The senators in Rumen often forget that our legions could never have dominated the Cirum Mare without the Pārsan knowledge of astronomy. For an island people, we Etalans have never been the greatest sailors, and we would still be hugging the coast of Etalus on fishing boats if we did not have the stars to guide us.

* The Campaign Journals of General Aurelius, volume I

☀

11th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

A burning sphere of tightly wrapped threads pulsed and vibrated and beat, sparking off glowing embers of burnt red, orange and incandescent yellow. Tendrils of fire caressed the orb, stoking it with waves of power like an apprentice working the bellows in the forge. With each pulse, the red threads brightened to orange, the orange to yellow until the very air around the orb wavered from the heat.

Somewhere beneath and very far away, Trist’s unconscious body was dragged toward the winch next to the gate by a group of men-at-arms. The burning core found that it was tethered to the sleeping man, and floated along in the wake of his passage.

“It’s done, Trist,” Acrasia whispered. “Come back.”

Without eyes, the orb saw and recognized another like itself. That was where the tendrils came from that caressed it, that stoked it with warmth and heat, that nurtured it. The two orbs circled, slowly, drawn to each other.

“Caught in each other’s -” Acrasia said. “Like a pair of stars. You aren’t ready for this. Go back!” The words made no sense, and one slipped through his mind like a wet fish: he couldn’t grasp the meaning at all.

With a sucking breath of air, Trist filled his lungs again and sat up, panting like a boy who’d been underwater too long. The world seemed dim and colorless, flat, like a painting that was only a poor reproduction of reality.

“We thought you were dying, Exarch,” one of the men-at-arms said.

“Not yet,” Trist coughed. His throat was dry as cracked summer earth. “Wine,” he croaked, reaching out a hand. One of the soldiers got a wine-skin to him, and Trist felt better after he’d sucked down a few swallows and wet his throat. “It has never been like that before,” he said, looking about for Acrasia.

She appeared kneeling next to him, the black dress she’d been accustomed to of late trimmed with forest-green. “You’ve never used so many Tithes at once before,” the faerie explained. “And you’ve never had a yellow Boon before, nevermind two at once.”

Trist frowned. “Bors must have a yellow strand or two,” he objected. “And he never told me about anything like that.”

“Bors isn’t like you are,” Acrasia said. “None of them are. I’ve told you, Trist, you’re special.”

“How? Why?” Trist asked, but then Acrasia flickered and vanished like a reflection in a pool after a stone has been thrown.

“Sir Trist,” said the man at arms next to him, a young man with an unfortunate nose and a mop of curly black hair, shaking him by the shoulder. “We have a lot of wounded men from holding the portal. I don’t know if we can hold the gate, if anyone comes. What should we do?”

Trist sat up. “What is your name?”

“Merek,” the young man said, backing up to give Trist room to rise. The ease and vigor with which his body moved took Trist by surprise: after such a jarring experience, he would have expected to be weak, to require time to recover, but he didn’t feel the need at all.

The wounded men had been dragged away from the Kimmerian corpses, which still lay scattered where they’d fallen around the former location of the daemonic-portal. Now, the soldiers of Rocher de la Garde lay in a neat row, half a dozen of them, their wounds wrapped with stained and blood-drenched bandages. One was missing an arm, another an eye, while a third coughed blood of such a bright red shade that Trist judged he could not be long for this world.

“Lend me that wine-skin again,” Trist asked, and when he had it in hand, closed his eyes. He teased the hot strand of the Graal Boon out of his core, and touched it to the wine. No longer a dull red, but a bright and scalding orange, the tendril stirred the wine like a wooden spoon in a pot of soup, and to Trist’s sightless gaze the wine took on the warmth and color of the thread. He wound himself tight again, withdrawing that small portion of himself from the wine, and opened his eyes.

“Have them drink this,” he commanded Merek. The man-at-arms moved from one wounded man to another, tipping the flask into their mouths. Trist watched the orange glow of the wine, which seemed to him to shine both through the flask itself and even the living bodies of the dying men. It spread down into them, growing less and less bright as it moved, until it seemed to have been entirely absorbed.

“The bleeding has stopped!” Merek exclaimed. The wounded men’s comrades gathered about, checking the bandage and the wounds beneath, and exclaiming in surprise.

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“The cut is entirely gone!” one older man shouted.

“They’ve been healed by the Exarch,” another gasped in awe.

“Merek,” Trist said, once the wine-skin was dry and each wounded man had drunk of it. “Can you hold the gate now?”

“Aye,” the young man said with a grin. “We will hold till the Cataclysm itself comes again!” Around him, the men cheered and repeated Trist’s name like a talisman.

“See to Sir Carados,” Trist commanded. “I need to get back to the North Gate and speak to Sir Gareth.” The soldiers promised to do so, and Trist turned, making his way toward the center of the city with long strides. He had half a mind to run, but bore in mind Acrasia’s words of caution from many days before: that he needed time to get used to the changes to his body.

