The Vampire & Her Witch

Freeholders.

Heretics.

The two words meant very different things, but for the past hundred years or more, they’d become inexorably intertwined.

The First Crusade had forged the Kingdom of Gaal in Holy Fire and quenched it in the blood of the slain, human and Eldritch alike. Before that, settlers from across the sea had made their own decisions about coexisting with the native Eldritch nations or fighting them for supremacy. Under the banner of Gaal, however, collaboration with ’demons’ was seen as high heresy.

Still, at the end of the First Crusade, many people who rejected the kingdom’s rule had moved west, establishing new villages and towns beyond the king’s grasp. Those people called their villages ’Freeholds,’ embracing the wilderness of the frontier to make their own way.

Some of those Freeholds were rough, dangerous places, filled with wanted men, fallen nobles, and fugitives from the king’s justice. Others were little different from the villages in Fayle or Dunn, filled with people working the land and making their own way in life, and for a hundred years, the crown had been content to ignore them.

The Second Crusade changed that. The Church charged Freeholders with the crime of heresy, and their villagers were slaughtered right alongside their Eldritch neighbors. The few Freeholders who remained were driven even further from the heart of the Kingdom of Gaal, but now, every one of them knew that they were living on borrowed time until the day that the kingdom and the Church noticed them again.

Hearing that Caleb Lothian, and likely his grandfather as well, had slaughtered a village full of Freeholders just south of the river Tuilig came as a shock to Erling, but the even greater shock was that a survivor of that massacre had been the one to offer him peace.

”Why?” Erling asked directly. ”Why would a man like that offer any kind of peace after... After what happened to him?”

”You’ll have to ask Wolstan when he arrives,” Ashlynn said calmly. ”I’ve never met with him, but I have my suspicions that Marcel had a hand in it as well. The timing feels right. If Marcel had learned about Bors’ attempts to convince the Church to launch a Holy War in the march, he would have passed word to Wolstan, and through him, to High Lord Dirar.”

”So it wasn’t because he was young and vulnerable,” Lady Ragna said as some of the tension faded from her shoulders and her gaze softened slightly. ”Or not entirely because of that. It’s because of things that happened before he was even born...”

”As I said,” Ashlynn said, taking a small sip of wine, no more than enough to wet her lips and tongue. ”Vampires have long, powerful memories. They live on the edge of a knife between the past and the present, life and death...”

”I don’t think Wolstan ever meant you any harm,” Ashlynn added. ”I think he was just trying, in his own way, to prevent another tragedy. I’m trying to do the same thing now,” she continued, shifting away from the past to concerns of the present. ”And for that, I’d like your help.”

”I’m not a warrior or a soldier,” Erling said, frowning at Ashlynn. ”And Fayle isn’t rich enough to fund an army. We don’t have enough people to raise one either. Compared to men like Loghlan Dunn, I don’t see how I can be of use to you.”

”What if your lands weren’t so sparsely populated?” Ashlynn asked. ”What if we invited people to help settle your lands, raise crops and tend herds? You might not be a soldier, but you protected your people for more than a decade just by honoring a pact and carrying a secret.”

”Could you protect peace now?” Ashlynn asked. ”If there were hundreds of Eldritch people living alongside the people of Fayle?”

”Would they build their own villages, apart from ours?” Erling asked hesitantly as he tried to imagine what it would be like for hundreds of Eldritch people, people that he would have called ’demons’ just days ago, to come and settle in Fayle.

If they kept to themselves, then the rolling hills of Fayle were both vast enough and empty enough to accommodate several new villages. It wouldn’t be very different from respecting the southern border at the River Tuilig...

Except those villages would need to trade with the existing villages and the town of Fayle. They’d need to pay their tithes, bring their goods to market, and buy all the things that an isolated village in the hills couldn’t make for themselves.

It would be impossible, Erling realized, for them to live truly independent lives the way Freeholders like Wolstan had. And perhaps even the Freeholders were never truly independent. They must have traded with each other, or with the kingdom through people like the famed Black Merchant.

The only way Erling could keep Eldritch villages in his territory from mixing with the rest of the barony would be to imprison them... and if he was going to do that, then what was the point of inviting them to settle his lands at all?

”No, that’s the wrong question,” Erling said, shaking his head as he thought it through. ”I’m sorry for sounding callous, but what’s in it for Fayle beyond the tithes we could collect? It’s easier to protect a peace if both sides gain something from it.”

”If I’m going to go to my people and tell them to welcome new settlers,” Erling said. ”And that those settlers are the ’demons’ the Church has taught them to fear for their entire lives... I need to balance the scales.”

”That’s fair,” Ashlynn said with a slight smile. ”What if I gave you Leufroy and LeGleau?” Ashlynn asked. ”And a position the same as Loghlan Dunn’s, with the same charge that I’ve given him. I want you to find a way to build a peace within your lands, and that peace needs to include the Eldritch as neighbors among you.”

”You’ll have to replace Valeri Leufroy,” Ashlynn added in a tone that made it clear that this item wasn’t negotiable. ”And I may want to introduce you to some Eldritch candidates to serve as lords within your domain. But you’d have three baronies worth of lands to draw on to create greater prosperity for your people, and hundreds of Eldritch settlers as well.”

”Would that be enough to balance the scales for you, Lord Erling?”