The Vampire & Her Witch

Sir Beathan had also witnessed Lady Ashlynn’s miracle. The young Templar’s face was the color of chalk, and his grip on his sword had tightened until the leather of his glove creaked. The verse she’d used had invoked both the sun and sacred fire, and the miracle she’d performed was as great as any he’d ever seen from a High Priest or Abbot, if not greater.

But the words were strange and foreign, and her invocation of leaves and fines sounded blasphemous at best, and heretical at worst. He’d seen great miracles performed before, but never this easily or with such a strange prayer.

Combined with the things he’d seen earlier, he was afraid he knew the truth of what Lady Ashlynn was, even if his lips refused to form the word. Still, he said nothing, and when Ashlynn turned to continue the advance, he fell into formation without a word. Whatever reckoning he needed to have with what he’d just witnessed, it would wait until they’d rescued Lady Jocelynn and put an end to Lord Owain’s reign of terror before it could even begin.

But if the healing had settled something in the people behind her, it had broken something in the man at the front.

Ollie stood at the edge of the light, the darksteel cleaver hanging at his side, his chest heaving with breaths that were too fast and too shallow. He’d watched Devlin go down. He’d watched the blood pool on the stones. He’d felt the same cold shock that everyone else had felt when the weathered sailor’s eyes went glassy, and his breathing turned to that terrible, wet rattle.

And then the power he’d absorbed from the Blood Acorn had answered the turmoil in his heart.

The Ancient Oak’s rage crashed through him like a river breaking a dam. Not the slow burn he’d been fighting to contain, but a flood, hot and roaring and tasting of sap and smoke and centuries of hoarded fury.

The memories came with it, sharper than before, and even more real: he could feel Ashlynn’s bruises forming on his skin along with the sharp, cold sensation of Nyrielle’s patient wrath tightening around his heart. In his ears, the sound of axes biting into the trunk of a sacred tree while men laughed grew louder and louder until it drowned out the anguished cries of the men falling beneath the black blade of his cleaver.

But beneath the borrowed fury, feeding it, amplifying it until the two became indistinguishable, was something that belonged entirely to Ollie.

He’d watched a good man nearly die. A man who had given half his lifetime in service to the Blackwell family, who had come all the way to the edge of the frontier to protect Lady Jocelynn. Captain Devlin was a man who had risked his life extracting the Blackwell household’s servants from Lothian Manor so they wouldn’t share in whatever fate awaited the people they served.

Captain Devlin was a father. A husband. He was a man who hadn’t turned a blind eye to the common servants the way many Lothian Lords would, and that, more than almost anything else Ollie had seen from him, made him a man who deserved to go home to his family when this was over.

And these soldiers, these men in their oiled mail and their polished helms who served the monster in the great hall, had nearly taken that from him. They’d nearly taken it from all of them, from Elgon, whose blood was still seeping through the bandage Isabell had wrapped around his ribs, from every person in this corridor who had come here to do something that should never have needed doing in the first place.

Ollie had spent the entire assault telling himself that these were ordinary men. That they were frightened, that they were following orders, that the rage he felt wasn’t fair to direct at soldiers who were just trying to survive.

He was done telling himself that.

The corridors ahead led to the great hall, and every step between here and there was guarded by men who had been dressed for war since before sunset, positioned by a commander who had organized them into shield walls and polearm lines designed to bleed anyone who tried to pass.

They might have looked like a ceremonial honor guard, but they were the last line of defense between Ashlynn and the hall where her sister was being married to the man who had tried to murder her.

Ollie shifted his grip on Frost Fang and the darksteel cleaver, and the gentleness was gone from his pale eyes.

"Stay behind me," he said, and his voice was flat and cold and carried nothing of the boy who had once cried in the kitchens when the cooks slaughtered a young lamb for a lord’s feast. "All of you. Stay behind me."

"Ollie," Isabell called, looking into his hardened, pale eyes with a gaze that held more ghosts than she cared to count. "Wait, let Ashlynn..."

"I’m fine, Isabell," Ollie said, even though the words sounded hollow in his ears. "We don’t have time to wait. Can’t you hear it?" Ollie asked, glancing down the corridor in the direction of the Great Hall. "The wedding’s already started. We have to go. Now."

"Ollie," Ashlynn said, giving him a worried look as she pursed her lips together. She could feel the power surging within him, bringing with it a rage that didn’t belong to the gentle kitchen boy who had only ever wanted to be a knight like the ones he admired from afar.

But knights weren’t the pure heroes he’d once dreamed they were, and after coming so far without having to claim another man’s life, when the moment was finally upon him, he’d been in the grip of a power and a blood oath that she’d formed with the Ancient Oak Tree. It wasn’t fair to him, and she wanted to pull him back so he didn’t have to stain his hands any further until he was free of the Blood Acorn’s power.

But that wouldn’t be fair to him either. He’d resolved himself to be her knight, and he’d sworn to help her rescue Jocey tonight. The violence and bloodshed in the corridor were part of that promise, and it would be an insult to his resolve to attempt to shield him from it.

"Don’t die, Ollie," Ashlynn said instead of the words she’d prepared to convince him to stay at her side. "You have to help me keep Jocey safe," she reminded him, hoping that his promise would at least hold him back from anything reckless.

"I know," Ollie said. "I promise, I won’t die, and I’ll keep your sister safe," he said before he turned away from the light of the lady he served and faced the darkness ahead.

He walked forward into the corridor, and the soldiers waiting in the darkness ahead heard his footsteps coming and gripped their weapons tighter, and the ones who had fought beside the men he’d already put on the ground tried to tell the others what was coming, but there weren’t enough words in the world to prepare them for what walked around that corner.

The darksteel cleaver rose, and the Cypress Knight went to work...