A cloud of black smoke hung in the air above Rocher de la Garde; Trist couldn’t see the docks, all the way to the south past the keep, but even from the level of the street he could tell that the northern section of the city was burning. How many buildings, he couldn’t say, but he hoped the fire-fighting teams Sir Gareth had prepared were able to keep it under control.

Ahead, the tower of the Cathedral of Rahab reared up into the sky, the top lost in the drifting clouds of smoke. Claire was somewhere within, he knew, and it was a safer place for her than in the streets. He would have been more comfortable yet if she was in the keep, at the center of the city and designed to be the stronghold of last resort in the event the outer walls fell. His steps slowed as he came up on the Cathedral steps; perhaps he should enter and see whether she had found any useful information in the library.

He hesitated, and then frowned as the Cathedral bells began to ring, peals erupting from the bell-tower not in a steady rhythm, but a wild, desperate staccato. Trist glanced up and down the streets to both the north and south, and the east and west, but he didn’t see any soldiers. He was the closest aid there was - and his wife was in that building. Resting his hand on the pommel of his longsword, Trist dashed up the stone steps and into the nave of the Cathedral, where panicked women and children clustered in the pews.

“What is happening?” Trist shouted, his voice echoing down the nave.

“Sir Knight!” A middle aged priest rushed down the aisle from the altar. “We have been attacked. Armed men snuck into the library, and struck down Dame Etoile.”

“Show me. Now!” Trist flashed from one end of the nave to the other, covering the distance before the priest could take another step, and the wailing of children in the pews was now interspersed with gasps and murmurs.

“This way,” the priest said, leading Tris through a doorway and into a long, stone hallway. “The third door down, on the left.” Trist left him there, dashing ahead and through the open doorway into a high room, two stories tall at least, with vaulted ceilings and beautiful stained glass windows. Trist hardly saw any of it: his eyes immediately fell upon the armored form of a woman, lying on the stone floor in a pool of blood, between two shelves made from black Iebara wood. A chair was splintered nearby, as if cut in half by an errant sword-stroke, and the corpses of three men were scattered about the room, with the last lying half-across the legs of Dame Etoile.

He didn’t see his wife anywhere.

“Claire!” Trist shouted, then ran over to Etoile and knelt. She hadn’t been wearing her helm: it was set on a nearby table, no doubt where she’d placed it while helping with the research. The men would have taken them by surprise. Trist put his hand in front of the blonde knight’s mouth, and was relieved to feel the faintest whisper of breath. He wished he’d kept the wine-skin from the west gate.

“I need wine!” he shouted, then leapt to his feet and rushed back out into the hallway, where the priest was nearly at the door. “Wine,” he said again. “Now!”

“I keep a bottle in the library,” the man assured him, wide eyed, and hurried over to a locked cabinet. He fit an iron key to the lock, and opened the left hand door, withdrawing a corked bottle.

Trist snatched the bottle out of the priest’s hands, and sent the power of his Boon into it with a thought. Then, he drew his sword, rubbed it up and down the glass neck of the bottle, and sheared the top off with a single practiced stroke. Wine sprayed out, and the cork bounced off the wall, but he ignored all of it and knelt at Etoile’s side, where he held her mouth open with the fingers of her right hand, and poured wine down her throat with the other.

Etoile coughed once, twice, and her eyes opened. Trist pulled back the bottle, and slid an arm behind her shoulders to help the other knight sit up.

“What happened?” he demanded. “Where is my wife?”

“Your wife?” The priest echoed, eyes wide. Trist couldn’t blame him; he didn’t know the other man’s name, either. There was no time.

“Fled upstairs,” Etoile gasped. “With the book.”

“How many men?” Trist asked her.

“Four.” Her eyes fluttered, but Trist had found out what he needed to know. He set Etoile back down on the stone floor and ran for the spiral staircase, taking the steps two at a time until he was on the second floor. He ran past the bookcases until he came to one that had been rotated at an angle, revealing a dark passage deeper into the Cathedral. Trist stepped over to the railing, leaned over it, and called down to the priest below.

“There is a secret passage!”

The old man looked up from where he was tending Etoile. “She will have fled to the catacombs below,” he called back. “I daresay little Claire knows the tunnels beneath this city as well as you know your sword, Sir Knight.”

“I have to follow her,” Trist said. “Where do they lead?”

“There are dozens of tunnels,” the priest protested, shaking his head. “You will never find her. You’ll only lose yourself down there in the dark.”

With a cry of frustration, Trist unwound the sparking orange thread of the Hunter’s Boon from his core, and cast it out. Clarisant. I need to find Clarisant. He half closed his eyes, and remembered the softness of her skin, the warmth of her body next to his in bed, the smell of her hair. The strand of the Boon caught and pulled taunt, stretching not down into the passageway, but east, across the city.

“Tend to Dame Etoile and see her brought to the keep to recover,” Trist commanded, rushing back down the staircase and across the library.

“You healed her,” the priest said, voice tinged with awe. “You are Claire’s husband?”

“Aye,” Trist said. “And I am going to her now.”

“She is a good girl. She always has been,” the old man said. “Keep her safe.”

“I will,” Trist promised, and rushed out the door.