The Vampire & Her Witch

Out on the field, icy shapes began to ascend.

Where the frost-ferns overlapped, something erupted from the soil. First came a simple bulge of ice, like the crown of a seed breaking free of the soil. It was followed a heartbeat later by a slender shaft that thickened into a trunk; crystalline and clear at the root, clouding to a milky translucence as it spiraled upward like a sapling reaching for the sun.

The growth was slow enough to follow with the eye, and up on the hillside, people stood on their blankets and climbed onto the terraces below just to get a better view over the heads of the crowd.

One lonely tree stood in the center of the field, shining with reflected and refracted radiance from above like a thing of wonder. It stood close to thirty feet tall, and it looked like it had been carved from a single block of ice, like a decoration at a lord’s winter feast. Only no lord had ever beheld an ice sculpture so large, or so lifelike.

But a single tree was far from enough for Ashlynn’s plans tonight, and soon, the sound of frozen earth cracking filled the air. A single tree multiplied into a dozen, then a hundred. They rose crooked and gnarled, some leaning so close their trunks nearly fused while others stood isolated in thirty paces of bare ice.

No two of them matched in height, and every one of them was as unique as any tree in a forest. The tallest reached perhaps thirty feet into the night sky like the first tree, while the smallest halted at twenty, spreading a low, tangled crown that a tall man would have walked into blindly if he wasn’t paying attention.

Then the branches unfurled, and the acoustics of the arena shifted.

A sound like hard frost settling on a winter lake, amplified a thousand times over, became a persistent, crackling whisper that emanated from every corner of the field. The limbs of the trees branched and forked repeatedly, thinning until the tips of the twigs at the end of each branch were finer than a needle, leaving the entire grove shrouded in a haze of ice so delicate it seemed to possess no weight at all.

The light from the rippling banners overhead caught in the crystalline leaves and shattered into a million fragments, dancing across the ground as the branches of the trees swayed in the wind.

That was when the crowd on the hillside made a sound. It wasn’t a cheer, not quite. Rather, it was a single, unified intake of breath followed by a mixture of exclamations and quiet prayers. Then a rising murmur of pure astonishment rolled up the terraces, bounced off the sails of ice, and descended back into the hollow.

On the platform, Ashlynn was only half finished.

She could feel Heila bending with the bond on her left, endlessly supportive, and the icy weight of Hauke on her right. Beneath her, she had summoned a forest of breathtaking beauty that was, as yet, entirely benign. But beauty was not the purpose of this invocation.

She had promised a contest that held genuine danger for both champions because without risking their lives, the Southern Steppe would never accept this as a victory or a defeat.

Slowly, Ashlynn raised her gnarled wand once more, letting her voice ring out across the frozen forest before her.

”What blossoms fair must ripen sweet,

Yet fruit falls hard where two hearts meet,

Hang low, hang bright, hang fit to burst,

The smallest bearing all the worst,

Let every bough its burden hold

Till hand or arrow breaks the cold.”

All across the frozen forest, the icy blossoms of frost flowers transformed, drinking deeply from the energy of the river as they reshaped themselves from flowers into fruit.

They beaded upon the twigs like droplets of water on a summer leaf, swelling into every imaginable size, from the smallness of a plum to the girth of a child’s head. They were not transparent; they captured the light of the night and held it, each sphere glowing with the shifting hues of the ribbons above.

Because the light in the sky never settled on a single color, the entire grove pulsed with an uneven, living light, emerald-green flowing through one thicket while another turned violet, the colors sliding from tree to tree like a storm crossing a valley.

In the seating area reserved for noblemen from Dunn, Sir Padraig Wyndan wrapped an arm around his wife, Seren, and pulled her close while pointing at the shifting colors in the forest of ice.

”Look, Seren,” he whispered in her ear. ”Does it remind you of the night we met at Lord Loghlan’s winter ball?”

”The trees in the garden were covered with ice that night,” Seren agreed, nodding as she snuggled into her husband’s warm embrace. ”But, beautiful as they were, they were nothing like this...”

”This is the world Eira will live in when she goes to Empress Ashlynn’s academy,” Padraig said softly. ”I confess, I’m a bit jealous. She and Idris and Bran are going to grow up in such an amazing world.”

”So join them in it,” Seren suggested. ”When they go to the academy, go with them. Leave Wyndan to me.”

”I’m a bit old to go to an academy, my love,” he said with a light chuckle as he watched the luminous, icy fruits growing larger before their eyes, the same way their children seemed to grow faster every year.

”So don’t go to study, go to teach,” Seren said, voicing a thought that had been weighing on her mind ever since Empress Ashlynn extended her invitation. ”I don’t want to see you fighting in wars; you’re too old for that, and you know it,” she said, poking him in the stomach that had grown softer and furrier than it had been years ago.

”But our boys learn so much from you about what it means to be a knight,” she said, looking at their sons who would have been seeking opportunities to become squires in another year or two if things hadn’t changed. ”I think that’s just as beautiful and just as important as things like this,” she said, gesturing at the shifting forest of ice.

”You think?” Padraig asked, raising a brow at his lovely wife.

”I think it’s worth talking to Eira about it,” Seren said. ”She can bring the idea to Empress Ashlynn’s ears. The worst Her Dominion can say is ’no.’”

”I suppose it is,” Padraig said with a deep, belly-shaking laugh. ”I hope she doesn’t mind her useless father trying to ride her coat tails...”

”Oh, hush,” Seren said. ”She’ll be happy to help. Just make sure to put in a good word for her with Lord Liam when next you see him, before he forgets about the ladies he grew up around...”

While the couple spoke, dreaming of wondrous days ahead, a wind swept down from the surrounding hills and found the grove, and the entire frozen forest began to sway.

The branches moved with a fluid grace that defied the nature of ice, swaying like an orchard in a summer breeze. The crowns of each tree bent and shook, sending the luminous fruit dancing on their stems, and the fine twigs at the end of branches shivering. Where the ice sails diverted the wind, sections of the grove remained perfectly motionless while the trees beside them tossed and glittered, causing the movement to ripple through the forest in bands and gusts.

The sound of it reached the onlookers a heartbeat later. It was the faint, ceaseless chiming of ten thousand shards of ice touching ten thousand others, forming a delicate, natural melody that no human ear had ever heard.

On the third terrace, a woman who had spent her afternoon mending her husband’s cloak sat with her mouth slightly open, speechless. Beside her, her husband, who had complained about the seats, the cold, and every other minor inconvenience since they left the city, reached out and took her hand without a word, though his body language made it clear how grateful he was to be here with her tonight.

If this was the only thing they saw and they had to turn around and leave right now, all the trouble would still have been worth it.

Out on the stone platform, the ring of blended energy was beginning to dissipate.

Hauke’s horn had dimmed from its brilliant blue to a dull glow, and his chest heaved in a way Ashlynn hadn’t seen since their flight in the High Pass. Heila had one small hand braced against the stone, her horns lowered as she breathed carefully. Ashlynn lowered her wand, and though her arm felt as heavy and limp as a dead fish, she made it come down with grace because two thousand people were watching their empress.

The last fruit finally completed its swelling on the furthest branch. The grinding rumble beneath the earth went silent.

And the only remaining sound in the hollow was the collective breath of two thousand people trying to comprehend what they had just seen, and the endless, delicate chiming of a forest that would not stop dancing in the wind...