The Vampire & Her Witch

”Is it me, or are the crowds even larger today?”

Ashlynn’s simple question prompted several people in the private box to crane their necks, looking out at the gathering crowds and trying to compare them to yesterday. Perhaps the crowd was larger, but in a space so vast, it was hard to say. Perhaps there were another thousand people? Two thousand? No one dared venture a guess, though one person felt it was more likely than not.

”Tomorrow is a rest day for the field workers,” High Lady Erna explained as she sipped on a wine that was such a deep red that it appeared almost purple. ”Since they don’t have to work tomorrow, they’re more willing to indulge today. I expect the crowds will be even larger tomorrow.”

”High Lady, you sound very confident that our friend will win again today,” a light, feminine voice said from the row of seats behind the thrones. ”She’s fought forty men already. Do you really think she can win again today? They say that Yotsun hired some extraordinary mercenaries to fight in today’s battle.”

”Too easy, too easy,” Talauia said. Her wings hummed with a faint, high-pitched wine that matched her excitement and she hovered an inch or two above her chair before she realized what she was doing and forced herself to calm down. ”Heila won’t lose, she’ll never lose. Not in something like this,” the Thistle Witch said confidently.

”I know she’s already one four times,” the serpentine woman said. ”But shouldn’t she be getting tired by now? She can’t keep this up forever, can she?” If the first day’s victory could be attributed to people underestimating the diminutive young witch, then the fights from the second day on could only be considered increasingly desperate attempts to break her down and find some weakness that could be exploited.

The injuries that Heila sustained on the third day were fairly light and she was able to use her own witchcraft to recover from them easily enough. It was yesterday’s bloody battle that combined sorcerers with gladiators to besiege the young witch that seemed to have pushed Heila to the edge, requiring Ashlynn to personally tend to her wounds afterward.

”There’s too much at stake for Heila to back down now, Nereida,” Ashlynn said, addressing the woman that Heila had befriended when Jacques brought her to one of the smaller arenas in High Fen City during their last visit.

It had surprised Ashlynn a bit to learn that Heila had made good enough friends in such a brief period of time that she insisted on visiting Nereida, Eusebia, and Delmatia the day after their arrival in High Fen City. It turned out that Heila wasn’t only acting out of friendship, there had been some practical purpose to her decision to engage with the women, but the more time Ashlynn spent with the trio of wealthy women from the Scaled Clan, the more she understood why Heila liked them.

Ashlynn’s first impression of Nereida at the Masquerade Ball had been mild. She struck her as not being very different from the countless wives of wealthy merchants she’d seen in her father’s court in Blackwell County. She was exceptionally well mannered, well educated, and had a refined taste that prized the finer things in life. When she’d met Jacques, the man had instantly dismissed her as a blood-sucking mosquito and tried to keep her away from Ashlynn.

The more Ashlynn came to know her over the past few days, the more she came to respect the woman. Certainly, when Heila asked for Nereida’s help to find a hatter who could craft traveling hats and a fancier hat for Ashlynn, there had been an element of currying favor in the effort the serpentine woman put into pleasing them. But that kind of social maneuvering was so expected that Ashlynn would have been more hesitant if Nereida didn’t try to take advantage in small ways than if she did.

But beneath the social climbing habits that seemed like second nature to the wives of many wealthy and well connected men, Ashlynn found a genuine charm and a touching sense of honor and loyalty. It couldn’t have been easy to pick sides between an annoyed Heila and a prickly Sandbox Witch, but when the two had been at odds, Nereida made her decision and stuck by Heila’s side.

In the end, the whole conflict had been a misunderstanding, one that was mostly Jacques’ fault. But Nereida had no way of knowing that when she chose to accompany Heila and even now, she was risking offending one of her husband’s business rivals just by coming to sit with Ashlynn and watch Heila fight.

”This would have been fine if that fool hadn’t tried to use Mistress Nyrielle as a way to shame the rest of the Vale of Mists,” Ashlynn said, continuing her conversation with the serpentine woman. ”But once he claimed that the only way the Vale could rise again would be for Mistress Nyrielle to fight another ten days in the arena to assemble another band of champions from among the warriors here...”

”Oh?” High Lady Erna said with a teasing smile. ”So do you in the Vale look down on our gladiators here in the High Fen?”

”A little bit, yes,” Ashlynn admitted directly. She might have tried to put things more tactfully before, but after spending so much time around the Eldritch, she had learned that it was better to challenge power directly rather than to attempt to flatter those with significant strength.

”Your gladiators are very strong,” Ashlynn acknowledged. ”But they fight for money and for the entertainment of the crowd. This fight right now,” she said, gesturing to the men fighting in the arena below. ”They may not have choreographed the fight in advance, but they’re clearly giving each other chances to recover and they’re not attempting fatal blows, even when there’s an opportunity.”

”The strongest people in the High Fen aren’t the gladiators in the arena,” Ashlynn said. ”Gladiators are entertainers. It may be deadly entertainment at times, but they still fight to entertain. No one in the Vale of Mists fights for entertainment. They aren’t gladiators, they’re soldiers and they fight to win wars. I would be more nervous if Heila was fighting the soldiers of the High Fen, but as long as they’re gladiators, I’m not very worried.”

”Perhaps today there will be some reason to worry,” the High Lady said with a wicked smile. ”I’ve confirmed the identities of the warriors that Yotsun has hired today.”

”Who are they, who are they?” Talauia said eagerly. ”Are they famous from somewhere else? Sorcerers from the High Pass maybe? They can’t be vampires,” she said, glancing at the sun high overhead. ”So what kind of warriors could they be?”

”The challenge was that she had to fight ten men, every day, for ten days,” High Lady Erna said. ”Since the only limit is on the number of men facing her, Yotsun has decided to recruit the most individually powerful men he could find. In this case, he’s hired a Tuscan hunting party to challenge your Willow Witch.”

The moment Erna mentioned Tuscans, Ashlynn’s blood ran cold. Visions of the towering, shaggy men with giant ivory tusks and long flexible trunks thundered through her mind along with the sickening sound of ice cracking beneath their feet. The last time they’d fought Tuscan hunters, one of their group had died, and everyone else only barely survived.

Now, Heila would have to face ten of them... and she would have to do it alone.