The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1492: An Unworthy Audience

Owain let his gaze sweep the central chamber of the cathedral, cataloguing the state of the assembled court with the same cold precision he used to assess a battlefield before committing his forces.

The lords and their families occupied the front rows of pews, arranged by rank and station, with their knights and retainers filling the rows behind them. Further back, the wealthy merchants and guild masters who had been invited to attend sat in clusters, their fine clothing a half-step below the nobility in quality but compensating with an enthusiasm for color and embellishment that bordered on the garish.

Too many of them, Owain realized, had been torn between dressing for a funeral and dressing for the wedding to follow, and while he appreciated that they had dressed to celebrate his ascendance, at the moment, many of them appeared as though they were celebrating his father’s demise.

But then again, there was a certain poetry to that as well, and Owain had to school his features carefully to prevent a smile from appearing on his lips at the thought.

The barons, at least, were all present and dressed in appropriately somber attire. All except the Hanrahans, that was.

Owain suppressed a flare of irritation at the empty pew where Baron Ian and his retinue should have been seated. He’d sent riders to Hanrahan as soon as he returned from the hunt, but it was still too soon to have received a report from his men or any sort of communication from Baron Ian Hanrahan.

If the old fool was conspiring with Loman to make some last desperate play for the throne, he was welcome to try. Owain had already sent word to every gate in the city: if the Hanrahans arrived, even with the Saint himself in tow, they were to be taken captive on suspicion of rebellion. The same went for Loman, wherever his pious little brother had crawled off to.

He wasn’t a fool. He wouldn’t let anyone spoil this, least of all the brother who had always been too weak to claim what was his.

But the Hanrahans were a problem for another hour. Right now, the problem was closer to hand, and it sat in the pews before him in various states of misery.

The knights of the march looked dreadful.

More than half of them were clearly suffering the aftereffects of the Stag Feast. They sat in the polished pews with the rigid, careful posture of men who had discovered that any movement of the head produced a wave of nausea and blinding pain that threatened to make their stomachs rebel against their masters and spill the remnants of their breakfast on the polished floor of the cathedral.

Sir Franc, who had feasted and drunk with particular enthusiasm the night before, looked like he’d been dragged from a gutter and propped upright in his seat, his face a shade of green that would have been comical if it weren’t so pathetic. Whatever favorable impression Owain had of the man for his contributions in the hunt for the Imperial Elk withered and died as he beheld the sorry state his vassal had reduced himself to.

Of the remainder who weren’t openly suffering, half looked like they hadn’t slept enough but were enduring through sheer pride and force of will, their jaws set and their eyes fixed forward with the glassy determination of men who refused to show weakness in front of their peers. Only a handful appeared genuinely alert and well rested, and Owain noted with displeasure that most of those belonged to the Dunn contingent, who had only arrived the previous evening and apparently had the good sense to retire early.

The Stag Feast had been meant as a celebration, a chance for Owain to display his generosity and for the knights of the march to toast the memory of the fallen Marquis before the solemnity of the funeral. Instead, it appeared to have turned most of his fighting men into walking casualties who would struggle to sit upright through the ceremony, let alone present the image of martial readiness that Owain intended to project to the court.

Owain didn’t know if he should blame the knights for overindulging the night before his Grand Ceremony, the barons for instilling such lax discipline in their men, or the staff in the kitchens for failing to water down the wine as the evening wore on. One way or another, however, someone was going to answer for this shameful display.

But worse than the state of his knights, worse than the empty Hanrahan pew, worse even than the gnawing suspicion that Loman was somewhere out there plotting against him, was the sheer, suffocating tedium of what Owain had just been forced to endure.

The eulogies Owain had just finished sitting through had been enough to make him wish for a jug of last night’s wine... or two of them after how long things had taken.

High Priest Aubin had spoken first, and Owain couldn’t fault the old man’s words even if he’d barely listened to them. Aubin spoke of the Struggle and the Heavenly Shores and the duty of those left behind to carry forward the work of the fallen. It was brief, respectful, and utterly forgettable, which was exactly what Owain needed from the Church today.

Then came the barons, and everything fell apart.

Baron Preden Saliou had gone first, as was his right as the eldest of the barons present, and the old man at least had the decency to keep his words short. He spoke of watching Bors grow from a young knight into a capable marquis who had lost too much too soon, and finished by expressing his confidence that the march was in good hands with Bors’s heroic son at the helm. Brief. Gracious. Sufficient. Owain had actually nodded his approval from where he sat, grateful that at least one of his vassals understood that today was about the future, not the past.

But then Baron Loghlan Dunn had risen from his pew, and everything went straight to the depths of the abyss.

The old man had spoken for the better part of a quarter hour, his deep, gravelly voice filling the cathedral with a meandering account of Bors Lothian’s struggles to defend the frontier and the boons of wealth he had bestowed upon the march after just three short years of war on the slopes of Airgead Mountain. Every sentence seemed to contain praise and insult in equal measure, each compliment carrying a barb that lodged beneath the skin and festered there.

By the time Loghlan finally sat down, Owain’s fingers had been digging into the arms of his chair hard enough to leave marks in the wood.

The only person who seemed more irritated by Loghlan’s performance than Owain was Baron Valery Leufroy, who all but stormed the pulpit when it was his turn so he could spend just as long setting the record straight. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Where Loghlan had been winding and barbed, Valery was blunt and sentimental, speaking of the War of Inches as the crucible that forged both himself and Bors into the men they became, and lamenting that the march would never see another like him. His greatest regret was that Bors hadn’t been able to hold on a few years longer to pass on his wisdom to young Tulori Leufroy, as if Owain was incapable of mentoring a brat who had yet to ride to war.

After those two, it was as though some unspoken competition had seized the remaining barons, each one rising to deliver a eulogy that was longer, more pointed, or more emotionally wrought than the last. What should have taken no more than half an hour consumed two full hours before Owain himself could even approach the pulpit, and by the time the last baron sat down, the candles in the chandeliers had burned noticeably lower and the weak morning light filtering through the stained glass had shifted from pale silver to the warmer tones of a sun that was well on its way toward midday.

Two hours. Two full hours of listening to old men reminisce about a man Owain had watched cough blood into his bedsheets for the better part of a month before pressing a pillow over his face to end the indignity.

But now it was his turn.

Owain placed his hands on the marble edges of the pulpit and let the silence stretch for several heartbeats, long enough for every whispered conversation in the nave to die and every pair of eyes to settle on him. He’d learned long ago that the most powerful opening to any speech was the absence of sound, the moment when an audience held its collective breath and waited for the first word to fall.

He let them wait. Let them see the sash of Lothian blue across the black of his mourning attire. Let them see the absence of jewels and gold, the way his clothing sat on his frame like armor waiting for its plates. Let them see a young lord who had set aside vanity in favor of readiness, who understood that the march couldn’t afford the luxury of a long mourning when demons prowled at their borders and one of the bastions of the Lothian legacy in the march that bore their name had already fallen.

Now, it was time to put things back on track. And after the barons’ performances, after the self-indulgent parade of old grievances and backhanded compliments, Owain had a great deal of ground to recover before he could move on to the real business of the morning.

He suppressed a smile as he thought of the decrees waiting on the altar behind him, sealed and ribboned, the physical weight of his father’s final wishes made tangible in ink and parchment. The barons had no idea what was coming, and when they heard what was in those documents, their eulogies would be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

But first, he had a few last things to say about the old man.

"My lords," Owain began, and his voice filled the nave like a blade sliding from its sheath. "My ladies. Faithful servants of the Light..."