The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 1798: The Southern Steppe Arrives (Part One)

The city of the Lothians crouched against its river like a beggar warming his hands at a poor fire.

High Lord Dirar stood at the crest of the last hill south of the humans’ capital city and tried, with the generosity befitting a guest, to be impressed by what he saw.

The walls were honest grey stone, and they looked sturdy enough to last another generation or two; he would grant them that much at least. The roofs beyond the walls were a hodgepodge of simple thatching and sturdier slate, all of them huddled close and exhaling woodsmoke from a thousand crooked chimneys until the whole valley smelled like a campfire that had been rained on.

There was no harbor of white towers on the river. There were no avenues of ten thousand lanterns, no canals lying like ribbons of green glass between tea houses or flower gardens. The few bridges he saw were barely wide enough for two chariots to run abreast, and all of them looked like short, stubby things cobbled together by the hands of a child mixing mud with stones. In the City of Solace on the shores of the Southern Sea, the gate he was looking at wouldn’t have been fit to guard the fish market, to say nothing of welcoming a High Lord.

"It is smaller than I imagined," Rastlan said. The captain of his Stone Guard wore an open expression of disgust on his feline face, and the only respect he paid the place was that he refrained from covering his nose to blot out the smell.

"It is smaller than they imagine," Dirar said with a snort. "That’s the more dangerous thing."

He had crossed the River Tuilig four days ago with one hundred of his people. Fifty of his Stone Guard led the way along with several of his most trusted servants, including not only Swift Hooves and Long Horns, but also several of the Golden Maned with their embroidered, scholar’s tunics and their quiet, watchful eyes.

Every league of the journey north had confirmed what his grandfather had said of the humans: ’They are a people who mistake hardship for virtue.’ Their villages were small, and their fields were smaller. Their horses were dull-eyed and short in the leg while their barons built keeps the size of a wool merchant’s summer house in Green Sand Cove. And yet they called themselves lords of all they surveyed.

And still...

His gaze drifted to the center of the city, where a great temple pierced the sky with spires wrapped in gold, shining in the snow-heavy town like a second sunset. The dying light ran molten along its edges, and the chill that ran down Dirar’s spine had nothing to do with winter.

He had not been born when the Church came to the Vale of Mists. But he had been raised on the stories of it, as had every scholar and warrior in the Southern Steppe for several generations. The false sun burning in the midnight sky of the vale, and High Lord Torbin dead on the hillside surrounded by the bodies of soldiers the humans called ’Templars.’

Mist City, once the fog-shrouded gateway between the eastern lowlands and the western highlands, had been burned to its bones by men in white and gold who sang hymns while they worked. The humans bred like rabbits and died just as easily. Their knights were nothing, and their barons were less than nothing.

But their Church had once put a sun in the sky at midnight, and their Oracles saw farther than any Stargazer dared to admit. Any lord of the Eldritch who did not respect that had no business ruling over so much as a well in the wilderness.

And the woman who now holds this city, Dirar thought, broke that Church across her knee in a single night, ending a century of restraint from the Vale of Mists and declaring to the entire world that the Era of Retreat had come to an end.

That deserved respect, and Dirar intended to pay it. But there were limits to how much he would yield without testing her strength for himself.

Rastlan stood patiently at his lord’s shoulder, observing the city along with his lord while the remainder of Dirar’s retinue formed up behind them. He didn’t break the silence until he’d made certain that every soldier and chariot were perfectly in place, and even then, he waited more than two dozen heartbeats before he interrupted his lord’s thoughts.

"Your soldiers stand ready, Highest One," Rastlan said. "At this hour, it should be one of their witches at the gate. Do you still want me to test them?"

Dirar rolled his shoulders beneath his ceremonial armor, and one of his front hooves clopped on the frozen ground before he could suppress the sign of irritation. The lacquered plates of his armor lay over a silk and brocade tunic, and beneath the silk, where no one but he could account for it, the skin of his ribs was smooth and whole and new.

It shouldn’t have been. By every right of nature he should have arrived here tonight wrapped in bandages and stinking of a healer’s herbs, and the fact that he hadn’t was owed entirely to the charity of a witch who stood no taller than his hindquarters. The little horned one, Heila, with her grass-green eyes and her terrible gentleness, who had knit his wounds closed without once commenting on how he’d come by them.

She hadn’t needed to ask. She knew. Everyone who mattered knew, even though no one would speak of it, and that was somehow worse.

His ’disagreement’ with Her Eternity had proved that the Harbinger of Death was no longer the passive, withdrawing woman she’d been when he first struck a bargain with her and accepted one of her progeny into his court.

The woman who had been content to be known as a mere Eldritch Lord had been reborn or reforged, and she’d made that painfully clear when she demanded her due...

"The light is failing," Dirar said, swishing his tail as if to swat away the thoughts of last night and everything that had gone wrong when he visited Nyrielle’s camp to pay his respects. "The sun will sink behind the mountains soon, and I did not cross a thousand leagues of grass to arrive in the dark like a smuggler. Announce me, Rastlan, and let’s see what sort of welcome the Mother of Trees has prepared for us..."