I’ve seen it plenty of times, sure enough - we call it Soldier’s Heart. No, I couldn’t tell you what the surgeons’ name is, that’s ours. Happens to all of us sometimes, once you’ve seen a battle or three. Can never quite tell what will set it off, but a bottle of wine helps.

* The Life and Times of Legionary Titus Nasica

☀

12th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

The jarring impact of the row-boat’s hull running up against the sand of the beach woke Trist. He was sticky with salt, his hair was still wet, and his breeches were soaked, but he managed to lever himself up from where he’d collapsed, collect his longsword, and jump out into the breakers.

The fisherman who’d pulled him out of the bay grabbed one side of the rowboat, Trist grabbed the other, and between the two of them they lugged it back up onto the strand. The second rowboat was already there - Trist was pleased to see that no one but the fisherman in the skiff had been hurt. Clarisant was waiting for him, as well, on the beach.

“I didn’t know if you were dead or alive,” she said, reaching out to him with a trembling hand and then dropping it.

“I apologize for that,” Trist said, taking the last few steps needed to close the distance to his wife, and wrapping his left arm around her. His right was still tied to the longsword, which he held awkwardly away from her. The hemp would be swollen and soaked, and it would be easier to cut it than to untie the knots. “Once I was in the water, I there was no way to get back up onto the surface and build up speed. I was lucky enough to be fished out, or I would have had to spend all day swimming back.”

“Did you kill it, at least?” Claire asked, but she didn’t look very hopeful.

Trist shook his head. “Wounded it. Drove it off for now. But it dived down deep, where I have no way to follow, and no way to fight it if I did.”

“I suppose wounded is a start,” she said, after a moment. “Perhaps that means they will think twice before sending it at us again. If we keep this to a fight between our soldiers and theirs, without any daemons involved, can we win that?”

“Let us find your brother and see what he says,” Trist suggested. He turned and waved to the old fisherman who’d saved him. “My thanks!”

The old man tipped the brim of his straw hat. “Not the first lad I’ve pulled out of the sea,” he said, with a grin. “Was a wonder to watch you fight, Exarch. You just hold the walls, and I’ll row you to shore any time you need it.”

When they found Sir Gareth at the north gate, he was just ordering Sir Florent to reinforce the west gate. “Take Sir Erec,” he commanded, “Along with Dame Ettarre, and ten men-at-arms from the garrison here. Wake them up if you need to, but get over there.”

“You may rely on us,” Florent assured Clarisant’s brother, turned, and descended the stone steps to the street, giving Trist and Claire a nod of greeting as he hurried past.

“Trouble at the west gate?” Trist asked. The morning sun and the walk from the harbor had mostly dried his hair, but not his breeches, which were already stiff and itchy from the salt water.

“Aye,” Gareth said, turning to greet them. “Sir Moriaen had his men move some of their siege engines during the night, it seems. Now they’ve burnt the north of the city, there’s no more use flinging pots of pitch and oil over these walls, so they’re set on burning the west quarter, as well. I expect that’s where they’ll push hard today. Tell me that daemon is dead.”

Trist shook his head. “I wish I could. I hurt it, but it took me on a ride from one end of the harbor to the other and then dove. I was lucky one of the fisherman rowed me back in, or I would still be swimming. No daemon attack at the west gate, yet?”

“No. No need for the priest.” Gareth frowned. “I suppose driven off is better than knocking at our door,” he said, after a moment. “Get into dry clothes and into your fighting harness, then,” he advised. “We won’t be lucky enough for them to attack only from the one direction.”

Trist and Claire hurried into the remaining guard tower, where they’d left his armor. He managed to get a spare pair of breeches from the men-at-arms, and his wife helped him into his armor with more skill than she’d shown a day or two before. They even got one of the men to lend Trist a dagger, which he used to cut the hemp bracelet off his wrist, and the figure-eight knot off his longsword.

By the time Trist was ready to fight, the siege engines were pounding the north wall again, each missile shaking the tower when it crashed into the city’s fortifications. “I really would prefer you back at the keep, now,” he chided Claire gently. “I am going to spend the day cutting men off the wall and throwing down ladders.” He settled his helm under his left arm.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“I don’t like it when I can’t see you,” Claire protested. “You could have drowned in the bay just now, or been eaten by the leviathan.”

“I do not believe there will be any more enemies snuck into the city,” Trist tried to reassure her. “Sir Moriaen does not seem the sort to keep trying the same tactic after it has already failed once. He is the sort to surprise us, instead.”

Claire sighed. “And yet, nowhere is really safe here, is it? I had an idea of what a siege would be, but my imaginings were nothing like this. Will any of the city be left by the time they’ve finished? Even if we win? What does winning even look like with so many people’s homes burned? It will take us months just to clear the rubble, and count the dead.” Trist saw that her eyes were wide, her shoulders tensed - she looked much like she had on the night of her wedding to his brother, nearly overwhelmed with panic.

