Where there weren’t enough trees to be logged, people began to tear apart wagons to burn. Old sheds or barns, broken furniture, spare chairs or benches. Anything that could be spared went to feed the flames that men crowded around for comfort.

* François du Lutetia, A History of Narvonne

☀

13th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

It was all Trist could do to stand still, with his arms held out, and allow Clarisant and Sir Florent to buckle on his armor. The steel plates were scratched, dented, and grimy with a mixture of dirt, blood and soot that had turned almost to a kind of glue. When Claire set the left cuisse against his thigh, he sucked in a pained breath despite himself.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll be as gentle as I can be.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he told her, and she frowned. Finally, with everything but his helm on, Trist buckled his sword belt around his waist, making certain the sheath hung where he liked it. “Give us a moment,” he asked Sir Florent, who stepped out of the bedchamber and into his wife’s sitting room.

“You aren’t ready to fight,” Clarisant said, keeping her voice low so that it didn’t carry. “You still need time to rest. You should take the armor off, Trist, and lie down. You’ve done enough for now.”

“If I do not fight,” Trist told her, “the keep may not hold long enough for anyone to rest.”

“I don’t want you to go.” Claire’s hand fell to her belly.

Trist reached out carefully, and wrapped his steel-clad arms around her waist, pulling her body into his. “I would rather stay here,” he admitted. “With you.”

“Husband,” Clarisant said, and he leaned down to kiss her, because nothing she said could change the fact that he had to go to the wall, no matter how wounded he was, and fight - while she stayed behind. She raised a hand to cup his cheek and kissed him back, and Trist only pulled away when he was out of breath.

“Take care of our child,” Trist whispered. “No matter what happens. Go into the catacombs, if you have to.”

Claire nodded. “I will, I promise. But I have to tell you something before you go.” Her eyes were still closed, her head bowed.

“What?”

“I love you,” Clarisant whispered, and looked up to meet his eyes. “I should have said it days ago, outside the city, when you told me, but I was so frightened to lose you. I never thought I would, but I do. I wanted you to know it, before…”

Trist grinned, and a thrill of energy shot through his veins. “Thank you,” he said. “I am not intending to die, my love. Whatever happens, I will find you. I promise.” He kissed her one more time, and then pulled away, before he could delay any further, grabbed his helm and walked out of the room. Sir Florent fell in step beside him, and together they marched down the stone halls of the keep, toward the battle.

Outside, in the courtyard, the people of Rocher de la Garde huddled together by torchlight, trying to get as far from the walls as they could. Arrows arced down over the walls, and a woman screamed as one pierced her through the back. Trist and Sir Florent passed Baroness Blasine on the steps, where she was instructing a half dozen maids and kitchen servants.

“...down to the cellars,” Trist’s mother-in-law said, as he approached, her voice raised to be heard over the impact of siege missiles against the curtain wall. “And into the catacombs. They can take shelter there. Be certain to bring torches and candles. Groups of ten, you hear? Women, children and the elderly. Anyone who can fight had better be on their way up to the walls, instead.”

The older woman turned to regard Trist as her servants scurried down the steps to begin gathering people from the courtyard. “My daughter?” she asked.

“In her rooms,” Trist answered.

Blasine nodded. “I will see to her. Can you fight?”

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. Angelus be with you. I would rather my daughter not be widowed twice.” The Baroness turned, lifted her skirts, and made her way up the steps and into the keep.

“I do believe you’ve won her over,” Sir Florent told Trist, with a grin, as they walked over to the stone stairs that led up to the parapet.

Trist grunted - his leg certainly didn’t enjoy being used to climb stairs. “With a choice between a dead husband and a living one, I do not think it says much,” he remarked. He forced himself onward, up the last two steps and into the chaos.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

What was left of Rocher de la Garde stretched out beneath the walls, to every side of the central keep. Sir Moriaen’s army had moved in, and now surrounded the last redoubt. Trebuchets and catapults crowded the streets, while enemy archers and crossbowmen had climbed onto the roofs of houses for a better angle to shoot from. Everywhere, there were torches, but bonfires, as well, lit at intersections.

Soldiers rushed forward under fire from the walls, carrying ladders to climb the walls. Trist’s eye was caught by one group of perhaps a score of enemies, trying to get a ram forward to the gate: half the men were carrying it, while the other half clustered around, holding shields up to defend against the crossbowmen above them on the parapet.

“Kill those men!” Sir Gareth shouted, waving his arm at the ram. Next to him, the top of an enemy siege ladder landed, and three men ran forward to push it off the wall. The Kimmerian troops who had just started climbing it fell back down to the city street below. An arrow whistled in from a nearby rooftop, and Trist drew his blade in a single motion, cutting the wooden shaft out of the air before it could strike his brother-in-law.

Gareth blinked, and his face paled. “My thanks,” he said, simply. “I am surprised to see you on your feet.”

“On my feet,” Trist said, longsword in hand. “Until this is over, at least.”

