The Vampire & Her Witch
Chapter 477: A Few Words

Chapter 477: A Few Words

"Hauke!" Ashlynn cried, jumping down from her throne and stumbling down the icy steps of the dais in her haste to reach the young Frost Walker’s side. All thoughts about her dignity as the Mother of Trees, her role in presiding over the trial and the path she’d been carefully building toward the future left her mind as she focused on the only thing that mattered. Her friend.

Odette moved just a handful of seconds later, similarly abandoning decorum at her son’s first sign of movement since they brought his listless, unresponsive body into the room. Seeing him like that had crushed what little resolve she had left, but now she cast aside all of her worries as she dashed across the icy floor to join the Mother of Trees at her son’s side.

"Hauke, you’re alive," Ashlynn said, reaching out gently to stroke the soft white flowing fur of Hauke’s mane. Alternating warm and bitter cold magic rippled across her fingers as soon as she came close to his face and she quickly snatched back her hand as she realized that the young lord wasn’t nearly as free of this curse as she thought he’d been.

When she met Hauke before, his magic had always felt fresh, joyful, even playful when he created an ice house on the lake or showed off his ability to form complex constructs from pure ice. Now, however, the feeling of warm wind that brushed against her fingers felt like the steaming breath of an overworked beast of burden in the cold winter air while the cold energy felt like a howling mountain wind that pierced through clothing and stung the flesh.

More than that, his magic felt... desperate and barely under control.

"Step back, Lady Odette," Ashlynn said, holding out an arm to block the older woman’s path and taking a step back herself as she did. "Hauke," she continued, not taking her eyes off her friend’s for a moment. "You’re struggling, I can feel it. How can we help you break free?"

"Need to say. Say something," Hauke said through gritted teeth as he struggled against the magic holding him back. Freeing even a portion of himself from the binding took as much effort as holding a man his father’s side above his head and that effort grew greater every second as he exhausted the limited reserve of energy he’d been able to gather during the day.

"Yes, you need to tell us how to help you," Ashlynn said, frantically waving at Erkembalt and Aspakos to join her at the young man’s side. "How are you speaking to us? We can at least make it easier for you."

"My fault," Hauke said, ignoring Ashlynn’s pleas to focus on what he needed to say. He might be young, but even he could tell that Ashlynn had been working hard to force the blame for the disaster onto the ancestors and onto his father for granting him permission to wear the horns. She’d been working hard to build a way out for him by casting him as a puppet of the ancestors but if he let her do that then even if he escaped responsibility for what happened, his father wouldn’t.

"My fault, for trusting them," he said, looking from Ashlynn’s worried face to his mother’s tearstained visage. "Father. Didn’t know. Enough. To say no. And I," Hauke said, struggling for every word. "I didn’t. Tell him. Enough."

"Save the explanations for when you can speak freely, young lord," Erkembalt said as he stepped around Ashlynn to examine Hauke, pulling a series of lenses from one of his many bulging pockets and fitting them carefully over his spectacles before carefully inspecting Hauke’s horn.

"Mother," Hauke said, ignoring the artificer’s advice. "I’m sorry," he said as his faltering strength failed at last and his eyes once again turned glassy and unfocused.

"Hauke!" Odette cried, pushing past Ashlynn and flinging her arms around her son as she sobbed. "Hauke, come back! Come back to me," she wailed, sobbing into her unresponsive son’s tunic.

"Well?" Ashlynn asked, stepping back from Hauke and his mother and addressing the pair of sorcerers. "Were you able to see how he slipped free? I only felt a moment of warm and cold energy from him but what he was doing with it, I couldn’t say," she said helplessly.

It was her first time getting a chance to examine the magic that held Hauke’s mind captive but one look was all it took for her to realize that it was much, much more complicated than anything she’d ever dealt with in the past.

"He’s cracking the chains that bind his mind using alternating heat and cold," Erkembalt said, shaking his head in wonder at the young man’s recklessness and at the courage required to endure such a painful method, just to speak a few words in his father’s favor. "It won’t free him. At most, it let him have a few minutes of freedom to speak."

"What do you mean a few minutes of freedom to speak?" Odette asked, looking at the artificer with eyes that were red and swollen from her tears. "What chains that bind him?"

"This..." Aspakos began, trailing off as he turned to look at Nyrielle atop her frozen throne. He and Erkembalt had come to explain Hauke’s condition but only after Nyrielle revealed her judgment, or if it seemed necessary to gain acceptance for what she and Ashlynn planned for the evening. To reveal it now...

"Go ahead," Nyrielle said, smiling softly as she felt the warmth and concern flowing from Ashlynn’s trembling heart. Whether it undermined their goals or not no longer mattered to her lover. Six months ago, Nyrielle would have chastised Ashlynn for being naive and wasting an opportunity, but now, she sat back on her throne and let events play out as they would. And who knew, perhaps her love was right that sometimes, even politics had to give way to matters of the heart.