It was roughly one month after the end of Cockatrial festival. Violant was in the other march again. This time there was a report about suspicious movements not from otherworldly beings but rather from humans. It was assumed that witches and warlocks planned to hold a witches’ Sabbath in the other march where they would be safe from the prying eyes of at least their fellow human beings.

What made the practitioners of witchcraft and sorcery so damnable was the fact that they weren’t content with their natural magical aptitude but sought to artificially increase it by making a pact with some infernal demon, ultimately at the price of their soul. It was already bad enough if that had been all, but no, it came worse. Those wicked fellows who had resorted to forbidden means often felt an urge to cause harm to the people around them. The longer somebody was a sorcerer or sorceress, the more they lost their human sense of morals and the more atrocious their deeds became. For that very reason sorcery was seen as the worst kind of illegitimate magic imaginable, punishable only by burning at the stake.

To blow the cover of those involved with the witches Sabbath was also one of the many tasks of the Avallachs, at least as far as the other march was concerned, which in this case it definitely was. Violant wasn’t the only one who had been assigned to this mission – in fact more than half of the garrison’s soldiers had moved out – but she preferred working independently. Her only companion was her mount Huwcyn. Well, Hraban also kept an eye on her but otherwise he wasn’t of much help.

At the moment the young lady had left behind the ceffyl dwr and the night-raven. She carefully closed in to the upper edge of a scarp, slowly and carefully crawling through the dewy grass. Her posture, flat on the ground like a lizard, was anything but graceful and the complete opposite of what would have been expected as the demeanor of a young noble lady such as herself, but some prim and proper decorum wasn’t of any use out here on a stealth mission after all. She had stowed away her spear in a pouch she wore at her belt. That was possible because she had developed a new kind of magic, allowing her to shrink the rather cumbersome weapon to the size of a feather quill for the time she didn’t need it.

Stealthily she was, for below her she could hear the maniacal laughter, hysterical racket and discordant music of the witches’ Sabbath. The dark of the moonless night, further deepened by the dense canopy of the forest, was only lit by the brightness of the sorcerers’ bonfire down in the valley.

From her hiding place, under some shrubbery growing directly at the edge of the precipitous scarp, the redhead had a perfect view on the wild and unbridled goings-on. There were about thirty men and women, perhaps some more or fewer, all dressed completely in black, the color of the night and the ashes of hell. They all wore curious broad-brimmed and pointed tall hats. Additionally there also were several demons present. Some of the attendees danced around the fire, either afoot or flying on objects such as brooms or oven-forks, following the music some of their comrades stroke up on unthinkable instruments like dead cats and horse skulls. Others feasted on bizarre delicacies not too different from the instruments mentioned before, among them – sadly – the remains of dead or stillborn children. Still others unrestrainedly indulged in intercourse while openly visible for all around them. New members of the devil’s sect showed their devotement by kissing the demon they had formed a pact with directly on the buttocks. The audacities and debaucheries going against everything society acknowledged as morally and ethically correct were without count. Some of them were so ghastly that Violant hardly could stand to observe any longer, at least not without feeling a severe urge to gag. After living through the cruel times of civil war in her previous lifetime she believed to have seen most excesses evil humans were capable of but now she got disabused how wrong she had been.

The young lady counted herself lucky that her father Ipos wasn’t among the demons present, but those who were present also exuded a weaker evil aura than the infernal earl and prince did. Hence she deduced that all demons present were but of lower rank in the infernal hierarchy.

She nonetheless spotted a familiar face among the witches and warlocks, but the middle-aged man whose half face was made up from nothing but raw flesh was hardly a person you could forget after encountering him once. Well, Violant hadn’t met him yet this time around but the sorcerer known as Mansie – a curiously cute name for such a cruel and hideous man – was the main culprit behind the great troll uprising which shook the kingdom and the other march during the first year of Gervase’s reign after the civil war. She still didn’t know how the warlock had managed to convince the relatively dumb and unorganized trolls to gang up and attack the humans but fact was that he did. The sorcerer also managed to disappear without trace, successfully eluding capture and execution.

The one who had to bear the human’s wrath were the trolls instead who were close to being exterminated in the aftermath. In particular the figurehead of the rebellion, a female troll called Arinnefja, had to bear the brunt of the repercussions. But even if she had been forced by Mansie to take part in the uprising like she had declared, she was simply too dangerous to be left alive.

That was because Arinnefja had been a genius among geniuses whose intellect not only surpassed all other trolls but also most humans. She was behind the crafty and unconventional war strategies of the troll as well as the developer of the magic weapons her people had used. Those weapons were more powerful than everything humans had ever seen before and in the hands of the dumb but superhumanly strong trolls they caused an amount of damage surpassing everything humans had ever experienced in their history.

Ultimately the humans triumphed over the trolls thanks to their superior cunningness but it came with a heavy price. The areas where the troll uprising had raged were uninhabitable for years to come. It was literally scorched earth. That hit Yteland especially hard since it had just begun slowly recovering from the scars left from the civil war.

Violant’s fate too was sealed with the victory won at a heavy price. Since she had wrested control over the other march from her estranged foster father’s hands and given it to her husband instead, Gervase didn’t need her any longer, leading to her inevitable demise.

During the time Violant took to reminisce the past or rather the future after unexpectedly catching sight of Mansie, she forgot to keep watch on her surroundings. Thus she got discovered by some witch who flew especially high during her rollicking dance and had spotted her by chance. The agitated shouts soon managed to bring the red-haired girl back to the present. She immediately retreated and rapidly escaped deeper into the woods, swift-footed as she was. It would only be a question of time until the Sabbath participants would give chase though.