The Vampire & Her Witch

Harren had been a guardsman in Lothian City for eight years, long enough to have served under Marquis Bors and to have fought demons twice in the foothills beyond the city walls. He wasn’t a coward. But the city had changed in the weeks since Bors died and his son claimed the throne, and Harren had learned very quickly that the rules he’d lived by for the better part of a decade no longer applied.

Under Lord Bors, a guardsman who did his job and kept his head down could expect a fair wage, a warm meal at the end of his shift, and the occasional gold sovereign if he distinguished himself during a demon raid.

Meanwhile, Lord Owain spoke of even greater rewards for men who could prove their might against the demon hordes, but the punishments he meted out to keep discipline were worse, and a man could find himself on the wrong side of Lord Owain’s temper without even knowing how he’d stepped out of line.

Harren had seen what happened to the Inquisitor’s acolytes. Blinded, broken, and paraded through Market Square like animals while the city watched. He’d heard the stories about what Owain had done to them in the dungeons before that, and the rumors about what happened to the Inquisitor himself afterwards, whose bones, some said, were still bleaching on the hillside outside the abbey in Maeril.

He didn’t know if the rumors were true. He didn’t want to know. What he knew was that Lord Owain rewarded obedience and destroyed anything that stood in his way, and that was enough to keep Harren at his post on the coldest night of the year without a word of complaint escaping his lips.

”Hey, at least it’s not snowing,” Harren said, trying to shake off the gloom that had settled over him. ”Or hailing. Hail is a miserable thing, even when your helm is on. It’s the pinging that does it, all those little balls of ice ringing off steel right by your ears, really makes you go mad in the cold.”

Tonight was cold, but it could be worse. All he had to do was stand here and shiver for a while longer, and there would be a warm meal waiting, and if he was very, very lucky, there’d be a delicacy that would put his wife in a good enough mood for him to be even luckier before the night ended.

So when the sound of hooves and wheels reached his ears from the avenue beyond the square, he straightened and put his hand on the handle of his mace, swallowing down the butterflies that started fluttering in his gut as he hoped it was nothing.

When the first of the riders emerged from the darkness into the torchlight, those butterflies felt like they’d turned to stones in his stomach, pulling it down so far he nearly stumbled as he took half a step back.

There were more than twenty of them. Armed men in matching gambesons of emerald green and midnight blue in a harlequin pattern that Harren had never seen before. They were marching in a loose column that filled the width of the avenue.

Among them walked knights in mail hauberks with swords at their hips, and behind the knights came four men in the heavy plate armor of Church Templars, the radiant sun of the Holy Lord of Light emblazoned on their breastplates, making them unmistakable as anything else even in the dark of night.

Two carriages rolled through the column, and flanking them were sailors in black wool coats who carried long, curved fighting knives alongside their swords, moving with the rolling gait of men more accustomed to the deck of a ship than the flagstones of a city plaza.

At the front of the column, a tall young man with flame-red hair walked with the easy, balanced stride of a trained fighter, and beside him, a broad-shouldered squire carried himself with the stiff-backed determination of a boy trying very hard to be a man.

”Harren,” Pol said, his voice cracking. ”Harren, what is that? Who, who are these people?”

”Trouble,” Harren said. ”That’s who they are,” he said grimly as he slipped the mace from the loop on his belt and picked up the shield he’d left leaning against the wall.

The column halted at the edge of the square, and the second carriage’s door swung open. The man who stepped out was young, no older than his mid-twenties by the look of him, with a ruddy complexion, dark, steady eyes, and crimson-and-gold robes marked with antiquated sun symbols that looked like they belonged in a cathedral rather than on a man standing in a frozen courtyard at nightfall.

Then the man drew a sword, and every thought in Harren’s galloped away like wild horses fleeing a brush fire.

The blade burned. It wasn’t the dull red of heated steel or the shimmer of polished metal catching torchlight, but a living, rolling flame that erupted along the full length of the weapon and turned the night air around it to wavering heat. The fire was the color of the sun at midday, fierce and golden, and it cast the man’s face in sharp relief, illuminating features that were kind and calm and utterly without fear.

Holy Fire. Harren had seen it once before, years ago, when an Inquisitor came to cleanse a farmhouse after the farmer and his wife were accused of witchcraft. It had been a small flame, contained and controlled, summoned through prayer and ritual. The Inquisitor had claimed that using a small wisp of Holy Fire was enough to light the blaze, and he assured them that the flames that spread from his Holy Fire would be enough to cleanse the farmhouse of evil, even if the flames that engulfed it looked ordinary.

This, however, was completely different. What he was looking at now was something that belonged to the stories of the great Inquisitors of old who had carried the light of the Holy Lord into the darkest places of the world and fought against the Demon Lady of the Vale and the greater demons who spawned her.

”Open the gates,” the man said. His voice was rich and warm, but the fire reflected in his dark eyes made it clear that he would not be disobeyed.

”Open them,” he repeated. ”Or I’ll open them myself.”