The Vampire & Her Witch

”You can’t be serious,” Loman sputtered, coughing as he nearly choked on his tea. ”You’d be telling thousands, tens of thousands of people to give up the only homes they’ve ever known. They’d never stand for it. You’d have common people with pitchforks and woodcutters’ axes fighting your armies, and thousands would die on both sides,” he said, horrified by the idea of the carnage her proposal would unleash.

”I agree, it would be horrible,” Ashlynn said calmly. ”But again, be honest,” she prompted. ”Would it be worse for my armies, or for the people of Lothian March? You’ve seen a portion of our strength, and the Second Army is one of our stronger forces, but it isn’t the strongest by far,” she said as her tone grew harder.

”How many villages in the march could resist an assault by a handful of Tuscan giants?” Ashlynn asked pointedly. ”Or a vampire like Dame Sybyll? Heila is a healer and my lady-in-waiting who only learned to fight over the summer, but I have witches in my coven who are more skilled at fighting than she is. So, if we wanted to treat the people of Lothian March the way your people have treated the Eldritch... Do you really think that you could kill enough of us to stop us?”

”Or,” Ashlynn said, raising a brow at the young priest. ”Given the choice to keep their lands and accept Eldritch rule, would your people choose to submit, rather than face the power of my armies?”

She wasn’t being subtle, and she was emphasizing again and again the power of the armies she could unleash on Lothian March if she wanted to. It wasn’t a fair or kind bargaining position, and it had all of the subtlety of a Tuscan charge with a battering ram, but that was fine.

It wasn’t a position that Ashlynn intended to defend and hold on to, but it was one she had to present in order for Loman to understand that he was negotiating from a position of weakness as the defeated party rather than from the position of absolute strength that the Church often occupied.

”The people in the villages would panic and flee,” Loman admitted with a heavy sigh. Ashlynn was right. He’d seen the giants, and he’d felt the power of Ashlynn’s witches when he fought Heila atop the towers of Hanrahan Keep. He also knew painfully well how easily a powerful vampire like Dame Sybyll could dismember a man, and he shuddered to think of the carnage a demon like her could unleash on a village without a Templar at least as strong as Sir Tommin had been to stop her.

”There’s still the Abby of the Inquisition in Maeril,” Loman pointed out as he sought a different method of making his point. ”And the Temple in Lothian City. The Church would step in if you offered such a blatant ultimatum, and even if they couldn’t stop your armies, they could delay you long enough for help to arrive from Keating Duchy and beyond.”

”I don’t think the Church would slow us down as much as you think it would,” Ashlynn said, standing from her chair as she moved to the hearth, checking on the simmering dishes in pots and turning other dishes so the side closest to the flames didn’t burn.

”I know about the Inquisition’s abbey in Maeril,” Ashlynn said, pausing as she gazed into the brightly glowing coals of the fire. ”Why do you think we didn’t send Inquisitor Ignatious to fight in Hanrahan, even though we knew that you, Inquisitor Diarmuid, and a Templar with a Holy Light Blade were all there?”

”Because you were reserving him to assault the abbey,” Loman said, his remaining eye widening in horror as he considered the implications of a High Inquisitor wielding a Holy Flame Blade against the Inquisitors of the abbey.

If they fought back at all, it was unlikely that their Holy Flames would harm the vampire who should have been more vulnerable to those flames than any other demon under Ashlynn’s command. By the same token, the Inquisition should have been safe from one of their own, but Loman knew all too well that the Inquisitors in Maeril weren’t the sort of pure men of faith that he’d encountered in the Holy City.

The Inquisition in Maeril had long ago become embroiled in the power struggles between the lords of Lothian March, and many of its Inquisitors adhered to questionable interpretations of the sacred texts. Yet, according to Lady Heila, High Inquisitor Ignatious had endured close to eighty years of torture and tempering of his faith in a place of great darkness...

The faith Ignatious adhered to had been produced by a greater struggle than any Inquisitor in Maeril had ever faced, and the difference would become clear as soon as he unleashed his own Holy Flames on the worldly, impure men of faith in Maeril’s abbey. Just like a village facing Ashlynn’s giants, the Inquisitors would find themselves helpless before his flames.

”You’re saying that if we fight, we can’t win,” Loman said with a heavy sigh. ”And you’d sooner force our people to give up their homes than to ask the Eldritch to do the same. But how can you do that?” Loman asked. He felt like Ashlynn had stabbed him in the chest with a blade made of ice. Her position was so cold and cruel that it felt nothing like the merciful woman he’d seen just an hour ago in the courtyard below.

”Aren’t the people of Lothian March your people too?” Loman asked as he came to another realization. Somewhere deep inside, Ashlynn still thought of herself as Owain’s wife. She proved that every time she addressed him as ’brother-in-law.’ Which meant that she must still want to see the people of Lothian thriving as she had talked about when they shared tea in the days leading up to her wedding.

”If my father passed his throne to Owain, you would be the next Marchioness of Lothian,” Loman pointed out. ”Shouldn’t you be looking for a way to care for the people of Lothian as your own people? Why would you unleash your armies on your own people when you don’t have to?”

”That’s true,” Ashlynn said, smiling slightly as the first crack appeared in Loman’s defenses. He still hadn’t come far enough, but he was slowly recognizing how little power he had in this negotiation, and that was an important step.

”I could negotiate both sides of a peace accord,” Ashlynn said as she returned to her seat and topped off her cup of tea. ”But then, are you prepared to let me dictate the terms of the agreement as both Marchioness and Mother of Trees?” Ashlynn asked pointedly.

”After all, if there’s only one person representing both sides, it’s very easy to declare even the most unreasonable compromise to be ’necessary’,” Ashlynn suggested. ”For instance, if I said that the people must renounce the Church of the Holy Lord of Light because peace with the Eldritch is incompatible with Church doctrine... could you accept that kind of condition in order to bring peace to the march?”