The Vampire & Her Witch

”My father’s final decree,” Owain announced in a firm tone that made the assembled court sit straighter in their pews. ”Concerns the defense of the march.”

He broke the seal and unfurled the parchment with a snap that echoed off the vaulted ceiling like the crack of a whip.

”In light of the growing threat from the demons of the western wilderness,” Owain read, his voice filling the cathedral with the weight of a pronouncement that would reshape the lives of every person in the room.

”And in recognition of the urgent need to prepare for the coming campaign to secure our borders and rid ourselves of the threat posed by the nests where demons breed, the Marquis has decreed that each baron of the march is hereby permitted and required to raise a levy of soldiers numbering no fewer than three times their current standing forces.”

The words landed like a mace strike to the chest of every lord in the cathedral.

”These soldiers,” Owain continued, his eyes sweeping the pews with cold deliberation. ”Are to be recruited, equipped, and trained for war by the first day of summer, at which time they will be mustered for the campaign against the demons that threaten our borders.”

For a moment, the cathedral was silent enough to hear the candle wax dripping from the iron chandeliers overhead. Then the silence cracked, and the murmuring began.

Not the polite, restrained murmuring of lords exchanging opinions in hushed tones, but the raw, involuntary sound of men who had just been told that the foundations of their lives were about to be ripped out from under them.

Baron Erling Fayle sat perfectly still in his pew, but behind his carefully neutral expression, the blood was draining from his face with the slow, terrible certainty of a man watching floodwaters rise toward the threshold of his home.

Triple the levy. His barony could barely afford to raise an ordinary complement of soldiers without pulling men from the vineyards and the fields. If he called up three times as many, there wouldn’t be enough hands left to tend the vines that produced the wines his barony depended on, or to work the fields that grew the grain that fed his people through the winter.

Within a year, maybe two, Fayle Barony would be bankrupt. The vineyards would go fallow. The fields would lie untended. And the people who couldn’t feed themselves would leave for baronies that could still provide for their own.

Everything he’d built since inheriting from his father, every careful, quiet effort to keep his people prosperous and safe while the rest of the march threw itself against the demons in the wilderness, would be destroyed in a single season of war.

Beside him, his mother, Lady Ragna, reached out and placed her hand over his. She said nothing, but her grip was firm, and when Erling glanced at her, she gave him the smallest shake of her head. Not now. Not here.

A few pews forward, Baron Valeri Leufroy turned to his son with the grim satisfaction of a blacksmith placing raw iron into the forge.

”This time,” Valeri said in a low voice that carried just far enough for the people seated nearby to hear. ”It will be your turn to ride to war. Prepare yourself well, Tulori. The frontier will not coddle you the way Keating did. Stay close to men like Reynold Aleese and you may yet forge yourself into the kind of lord who can rule without fear. And if you’re lucky, you can forge a friendship like the one I had with Marquis Bors...”

Tulori Leufroy’s face went the color of old parchment. His lips parted as if to protest, but one look at his father’s expression, the hard, bright-eyed look of a man who had been forged in the fires of the War of Inches and fully expected his son to emerge from a similar crucible or not emerge at all, sealed his mouth shut. His hands, soft and uncalloused from years of academic study, gripped the edge of the pew hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

Among the pews occupied by the Otker family, Baron Serle delivered a similar verdict to his son Serge, whose face contorted into an expression of undisguised horror that he made no effort to conceal. Beside him, Charlotte Otker looked at her brother with worried eyes, her mind already racing through the implications. Serge wasn’t a warrior. He’d never been a warrior. And sending him to fight demons on the frontier was as good as writing his name on a gravestone.

She wanted to say something, to protest, to point out the insanity of what was being asked, but the words died in her throat when she saw the look on her father’s face. Serle wasn’t horrified. He wasn’t even surprised. He was resigned, as though he’d known this was coming the moment Owain stood up in his mourning black and started talking about warriors and struggle.

Baroness Peigi Aleese sat with her hands folded in her lap, her posture immaculate and her expression composed in the practiced stillness of a woman who had spent decades concealing her true feelings behind the mask of a dutiful wife. But beneath that mask, her heart was a clenched fist beating against the walls of her chest.

She couldn’t look at Reynold. If she looked at her son, if she saw the fear or the determination or whatever expression was forming on his young face, she would break. She would say something. She would beg Tybal to find a way, any way, to keep their boy at home, and the words that spilled out would carry the weight of secrets that could never be spoken in Tybal’s presence.

She had already lost one son to the frontier. Rain, whose face she saw every time she closed her eyes, whose boisterous laugh she heard in quiet rooms when the house was still. Rain, who was Tybal’s son in every way that mattered except the one way that could never be spoken aloud.

Now the frontier wanted Reynold too, and Peigi couldn’t voice the terror that clawed at her throat because the words that would make Tybal understand, that Reynold was his only child, and that the son he believed was merely missing had never been his to begin with would confirm a secret Tybal had long suspected and that neither of them had been willing to admit to.

So she sat in silence, her hands folded, her face composed, and let the fear eat at her from the inside while the man at the pulpit spoke of duty and sacrifice and the defense of the realm.

Owain watched the reactions ripple through the cathedral with the satisfied expression of a man who had thrown a stone into a still pond and was enjoying the way the waves spread outward, touching every shore. He could see the fear in their faces, the calculations already beginning behind their eyes as each baron weighed the cost of obedience against the cost of defiance.

Good. Let them calculate. Let them realize that the cost of defiance was higher than any levy he could impose, because the man standing before them had already demonstrated what happened to those who opposed the will of the Lothian throne.

”My father gave his life to protect this march,” Owain said, rolling the decree closed and setting it on the altar with a decisive motion. ”Now it falls to us to finish what he started. I trust that every lord here will honor his memory by answering this call with the courage and dedication that the march requires...”