It is tempting to think that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can point at clear signs of the coming Cataclysm. The truth, however, is that by all accounts Decimus Avitus led a thoroughly unremarkable life for the son of an Etalan Emperor, and that prior to the arrival of Sammāʾēl the Sun-Eater there was no reason to think he would ever rise higher than his post as a provincial governor, or indeed do much of historical note at all.

* François du Lutetia, A History of Narvonne

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19th Day of the Planting Moon, 297 AC

When Trist had nearly reached the end of the woodcutter’s paths, not far outside of where the edge of the village was marked by a stockade of dark Iebara wood, he reined Cazador to a halt and dismounted. The steel rings of his chain mail rustled, and he readjusted his broad leather sword belt to settle it on his hips comfortably. Rather than tie the gray destrier to a convenient branch, Trist pulled a carrot from his saddlebag. Caz snuffed over his hand, accepted the offered treat, and happily munched away.

Trist took a few more things out: two unlit torches, which he thrust through his belt; a wineskin; and a sack with a slice of cold roast boar, a wedge of cheese, and a loaf of last evening’s bread from the kitchens of Foyer Chaleureux. He checked the newly forged dagger in his boot, to be certain it was still there, and then turned back to the destrier.

“Good boy,” Trist murmured, cupping the horse’s head with his left hand and leaning his own forehead down against the white blaze that stood out from Cazador’s otherwise gray coat. “Don’t wait for me,” he said, after a moment, then stepped away and raised his voice. “Go home, Caz.” He turned into the forest, ignoring the whinny from behind him, and set off through the Ardenwood for the Chapel of Saint Camiel. He knew the way: he had walked it since childhood.

☀

7th Day of the Flower Moon, 285 AC

Trist du Camaret-à-Arden didn’t have a destination in mind when he fled the manor: he only wanted to get away from his tutor, Brother Alberic, before the old monk could switch his knuckles raw again. Mother would never have let the old man hurt him, if she was still alive.

“It isn’t fair,” Trist grumbled to himself, sprinting down the beaten dirt track to the forest, away from the center of the village, the river, or the fields to the south. Even Percy had yelled at him, finally, in frustration, when Trist had knocked over a pot of ink with his elbow. Trist’s half brother - elder by just over two years, and their father’s heir - was usually his protector, the one who stepped in when Trist was in trouble. But this time the ink had spilled on Percy’s parchment of Old Etalan translations, and even he’d had enough.

Trist ducked off the path when he heard the woodcutters singing their tree songs up ahead in the distance, the thunk of their blessed axes, and their occasional shouts to each other in the cool morning. To the west, a carefully tended Iebara grove provided the village’s most prized crop: a fine, black wood nearly as strong as steel, used to create longbows of incredible power, stringed instruments that sounded more truly than any other wood, and a dozen more goods besides. He jumped a fallen tree as he moved away from the woodsmen and the grove, cut around a patch of blooming sweetbriers, and followed the gentle sound of flowing water until he came out of the undergrowth to a broad, shallow stream, rippling over pebbles and around rocks. “It must flow into the Rea,” Trist decided, talking out loud to himself. Another habit that Brother Albernic and his parents deplored. He sat down on the mossy bank, removed his boots, then his wool socks, and dipped a foot into the water, finding it cold.

He was just selecting a good rock for skipping when the wind carried the sound of someone humming to him. “Hello?” Trist called, and, forgetting his boots on the bank, picked his way upstream. He climbed a small series of cascades among the wet rocks until he came to a golden pool, sandy beneath the water, where a break in the green canopy overhead let fall a shaft of sunlight. A slim girl, perhaps ten years or so of age, like him, was standing in the pool in a white linen shift, singing softly to herself.

“Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,

For he would call it a sin;

I’ve been with my love in the woods all night,

Conjuring Summer in!

Now is the Sun come up from the South,

With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, my love,

All of a Midsummer morn!

Surely we sing no little thing,

In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!”

