The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1075: Awkward Smalltalk (Part Two)
If it weren’t for the topic of conversation, Loman could almost pretend that he was visiting Ashlynn at her home in Blackwell County... or perhaps a significantly more luxurious version thereof. After all, she’d told him when they first met that she rarely left her chambers and spent most of her time outside of them in Blackwell Manor’s library.
But the illusion that he had entered the chambers of a cloistered royal princess shattered when he looked at other elements of the room’s furnishings. Things that no noblewoman in the entire Kingdom of Gaal would keep in their private chambers unless they belonged to their husbands.
In one corner of the room, two suits of armor stood, both sized for a person far too short to fit any knight that Loman had ever known, making it clear at a glance that the armor belonged to Ashlynn herself and not someone who fought on her behalf.
At a glance, even someone with as little experience fighting as Loman had could tell that one of the suits of armor was intended for practice, featuring mostly chain with stout gauntlets and a mostly open-faced helm that would protect its wearer from training accidents while offering more visibility than most helms, but would fall far short of the protection that most knights demanded on the battlefield.
"You’ve been training to fight in armor?" Loman asked as his eyes took in the mismatched links in the chain armor that indicated recent and extensive repairs. Just what kind of training had she been doing that would result in so much damage to her armor?
Even as hard as his brother, Owain, trained, Loman had never seen a single suit of training armor so worn unless it had been a hand-me-down from their father... yet the armor looked far too new for the damage to have come from a previous owner. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎
"There are times when it’s necessary," Ashlynn said, carefully skirting her intention to challenge Owain to a duel so that she could defeat him with the tools that he was most proud of mastering. The second suit of armor had been prepared for that very duel, though unlike her new sword, Water’s Edge, the armor’s design was fairly plain and practical. There simply wasn’t time for anything more elaborate than that.
"I don’t know if it would have been a boon or a blessing the first time I fought in the High Pass," she said, keeping the conversation in safe territory. "I would have welcomed the protection at the start of the battle, but in the end, the surface of the frozen lake we were fighting on broke and I fell into the water."
"A full suit of armor might have been a death sentence," she said, shuddering as she thought of Heila and Hauke struggling to free her from the grasp of the dying Tuscan who would have dragged her to the bottom of the lake without their rescue. Heila had barely been strong enough to free her as it was... if she’d had to struggle against the weight of even Ashlynn’s training armor, it might have been too much.
"The second time I fought there, I would have welcomed even a padded gambeson over the fur cloak I fought in," she said with a light chuckle. "Even though he was only a ghost, High Lord Ansgar was a powerful swordsman. He even shattered my sword," she said, gesturing to another of the room’s oddities as she spoke.
"That was your sword?" Loman asked in surprise as he stared at the shards of a darksteel falchion that had been carefully arranged into the shape of a sword before they were affixed to a slab of wood and hung above her hearth. "I thought that was a trophy from someone you’d defeated with your witchcraft," he said, realizing that Ashlynn had depths and complexities that defied the neat boxes his mind kept trying to fit her into.
From the shattered sword above the mantle to the polished, gleaming blade beside it, it was clear that this room belonged to a powerful warrior, but she collected none of the trophies of victory that men like his father and brother did. Instead, she kept her own shattered sword, like a memento of a fallen friend.
Her room contained luxuries fit for royalty, from the furniture to the masterpieces of artwork displayed on her walls, but when Loman looked at the hearth, it had been fitted with the same iron hooks and fixtures used in cooking hearths across the world, and his hostess was currently busying herself over them as she carefully assembled a meal that filled the room with the scent of warming spices, fresh bread, and sizzling meat.
It was like she refused to be confined to the fate the stars had laid out for her... Or rather, it was like no single role written of in the heavens could contain the woman she’d become since she left Lothian March. She was a refined lady who dispensed justice with the wisdom of a seasoned lord, a powerful warrior who fought like a knight and survived harrowing battles, a gentle housewife who tended the hearth and cooked meals for her guests... and all of this in addition to being a Great Witch who the Church would stop at nothing to capture.
If it wasn’t for that last facet, Loman could easily have called her the most amazing woman of the age, one that his brother should have praised the Holy Lord of Light for the rest of his life for having the chance to marry. Not that his brother would have appreciated having a woman at his side who could be his equal or perhaps his superior in so many things.
But when he thought about her witchcraft and the way the Church would respond to her, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was the greatest tragedy of the current era that such an amazing woman was cursed to be a witch, or if she had become so extraordinary in so many ways because she’d been blessed to become one...