Trist yanked the gauntlet off his right hand and set it on a nearby table, so that he could reach up and cup his wife’s cheek with his bare hand. “Those are worries for after the siege has been lifted. For now, think about keeping yourself alive, and keeping our child safe.” He did not fail to notice how her hand dropped to her belly at the mention of the baby growing there.

“You need to survive as well,” Claire insisted, gasping as if she couldn’t get a breath. “I won’t do it again, Trist. I refuse to be twice widowed, with a fatherless child. I don’t want do this alone.” She raised her other hand to grasp his, and leaned her cheek into his palm, closing her eyes as if to take shelter.

“You will not be alone,” Trist promised. “I promised that I would protect you, and I will. And I will always come back to you. Have faith in that. But now I need to fight, and I can do that better knowing that you are safe in the keep.”

Claire nodded her head, then released his hand. “I know,” she said. “I know it with my head. But sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, and I can’t breathe.”

Trist had been taught the importance of eloquence since he was a boy, but in this moment he did not know what to say. Instead, he wrapped his arms around his wife, drew her against him, and found her lips with his own. It was still a new thing, the way he felt about Clarisant. It wasn’t the burning, desperate love he’d harbored for Acrasia what felt like a thousand years ago - it was still growing, but he didn’t want to lose it, all the same.

“Your lips taste like the ocean,” Claire said, her forehead pressed against his, when they broke apart. Trist smiled.

“I will come to the keep tonight,” he promised. “I am going to need a bath. And a clean change of clothes.”

“I’ll make certain it's ready,” she promised him. “And I will take a horse back to the keep. Go fight with our men. It stiffens their backs to see you.” Claire darted in to kiss him once more, quickly, then turned and hurried out of the guard tower. Trist pulled his gauntlet back on, settled his helm over his head, and walked out onto the parapet for another day’s fighting.

Trist took another half dozen Tithes that day, bringing his total, after the cut taken by Auberon and Acrasia, to three.

He killed more than six men, of course, but those who died after being thrown off the city wall, or riding down their ladders, hadn’t been reaped by his blade, and so their souls did not go to the faeries. Sir Moriaen had concentrated on the west gate, as Gareth had predicted, but used his siege engines and Kimmerian mercenaries to maintain pressure to the north, as well, so as to force the defenders to split their forces. Sometime in the afternoon the last of the scorpions atop the remaining gate tower was destroyed by a well-aimed boulder from an enemy trebuchet, and the top of the tower collapsed with it. In other places, the crenelations along the top of the parapet no longer looked regular and even, but instead like the gap-toothed smile of a sick old man with a rotten mouth.

Trist didn’t know the exact number of men that Baron Urien had left behind to defend Rocher de la Garde, but he could make a guess. A garrison of roughly one-hundred men at arms, perhaps, along with a few dozen engineers to man the scorpions and keep the gate-winches working. Trist had brought a half dozen knights and their squires. And it was clear that Gareth had pressed every fit man of fighting age in the city into service, save for the fishers, who’d been killed by the leviathan anyway.

Clarisant had told him there were thirty-thousand people living in the city, and he guessed she meant that number before her father left with his troops to join the king’s army. Percy had always been the one who could do math, but this wasn’t very complex: half the people in the city were women, and maybe a third of what was left were the right age to fight, rather than being children or old men. Out of the maybe five thousand men of fighting age who would have been in the city to begin with, Trist figured as many as half of them were actually unavailable for a variety of reasons.

Some were already accounted for, having been trained into men-at-arms, engineers or infantry who Urien had already either taken to Falais, or who were manning the wall now. Some were fisherman who’d been lost to the first attack from Forneus. Others might have been crippled in some way earlier in their lives, while still more would be functioning in non-combat roles - part of the fire fighting teams, working in the stables, baking in the kitchens. All in all, Trist guessed that Sir Gareth would have been lucky if he’d been able to find two-thousand men to levy into defending the walls of the city.

And that was before the fighting began.

Trist had already seen men cut down at the west gate, smashed into a pulp under boulders flung by enemy trebuchets, thrown off the parapet, and shot through the eye with a crossbow bolt. The bodies were carted away, but the wounded lay in groaning piles after each enemy assault on the walls, until they could be evacuated to the inner keep and bandaged.

When there was time in between fighting, Trist had made a few rounds with a wine-skin, and provided healing to as many wounded men as he could. He’d found his limits, however, and a great weariness settled over him whenever he used his Boon to help more than a handful.

Sir Gareth likely had more accurate numbers, but even Trist could see that they’d started with hardly enough men to man the walls - most of them woefully under-equipped and untrained - and were losing fighters rapidly, with every assault. Urien had stripped the city nearly bare of fighters, and they were paying for it now. By the time it finally grew too dark for the enemy to continue throwing men at their fortifications, Trist was growing less and less confident they would be able to hold long enough for the siege to be lifted.

On the morning of the third day, the sun did not rise.