The Vampire & Her Witch

”I never trusted outsiders much,” Old Nan said as everyone in the great hall turned to listen to her story. ”I thought that Lady Nyrielle abandoned those of us who lived in the outlying villages. I never once thought of ’returning’ to the Vale of Mists, even when the Black Merchant visited with his offers of safety and security behind the Vale’s curtain walls.”

In hindsight, she’d been wrong to hold out for as long as she had. If she’d accepted Marcel’s offer more than a decade ago, she might not have lost her son, Lako, to Owain Lothian’s savagery, and that was a regret that she would carry to her grave.

”I never hated the humans either,” Old Nan continued. ”I didn’t have any great sense of fear of them or animosity toward them. So long as we kept to the wilderness in the hills, they left us alone, and we left them alone. I thought that it would continue that way until long after my old bones were dust. I was wrong,” she admitted with a tail that drooped so low in shame that it brushed against the boughs of cedar on the floor.

”Ollie wasn’t wrong,” she continued in a voice that sounded small and frail among the many strong warriors filling the great hall. ”If humans were my enemy, then he should have been my enemy, but he came to my village with a warning. My old ears were stuffed full of wood shavings, and I couldn’t hear the warning from Marcel... but I heard it from him.”

The entire hall sat quietly, leaning forward in their seats as they listened to Old Nan telling her story. They heard the bitterness and pain in her voice as she spoke of losing her son, Lako, and of the deep desire that built within her chest to die and join her fallen family members.

She held nothing back and made no attempt to excuse her weakness when a deep sorrow overtook her and even chewing food felt like more effort than she was capable of, but once again, Ollie refused to give up on her, bringing her rich broth and thin porridge to sustain her while her family tried to pick up the broken pieces of their hearts to make a new life.

Finally, when she reached the end of her tale, it was Milo’s turn to step up and offer his own testimony about Ollie’s deeds. Even though his mother had told much of the story already, he refused to let her to be the only one to bear the weight of speaking up in favor of the man who had given them all a second chance at life.

”Ollie didn’t give up on any of us,” Milo said, standing next to his mother and gently wrapping both an arm and his tail around her in quiet support. ”For our clan, the things we carve with our own claws contain the splinters of our hearts and the last traces of our departed loved ones. We lost most of those treasures when Owain Lothian burned our village to the ground, but once Ollie understood, he ventured out to our village, digging in the still-smoldering ashes to find any trace of the history and loved ones we’d lost.”

Ollie came to the Heartwood clan because, in his words, they held the key to turning a house into a home, creating beautiful burrows carved with more than simple ornaments. Milo spoke at length about how Ollie consulted with them to find an ideal place to build a village with a dam that could hold enough water for fish and crops, and children to play as well.

More importantly, at least to Milo, he spoke of the conflict that seemed to torment Ollie when Liam Dunn’s forces attacked and many of them marched to war, leaving Ollie behind to watch over their still-forming village, their families, and their children.

”He would have been there, fighting at our side,” Milo swore solemnly. ”He would have been there, but we needed him in the village more. Some people may criticize him for staying where he was safe, but... Because he watched over my mother and my Juni, I could leave my fears behind when I went to war. Without him at home, I never could have left them to fight the Dunns.”

Around the great hall, several people nodded, having felt much the same when they joined Commander Bassinger’s forces for a chance to claim a portion of the vengeance they were owed for being driven from their homes. Without Ollie watching over their loved ones, they too would have struggled to wade into battle so soon after arriving in the Vale of Mists.

”Ollie made space for all of us,” a third person said as they stood and began to tell their story of arriving late in the refugee village because they’d held out hope for too long that Liam Dunn’s campaign would spare their village. When it hadn’t, Ollie had adjusted the plans for the new village, enlarging it yet again and weaving the newcomers in among the first to arrive so they didn’t become isolated in their new community.

”Ollie never lorded over us...”

”Ollie has always been humble. He didn’t know our ways at first, but he always listened and respected...”

”Ollie trusted me,” Daithi said as he stood at last. ”He didn’t just accept me and my family into his village, he asked me to become its Constable. I didn’t realize how much losing my position as a soldier haunted me or how lost I felt until my family arrived, and I felt like I no longer had anything for them to take pride in. But when I went to Ollie to offer to work, even if it was just as a guard at the gate, he offered me so much more.”

As Daithi spoke, his eyes grew distant, and a faint smile tugged at the corner of his lips. Lady Ashlynn had promised that if they did their best to live their lives well in the Vale of Mists, she would attempt to bring their families to join them in the Vale. Perhaps she’d understood that having men cut off from their wives and children was a recipe for disaster and that it would only encourage them to attempt to escape in order to rejoin their families.

Or perhaps she was simply kind, in the same way that Sir Ollie was kind, and saw it as the right thing to do. Either way, Sir Marcel had kept the promise Ashlynn made, spiriting away wives and children, even siblings or elderly parents of the captured men in order to reunite them, but it had been Ollie who helped them to build real lives in the Vale of Mists...