The Vampire & Her Witch

”Aunt Maela, do you, do you really think they’re taking us to Lothian City?” Micheline asked as the carriage clattered down the frost-covered road.

Micheline had her cheek almost against the glass. Outside, the countryside rolled by, just as it had for several days; low hills with the snow lying grey in the furrows, a stand of alders along a frozen ditch, and every league or so a farmhouse with a thatch roof and a barn with a thread of smoke going straight up in the cold. For a land recently conquered by demons and witches, it looked... bland. Bland and a bit boring.

”You’ve been here before, haven’t you, Aunt Maela?” Micheline asked, turning away from the window to look at her aunt in the seat across from her. ”Does any of this look familiar?”

”No,” Maela said mildly, glancing briefly out the window only after she’d given her answer.

”No, it doesn’t look familiar?” Micheline asked. ”Or no, you haven’t been here?”

”I’ve only been to Lothian City once, Micheline,” Maela reminded her niece. ”For the wedding last spring. At the time, I came up the river with your father and forty other people,” Maela said, looking briefly nostalgic.

”Rhys complained endlessly about the riverboat and said that if Ashlynn was going to be forced to travel like that, he’d hire half the shipbuilder’s guild to build her a proper dromon,” Maela said before her expression grew somber again. ”Not that things worked out that way.”

”So, no, none of this is familiar,” Maela said. ”Beyond the fact that we’re in Lothian and headed roughly west, I couldn’t tell you anything.”

”That’s not very comforting,” Micheline sighed, slumping in her seat as she returned her gaze to the window. ”If Lothian is a great city, shouldn’t we have passed through little hamlets by now? Or a proper village or two? We always seem to veer away from them.”

”You didn’t ask me to be comforting,” Maela pointed out. ”You asked me if it looked familiar. I’m just as lost as you are,” Maela said. ”And you shouldn’t expect much by way of hamlets in Lothian. It’s still the frontier. No one clusters together without stout walls and a knight to protect them out here.”

”It’s not like DuCoumont or Blackwell,” Maela said. ”They have to defend against raids and all manner of trouble... Or at least they did,” she added, realizing that she had no idea if that would still be true now that her daughter had claimed the Lothian throne and allied herself with the people Marcel called Eldritch.

”But the farmhouses aren’t behind strong walls,” Micheline said. ”If everyone needs to be able to make it back to a village for safety...”

”I’m told that many of the farms here have sturdy cellars with iron bars across their doors,” Maela said. ”Ashlynn noticed it on her first visit. Most raids are looking for foodstuffs, livestock, grain, that sort of thing. If a farmer hides in their cellar and bolts it tight, they can wait out an attack. But if people congregate into a hamlet, they become a different kind of target, one that needs stout walls and a knight to defend it...”

”I didn’t think it would be that different,” Micheline said, watching the snow-covered hills roll by. ”Gaalen is different because it’s the capital, but most of the villages between DuCoumont and Gaalen have torn down their village walls so they can grow beyond them... Only the knights’ manors still have real fortified walls anymore.”

”I don’t think the kingdom thinks very much about the marches,” Maela said. ”Except as the place where their furs and their timber and their wool come from. It’s different in more ways than you can imagine,” she said quietly.

”If we’d understood that when we first started talking to Bors Lothian, then maybe...” Maela started to say, only to cut herself off with a shake of her head. Dwelling on the past wouldn’t help her now. ”It doesn’t matter,” she said. ”We’ll see Ash and Jocey soon enough and then... Then things will get better,” she said, mostly to reassure herself.

”How can you be so sure?” Micheline asked, finally giving voice to the fear that had been stewing in her heart for the past several days. ”How do you know we’re being taken to them and not somewhere else...”

”We’ve been through three carriages now,” Micheline said. ”Three carriages, at least seven sets of horses, and that inn two nights ago where the woman wouldn’t look at us.... And we can’t see any landmarks or talk to anyone who can tell us where we are or...”

”So?” Maela asked, waiting to see where her niece was headed.

”So how do you know that we aren’t being kidnapped?” Micheline whispered as she leaned across the gap between her seat and Maela’s. ”How do you know we’re actually being taken to Ashlynn and Jocelynn and that everything that man said is true?”

”We don’t have an escort,” Micheline continued, ticking off points on her fingers. ”Papa wouldn’t send one after what Master Marcel told him about his vassals, so the only guards we have are the men driving the carriage,” she said, nodding toward the front of the carriage where two men sat outside on the driver’s seat.

Neither man looked reputable, and the larger of the two, an old soldier who responded to the name of Mirt, seemed far too comfortable with the sword he wore at his waist for Micheline’s comfort. Both men looked competent and capable, but the same praise could be extended to highwaymen and horse thieves.

”There isn’t a device on this carriage or on either of those men,” Micheline added. ”And I’ve been trying to get clues out of them for six days. They barely speak more than three words at a time! If we simply... disappeared one day on the road, who would ever know where to begin looking for us? If Father had us followed, I’m sure we lost his men with all the carriage changes and the riding through the dark, so...”

”So if this Marcel wants to betray us,” Micheline finally asked. ”How can we hope to stop him?”

”Oh,” Maela said with an odd smile. ”Against a man like Marcel and the people driving this carriage? If he really intended to kidnap or betray us? I don’t think there’s anything we could do at all...”