The Vampire & Her Witch

A duel between knights. That’s what Lady Ashlynn had called it, and that’s what everyone in the room believed they were watching. The useless, cowardly soldiers had laid down their weapons. The Inquisitor had lowered his flames. The knights and sailors of Blackwell were standing at ease, watching the fight play out with gazes that ranged from disturbed to determined, but not one of them held any doubt that Sir Ollie would win this fight.

Everyone thought he was already defeated. No one thought that Sir Franc had enough left in him to pose a threat to anyone. Not after Sir Ollie had carved into his armor like a butcher with a spring lamb. In fact, a few of the Blackwell knights were even looking at him with pity in their eyes, which only made things worse.

But Franc hadn’t survived the political snake pits of the Lothian Court by being predictable.

If he could reach the girl before anyone reacted, he could drag her behind his shield of ruined armor and put his sword to her throat. The kitchen knight’s eyes told Franc everything he needed to know about what would happen next.

The man who had carved through fifty soldiers to reach this room would stop. He would stop because the girl mattered to him, and men who cared about things could be controlled by threatening the things they cared about.

It was what Owain would do. It was what any smart man would do when his back was against the wall, and his only choices were surrender or death, and it was doubly true when surrender was no different than death.

"Aaarrgggg!" Franc roared through gritted teeth as he tightened his grip on his longsword and surged to his feet.

His movements were ragged, graceless, and bore little resemblance to the clean, disciplined stance he’d opened the fight with. His wounded arm screamed in protest, and his vision tunneled from the pain, but the plate armor did what plate armor was designed to do. It held him together when his body wanted to fall apart.

Franc aimed his thrust at the kitchen knight.

The blade extended toward Ollie’s chest in a line that looked like desperation, like one final attempt to land a blow before surrendering to the inevitable, and for a fraction of a heartbeat, every eye in the vestibule followed the longsword’s point toward Ollie’s body.

The world seemed to move so slowly. The kitchen knight lifted his cursed, black cleaver in an almost lazy fashion, or perhaps it only looked that way to Franc. To the wounded knight, everything felt like it was underwater, moving slowly, making sounds that were distant and muffled.

It didn’t matter. The pounding, thumping pain behind his eyes didn’t matter either. His sword made the briefest of contact with the black cleaver before Franc let Ollie knock his blade off line, using the force of the novice-knight’s deflection to reorient toward his real target.

He pivoted on his back foot, the plate armor grinding at the joints as he threw himself sideways, past Ollie’s left flank, and the longsword’s point swung away from the kitchen knight and toward the girl with the dark hair who stood frozen beside the pregnant woman.

Morwen saw him coming. She saw the longsword’s point turning toward her, saw the desperate, calculating fury in the knight’s eyes through the slit of his battered visor, and her body froze as if she were encased in ice. Every muscle in her stiffened the way a rabbit went still when the hawk’s shadow passed over it. It was an ancient, instinctual response that no amount of courage or good intentions could override in the fraction of a heartbeat she had to react.

But while Morwen froze, Ollie didn’t. He didn’t even think. There was no time to think. Instead, he moved, acting on pure, desperate instinct to protect someone who never should have come to a place this dangerous. Someone who wouldn’t have gotten caught up in all of this if not for him, and her desire to be closer to him...

The darksteel cleaver left his hand.

It wasn’t a throw he’d been trained for. Marcel’s knife-fighting lessons included throwing knives, but he’d never covered the mechanics of hurling a butcher’s cleaver at a man in full plate armor.

Thane would have called the decision reckless at best and suicidal at worst, because a knight who threw away his primary weapon in the middle of a fight was a knight who had chosen to trust everything to a single moment.

But the Blood Acorn’s strength was in his arm, and the Ancient Oak’s fury was in his heart, and the cleaver was so light in his hand after drinking the blood of every man whose blood it spilled tonight that it flew from his fingers as easily as a stone skipping across the still water of his village pond.

Sir Franc was five paces from Morwen when the darksteel cleaver struck him between the shoulder blades.

The impact was catastrophic. The blade sheared through the backplate of his ceremonial armor the way it had sheared through every other piece of steel it had touched tonight, but this time, there was no resistance to speak of at all.

The darksteel edge parted plate, mail, gambeson, and flesh with equal ease until it found the rigid column of bone beneath, and the sound that filled the vestibule was not the ring of metal on metal but the wet, terrible crack of a spine being severed.

Franc’s legs stopped working. The longsword, still extended toward Morwen, dipped as the arm holding it lost its connection to the body that commanded it, and the blade’s tip traced a descending arc through the empty air until it struck the stone floor with a bright, clear ring that echoed off the walls like the tolling of a bell.

Franc’s armored body pitched forward. Without his legs to catch him, he fell the way a tree fell to a woodsman’s axe, dropping like a log until he struck the flagstones face-first with a crash of steel on stone that shook dust from the ancient timbers overhead.

A brief, rattling exhale escaped Franc’s lips, and his eyes stared fixedly at the tiny sliver of the polished stone floor he could see through the slit in his visor before darkness claimed his sight and an unnatural stillness settled over him.

And just like that, in a duel that had only lasted for a few brief minutes, Sir Franc joined the likes of Sir Kaefin, Sir Broll, and all the other knights who had given their lives in the service of a lord who would never mourn their deaths as much as he would mourn the loss of a useful tool.