The Vampire & Her Witch

Adala Leufroy had attended countless banquets, including what should have been the coronation of a marquis, and she could say with some authority that she had never seen seating arranged half so shrewdly as it had been arranged tonight on the southern wall of Lothian City.

To the untrained eye it was hospitality. There were braziers set along the top of the wall, mulled wine going around in dented cups, and even benches dragged up from the gatehouse for the elderly and the important. But Adala’s eye had been trained in the Kingdom of Iron, where hospitality was understood to be a weapon like any other, and she had spent the last hour cataloguing the guest list with growing admiration.

Over by the second set of braziers, Adala spotted a goldsmith famous enough in Lothian March that his name was known even in the baronies, along with the master of the local Carters whose wagons carried half the apples and cider her family sold outside of their own barony.

She also spotted a woman who she’d heard owned no less than six fishing ships that worked the River Luath and another woman whose counting houses in each major town in the march wrote two out of three letters of credit that were redeemed

Lady Ashlynn hadn’t just arranged for most of the young noblemen and women of the Lothian Court to watch from the wall, whether they were the heirs to their parents’ titles or not; she’d also gathered the most influential commoners in the city, and perhaps the entire march, to bear witness to the arrival of their ’guests.’

More than that, Adala thought as her eyes swept over to the closest brazier where another group stood idly by, she’d sent along a suitable set of ’chaperones’ in Sir Elgon, Captain Devlin, and Lord Reynold Aleese.

Though from the rumors she’d heard, she couldn’t help but wonder if Lady Ashlynn had sent Lord Reynold here to keep from getting caught up in any trouble at the main reception where his father would come face to face with the lord of the Eldritch people their family had been fighting for close to a hundred years.

”Adala, your hands are frozen,” Charlotte said from just inches away, pulling Adala out of her thoughts. ”Adala. Your hands are frozen; give them here,” Charlotte insisted.

”They’re perfectly fine,” Adala insisted, curling her fingers tighter around the cup of mulled wine in her hand only to belatedly realize that she’d emptied the cup long ago, and she’d been too lost in her thoughts to set it aside when she was done.

Charlotte snatched the cup from Adala’s hands and set it quickly at her feet before she captured Adala’s hands and drew them under the heavy wool blanket the two of them shared. As soon as she had, she started rubbing Adala’s icy, delicate hands between her own warm palms, and Adala did her best to keep her face from turning red from more than the cold as she basked in the affection that flowed from Charlotte along with the warmth.

To the wall at large, they were two noble girls bundled on a bench like children at a fair. Lady Otker being kind to poor stiff Lady Leufroy, nothing worth a second glance. Under the blanket, Charlotte’s thumb traced a small idle circle against her wrist, and Adala reminded herself that she was composed, and educated, and too old to grin like an idiot in front of half the young nobles of Lothian just because the girl she liked held her hand.

”Thank you,” Adala said softly, nestling up against Charlotte’s warm softness and resting her head on the taller woman’s shoulder.

”Of course,” Charlotte said brightly as she pulled the blanket tighter around their shoulders. ”Someone has to...” she started to say, only to cut off as the sound of horns echoed across the hills beyond the wall.

It wasn’t a sound that Adala had ever heard before, wild and winding and free. It reminded her of the great halls of music in the Kingdom of Iron in a way. Instruments played with a skill and complexity that spoke to years spent mastering the horn... But no one in the Kingdom of Iron would ever have played with so little restraint.

Then two columns broke from the hilltop and came down the road like arrows off a string, and it felt like the entire crowd atop the wall held its breath.

Beside the brazier, Sir Elgon let out a low whistle of admiration as he watched the cavalry racing forward, moving with speed and confidence that only the most expert of riders could accomplish after years of training and constant practice. Only... Only these weren’t horses with riders.

There was always a bit of hesitation between a rider’s direction and a mount’s reaction, and every company of cavalry who rode in formation allowed extra space for the surprises that could come from the less intelligent part of the pair. But this formation had none of that separation, nor any of the hesitation because these weren’t men riding beasts... Man and beast blended into a single being, joined where the horse’s neck should have been, and they moved with the discipline of the best-drilled soldiers Elgon had ever seen.

The columns did not slow. Two hundred paces, then a hundred, and the youngest lords on the wall, along with the few of the merchants, had begun to clap, as though they were watching a circus of performers rather than the arrival of an ancient, hated enemy.

Then the columns of Eldritch horse-men split to the sides of the road like water flowing around a boulder, and began to run in circles. The snow rose high into the sky, crackling with lightning and thunder, and the clapping hands started clutching for sacred pendants or their neighbors’ hands as they suddenly felt very, very small in the face of the rising pillars.

Adala watched the white pillars climb. They were impressive even at ten paces high, but they quickly grew to twenty, then thirty, climbing ever higher until they’d transformed into two spinning towers of snow standing higher than the wall she sat on. And inside them, blue-gold and branching, trapped bolts of lightning crawled, flickering like something alive that was testing the bars of a cage.

The light of it fell across every upturned face on the battlements. Nobody clapped. Somewhere down the wall a merchant was reciting the Prophet’s Litany in a rapid, toneless mumble, getting the third line wrong every time, but no one corrected him. Beneath the blanket, Charlotte’s hand had stopped being a warm, comforting thing and transformed into an iron grip...