The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1540: The Herald Speaks

Two young men strode down the center of the aisle, and their appearance alone was enough to startle anyone sitting close to the aisle into pulling back.

On the right side, a tall young knight dressed in the same midnight and emerald as the others walked with a powerful purpose and a gaze that was fixed on the lord and lady standing before the dais. He had flame-red hair, and both the coat of mail and the tabard he wore over his armor were so stained with blood that it was difficult to make out the design on the tabard itself. He wore heavy knives at each hip, and he seemed to eschew a shield as unnecessary.

Seeing his powerful stride and the amount of blood that stained his armor, even veterans of the War of Inches like Valeri Leufroy had to admit that he might be one of the most dangerous knights they’d ever seen. Who knew how many bodies he’d left in his wake over the years to develop such a potent aura of menace when he walked into the wedding like a man walking onto a battlefield?

The young man to his left, however, was even more intimidating to others in the room, particularly High Priest Aubin and Abbot Recared.

Beside the knight walked a man draped in the crimson and gold of the Inquisition, but the symbols on his robes were antiquated enough to have been old even when Aubin was only an Acolyte, and some of them, like the figure eight of burning suns, had never belonged to any order of the Inquisition that either Aubin or Recared had ever heard of.

But it was the sword the young man carried, with a hilt wrapped in gold wire and rubies, resting in a gilded sheath adorned with burning suns and holy flames, that captured the eyes of the High Priest and the Abbot.

"High Inquisitor," Recared breathed, not daring to believe his eyes. There hadn’t been a High Inquisitor in Lothian March in nearly a hundred years, and that had been when the famed High Inquisitor Ignatious disappeared following an attack by the Demon Lady of the Vale herself. For one to be here now, barging into this ceremony...

The Abbot quickly shook off his rapidly spiralling thoughts. Just because the man carried a Holy Flame Blade didn’t mean he had the ability to draw it. For a man that young to carry one, it was entirely possible that it was nothing more than a dead ornament in his hands. But if it wasn’t...

The knights and Templars reached their positions and went still. The emerald-and-midnight gambesons formed a wall of color that bisected the great hall, separating the guests from the aisle and turning the space between the tables into a corridor of its own, one that led from the shattered doors to the dais where Owain and Jocelynn stood in the stunned silence of a ceremony that had just been torn apart.

Then, through the open doors, a young man entered the hall.

Lord Liam Dunn, heir of Dunn Barony, walked into the great hall of Lothian Manor wearing the same gambeson of emerald and midnight, and his boots rang against the stone floor with a sharp, measured cadence like the steady beat of a heart that held no fear.

He stopped at the head of the aisle, between the two rows of knights, and when he spoke, his voice filled the great hall from floor to rafters with the same powerful, commanding tone he’d honed on a dozen battlefields in the wilderness or when addressing dozens of his peers at the Keating Academy.

"Lords and ladies of Lothian March," Liam said, and almost every eye in the room drifted toward him, though a few remained fixed on the pair of powerful young men in the center of the aisle or the knights and templars standing guard. "I present to you Lady Ashlynn Blackwell, Daughter of Count Rhys Blackwell, Slayer of Ghosts and Giants, Conqueror of the High Pass, Commander of Four Armies, Destroyer of the Summer Villa, Lawful Wife of Marquis Owain Lothian, and Rightful Marchioness of Lothian March."

He paused. The silence in the hall was so complete that Charlotte could hear the wine dripping from the shattered decanter onto the floor.

"Bow before her majesty and her fury," Liam said, in a voice that was both commanding and a touch reverent. "Because she has come to claim justice from the husband who tried to murder her on the night of her wedding."

No sooner had Liam finished announcing her than Ashlynn Blackwell stepped through the doors of the Great Hall.

In the spring, the lords and ladies of Lothian March had gathered in this very hall for a feast to celebrate the marriage of Ashlynn and Owain. At the time, she resembled a voluptuous gift from the Lord of Light, radiant in her white dress covered with pearls from the distant sea. Her temperament had been smooth and mild, and many barons of the march had told Lord Bors that his son had just married the most perfect mother for his children they could imagine.

The Ashlynn Blackwell who returned for her husband’s wedding couldn’t have been more different if she’d tried. Her features were the same, still as achingly beautiful as they were before, but there was a hardness in her emerald eyes that had never been there before, and when she walked, it was with a power and purpose that a younger Ashlynn Blackwell had lacked.

Her rolled-down boots clicked sharply on the stones of the Great Hall, echoing through a silence no one dared to disturb while her black sailor’s coat streamed out behind her like a dark wing to match the black feather in her cavalier cap.

Most striking of all was the sword at her waist, with its wave-shaped guard and intricately tooled sheath. A sword at a woman’s hip should have been an awkward ornament at most, but when Lady Ashlynn wore it, it looked like it was just as much a piece of her as the sword at Owain’s side.

The great hall of Lothian Manor held its breath.

And at the base of the dais, standing beside the bride he had been about to claim, Owain Lothian stared at the woman in the cavalier hat with an expression that, for the first time in his life, held no mask at all.

"Hello, Husband," Ashlynn said, coming to a stop once she’d reached a point two paces in front of the bloody knight and the young Inquisitor. "It’s been a long time," she added. The words were conversational, but her tone was colder than ice, and her emerald eyes flashed with fury as she stared at the man responsible for everything she’d suffered.

"Get away from my sister, Owain," she added coldly. "You and I still have unfinished business to settle..."