The crops began to wilt after three days, the contemporary accounts attest. By the time the sun finally returned, most of the fruit bushes were dying: blackberries, raspberries, strawberries. Peppers, cucumbers and lettuce as well. The trees proved to be much more hardy, and crops of apple, peach, pear, apricot and the like were hardly impacted.
* François du Lutetia, A History of Narvonne
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13th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC
For the entirety of his sprint from the north gate south to the harbor, Trist cursed the misfortune that he didn’t know anyone on the beach, or out in the water. The first half of the run he used the Hunter’s Boon to lock onto Clarisant, who was still in the keep at the center of Rocher de la Garde; but once he’d reached that point, he had been forced to release the Boon. That meant that he covered the distance from the north wall to the keep much quicker than the second half of his run, from the keep to the bay.
At this point, there was no longer much reason for him to ride a horse when he needed to cover ground, unless it was going to be over a long distance. The Fae Touched Boon, now fueled with sufficient Tithes to make its strand the bright yellow of a rapeseed flower, pulsed in time with his heartbeat and sped him along his way faster than most steeds could run.
Sir Gareth hadn’t stationed more than a handful of men-at-arms to keep watch on the shore, after the docks and ships had been destroyed by the leviathan. Forneus was not the sort of daemon that even siege engines posed much of a threat too, and so it had been judged wiser to keep men out of its reach, and use them elsewhere to hold the north and west walls.
Unfortunately, that meant that when Trist arrived at the harbor, he was alone. A small group of knights was riding south through the cobblestone streets in his wake - Florent, Erec and Lucan had followed him down the stone steps from the wall. But until they arrived, and then the men-at-arms coming after them on foot, Trist was alone.
The men set to watch the strand were already dead when Trist’s boots hit the sand, and a Kimmerian shield-wall stretched between him and the landing boats. They were small: row boats and skiffs likely looted from fishing villages north of the city, such as Havre de Paix, where Trist had met Yaél a moon and a half ago. Each was jammed with mercenaries, in their onion-shaped helms, who hit the surf as soon as their boat reached the breakers. Behind the line of men strode the fiercely bearded Alyosha Nikitich, who had been at the first parley in front of the walls with Sir Moriaen. The Kimmerian commander was illuminated by torches that had been removed from the boats and jammed into the wet sand, illuminating the strand and the surf in a flickering glow of orange.
If Trist could kill their commander, the rest might break. Mercenaries, after all, fought for gold under the assumption that they would live to spend it. He drew his longsword from the sheathe at his side, raised it above his head into High Guard, and closed with the front line of the shield wall. Rather than try to overpower the line, Trist simply leapt over them. “Father! Sir Tor!” he called as he flew through the air.
In an instant, the temperature on the beach dropped, and frost cracked across the sand. With a roar, Sir Tor crashed into the enemy line somewhere behind Trist, the clang of his hammer hitting a shield unmistakable.
“We have your back, boy!” Sir Rience’s voice called.
He landed with a spray of sand, spun, and cut the hamstrings of the two nearest shield-men. They fell screaming, and one of them knocked his head on the wet rocks. Before they had even hit the beach, Trist blurred forward, lashing out with his blade to his right and left, finding the weak points in the Kimmerian armor. Mercenaries fell with slit throats, with stumps pumping blood where their hands used to be, or legs hacked out from under them. Before the mercenary captain could give his first order, Trist had broken the line and cleared a circle around him, filled only with corpses and moaning, mutilated men.
“You Tithe me more souls than I could ever have taken on my own,” Acrasia said, her voice caressing him and making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Trist shuddered: it was like she was standing right behind him, whispering in his ear, and he found that he had come to prefer that she remain silent. “Two each for the king and I, and one for you, but that won’t be the end of what you take this morning.”
“Eta Exarch, ubey evo!” Alyosha’s shout rang out across the beach, and Trist wheeled, searching for the enemy commander in the darkness. The Kimmerian words might as well have been the chittering of mice to him, but it hardly mattered. He was fortunate, once again, for Auberon’s Boon: even in a world without a sun, he could see clearly.
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The mercenary commander had a round shield on his left arm, and an axe gripped in his right hand, and his beard dripped with sea-spray. “Alyosha!” Trist called out to him. “Face me!”
Instead of stepping forward, the bearded Kimmerian called out in his own language, and half a dozen archers with recurved bows loosed arrows. The world slowed around Trist, and he cut two of the arrows out of the air, then leaped over a third. One missed on its own, a poor shot, whistling off to his left and piercing the sand. A fifth skidded off Trist’s pauldron: it would leave a bruise, but nothing more.
The sixth and last found Trist’s thigh, a finger’s width past the edge of his cuisse, nearly taking him in the groin. The force of it wasn’t quite enough to knock him back, but it did spin him out of control, and he landed on only one boot instead of two before falling onto the wet sand, scattered with sharp shells, halfway to where the Kimmerian captain hefted his weapons.
