The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 674: War Orphans

Standing to the side as Ashlynn organized the impromptu tribunal, Tiernan tugged on Isabell’s sleeve before nodding in the direction of the edge of camp and gesturing for her to follow so they could speak in relative privacy.

"You were much closer to her than I ever was," the thickly muscled iron monger said once they stood on the edge of the dancing golden light cast by the bonfire at the center of the camp. "It’s really her? She seems... She seems very different from how I remember her from the few times we’ve met. It hasn’t been that long for someone to change that much, has it?" Tiernan asked in hushed tones, barely speaking above a whisper.

"You’ve known too much peace in your life, my friend," Isabell said, resting a hand on Tiernan’s muscular forearm and speaking without taking her eyes off Ashlynn. "You’ve never met a war-orphan, have you? Someone who had their entire world shattered in blood and fire when they were too young and too powerless to do anything about it," she said as the reflection of the bonfire danced across her eyes.

"Lady Ashlynn reminds me a bit of the young women who tried to join the prince’s army after his uncle’s men burned their villages to the ground and set fire to their fields to prevent the prince from collecting their crops to feed his army," the woman once known as the Engineer of Destruction said as her gaze grew distant. After all, she’d left behind more than a few war-orphans of her own during that bitter, bloody war.

"They wanted to fight?" Tiernan said, shocked at the notion of women who had been through something so horrific trying to turn themselves into soldiers in a war. "Wouldn’t it be better to flee somewhere safe? Somewhere far away from the war?" he asked, trying to imagine what his wife would do, or his children, if anything ever happened to Blackwell City.

Hopefully, they would all escape long before a war could ever threaten them, but if they couldn’t, and if the worst came to pass, he hoped that they could at least find safety afterwards. In his mind, even though he wasn’t a soldier, he was a strong man, and he wouldn’t hesitate to stand in the way of anything that tried to harm his family. So long as they could escape, it would be worth laying down his own life so they could keep theirs. As a husband and a father, he couldn’t accept anything less of himself, but the idea that his wife or daughters would then come back to fight... It was too horrifying for words.

"You don’t understand," Isabell said, shaking her head. "They didn’t want to fight, they wanted to kill. Half of them didn’t even care if they survived so long as they could take a few of the men responsible for their suffering with them when they died," she said, pursing her lips as she watched the man Ashlynn had called ’Constable Daithi’ and the one named Eamon as they dragged a sodden and stumbling Daithi back to the light of the camp.

Evidently, they’d taken Lady Ashlynn at her word when she suggested dunking him in the river, but either the herbs or the river had worked, and the prisoner looked alert, even if his movements were still a bit clumsy and awkward.

"Lady Ashlynn isn’t that bad," Isabell said, half believing it and half wishing it to be true simply by speaking the words. "She’s hurting badly, and the wounds are still fresh, even if her body has healed from her ordeals. But even if she’s haunted by what happened, she doesn’t have the eyes of a woman who wants to die," she said, thinking of the countless women and children she’d seen who seemed to cling to life only for the sake of hurting the people who had destroyed everything they held dear.

"I hope my little ones never go through anything like what you describe," Tiernan said, shivering from more than the chill, damp autumn air as he listened to Isabell’s story. "Those war-orphans," he said a moment later as he tried to imagine his daughter standing in Lady Ashlynn’s place.

He didn’t yet know what she had suffered, but from the way Isabell spoke, it must have been horrific, but try as he might, he couldn’t imagine any of his children standing so tall and persevering through the hurt the way Lady Ashlynn seemed to be doing.

"Did any of them ever recover?" Tiernan asked hesitantly. "Did they find love and a normal life?"

As much as Isabell accused him of living a peaceful life, ironmongers were hard, strong men who spent their lives doing some of the most back-breaking work in the kingdom in one of the hottest, most inhospitable environments imaginable. As a Guild Master, Tiernan had seen more than one man broken or injured in a smelter’s forge who turned to drink to dull the pain and lashed out at their families in frustration when they could no longer do the work that put food on their tables and kept a roof over their family’s head.

He’d seen broken and haunted women and children who had watched their fathers transform into demons possessed by the bottle, and even if it wasn’t the same as what Isabell had described, it still left scars on their lives. The Iron Monger’s guild did its best to provide for men who were hurt too badly to work, and none of them faced a life of poverty on the streets, but the blow to a man’s pride could twist him into even more of a demon than the blow that broke his body, and in the end, it was the people who were closest to him that suffered for it. freēwēbηovel.c૦m

"Some did," Isabell said with a slow nod. "Time helps to heal many things. Others managed to walk out of the fog of their suffering when the war ended or the lord who destroyed their lives fell in battle. Perhaps Lady Ashlynn will be the same," she said softly. "How she handles this man will tell us a great deal."

"Mmm," Tiernan said, nodding his agreement as Ashynn finished her preparations. Whatever Ashlynn had in store for them tonight, it appeared that she was ready to begin.

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