The Vampire & Her Witch

”Sir Elgon,” Reynold said, his eyes fixed on the towering columns of snow and lightning. ”You’re from Blackwell. You know Lady Ashlynn better than most. How do you fight something like that?” Reynold asked, placing extra emphasis on the final word.

”I was going to ask you,” Elgon snorted. ”You’re the one who’s hunted them, Lord Aleese. Your people have been trading raids with the Steppe since your grandfather’s day. Tell me you’ve seen this before, and tell me how your father’s knights answer it, and I’ll sleep better tonight.”

”I’ve never seen this.” Reynold’s voice was more uncertain than Adala had ever heard it before, and this coming from the man who had declared for Her Dominion in defiance of his own father without even a flicker of hesitation.

”I’ve seen them vanish into dust storms in high summer,” Reynold said. ”I’ve ridden into a brown wall of it after them and come out the far side with empty hands and two men missing. We always said they had the luck of ten men and the courage of twenty to ride so close to the storms. But maybe they weren’t riding close to the storms at all... they brought the storms along with them,” he said, shuddering visibly as he watched.

The storm-summoning horsemen were followed several heartbeats later by the thundering of a heard, or at least, what sounded like a herd, only to reveal itself to be just six men with lower bodies as large as a bull or an ox, and humanoid torsos that matched the scale of the powerful, four-legged bodies below. This time, the walls shook with their advance and snow fell from the battlements as if it had been swept clear by a broom.

Below the wall, the six giants planted their six banners, sending a final ripple of vibrations through the stones of the wall before they went still as standing stones behind them, arms out, fists closed, in a posture Adala could not read and wasn’t certain she liked.

A single chariot rolled down between the pillars and the planted banners, gold from tongue to tailboard, drawn by one of the horse-people moving as if the whole gleaming rig weighed nothing. The figure standing in it was no horse at all; he was an entirely different sort of Eldritch being that Adala had never even heard of before. He stood tall with a mane like a lion’s ruff, and across his broad chest, stitched in stones that caught the last of the sun’s fading light were an array of jewels arranged in a pattern so familiar that even Adala’s eyes went wide in disbelief.

”Oh,” Charlotte breathed in awed tones. ”Oh, he’s wearing the night sky. Adala, look, his tunic, those gemstones would be enough to build a copy of my father’s manor, and that’s just what I can see on his shirt...”

But Adala was watching the men by the second brazier, because the woman who owned the fishing ships had fallen to her knees while clutching the pendant around her neck.

”Gareon, the Ascended Archer,” she prayed, bringing the pendant to her lips as if to banish the heresy that had just escaped them. ”How can it be? The sacred stars upon his chest...”

As soon as she said it, everyone else could see it plainly too. The largest gemstones on the herald’s chest had been stitched into a pattern that any child of Lothian who’d set foot inside a temple would recognize.

Five stones in a curve, like a drawn bow.

The chariot drew up before the gates in a spray of snow, and the herald threw back his head, and when his voice came it didn’t come from below; it came from above, from the twirling pillars of snow and lightning, echoing across the whole of the city from a height above the walls.

”PEOPLE OF LOTHIAN! I am Rastlan; Holder of the Iron Chalice, Captain of the Stone Guard, Master of Four Constellations, and Herald of High Lord Dirar! Open your gates, and be honored beyond the deserving of any city of men!”

The echoes rolled away down the river and died. Thirty feet of empty battlement away from Adala, directly above the gate arch, a small silver-haired figure in a plain dark coat who had stood there so quietly and so long that half the wall had taken her for someone’s clerk stepped forward into the torchlight and looked down at the gleaming chariot with the mild attention of a woman receiving a delivery she had been told to expect.

”Good evening,” said Master Isabell, her voice ringing out loud and clear despite the sound of thunder and lightning crackling around her. ”We’ve been expecting your visit.”

Isabell’s voice was calm and unhurried, and it did a strange thing to the people around her. It made them exhale, as if, now that Isabell had arrived, everything would be all right... Almost like they were all children whose mother had just arrived to protect them from a schoolyard bully.

She glanced at Charlotte to see if she’d felt it too, and found Charlotte already looking at her, curls escaping her hood, eyes enormous. It was just like it had been on that terrible Midwinter’s Night in the Great Hall, only this time, Master Isabell seemed even more self-assured, as if everything was playing out exactly as she’d expected it to.

”I am Isabell,” the silver-haired woman said to the field, unhurried, and though she did not shout, her voice arrived at Adala’s ear as clearly as Charlotte’s had as she matched the herald’s litany of impressive titles with a set of her own. ”I am the Hemlock Witch, Architect and Engineer. Master of the Illustrious Corps of Engineers... And in the Emerald Kingdom, I’ve been called the Engineer of Destruction.”

The last title she spoke dropped into the crowd like a stone into a millpond, startling everyone as they found themselves reevaluating the woman that many of them had mistaken for someone’s clerk. But then, none of them had heard of an ’Engineer of Destruction’ before... It was impressive enough that she came from the Old Countries with a title that sounded so prestigious.

Adala, on the other hand, had heard it before; in the Kingdom of Iron, where military history was taught to young ladies on the theory that a wife who could not follow a siege was not fit to marry a man who would command one. She’d never heard a name with the title before, but she’d come to have great respect for a woman who could stand side by side with the Emerald King as a force equal to any of his knights.

”No wonder Lady Ashlynn made her a witch,” Adala breathed. Isabell was a woman who had leveled cities without the need of witchcraft or sorcery. Now that she had become a witch, the power she possessed must be... terrifying.

”Name your lord,” Isabell said, ”and be welcome as our guests.”

The herald below drew himself up, and the diamonds across his chest flared, and his voice rolled over the city like a landslide.

”Bow your heads to His Radiance, DIRAR! High Lord of the Southern Steppe! Master of the Seven Great Herds! Sovereign of the Six Jewels of the Southern Sea! Ruler of Endless Waves of Water and Grass! Master of Seven Constellations... and TRAMPLER OF THE HEAVENS!”