“The Exarch fights with us!” Gareth shouted, and raised his sword, and up and down the wall every fighting man within earshot took up the cheer. “You men, there, bring the pitch!”

Trist scanned the wall, looking for something he could do to help. If his legs hadn’t been wounded, he thought he could have just made the leap to a nearby roof, and begun dealing with the enemy archers, but it would be impossible now.

To his right, another ladder - or perhaps the same - struck and lodged between the crenellations. The first man who ran to it fell with a crossbow bolt in his eye, and Trist lurched forward. He and another soldier - no one whose face he recognized - pushed at the ladder together, and with a heave threw it backward. Men fell from it screaming, but to his right, perhaps twenty feet down the parapet, Trist heard the sound of blades.

He turned, as well as he was able, to see a third ladder, with men piling off it, laying about them with axes. Trist’s footwork was slow and sloppy, his legs barely willing to support his weight, but he threw himself forward all the same, cutting down from High Guard to cleave a mercenary’s axe-arm from his torso. Blood sprayed from the man’s dismembered shoulder, slicking the stones of the parapet, and Trist used his left hand to throw the Kimmerian down to the courtyard below, to get him out of the way.

With a half dozen other men, including his cousin Lucan, Trist hacked his way through the Kimmerians to the ladder, but just as they were pushing it away from the wall, a sickly yellow flare of light caught his eye from the courtyard below.

The Serpent of Gates, Bathin, had finally made his move. A yawning portal ripped open the air in the middle of the courtyard, where it had sliced an old man in half as it opened. Kimmerians and Moriaen’s Narvonnian men-at-arms poured out, and Trist knew he could never get there in time to hold the portal, not as wounded as he was.

A thunderous crash came from somewhere behind him, down below, and Trist turned to see Gareth’s men hoisting a cauldron over the edge of the parapet. “Now!” Gareth ordered, and boiling water spilled down over the wall and onto the men with the ram. Screams filled the air, but when Trist looked over the wall, he saw dozens more men, shields held over their heads, running forward to pick up the ram.

In the courtyard, meanwhile, the enemy soldiers were bringing another ram through Bathin’s gate, for the door of the keep itself. Trist could only hope that Clarisant had already made her way down to the catacombs. Everywhere he looked, men were dying, falling back with arrows in their flesh, or severed and mutilated limbs. The keep was lost.

A single horn sounded, somewhere out in the dark city.

The note hung, and the swirl of battle seemed to pause for just a moment under the starry sky. Then, the shouts erupted from the enemy’s rear. Trist leaned forward over the parapet, Auberon’s Boon lending him the ability to see clearly even where the darkness was thickest.

A wedge of mounted knights, lances lowered, hit the enemy troops like a charging bull. There couldn’t have been very many of them - a score, perhaps two or three dozen at most - but they couched their lances in one hand, and had discarded shields in favor of torches for the other. They drove through the enemy men-at-arms and mercenaries without stopping.

“Fire the siege engines!” a man’s voice shouted, and Trist recognized the king. One trebuchet ignited, then a second, and the ring of swords rose above the din of battle. Sir Bors raised his flail, spun the spiked ball around once at the end of a short chain, and swung it into a catapult.

The entire machine shattered, flying apart into broken lengths of wood and splinters. Sir Guiron rode by, leapt off his horse, and drew an arming sword in each hand. Spinning to right and left, he began cutting men down two at a time.

A red veil fluttered and Ismet ibnah Salah leapt from her desert horse's back, plunged a spear into the side of a house, and used it to fling herself up onto the roof. Drawing her curved sword, she cut down every archer there in less than the time it took to draw a breath, then drew her horsebow from her back and began raining arrows down onto the enemy.

“The king!” Trist shouted, raising his sword. “The king has come! Hold fast!”

Outside the keep, the enemy was crumbling into a panic at the assault on their rear. The ram lay abandoned as the men who’d carried it fled. One after another, the siege engines burned.

But in the courtyard, the yawning portal remained open.

Trist threw himself from the parapet to the courtyard below, cleaving a man in half as he came down. His legs buckled under him with a sudden shock of pain, but he could not let them break down the keep’s door, not when salvation was at hand.

“Father!” he gasped. “Sir Tor!”

Frost cracked outward from where Trist had fallen, spreading across the cobblestones, as one after another wraithly forms of dead knights appeared. Sir Rience cut down a Kimmerian at the portal, while Sir Tor brained one of the men holding the ram at the top of the stairs. Percy was there, as well, and half a dozen more knights besides, all risen from their biers beneath the Ardenwood, and everywhere the dead men went, the enemy perished.

Trist struggled to his feet, in spite of the pain, and staggered toward the portal, sword raised. On the other side, he saw the daemon, finally: a creature of dirty-dull skin and midnight blue wings; of red eyes and horns, and a serpent's tale. Trist settled into the Key Guard, tip of his blade pointed straight through the portal at the daemon Bathin.

“Face me,” Trist growled.

The portal snapped closed, stranding the last of the enemy troops in the courtyard, where they died to the man.