The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1305: Heroism (Part Two)

Across the small clearing, Sir Gavin stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his newly healed arm resting comfortably against his ribs in a way that still felt both strange and wonderful. His eyes weren’t on Ollie or Milo, but on the devastation that surrounded them.

The trees were dead or dying. Every single one of them. The evergreens that should have been green and vibrant even in winter had shed their needles in brown carpets across the frozen ground. The oak tree that had sheltered Lady Cerys had lost almost half of its branches, its massive limbs scattered like the bones of some great beast. Even the undergrowth, the bushes, vines and small plants that had filled the spaces between the trees, looked brittle and lifeless.

There had been other life here as well. Birds’ nests dotted the trees, but everything that could fly had fled from here while Sir Ollie was still in the stream. Here and there, small rabbits and squirrels were darting through the woods, checking on caches of nuts or searching for a place that felt safer to hide, though whether they were hiding from Sir Ollie and the knights in the wood or the birds that could easily spot them without the cover of trees was difficult to say.

One way or another, everything that had once lived here needed to flee and find a new place to build their nests or dig their burrows.

An entire copse of trees, a small forest and everything that lived in it, destroyed just to save one woman’s life.

Gavin remembered what Ollie had said the night before, about how he had to be careful to take only a little bit from each tree when he was restoring himself after a healing. About how taking too much would harm them, would damage the very thing he was trying to draw strength from.

There had been nothing careful about this. This had been desperate and reckless and all-consuming. Ollie had taken everything the trees had to give, had drained them down to nothing, had killed an entire forest to fuel his miracle.

And it had nearly killed him, too.

"Everything just felt so heavy," Ollie had whispered. "Too heavy to bear any longer."

As he looked around the devastation, Gavin wondered how many times Ollie had done something like this. How many times had he pushed himself to the edge of death trying to save someone, trying to protect someone, trying to be the hero that everyone expected him to be? How many burdens had he taken onto his own shoulders, and how much weight had he carried, before it all became too much to bear?

Last night, Ollie had healed Gavin’s arm with what had seemed like relative ease. Oh, there had been pain, certainly, and exhaustion afterwards. But Ollie had recovered quickly; he’d been able to stand and walk and talk without any visible difficulty. At the time, Gavin had thought that this was normal for Ollie.

Or, not normal necessarily, he corrected himself when he recalled how Ollie had endured two years of Gavin’s pain in a handful of heartbeats to perform his miracle. It was extraordinary, and generous and selfless and kind... but it hadn’t seemed to cost Ollie more than the young man was willing to pay.

Now, Gavin understood now how wrong he had been.

Last night had been easy because Gavin’s injury had been relatively minor. A shoulder, once torn by the splinters of a lance, now mended, though imperfectly. Painful and inconvenient, certainly, but not life-threatening. Not something that required Ollie to drain an entire forest and nearly die in the process. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

But Lady Cerys... Lady Cerys had been dying. She had been on the very edge of death, with injuries so severe that no normal healer would have even attempted to save her. And Ollie had stood between her and certain death, evidently fighting death itself while he worked, and the effort had nearly dragged him across that threshold along with her.

How many more times could Ollie do this before the weight became truly unbearable? How many more miracles could he perform before one of them killed him?

Gavin didn’t know. But he suspected that Ollie didn’t know either, and that terrified him more than he wanted to admit. Today, Sir Cynwrig had called Ollie a hero, and Gavin would never say that Ollie wasn’t. But heroes died, and all too often, they died young. Gavin had been lucky twice; first, when he survived taking Sir Rain’s lance to his shoulder and a second time when Ollie bestowed a gift of miraculous healing on him.

Sir Ollie had been lucky to survive today’s act of heroism, but Gavin was worried that he wouldn’t survive the next one. Gavin couldn’t imagine the kind of threats that Ollie would face in the days to come, and he doubted that he could help to stand against those foes.

But as soon as the opportunity presented itself, Gavin vowed to talk to Lady Ashlynn about finding ways to reduce the burdens the young knight bore... even if he had to take up a few of them himself. He owed Ollie that much at least, and he doubted that Isolde or Lord Loghlan would object if he asked to serve in Ollie’s stead in minor matters that were within his reach.

He just hoped that Lady Ashlynn was the sort of liege lady who would see the value in preserving Ollie’s strength, because if she saw all of this as a method of tempering and strengthening Ollie in order to face even greater challenges... Gavin didn’t know what he could do to protect the young knight from his own lady.

But perhaps he was getting ahead of himself to be thinking of intervening with Lady Ashlynn. After all, he wasn’t the only one here who understood just how far Ollie had pushed himself, and Lord Loghlan would soon become one of Lady Ashlynn’s vassals. That would give the Baron of Dunn the chance to plead Ollie’s case, even if Sir Gavin couldn’t, and he trusted Lord Loghlan to do the right thing to repay the debts he owed to Sir Ollie after last night and today...