The Vampire & Her Witch
Chapter 533: The Oldest Oak

Chapter 533: The Oldest Oak

Hours after their meal, Ashlynn and Virve walked quietly through the gathering gloom of the autumn afternoon, having left the ancient fortress and the town surrounding it far behind.

Their meal together had been an opportunity to put down the barriers of guardian and liege lady, along with the need to play their parts before the people around them. It let Ashlynn see a side of Virve that the older woman had kept bottled up and rarely showed.

Ashlynn had no idea how much courage it had taken Virve to be honest about her struggles to consider integration with the humans of Lothian March, but she wasn’t about to cast aside her veteran guardian just because she bore deep scars from personal losses. Ashlynn herself struggled to imagine a world where she reconciled with the Lothians after what Owain had done to her.

Still, she had some hope that Owain’s brother, Loman, might be redeemable enough to become an ally rather than an enemy. By all accounts, he had been a good man, focused on the charitable efforts of the Church in Lothian City. If that was true, and if he could be reasoned with, then he could help her prevent a great deal of needless bloodshed.

If he couldn’t be reasoned with, however, and if he turned himself into a rallying point for resistance, then she would be left with little choice but to deal with him in the Eldritch way and destroy him as a threat to her rule of the march. It was something that the Ashlynn of six months ago would never have considered, but much had changed for her in those six months.

That was why, when Virve said that it would be hard for her to ’play nice’ with the Lothians, Ashlynn understood at least a little bit of what the older woman meant. They were both wounded, but Ashlynn’s wounds were still raw and fresh, and they were still something that could heal once she’d dealt with the man who nearly killed her.

Virve’s wounds were old and deep, with layers upon layers of scar tissue built up over them. Healing wouldn’t be easy and true acceptance might be impossible. But, with humans like herself and Ollie in the coven, Ashlynn hoped that she could eventually build a bridge to reconciliation that Virve could cross. And who knew, perhaps the entity they’d hiked out into the wilderness to meet with could help her next coven member with that healing.

"Have you ever been to the Ancient Oak, Virve?" Ashlynn asked as they walked across the tall, damp grass that covered the hillside. "This one specifically," she added. "I know there are others still within the Vale."

"Only once, my lady," Virve said as she walked slowly beside the younger woman, taking one step to every two of Ashlynn’s. "I accompanied Lady Nyrielle when she visited the Ancient Oak a few years ago. Every decade or so, Lady Nyrielle makes an offering of blood to each of the Ancient Oaks in order to strengthen them and protect them from any humans who might slip over the wall to do harm to our treasured trees."

"Was this something that High Lord Torbin did as well?" Ashlynn asked. She still vividly remembered Nyrielle’s ritual the night they’d formed their bond of blood beneath the Ancient Oak, when Nyrielle had offered blood to the mighty tree in exchange for energy that could heal Ashlynn’s wounds, even if it was just enough for her to make it through the ceremony where she became Nyrielle’s Seneschal.

Clearly, Nyrielle was no stranger to offering blood to these trees, but the Ancient Oak seemed like a very different kind of tree than the Bloody Sandbox Tree in the Briar that had produced Jacques’s seed of witchcraft. If the Ancient Oaks were like this because of vampire blood offerings, Ashlynn would have expected them to have a much more violent and much bloodier aura than the Ancient Oak seemed to possess.

"Not that I’ve heard of, my lady," Virve said. "As far as I know, this tree was here when the Horned Clan and the Clan of the Great Claw first arrived in the Vale of Mists, before the High Pass was even passable. This tree is the oldest growing thing in the entire valley. It was old long before the High Lord Torbin brought vampires into the Vale of Mists."

"The oldest living thing?" Ashlynn asked, raising an eyebrow at Virve. "Not ’one of the oldest’ but ’the oldest?’"

"The oldest," the older woman confirmed. "Perhaps there were grasses alongside it then, but such things have died and renewed themselves several hundred times over in the time this tree has been here."

"I’ve even heard that the other Ancient Oaks were all planted with seeds taken from this one," Virve said, as the large, majestic tree finally came into view. Its branches stretched so wide that in the thick fog of the late afternoon, it wasn’t possible to see the entire tree all at once, and the top of the tree vanished into the fog high overhead.

The trunk stood mighty and proud, stretching upward as if it were holding up the sky itself, and its gnarled roots that peeked above the ground had become tall enough in some places that members of the horned clan could hide behind them without even crouching down.

More than its physically imposing stature, however, the tree seemed to gather the fog around it like a cloak, and eddies and swirls of wind could be seen dancing about the branches, as though the tree itself were taking deep, steady breaths through its red and gold leaves.

"So this tree is the father of all the other Ancient Oaks," Ashlynn said, bowing in deep respect as she approached the base of the tree. "No wonder it asked me to help it spread its seeds when I asked it for a branch."

"The only question," Ashlynn said as she reached out to touch the bark of the mighty Ancient Oak. "Is whether or not it will allow me to turn one of those seeds into your seed of witchcraft."