The Vampire & Her Witch

The little one was dawdling.

Taghai couldn’t see him; the sweeping face guards of his helm saw to that, but he could hear the cadence of his nag’s iron-shod hooves, and he knew the sound of a beast at a gallop. Whatever the broken rhythm the human forced his beast to use, it was a long way from a gallop or a threatening charge.

Fine, Taghai snorted. Let the man pick flowers.

The first ring hung out over his path, and Taghai put his lance through it without breaking stride. He captured the ring more from curiosity than any great desire to. It wasn’t that difficult after all, and in the blink of an eye the ice ran down the shaft and burst against his vamplate in a shower of tiny shards of ice and faintly luminous energy.

"Hmmm," Taghai mused as he charged toward the next one.

A strange energy flowed within him, unlike any sorcery he’d ever experienced. In a pair of heartbeats, he felt his forelegs come down harder and push off the frozen earth cleaner. The weight of his own body settled more comfortably into the fall-and-catch of a proper charge, and the lance sat a little lighter under his arm.

While the energy felt different than anything he’d experienced before, the way his body felt wasn’t unusual at all.

It was the feeling of a good morning. The feeling of the third day of a march when the stiffness had gone out of him, and his body had remembered what it was for. He’d had it a hundred times. He’d had it every time he’d worked himself hard enough and slept well enough and eaten enough red meat, and it was a fine feeling... But it was not a gift.

The witch had hung her rings and put a good morning in each of them, as if they would somehow change the inevitable outcome by forcing a proud warrior of the Southern Steppe to play her festival game.

"This is what they were afraid of?" Taghai sneered. "Baubles like this were enough to decide Khorijin’s match?"

The second ring came up fast. Taghai went at it with his head down and his shoulders driving the lance before him. He was moving well enough now that the ring arrived before the point of his lance had finished its climb, and the tip caught the underside of the ice instead of threading neatly through it.

The wreath burst on the branch.

Ice went past his face in a glittering spray, and then he was past the tree with nothing to show for it.

Taghai snorted and did not slow. A good morning, lost. He had a hundred of them. He’d had one today now that the humans who brought his meals stopped asking if he wanted a pile of hay or oats as if he was a cud-chewing beast of burden.

The third wreath he took cleanly, mostly because the branch hung high and his own height did the work, and the burst against his vamplate gave him another push, along with a faint, lingering glow just barely visible out of the corner of his eye as it clung to his lance.

This one he measured more carefully, because he was curious whether or not the famed Mother of Trees had put anything else besides a good night’s sleep in these baubles. He felt better. Yes. He was faster than he’d been at the gate and his lance felt a bit lighter than it had been in his hand, a bit surer in his grip.

But he was still Taghai of the Whispering Grasses, and he had come into this hollow already the strongest thing in it. The two wreaths of ice had brought him to roughly where he stood on the best day of a good season. Nothing more. He’d expected the witch’s power to feel like... power. Like something he couldn’t have achieved on his own. Instead, it felt like being well rested.

Three days those warriors have been with the healers, he thought, remembering the few men who had contended for the right to face the lord of Aleese in combat. And I did that on an ordinary morning, with no rings at all.

Then the far hillside started shouting.

He didn’t understand the words at first. They came across the infield in a great ragged chant, thousands of them, and the shape of it was two beats, hard, over and over.

"OX. CART."

"OX. CART."

Taghai’s jaw came together hard enough that he felt it in his horns.

They had laughed. The whole hill of them had laughed when the little man made his joke, and now they were chanting it at him, at the champion who had put four of his own kin in the healers’ tents for the honor of standing here. Laughing at the man who had come north across frozen country to collect a debt older than any human in this valley.

A beast. That was what they were calling him. A thing to be harnessed. The little ’Lord Gardener’ had said it in the witch’s warm room with wine in his hand, and now two thousand peasants were saying it in the cold.

The fourth ring came up on his right and Taghai went through the space beneath it without even raising his point.

Enough.

Enough of the witch’s flowers. Enough of picking ice out of the air like a child at a fair while the little man crept round the track collecting trinkets. There was one thing in this hollow that would decide the victor and it was not a ring of ice. It was two thousand pounds of Long Horn at a full charge, and the man who got in front of him would not walk away from it whatever he was carrying.

Let him gather as many as he pleases, Taghai thought. Let him come to the tilt riding high on his petty victories against baubles of ice that never threatened his life.

I will still be the landslide that buries him.

Taghai put his head down and stopped looking at the trees, and began, in earnest, to build momentum for the decisive charge.