The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1467: Coming Home (Part One)

The shadows were long on the Lothian docks when the first of Baron Loghlan’s cogs nudged against the quay, and the cold that had been merely bitter on the open river turned vicious as the winter sun dropped behind the city walls.

Sir Ollie Heartwood stood on the deck near the bow, his hands gripping the rail while the crew threw mooring lines to the dockworkers below. He was dressed in clothes he hadn’t worn in nearly eight months: a patched linen tunic that had once been white but had yellowed with age, a pair of rough woolen trousers with frayed hems, and a threadbare coat that barely kept the wind from cutting through to his skin.

They were the clothes of a kitchen servant, the very same ones he’d worn when he fled the Summer Villa with Ashlynn on a night that changed his life in ways he’d never imagined in even his wildest dreams.

They didn’t fit anymore.

The tunic pulled tight across his shoulders and strained at the chest every time he drew a breath, and the trousers, which had once hung loose on his gangly frame, now clung to thighs that had thickened with months of weapon training and hard riding. He kept tugging at the collar, trying to loosen it, but there was nothing to be done.

The boy who had last worn these clothes simply didn’t exist anymore, and the man who stood in his place was too broad for the life he’d left behind.

Around him, the docks bustled with the controlled efficiency of Loghlan’s people unloading the cog. Experienced cargo handlers hauled chests and casks from the hold with the practiced rhythm of men who had done this work a thousand times, calling to each other in low voices as they stacked crates on the frost-slicked quay. The second and third cogs were still maneuvering into position further along the platform, and Ollie could see Baron Loghlan himself on the deck of the nearest one, speaking with Lady Mairwen while his household knights supervised the unloading.

This was hardly Ollie’s first time coming to these docks. Over the years, he’d spent countless early mornings here, following Master Baden through the fish market, carrying a basket that grew heavier and smellier with each stall the old Master of Kitchens visited.

A pained expression flickered across Ollie’s face as he looked out over the market. At times, he’d thought of Master Baden as a demon, a tyrant who ruled over his kitchens with a wooden spoon for a club and a fist that flew just as freely when he thought someone was slacking or making mistakes.

Now, however, when he thought back on those days, he realized that the old master must have been under tremendous pressure from his own masters, and men like Owain or the other visiting lords of the march could easily make life just as hard for Master Baden as the master had made life for Ollie. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Maybe the man had been a tyrant in his kitchens... but he hadn’t deserved to die for it, Ollie thought as his eyes traveled from one shuttered stall in the market to the next. Now, because of the Inquisition, the old master would never walk these streets again, nor would he see what became of the gangly kitchen boy who’d been swept up in something so much greater than his life in the bowels of Lothian Manor.

The docks themselves looked different from how Ollie remembered them. There were guardsmen everywhere; pairs of men in Lothian yellow and blue who moved among the remaining merchants and dockworkers with a confident swagger and iron-banded cudgels in their hands. A few of them were eying the arriving cogs and thumping their clubs into the palms of their hands as if they were hoping that a chance to use cudgels had just arrived.

The fish market that must have been bustling that morning had mostly packed up, though one or two stubborn merchants lingered near the water’s edge, hoping to sell the last of their catch to the arriving travelers. Beyond the docks, the walls of Lothian City rose dark against the fading sky, and above them, the towering spires of Lothian Manor caught the last of the sunlight like fingers of pale stone reaching for something they could never quite grasp.

"You look like you’re being strangled by your own shirt," Liam Dunn said as he climbed up from below decks with Hugo Hanrahan trailing a step behind him. Both men were dressed in similar laborer’s garb, rough wool and patched linen that Marcel had prepared for this phase of their infiltration into Lothian City.

Liam didn’t look bothered by his disguise. Part of it was the fact that the clothing fit, even though the wool coat was patched in several places, which let the cold winter wind slice all the way through to his skin. His pride and regal bearing had been trained into him over years of education in Lothian March and Keating Duchy as well, and a common laborer’s clothing couldn’t diminish that, no matter how many layers of rough wool you wrapped around him.

Hugo, by contrast, looked like he was trying very hard not to shiver, his hawk-nosed face pinched against the cold and his thin frame hunched beneath a coat that was only marginally warmer than Ollie’s. His dark hair was tucked beneath a wool cap, and his sharp, bird-like eyes darted between the guards on the quay and the spires of Lothian Manor with an expression that couldn’t decide whether it was dread or determination.

"I’m sure that Sir Marcel did his best for you, Sir Ollie, but you’re just too tall," Liam teased as he clapped Ollie on the shoulder. "But don’t worry, this time of night, it shouldn’t take long for a cart to reach the Gilded Horns even if we have to follow my father’s carriage in the wrong direction for a while. An hour or two and you can stop looking like a sausage someone’s tried to stuff back into the casing."

"That’s the thing," Ollie said, scratching the back of his head in an awkward gesture that hadn’t changed even if the rest of him had. "These aren’t from Marcel. They’re mine. They’ve been in the back of my wardrobe since I came to... Since I left home," he said, carefully avoiding speaking Lady Ashlynn’s name or mentioning the Vale of Mists where someone might overhear.

"This used to be loose on me," he said as he plucked at the straining tunic with a sheepish half-smile. His pale eyes, however, were filled with anything but mirth as he gazed out at the city that had once been his home.

The old clothes didn’t fit anymore, and he couldn’t just slip back into the life they represented... But that life included a family that he’d left behind, and when he looked toward Lothian Manor, even Liam could see the worries reflected in the Cypress Knight’s eyes...