The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1499: Emerald and Midnight (Part Two)

"My lady," Elgon said in a lower voice, his eyes dropping briefly to the breeches and rolled-down boots she still wore from the previous evening. "Is that how you intend to present yourself to the Lothian Court tonight? The trousers, and boots..." he hesitated, his well-trimmed mustache twitching with the effort of finding a diplomatic way to say what he was thinking.

"They aren’t technically proper attire for a lady of your station," Elgon said awkwardly. "Some members of the court might think the Blackwells have returned to their roots as privateers or worse," he said, though he wasn’t quite willing to say that she resembled a pirate queen in the making.

"Some members of the court will be scandalized regardless of what I’m wearing," Ashlynn said, and the matter-of-fact quality of her voice told Elgon that this was a decision she’d made long ago and had no intention of revisiting. "I expect to cross swords with Owain before the night is over, Sir Elgon. I’m dressing for the battle ahead, not for the approval of the Court."

"They can accept me as I am, or not," Ashlynn said flatly. "But I’m done twisting myself into knots over the opinions of people who haven’t earned the right to express one."

Elgon’s jaw tightened at the casual certainty with which she spoke of fighting the most dangerous swordsman in the march, but before he could press the point, his gaze dropped to the weapon belted at her hip, and the concern on his face shifted from propriety to something far more serious.

"That sword," he said slowly, studying the curved falchion in its deep blue scabbard tooled with wave patterns. The S-shaped guard with its knuckle guard of twisted steel ropes, the upward quillion shaped like a rolling wave, the polished oyster-shell pommel; it was unlike any weapon he’d ever seen, and the quality of the metalwork was extraordinary. "Where did you come by it, my Lady? That’s not Lothian work, and I don’t recognize it from the Blackwell armory either."

"Her name is Water’s Edge," Ashlynn said, resting her hand on the hilt with a familiar ease that made the old knight’s brow furrow even deeper. "She was made for me by a master artificer, forged from the captured blades of fallen Lothian Lords."

She let that sink in for a moment, watching the recognition dawn in Elgon’s eyes as he understood the symbolic weight of what she was describing.

"How much have you had to use it?" Elgon asked. His voice was fragile as he spoke, and for a moment, the bright, smiling features of his daughter, Siriol, overlapped with Ashlynn’s. Siriol was ten years Ashlynn’s junior, but the thought of her taking up arms the way Lady Ashlynn had sent a chill down his spine.

How much fighting had Lady Ashlynn done to feel so comfortable with a sword on her hip? How many battles had she survived? How far had the girl who snuck out of balls to read books traveled from who she used to be?

"The sword is new," Ashlynn said gently, refusing to comment on the turmoil she saw in the older man’s eyes. "My last one shattered in the High Pass, fighting the ghost of a High Lord who had been dead for at least a thousand years."

The silence that followed was the particular kind of silence that fell when a person said something so far beyond the boundaries of normal experience that the listeners couldn’t decide whether to believe it or not.

Elgon’s mustache bristled. Devlin, who had been buckling a gambeson across his broad chest, stopped with his hands frozen on the straps. Even Beathan, who had been quietly conferring with his Templars about the fit of their new armor, looked up with an expression of naked disbelief.

"I’ve seen the shattered sword," Isabell said quietly from her seat near the hearth, adjusting her spectacles as she shook her head in mild disbelief. "What’s left of it, anyway. The blade was made of darksteel, but from the look of what’s left of it, it might as well have been made from glass."

"Darksteel," Elgon murmured, resisting the urge to pull back from Ashlynn as he heard the word. When she said she’d allied herself with the Dem- er, the Eldritch Lady of the Vale, he should have expected something like this, but somehow, it never occurred to him that Lady Ashlynn would become so deeply involved in things that were supposed to be wicked.

"Like the spear in your father’s great hall? The broken one?" Elgon asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral. Out of the corner of his eye, he could already see Beathan and the Templars bristling as they struggled against the instincts that a lifetime in service to the Church had instilled in them. "It takes two of us to take that thing off the wall for cleaning, you know. They say it takes a blood sacrifice to even use one of those blades..."

"That’s one way to do it," Ollie said, walking over from where he’d been helping Elgon’s knights adjust the fit of their armor to join Ashlynn and Elgon. As he walked, he drew a black-bladed knife from a sheath at his waist that resembled a butcher’s cleaver with a rounded end. "There are others, once you learn how," he said, flipping the blade around easily in one hand to present the hilt to Sir Elgon.

When Elgon’s fingers brushed the hilt of the knife, he felt a shiver racing from the tips of his fingers to the center of his chest. An instant later, the sensation passed, but the memory of it lingered in his fingers as he wrapped them carefully around the weapon’s hilt.

-THUNK!-

As soon as Ollie withdrew his support, the blade pulled Elgon’s hand sharply downward as if he’d just picked up a heavy iron pot full of water. The blade bit deeply into the surface of the table, just from the force of its own weight, and Elgon stared at the young knight in shock as he retrieved the blade from the table as if it weighed no more than a kitchen knife.

"Like I said," Ollie said with a proud grin. "There’s a trick to it. You can learn too if you want to," he suggested casually.

What Ollie had just done truly was easy now that he was a witch, but he’d learned how to use the wide-bladed knife well before he’d received an invitation from Ashlynn to join her coven. It had taken months of training with Thane and Marcel to be able to use the weapon confidently, even though he hoped he’d never have to use it the way Thane had taught him to.

At the time, the vampire-knight had been full of praise for how quickly Ollie learned to use the weapon, but when Ollie considered how much more training and experience Sir Elgon had with weapons, he was certain that it would be even easier for a man who had been raised to be a knight.

"I think I’ll pass," Elgon said with a slightly uncomfortable-sounding chuckle as he shook his head at the flame-haired youth. At first, he’d thought that Lady Ashlynn must have been desperate for help to bestow knighthood on a kitchen boy, but after what he’d just seen, he was rapidly revising his opinion of Sir Ollie.

Glancing at Sir Beathan, Elgon saw a similar look in the young templar’s eyes. They’d both seen the harsh reality of the Church in the frontier, and they were willing to stand with Lady Ashlynn against both the Lothians and the Church after what had happened to her and Lady Jocelynn, even if that meant accepting an alliance with the ’Eldritch.’

But the notion of taking up Eldritch weapons felt like a step too far at the moment.

Ashlynn saw the hesitation in their eyes and chose not to push matters with them. It was already enough that they’d chosen to stand with her despite her choice of allies. The time would come to tell them the rest of the truth, when they could see the wonders of the Eldritch world for themselves.

Perhaps then she would even tell them that the silk lining of the gambesons they were eagerly buckling on had been produced by the Nightweaver clan, and while it wasn’t as aggressive as darksteel, it was every bit as much a product of Eldritch sorcery as Ollie’s knife...