The Vampire & Her Witch

Behind Owain, the lodge door opened, and Sir Gilander stepped out into the cold. The old knight moved with the careful precision of a man whose joints had been arguing with the weather since long ago, but there was nothing frail about the way he carried himself.

Gilander had commanded the personal guard of Marquis Bors Lothian for more than thirty years, and even now, days after his lord’s death, he wore the blue and yellow surcoat of House Lothian as though it were armor rather than livery. Given the chance, he would likely cling to his post until the day he died.

”The trackers went out an hour before dawn, my lord,” Gilander reported calmly. If the poor turnout for the hunt or the disrespect of the barons bothered him, he gave no sign of it, keeping himself strictly to his duties and the tasks at hand.

As one of the senior surviving knights who owed their fealty directly to the Lothian Marquis rather than one of the baronies, Owain had assigned him the duties of the Master of the Hunt. It was also something of a reward for Gilander’s help in retrieving Percivus and his acolytes from the Abbey of the Inquisition in Maeril and delivering them to the dungeons for Owain to deal with. Personally.

The position of Master of the Hunt placed responsibility on the aging knight’s shoulders for everything from managing the trackers with their hounds to seeing that the horses were fed and rested and a thousand other details that would only have distracted Owain from pursuing his prey.

Many of the things Gilander had been tending to this morning were the sort of details that Jocelynn could have managed if she were here, but Gilander seemed well-suited to women’s work. He even seemed to take some kind of perverse pride in doing it well, which suited Owain just fine. The extra work kept Gilander out of his way.

”Huntsman Fabel is confident,” Gilander continued, seemingly unaware of his new lord’s sinking opinion of him. ”He tracked a solitary bull elk three days ago to a flat strip of land above the eastern creek drainage, and he expects to confirm its position before the party assembles.”

”Good,” Owain said, though the word came out flat rather than eager. He should have been thinking about his prey, about the plan to drive the bull elk to a place where he could face it head-on. He should have been paying attention to details that would help him to position the relays who would be responsible for ensuring that the elk couldn’t escape the party of hunters, no matter which direction it tried to flee.

Instead, his mind was still counting banners.

”Sir Garrik is seeing to the hounds,” Gilander continued, apparently untroubled by Owain’s lack of enthusiasm. ”And Captain Albyn is in the stables. I’ve assigned him to the third relay position on the western ridge,” he added, raising a brow at Owain as if to confirm that the assignment would meet with his lord’s plans for the soon-to-be knight.

The mention of Albyn pulled Owain’s attention back to the moment and Gilander’s unspoken question.

The former Blackwell pirate turned respectable ship’s captain, and now a rising star of the army Owain was assembling for the Holy War was an uncomfortable reminder of how chaotic things had become within his own household.

Owain had decided to elevate the man to knighthood and grant him lordship over Hurel Village. He made that decision in part because the man had demonstrated genuine competence during the rescue of Jocelynn from the Inquisition, and it was worth rewarding the man for having the courage to escape the Inquisition to bring Owain news of his father’s increasing madness and Jocelynn’s imprisonment.

Not many men would have been willing to take that risk, and Owain appreciated the fact that the man recognized that only Owain could architect Jocelynn’s rescue in that moment of crisis. But more importantly, he did it because keeping Albyn close and occupied with new responsibilities would limit the influence he exerted over Owain’s bride-to-be.

Jocelynn trusted Albyn with a fervency that bordered on devotion, and that kind of loyalty, aimed at anyone other than Owain himself, was a problem that needed careful management. Giving Albyn a title, lands, and obligations would bind him to the Lothian household in ways that mere gratitude could not. It would also mean that any act of defiance on Albyn’s part would no longer be the disobedience of a common sailor, but the treason of a vassal against his liege.

”Keep him there,” Owain said after a few moments of thought. ”I don’t want him anywhere near the barons during the hunt. The last thing I need is for Fayle or one of the heirs to start asking questions about why I have a Blackwell pirate in my retinue.”

”Once he’s proven himself in battle against demons, it won’t matter,” Owain added. ”All anyone will care about is how many trophies he’s collected and how impressive they are. But until then, we should try to keep him in the background until I formally grant him his new title.”

”As you say, my lord,” Gilander replied, though something shifted behind his weathered eyes. It was a look that Owain had grown accustomed to seeing on the old knight’s face; not quite disapproval, but not quite agreement either.

Gilander had served Bors Lothian with absolute loyalty for three decades, and in the days since Bors’s death, Owain had noticed that the old knight’s obedience had taken on a quality that was technically flawless, yet he seemed to be holding himself back more than he had before.

It seemed like he was expecting the same treatment from Owain that he’d received from Bors, with more freedom to speak his mind and offer unsolicited advice. But Owain had no need of an aging, out-of-touch knight’s counsel, and when he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in hearing Gillander’s unprompted suggestions, the aging knight wisely stopped offering them.

It irritated Owain, but Gilander was too useful and too respected by the rest of the Lothian Court to antagonize. At least, he was for now. There would be time to address the old guard’s lingering sentiments after the coronation, once the political landscape had been formally redrawn with Owain at its center.