The Vampire & Her Witch

Ollie stopped at the edge of the vestibule. The Ancient Oak’s fury boiled inside him, demanding that he charge, that he close the distance and start cutting, that he take these men apart the way he’d taken apart the shield wall and the halberdiers and every other obstacle between the gatehouse and this room.

The memories pressed against his skull; axes and burning groves and Ashlynn’s bruises and Nyrielle’s patient, centuries-old wrath, and all of it screamed for him to move.

But the crest on the knight’s surcoat stopped him.

A fox and a hammer. Kermeen Village.

The recognition cut through the rage like cold water thrown on coals. It didn’t extinguish it, but it created a hissing, steaming gap between Ollie and the rage that didn’t belong to him where something older and more fragile could surface.

Ollie had known that crest since he was a boy in these kitchens. He’d watched the distinguished Sir Jac Kermeen walk through the great hall’s doors while he hauled buckets of water from the well and scrubbed pots until his hands were raw. Then, a few years ago, he’d helped to prepare the feast where Sir Franc Kermeen swore his oath of fealty to Lord Bors and took the place of his ailing father, Jac, as the Knight Protector of Kermeen Village.

Franc hadn’t been one of the famous knights of the Lothian Court. He wasn’t Sir Rain, whose tournament victories in the joust were legendary, nor was he a ’demon’-slaying hero whose name Ollie had whispered to himself while he pretended his wooden sword was made of steel.

But the servants in the kitchens had spoken of Sir Franc with a grudging respect that Ollie had learned to trust more than the praise that flowed from the lips of noblemen. They said his village prospered. They said he settled disputes fairly. They said the men who served under him ate well and were equipped as well as their lord could afford.

If anyone had a complaint about Sir Franc, it was that he clashed too frequently with the lesser barons of the March and that he chafed against the limits of his station. But for all that some men saw him as ambitious, most agreed that his ambition brought prosperity to his villagers, the likes of which his father had never been able to produce after the last of the treasures plundered from Airgead Mountain during the War of Inches dried up.

He was a good knight. Not a great one, perhaps, and he had his share of failings, but he was a good knight nonetheless. He was the kind of knight that Ollie had wanted to become before he understood what becoming a knight actually required.

And now that knight was standing between Ollie and the doors to the great hall, and the blood on Ollie’s cleaver said clearly what would happen if he refused to move.

The rage seething within him fought the recognition. The Ancient Oak didn’t care about good knights or kitchen memories. It cared about vengeance, about the throne in the great hall carved from the body of its murdered child, about the decades of desecration that the house of Lothian had inflicted on the sacred groves.

Every man who served the Lothians was complicit in that desecration, and the oak wanted them all to burn. Even if Sir Franc had never set foot in Eldritch lands, he was the sapling of a man who had raided and murdered on the slopes of Airgead Mountain, and the part of the rage within the Ancient Oak’s seed that belonged to Virve flared even hotter when it recognized that fact.

But Ollie was still in there. He might be buried under the fury, drowning in borrowed hatred, and fighting to keep his head above a tide that wanted to pull him under, but he was still there. And the boy from the kitchens who had admired Sir Franc’s crest could still reach the man holding the cleaver, even if the distance between them grew further with every heartbeat.

"Sir Franc Kermeen," Ollie said, in a voice that was rough and raw, scraped from somewhere beneath the rage like a root pulled from hard earth. "Knight Protector of Kermeen Village."

Franc’s eyes narrowed. The blood-soaked figure before him knew his name. Knew his village. The flame-haired knight’s own crest, a strange tree and an iron pot, embroidered on a jade-green tabard that was now more red than green, was completely unknown to him. He’d memorized every noble sigil in the march the way a merchant memorized his costs and margins, and neither the tree nor the pot belonged to any house he recognized.

"You know me," Franc said, with a wariness in his voice that hadn’t been there when he’d mocked Captain Albyn at these same doors barely an hour ago. The man standing before him was not a sailor playing dress-up. The man standing before him had carved his way through the interior garrison like a butcher through a carcass, and the blood on his weapons and his clothes told a story that Franc could read as clearly as words on a page.

"I grew up in the kitchens of this manor," Ollie said. The words came slowly, each one dragged up from beneath the weight of everything the Blood Acorn had poured into him. "I watched you from the balcony of the Great Hall when you swore your oaths to Lord Bors. You said that Dedication was your highest virtue because you would never falter in your dedication to your village or your lord," Ollie said, glancing at the large doors to the Great Hall as if he was looking back on that long-ago day.

"I admired you," Ollie said. "And I admired your father, Sir Jac, before you, too."

Something flickered across Franc’s face. It wasn’t sympathy, the sight of the carnage behind Ollie killed any chance of that, but confusion, the bewilderment of a man confronting something that didn’t fit into any category he understood.

A kitchen boy. A kitchen boy in a knight’s armor, carrying weapons that had cut through mail and men with equal ease, standing in a vestibule full of bodies and speaking to him with a respect that was completely at odds with the blood on his hands.

And it wasn’t just the respect that seemed at odds with the carnage the young man had wrought... He actually seemed to believe the puffery and nonsense that had accompanied the Oaths Sir Franc swore, as if the posturing statements made for the benefit of the audience were the Holy Lord of Light’s own truth.

"I don’t want to add your name to the list of men I’ve hurt tonight," Ollie continued, and the honesty in the words was raw enough to make several of Franc’s soldiers shift uncomfortably. "I don’t want to hurt anyone I don’t have to. Lay down your weapons. Open the doors. Stand aside. Let Lady Ashlynn reach her sister and let this end without more bloodshed."

"If you do that," Ollie said. "You have my word, a promise between knights, that you won’t be harmed."

"Lady Ashlynn is dead," Franc said, though his conviction wavered as he glanced past Ollie to the column behind him, searching for the woman the blood-soaked knight claimed to serve.

"Your lord wishes I were dead," Ashlynn said from within the center of the group. The knights and sailors in front of her stood aside as she walked forward, her turned-down boots clicking softly on the flagstones of the vestibule as she tilted her head back enough to reveal her features beneath the wide brim of her cavalier hat.

"Owain tried to kill me, more than once," Ashlynn said. "I’ve come to settle the matter. It doesn’t need to involve you. Listen to Sir Ollie and stand aside," she commanded.

Franc’s jaw worked beneath the visor of his helm, and Ollie could see the calculation playing out behind his eyes. The fear of Owain warred with the fear of the man standing before him, and for a long, frozen moment, the outcome hung in the balance.

Then Franc raised his longsword and settled into his stance.

"I don’t believe you," the armored knight said. "Even if I did, it doesn’t change anything. I hold these doors," he said, and his voice cracked on the last word. "For my lord."

Ollie closed his eyes for one heartbeat. Behind the darkness of his lids, the Ancient Oak’s rage surged, eager and ravenous, and for a moment, he let it come, let it fill him the way water fills a bucket, because he knew that what he was about to do would require every drop of fury he could muster.

Then he opened his eyes, and the pale gaze that met Franc’s through the slit of his visor held nothing of the kitchen boy who had admired the man with the fox-and-hammer crest.

"Then I’m sorry, Sir Franc," Ollie said. "Truly."

He raised the cleaver, and the fight began.