The Vampire & Her Witch

Sir Ollie Heartwood planted himself between Owain Lothian and Jocelynn Blackwell the way a tree plants itself between a river and the earth it protects, and the hand that he placed flat against the center of Owain’s chest stopped the lord of Lothian March as completely as if he’d walked into a wooden wall.

For a frozen heartbeat, Owain stared at the hand on his chest, then up at the face of the man it belonged to, and the calculation that was always running behind his charming mask ground to a halt against something it couldn’t process.

The knight standing before him was taller than Owain by several inches, broad through the shoulders, and the jade-green tabard he wore over his coat of mail had been soaked with so much blood that the design embroidered on the front was barely visible.

In fact, if not for the pale, flame-red hair that hung in sweat-soaked strands around a face that was far too young for the amount of carnage it had witnessed tonight, Owain might have mistaken the man for one of the demon-slaying veterans who had served at his side during the worst of the summer campaigns against the demons of the Southern Steppe and the Horse Lord’s endless hordes.

But this wasn’t a veteran, or any famous knight whose valor and skill at arms were known across the march. This was someone Owain had never seen before, wearing a crest he didn’t recognize, one that looked like it contained an iron pot of all things. Moreover, the young knight carried heavy knives instead of a proper sword, and when he looked at Owain, his pale eyes held the kind of cold, controlled fury that Owain was accustomed to seeing only in his own mirror.

”You might be a better swordsman than me,” the knight said, and his voice was steady, almost calm, as if the hand he’d placed against the chest of the most powerful lord in the march was no more remarkable than holding open a door. ”But even if there were ten of you, I swear, you couldn’t get past me to lay a hand on Lady Ashlynn’s sister.”

The words were spoken quietly enough that only the people nearest to the dais could hear them clearly, but the physical reality of what was happening was visible to every person in the great hall. A blood-soaked knight had placed himself between the lord of Lothian March and his bride, and the lord of Lothian March was not moving him.

Owain’s jaw tightened. He knew how this looked. He knew that every baron in the hall was watching, that every knight who had drawn a sword tonight was measuring the distance between this unknown man and the lord he served, and that every moment he stood here with another man’s hand on his chest was another moment his authority bled away like wine from a cracked cask.

He pushed against the hand on his chest, putting his weight behind it the way he pushed against the training dummies in the practice yard. Owain was strong; he knew it, he’d built his body into a weapon since boyhood, and he’d killed more demons with his own hands than most knights in the march combined. When he pushed, men moved.

Except this one didn’t move. He didn’t even budge. The hand on Owain’s chest might as well have been the root of an ancient tree, sunk so deeply into the stone floor that not even the full weight of the Lothian throne could have shifted it.

There was no give, no flex, no tremor in the arm or the shoulder behind it. The pale eyes that looked down at him held no strain, no effort, nothing but the quiet, unyielding resolve of a man who had decided that this was where the line was drawn, and nothing in the world would move him from it.

Owain had fought demons who couldn’t be pushed. He’d locked blades with creatures whose strength exceeded anything a human body should possess, and he’d learned to recognize the moment when force alone would not be enough. This was that moment, but it shouldn’t have been, because the man standing before him was not a demon. He was just a knight, and knights could be moved.

But this one couldn’t, and the frustration of that fact curdled in Owain’s chest like sour wine.

He tried to bull past instead, dropping his shoulder and throwing his weight forward the way he’d seen soldiers force their way through shield walls, hoping to get around the knight’s flank to reach Jocelynn before she could escape his grasp, but the moment his shoulder made contact, the knight responded with a shove that seemed almost effortless.

Owain stumbled backward. Three full steps, his polished boots scuffing against the stone of the dais, his arms pinwheeling for a fraction of a heartbeat before he caught himself and straightened up, and every person in the great hall saw the lord of Lothian March stagger like a drunk pushed out of a tavern.

”Stand down, Lord Owain,” the flame-haired knight said, his voice growing frosty as his hand dropped to the polished hilt of one of the knives at his waist. ”Your life belongs to Lady Ashlynn; it isn’t for me to claim,” the man said in a voice that was loud enough that no one in the front half of the Great Hall could mistake his words.

”But I promise you,” the young knight added. ”If you make trouble for Lady Ashlynn right now, I’ll break your arms before you can draw your sword and your legs before you can take three steps toward her.”

The threat was bad enough, and the lack of response to the threat from his own knights was even worse. But the greatest insult came a heartbeat later when Owain heard the one sound that could have made this moment worse. It was a sound that reached past his humiliation and his fury to touch the rawest nerve in his body.

He heard Jocelynn sob.

It wasn’t the quiet, dignified sob of a noblewoman at a funeral or the controlled trembling of a bride overcome by emotion and anticipation on the happiest day of her life. It was the desperate, ugly, full-bodied sob of a woman who had been carrying something too heavy for far too long, and the sound of it told Owain, with a clarity that cut deeper than any blade, that Jocelynn wasn’t crying for him.

She was crying because she had reached Ashlynn.