The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1192: Charting A Course (Part One)
"War," Rhys said, closing his eyes as he tried to imagine what Ashlynn was going through as she prepared to go to war against Owain Lothian... and what would happen to Jocelynn standing on the other side of that war, especially if Ashlynn ever learned that Jocelynn had been the one to tell Owain her secret.
"You said that Ashlynn is the ’Mother of Trees’, a Great Witch like the Mother of Tides," Rhys said as he tried to organize his thoughts, summoning as much of a lord’s detachment as he could. He’d sat in judgment on murderers and heretics, and on two occasions, he’d even sat in judgment on knights who had betrayed him and their lords...
It was never easy to separate your own feelings from such cases, but justice demanded impartiality, and so he had trained himself to set aside his feelings, as much as it was humanly possible to do so at least, to consider things as objectively as possible. Now, he tried to use that same discipline to consider what would happen when Ashlynn went to war against Owain Lothian and the forces behind him.
"My ancestor, Phylip, wrote that the Mother of Tides could drown fleets and reshape the coastline with her powers," Rhys continued. "He said that there was no power on the seas that could resist her. But when Claire du’Gaal was the Mother of Trees, she fought against the Church and the Kingdom of Gaal, and she lost. It took years for them to capture her, but she was defeated in the end."
"Is the Mother of Trees a weaker witch?" Rhys asked. "Or did Claire du’Gaal fail because she hadn’t mastered her powers yet when she tried to free her brother from the Church?"
Wars took time to plan and prepare for if they were going to be successful. If there was one thing that the past several years of negotiating with the Lothians and the Church had taught him, it was that the Church and the Kingdom of Gaal had been so successful at conquering the Eldritch because the Church possessed exceptional foresight to plan for things that could disrupt their strategies, and the Kingdom of Gaal possessed the discipline to assemble their forces and attack only when they could amass an overwhelming advantage.
It might shock the lords of the marches to know it, but neither the Kingdom nor the Church expected them to be successful in clearing their lands and establishing the borders that would allow them to make the transition from March to Duchy.
The job of the marches was only to hold the territory that had been gained in the last Crusade and to wear away at the neighboring Eldritch nations enough to prevent their enemy from amassing strength while the Kingdom and the Church slowly built momentum for their next Holy War or Crusade.
The Church thought on a longer timeline than most men, putting plans in place that would only come to fruition after the people who conceived the plan had died of old age. Right now, in the marches, there were still dozens, if not hundreds, of Eldritch villages within the borders officially claimed by the kingdom.
But each of those villages had been cut off from the others. There was no trade between them, no reinforcements. No healers could visit a village when sickness spread among the people, nor shipments of food in a hard year when famine struck one village while another prospered with a great harvest. By the time the Holy War came, those villages would be softer, easier targets, like ripe fruit, ready for the harvest, because the Church and the Kingdom had been patient.
By contrast, Claire du’Gaal had only spent a few years learning to master her powers and recruiting a pair of witches into her coven. She feared that her window of opportunity to break the Church’s hold over the nascent Kingdom of Gaal was closing, and she launched her one-woman war as soon as she felt ready.
Privately, Rhys had always wondered if she would have succeeded if she had waited longer, learned more from the other Eldritch witches, and assembled greater forces to fight back against the Church. But she’d allowed her desire to free her brother from the Church to overwhelm her patience to prepare... or perhaps she’d just been over-confident in the powers she’d gained and underestimated what it would be like to oppose a Saint and his Exemplars.
Whatever the reason for Claire du’Gaal’s downfall, Rhys was afraid that Ashlynn was preparing to repeat the same mistakes. If she only had a single witch in her coven, then even with one that she ’borrowed’ from the Mother of Thorns, she lacked the forces required to fight against the Kingdom and the Church.
"Cannot say," Esselk’ti said as she watched Rhys trying to understand how much his daughter had changed since she became the Mother of Trees, and what that meant for her ’war’ against the Lothians and the Church. "Mother, the Mother of Tides, warns me, teaches me flags of Church so I know them. Tells me never to attack ships with Church Flags. Dangerous," she explained.
"Dangerous, even for witches," Esselk’ti emphasized. "But Vale of Mists is far from sea. Far from King. Far from Church’s Sovereign," she continued. "Auntie Ashlynn not weak. Fights with sword, also, fights with vampire power. Stronger than witch alone."
"Vampire power?" Rhys asked, frowning as he tried to remember everything he’d heard about the ’Demon Lady of the Vale’ while he was visiting Lothian March for Ashlynn’s wedding. He’d been hopeful that there might be other witches among the Eldritch nations fighting against the Lothians, ones that he could encourage Ashlynn to seek out if Owain couldn’t accept her mark or if her powers began to grow, whether she wanted to use them or not.
As disappointed as he’d been to learn that there were no witches among the people of the Vale, nor among the people of Airgead Mountain or the Southern Steppe, he’d wondered if an Eldritch being as powerful as the ’Demon Lady of the Vale’ might have a connection to them. But the rumors he’d heard about the powers of this Eldritch Lady sounded so much like the lies and rumors told about Clair du’Gaal that he’d been reluctant to believe anything he heard from the people of Lothian March about this ’vampire.’ 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂
"The Harbinger of Death, she is called," Esselk’ti said slowly as she grappled with how to explain what she’d learned from Auntie Amahle to Ashlynn’s father. "Great Vampire, like Great Witch. Powerful. Saves Auntie Ashlynn on night Owain murders her," she started, putting the important part first to cushion the blow.
"She makes pact of blood with Auntie Ashlynn," the witch continued. "Binds lives together, forever. Shares power. Shares strength. Saves Auntie Ashlynn, stops dying," she said as the look on her face grew more hesitant and her whiskers began to twitch nervously.
"Not just... not just fight together," Esselk’ti said. "Lives together. Close together. Auntie Amahle offers to free Auntie Ashlynn from pact of blood. Ashlynn says no. Chooses vampire. Chooses binding. Chooses be together with vampire. Forever..."
