The Vampire & Her Witch

Sir Franc Kermeen lay on the cold stone floor of the vestibule, clutching his father’s longsword in a grip that was slick with his own blood. The weapon shook in his damaged hands, the blade scraping against the flagstones with a thin, grinding sound that set the teeth of everyone in the room on edge.

He was finished, and he knew it.

Three gashes had been torn through his plate armor by the darksteel cleaver. The breastplate was split down the center, the cuirass of polished steel that had cost him more than a year’s worth of tithes from Kermeen Village looked like it had been peeled open like the rind of a fruit. His right pauldron was a ruin of twisted metal that dug into the joint of his shoulder with every breath, and the rerebrace on his left arm had been sheared through to the muscle beneath, leaving a wound that bled freely down his forearm and onto the floor.

The poison that had been hollowing him out since the Stag Feast chose this moment to surge through his body, driven by the rapid beating of his heart. His vision swam, and the edges of the vestibule blurred into a smear of lamplight and shadow, while his stomach heaved with a violence that left him gasping on the floor like a landed fish.

The pain in his head was a living thing now, a drumbeat behind his eyes that pulsed with every heartbeat, and each pulse drove a spike of white-hot agony through his skull that made thinking feel like trying to read by the flashes of lightning in a thunderstorm.

Above him, the blood-soaked kitchen boy stood with his weapons at his sides, waiting for his opponent to admit to defeat.

Franc’s eyes moved past the knight who had beaten him and swept across the vestibule, searching for something, anything, that he could use to his advantage. He had spent much of his life finding advantages in rooms full of people who underestimated him, and he refused to think that this moment was any different.

His mistake had been in underestimating the lightly armored kitchen knight and allowing himself to be drawn into a duel he had no hopes of winning, but if he could just think, think through the blinding pain in his head, then he was certain that he could find another way out of this mess...

Lady Ashlynn stood at the center of her group, her emerald eyes hard and cold beneath the brim of her cavalier hat. Whatever softness the Count of Blackwell’s daughter had possessed when she first arrived in Lothian March was long gone, burned away by whatever had happened to her in the time since she’d vanished from the public eye.

The hand that rested on the hilt of her falchion was steady, and even though much of her attention was focused on either the duel or the door to the Great Hall ahead of her, she seemed to notice even the slightest movement from the Lothian Soldiers who had given up the fight, as if she expected them to betray their words when they surrendered to the Inquisitor.

Behind her, the Inquisitor in the antiquated robes had lowered his hand, but the memory of golden flames still seemed to cling to his fingers, and his dark eyes watched the scene with the gentle, sorrowful expression of a man who had seen too much violence for a person of his age.

They were strange eyes for an Inquisitor, and he looked far too gentle to be so terrifying, but the speed with which he summoned Holy Flames had been very, very real, and Franc had to believe that the Inquisitor would use them if he was forced to.

Nearby, the pregnant woman sheltered behind the silver-haired engineer, both hands wrapped around her swollen belly and her face drawn tight with an anxiety that went deeper than the fighting. The engineer’s hand rested lightly on the pregnant woman’s shoulder, protective and steady, her spectacles catching the lamplight as her eyes swept the room.

What a grey-haired old woman could do to protect anyone was beyond Franc, but the look in her silvery eyes held far too much confidence for someone who was either incapable or ignorant of the brutal realities of war and a fight to the death.

And there, just a few paces from the center of the group, stood the girl.

She was young, sixteen at most, with dark hair and features that were still softening from childhood into something that might become beautiful if she lived long enough. Her hands were pressed to her lips, and her dark eyes were fixed on the kitchen knight with an expression that Franc recognized as easily as he recognized a knight’s crest on his shield.

She was watching him the way a woman watched the man she loved.

The young squire who had been standing behind her had moved forward when Franc fell, positioning himself between his sister and the duel, and the girl had taken half a step after him before someone pulled her back.

She wasn’t a fighter. She wasn’t wearing armor. She was, Franc realized with the cold clarity of a man whose options had narrowed to a single, desperate point, the only person in the vestibule who couldn’t protect herself.

Better still, while the old woman protecting the pregnant one looked calm, composed, and ready for the chaos of battle, the squire was clearly in the middle of his first battle. He didn’t know how to stand, he didn’t hold his sword in a ready guard, and he wasn’t paying attention to the right things if he intended to protect the young lady whose features resembled his... As a bodyguard, he looked almost completely useless.

But more importantly, he looked like someone who could be bent and twisted in order to protect the pretty girl, and if Sir Ollie were as naive as his belief in Franc’s public reputation suggested he was, then he could capture two knights for the price of claiming a single pawn...