The falling sun lit up her pale hair like fine strands of fire, her shadow danced on the rippling water, and Trist stumbled, his foot coming down heavily, with a loud splash, as he caught his balance.

The girl gave a cry of fright, eyes wide as she saw him, frozen in the moment like a deer startled by the hunters. Trist knew that she would run.

“Wait!” he called, holding up his hands. “I won’t hurt you. I just heard you singing, and wanted to see who it was. I haven’t seen you in the village, before.”

She trembled, there, hesitant. “I’m not from the village,” she said softly.

“My name is Trist,” he introduced himself, but didn’t dare bow. He felt, somehow, that he had trapped her eyes with his, and the moment he broke the connection, there would be nothing holding the girl here. “Trist du Camaret-à-Arden.” He swallowed. “You don’t need to be afraid. This is my father’s land. I won’t let anyone harm you.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Something flickered through her eyes at his name, and she swallowed. “Call me Linette,” she said.

“What were you singing?” Trist relaxed a bit; she seemed to be calming.

“An old song,” Linette said, after a moment. “A tree song.”

“It was pretty,” he said. “Teach it to me?”

Linette nodded, and they sat on the bank, bare feet in the brook, until he’d learned the words and the tune, while she wove roses from the sweetbriers into his nut-brown hair.

☀

19th Day of the Planting Moon, 297 AC

Trist had expected that something would bar his way, but that it was a knight all armored in thorns was a surprise.

“Let me pass,” he said, grimly, but the wood-helmed knight gave no response, and Trist could not see his face. His armor was all of a pale green, almost faded to gray, in large, thick plates of bark. Sharp thorns extended from his pauldrons an inch or more, from his cuirass and greaves and everywhere that Trist could see. His shield was blazoned with the pink rose of the sweetbrier, and his sword was serrated beginning a hand’s span below the tip. If drawn across his bare flesh, Trist expected it to leave horrific wounds: he was thankful he wore a shirt of good mail over his padded gambeson, with steel pauldrons and vambraces over that. Trist stepped left, and the Knight of Thorns mirrored him; two steps to the right, and the knight moved again. He pulled the unlit torches from his belt and dropped them, and then the sack of food. He had no shield to match, but his blade had the better reach.

“I have business with Linette du Chapelle de Camiel,” Trist said, formally.

The Knight of Thorns raised his shield and set the tip of his blade in line with Trist’s chest. Trist’s longsword slid free of its leather sheath with a sigh, thirty-six inches of well-kept steel. He raised it to his right ear, both hands on the hilt, blade parallel with the ground, tip aimed at the chest of the Thorn Knight. Ox. John Granger, his Master at Arms, had always said that Trist favored the guard too much, but for all that, Percy could only rarely break it. For a moment, all the sounds in the forest died away, save for the soft babble of water over stone, somewhere just past the knight, from the brook that ran into the Rea. The twin shadows cast by the two knights leaned toward each other, barely restrained.

Trist pushed off with his back foot, more clumsily than in the practice yard, his blade coming around in a diagonal cut, down and from right to left. The Knight of Thorns raised his shield to take it, and stabbed with his shorter arming sword.

Trist smiled. His enemy had taken the feint; he hadn’t been certain it would work.

Instead of remaining committed to the cut, which would never have pierced plate in any event, Tristan kept moving forward, spun tight counter-clockwise around the shield, keeping it between him and the arming sword, planted his right foot inside the knight’s left, and shoved him hard from behind. The Knight of Thorns stumbled, falling forward, and Trist quickly switched grips, holding his sword by the lower blade, and swung the cross-guard above the hilt into the thorn knight’s helm like a warhammer. The metal crossguard punched through the helm like an axe through rotten wood. Trist wrenched it out, then swung a second time, then a third. By that point, the knight had stopped moving.

The Thorn Knight’s armor began to fall apart, twisted vines unraveling like threads. No longer tightly pressed together into plate, they curled up, stretching for sunlight, and green leaves sprouted all along their length. It was as if Trist watched winter pass through spring and into summer in the space of a moment. Where a knight had sprawled on the ground, defeated, a patch of sweet-briers now blossomed, the roses delicate and pink.

