flame-haired knight that she was taken completely by surprise when a soldier burst from a side passage to the right, nearly colliding with her and Samira.

The young man was barely older than Cadeyrn, his face flushed with panic and his eyes wild. The sword in his hand suggested that he’d been running toward the fighting rather than away from it, and when he saw the group of women and the squire standing in the center of the corridor, he swung.

Cadeyrn moved before Morwen even had a chance to scream.

Her brother stepped forward with a quickness that surprised Morwen, putting himself between the soldier and the women and bringing his sword up in a guard position that their father had drilled into him a thousand times on the practice fields of Thorne Village.

The soldier’s blade came down in a hard, clumsy overhand cut driven by instinct rather than skill, and Cadeyrn caught it on his own blade, the impact jarring his arms hard enough that she saw his teeth clench.

The bigger man’s weight bore down on him. Cadeyrn’s knees buckled, his feet scraped against the stone, and for a horrible, stretched moment, Morwen thought her brother was going to be driven to the ground.

But Cadeyrn dug in, his broad build absorbing the force the way their father’s training had taught him to, and he turned the blade aside with a grinding slide of steel that threw sparks from the edges of both weapons.

Cadeyrn didn’t follow up. He didn’t try to counter-attack or press the opening he’d created. He simply held his ground, keeping his sword between the soldier and his sister, and waited for the other man to make a move.

Sir Beathan was there in the space of two heartbeats, his heavy Templar blade coming down on the soldier’s weapon with a force that knocked it from the young soldier’s hands. A second blow, delivered with the pommel of his sword, struck the soldier across the helm and sent him sprawling unconscious across the herb-strewn floor in a clatter of armor on stone.

"Good lad," Beathan said, clapping Cadeyrn on the shoulder with a mailed hand. The Templar’s expression was fierce, but his eyes were kind as he looked down at the squire. "You did well. Stay close to your sister."

Cadeyrn nodded, swallowing hard, and resumed his position behind Morwen with his sword still drawn and his hands trembling just enough for her to notice.

"Cadeyrn," Morwen said softly, reaching out to touch her brother as if to reassure herself that he was still there. "Are you... Are you hurt?"

"I’m fine," the young squire said. He barely noticed his sister’s touch as his eyes swept the corridor, searching for anything else that might threaten them while his heart thundered in his chest.

Behind them, Lord Liam, Sir Hugo, and the others from the rearguard were making their way forward, reuniting with the head of the column as the adjacent halls seemed to have run out of armed men to send against them.

"Devlin’s down!" Elgon’s voice cut through the aftermath, sharp with an urgency that had nothing to do with the fighting. "He’s bleeding badly. We need to stop the bleeding or he’s not going to..."

The veteran’s voice faltered. He was kneeling beside Devlin’s body, both hands pressed against the wound in the sailor’s side, and the blood was seeping through his fingers the way it had seeped through the torn fabric of the gambeson. Devlin’s face was the color of old parchment, his breathing shallow and rapid, and his eyes had gone glassy with the distant, unfocused look of a man whose body was beginning the slow process of surrendering to the inevitable.

The corridor went quiet except for the sound of Devlin’s wet, labored breathing and the distant, muffled swell of music echoing from the Great Hall where more than a dozen minstrels played the final stirring notes of a bridal procession...