“Today, I kill an Exarch!” Alyosha shouted in Narvonnian, advancing.
Trist, on one knee, dropped his sword to the sand, grabbed the arrow protruding from his thigh, and snapped it off as close to his skin as he could manage with very little time to work. He got his longsword back in hand just quickly enough to push to his feet and catch the descending chop of the Kimmerian’s axe, but his left leg throbbed with pain and was not capable of supporting him. When Alyosha followed up with a brutal shield-bash to Trist’s face, the helm kept his nose from breaking, but did not prevent him being thrown backward, off his feet and onto the strand.
Around them, the Kimmerians cheered, and Alyosha pressed forward, swinging his axe down again. Trist rolled to the side, coating his armor in wet sand, and the axe-blade sunk into the beach. He swung as he rolled, faster than any mortal eye could track, and took the mercenary’s left eye in a spray of blood.
Alyosha roared in pain, but did not drop his weapon. Instead, he shook his head while Trist scrambled back up onto his right leg. Blood soaked them both: it covered Alyosha’s face, and soaked Trist’s breeches beneath his armor.
“Even if you kill me here,” the Kimmerian captain taunted, “my soldiers burn your city. Kill your men. Take your women.”
Despite himself, Trist took his eyes off the other man. Two-score boats had landed now, at least, and a dozen of the Kimmerians remained on the beach, fighting the spirits of Sir Tor and Sir Rience. Another dozen surrounded the impromptu duel in a circle, but the rest had charged forward into the city streets. He could hear the clang of steel, and hoped that the other knights and the men-at-arms would hold the majority of them, but the enemy was in the city.
In the moment he looked away, Alyosha Nikitich charged. The mercenary led with his shield, aiming to knock Trist’s blade out of the way and expose an opening for the axe. Trist couldn’t use his left leg, so he pushed off with his right, leaping aside rather than give the burly Kimmerian a chance to knock him off his feet again. He tucked his shoulder and rolled, coming up kneeling with a thrust into the big man’s armpit, under his raised axe.
The longsword sunk to the length of a grown man’s hand, and the Kimmerian coughed, standing still as if enchanted. A dribble of blood ran out of his mouth, and then both shield and axe fell from his hands. Trist yanked the longsword out of his torso, and Alyosha Nikitich fell dead on the beach. Trist’s arm spasmed as a serpent of fire ran up his blade and into his core: one more Tithe, and this one his.
The Kimmerians in a circle around him hesitated, and Trist lurched up, getting his good leg under him again. They moved silently now, no longer cheering with their captain’s corpse on the ground, but they moved like a pack of wolves. If he’d had both legs, Trist could have used his speed to move among them, flashing from one soldier to another too fast for them to follow. His father and Tor, he saw, were being pushed further and further back by sheer numbers.
Wounded as he was, Trist could only parry, instead of dodge. He knocked aside a blow from an arming sword, flicked his wrist, and took the man’s hand off. The Kimmerian staggered backward, screaming and clutching the stump, but Trist couldn't turn fast enough to stop a spear from taking him behind the right knee, through a gap in his armor. The spear transfixed him for a moment, then was torn out again, which would only leave him to bleed out faster. With both legs wounded, he couldn’t stay on his feet, and tumbled to the sand.
Trist forced the Kimmerians back with wild swings of his sword, but desperate moves wouldn’t keep him alive for long. My soldiers burn your city, Alyosha had said. Take your women. Were the Kimmerians at the keep even now, breaking down the doors? Would Clarisant be able to escape into the catacombs beneath the city again, or would they drag her screaming back to the boats? Would Trist’s son be born in Kimmeria, his father nothing but one more corpse thrown into a mass grave?
“Acrasia,” he panted. “What happened to fighting beside me?” He no longer had the strength to keep his father and Sir Tor fighting, and felt the strand that held them on the beach slip through his fingers.
Her black dress trailed over the wet sand, soaking in the water. “What happened to loving me, and only me, forever?” she asked him, in return. “If you die here, my love, I am free of you. Free of these chains that keep me by your side.”
Trist desperately rolled to one side, out of the way of a spear thrust. “If you let me die here, I cannot keep my oath to your king,” he pointed out.
“True.” A burst of sparking tendrils shot out from the faerie in the black dress, spearing into the shadows of the Kimmerian men, which flickered darkly in the torchlight. Each shadow rose, hefted its weapon, and turned to face the man from whom it had come.
“Perish,” Acrasia intoned, as casually as a lady commanding her maid to pass her a comb.
Around the two of them, shadows lunged forward with spears, impaling surprised men. Swords and axes rose and fell. A dozen voices cried out for mercy, and were silenced, and left only a dozen corpses on the beach.
“It seems that I do still love you,” Acrasia said, letting the shadows fall away. “Easier if I did not.” She slipped her hands under his arms, lifted, and began to drag him up the beach, toward the keep.