Blood rushing in his ears, Trist looked at them once, then sheathed his sword and sat down to catch his breath. It was the first time he had ever been in a real fight, with live steel. Once his heart slowed, he picked up the things he’d set aside, and made his way through the wood to the brook where he’d met Linette du chapelle de Camiel, twelve years ago.

☀

18th Day of the Harvest Moon, 287 AC

“You really live here?”

They were thirteen, now, and after a day of dancing and cider at the harvest festival, Linette had finally agreed to take him to where she lived with her mother. Trist had a sack full of turnips, bread, a wheel of cheese, and salted dried meat, all slung over his shoulder. He’d made a habit of bringing Linette and her mother food for years now, from the manor’s kitchens. He also carried a knife in a sheath on his belt, though he would have wished for a sword, instead. Not that there was any danger so close to the village, not like in the depths of the haunted Ardenwood. Still, he liked the feel of a sword at his hip: it seemed to be the one thing he was good at, or at least the one thing he could do better than Percy.

“I do.” Linette nodded, reaching out her pale hand, and Trist took it. The briar-roses were still in her hair, from when she’d met him at the edge of town in the morning, just as the monastery bells were ringing terce. She tugged him along up the worn stone steps, beneath a canopy of oak and ash boughs, and his boots rustled through the dry autumn leaves as he followed her up the path. There was a stone arch, and the foundations of crumbling walls running away from it to either side, covered in moss. Beneath the green he could make out faded carvings of the Angelus Saint Camiel, sacrificing himself against the Sun Eater. Past the arch, Linette led him to a small chapel on top of the hill, rectangular in shape, built of regular stone blocks. They were mossy, too, and discolored by long exposure to the elements. The door had long since rotted away, and the roof, as well, and a great oak tree had grown up from the floor, spreading its branches over the structure. The oak retained most of its leaves, with the effect that the chapel was roofed in bright autumn scarlet.

“But there’s no actual roof,” Trist protested, their voices echoing around the inside of the chapel. “How do you keep warm in the winter?”

“The cellar,” Linette said, motioning to a stair in the corner that descended down into the earth beneath the chapel. “You can leave the food at the top of the stairs,” she suggested, and Trist set the burlap sack down.

“I wish you would come live in the village,” he said, again. “My father would take your mother on as a servant, if I asked.”

Linette shook her head, as she always did when he said this. “We like the forest. There’s too many people and too much fuss in town. We’re quite happy here. Though I did like the dancing!”

“I worry about you,” he admitted. “Especially in the winter.”

“Oh Trist,” Linette said fondly. “You don’t need to worry about me.” Suddenly, she leaned into him, flighty as a bird, and brushed her lips against his cheek. “I’ve shown you where I live. Now go, before my mother gets back.”

He did as she asked, as if asleep, and hardly knew where she was until he’d crossed the brook again and was nearly back to the village, only pausing once when he heard an old woman’s sharp voice from the ruined chapel. “Where’ve you been, girl?” her mother said. The thought of fleeing Linette’s mother displeased Trist, but he knew she was old enough to be betrothed now, if not married quite yet, and he didn’t want to ruin her reputation.

Trist grinned as he stepped back onto the beaten earth of the woodcutter’s road. He was thinking of Linette as if she were a lady, the daughter of a knight or a baron, when she was a peasant girl with no father, living in the woods. He doubted anyone else in the village would say she had much of a reputation to ruin, in the first place. But he still wanted to protect her. His birthday was High Summer Day, in less than a year. After that, he would be fourteen years old, and that would be old enough. He was the second son, and would never inherit land, no matter what. He could support Percy just as well with a peasant girl for a wife, as with some western knight’s third daughter. When he was fourteen, Trist decided, he would ask his father’s permission to marry Linette.

His fingers rose to touch his cheek, where she’d pressed a fleeting kiss, and Trist hurried home.