The Vampire & Her Witch

”What does it take to build a road of flagstones between villages, Liam?” his father had asked him one night over dinner when Liam had complained about the muck and the mud he had to walk through when his father brought him to inspect a village after a sudden summer storm. ”And what worth does it have to the barony?”

It was the first summer that Liam was spending back in Dunn after staying in Keating for most of the past year, and his father had wasted no time in involving his recently returned son in the affairs of the barony, testing what he had learned in his first year at the academy.

”In Keating, when they open a new shaft for a coal mine, they have to build a road to the shaft that connects to one of the existing roads,” Liam recited confidently. ”It costs ten sovereigns per league to build the road, and they can build ten to twenty leagues of road in a season. So, if we wanted to connect two villages with good roads, then it would only cost a few hundred sovereigns and two or three years of work.”

”So you know your sums,” the baron said with a hearty laugh. ”But you don’t pave roads with sovereigns. You pave them with stones. So where will you get your stones? Who will haul them there, and how will you haul heavy stones without good roads to transport them?”

”And before you answer those questions, consider another one,” Loghlan said. ”Those men that you put to work building roads, they won’t have time to plant crops or tend herds while they’re building your roads. So how will you keep the people fed while you build this road? How will you make sure there’s enough wool and beef to sell to pay our tithes and fill the coffers with the gold you need to build your road?”

Liam felt like a fool when his father laid it all out for him, but he couldn’t refute his points. The oldest towns in Keating predated the founding of the Kingdom of Gaal. They’d had three hundred years to grow, and in that time, their populations had grown large, and their infrastructure was well developed.

Labor was plentiful in Keating, but in the frontier, every man who wasn’t working the land took away from a village’s ability to produce the goods that they depended on to survive. If Liam wanted to build a road, then it wasn’t sufficient to simply pay the workmen a wage or to sign a contract with the Carter’s Guild to haul stone... he would have to account for the goods the village wouldn’t be able to produce while he put the villagers to work building the road as well.

”I’m not saying that we can’t improve the conditions of our villages, son,” the baron said gently. ”Why do you think I’ve worked so hard to establish all of these hamlets?”

”Because they allow us to expand our territory,” Liam said with a frown. ”And because that paves the way for us to become a county when the march becomes a duchy.”

”That’s all true,” Loghlan said with a sigh. ”But that’s the result. Understand the method. Industry is voracious, my son. How many flocks of sheep does it take to feed a single mill with wool? How many fields of flowers do we need to harvest in order to produce fine dyes?”

”When the time comes, I’ll hand over a portion of the barony to you, so that you can learn what it takes to rise up and rival the baronies and counties of the duchies,” the baron said with a smile.

”I didn’t provoke your mother’s anger by sending you all the way to Keating just so you could look at their wealth and grow jealous of it. I want you to learn what is possible if we dare to dream, son,” he said. ”And then, I want you to come home and find a way to bring those dreams to life.”

Liam’s grandfather had fought in the War of Four Templars, and as a young man, his father had seen the shifting tides of power in the march as the Church and the lords of the heartlands caught wind of the wealth that lay trapped in the stones of Airgead Mountain.

He knew that Hanrahan would rise on its own so long as Ian Hanrahan was half as competent as his uncle, Brighton, had been. But there was no pot of gold and jewels sitting next to Dunn. If they wanted to rise, they would have to do it the hard way, by building industries that could rival those of the duchies, and the industries that they could support required vast swathes of land.

By the time Liam left the academy in Keating, he’d come to understand his father’s vision for their barony, and the father and son pair had begun to shift their plans as Liam brought back new ideas along with skilled tradesmen who could make a real difference in life in the barony.

Already, the people of Dunn were coming to respect the young lord who would become the next baron. He fought for them against the ’demons’, and the soldiers he led in battle always spoke well of his leadership. Even those who came home wounded from war praised his care for his men, and he ensured that the families of the ones who fell in battle or who were wounded badly enough that they would never work again were well compensated for their loss.

It had taken years of hard work, but Liam was well on his way to becoming the next Baron of Dunn, and each year, his father had pulled back a little bit more, leaving his son to take over more and more of the responsibilities that would soon become his.

”If I asked my father to retire now, and leave the barony to me, I believe he would,” Liam told Ashlynn as he shook off the memories of years gone by. ”He would let me bear the weight of the decision to join forces with you, and the consequences of that decision if I’m wrong as well.”

”And is that what you want?” Ashlynn asked gently. ”To force your father to abdicate so that you can bring your barony under my banner?”

”No, it isn’t,” Liam said, shaking his head and drawing a deep breath as he prepared to confront one of his greatest fears in negotiating with the powerful Mother of Trees. For a time, he’d spoken with her as if she were simply ’Lady Ashlynn’, the daughter of a count from Trevarthen Duchy. But she was more than that, and power in the Eldritch world was very different from what it was in the human world.

”I feel confident that I could step into my father’s shoes today if I had to,” Liam said carefully. ”I could be a good baron for my people, and I would work hard to be a good lord to the Eldritch people who would come under my rule. But, compared to Dame Sybyll, I’m far too weak,” he admitted.

When Ashlynn extended her offer to the young lord from Dunn, she’d drawn up a territory that was every bit as large as the one Dame Sybyll had claimed by merging Lord Jalal’s Airgead Mountain with Hanrahan Barony and claiming all the lands in between.

Ashlynn had offered the Dunn’s parity with the new ruler of Hanrahan, promising Eldritch lands that they wouldn’t have been able to conquer without the support of a Holy War or a Crusade in exchange for their loyalty and their agreement to stay out of Ashlynn’s way when she fought the Lothians.

At the time, the offer sounded impressive, and even now, it was beyond generous. But an Eldritch Lord was expected to have the strength to protect their people, and when Liam Dunn compared himself to the people at Lady Ashlynn’s side, whether it was the witches like Lady Heila or the vampires like Dame Sybyll, or even people who were neither, like Hauke... his strength was far too lacking.

”Lady Ashlynn, no, your Dominion,” Liam said formally. ”If you give me a chance, I’d like to try to convince my father to stay on as baron for a few more years while I follow you,” Liam said. ”I don’t know if you have a place in your coven for a man like me, or if I can learn to be strong the way Eldritch Lords are strong... But as I am now, I’m afraid I would quickly become a puppet of a lord, and I don’t want that.”

”So, I’m asking for a chance, your Dominion,” Liam said as he lowered himself to one knee. ”Let me serve you the way Lady Heila and the others do. That way, when I do become the Lord of Dunn, I can be just as capable as Dame Sybyll is.”