Saint Penarys, Angelus of the Night, was one of the seven Angelus who empowered the first Exarchs of Narvonne; a Knight of Penarys has protected every sovereign of Narvonne ever since. Penarys is often said to be the brother of Saint Abatur, though I personally suspect that we are merely projecting human relationships onto beings beyond our comprehension. Regardless, the link between the Saint of the Night and the Saint of the North Star was strong: when Abatur was slain fighting the Prince of Plagues, it is said that the scream of Penarys shattered every pane of glass for a hundred miles.
* François du Lutetia, A History of Narvonne
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2nd Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC
Trist turned away from the light in his eyes, away from the open window in the wall of the north tower, and buried his face in Clarisant’s soft black hair. The gauzy summer curtains hanging around the bed stirred in the breeze, but did little to block morning sunlight.
“Good morning, husband,” Clarisant murmured, in front of him. It was only the second time they had shared a bed, and Trist was beginning to think that he could get used to waking up next to her. Beneath the linen summer sheets, he ran his left hand over the swell of her hip, marveling at how smooth and soft her skin was, compared to his.
“Have I told you,” Trist mumbled. “Under the mountain. When it seemed like those stairs would never end, that I would die down there. It was you I thought of.”
She turned over to face him, half pulling the linens off in the process, and when Trist opened his eyes they were nearly nose to nose. “Tell me,” Clarisant said. “Tell me all of it. Everything that happened between the morning you left, and now.”
And so he did, though he did not mention Acrasia’s name in the telling, so as not to upset her.
Trist started there in the bed, but did not finish the tale before they rose. It was a long telling, and part way through husband and wife pulled on robes, so that Baroness Arnive’s servants could bring in trays from the kitchen, and set them on the table. There was watered wine and fresh squeezed orange juice, which Trist had never tasted before, but which Clarisant knew from growing up at Rocher de la Garde. Leftovers from the feast, such as sheep’s cheese, and thin cold slices of rib steaks with peppers and garlic; fresh fried bacon, bread still hot from the ovens, and fresh churned, creamy butter to spread, along with preserves made from apples and cherries.
Having left the great hall early the night before, both of them dug into the food with enthusiasm. “Lady Valeria,” Clarisant repeated, when Trist was finished. “I met her once, you know, at Cheverny.”
“Did you?” Trist allowed himself to moan at the taste of a bite of steak. “I have spent so long riding or walking from one place to another,” he admitted, “With only salt meat and hard bread or whatever Henry could shoot to make a stew. Now that I can eat real food again, I think I am going to grow a gut.”
“We can’t have that,” Clarisant teased him, leaning over to spear a slice of his steak with her fork, and pop it into her mouth. “I enjoy watching you shirtless in the practice yard too much.”
“Do you?” Trist teased her right back. “Watched me while I was still half crippled, did you?”
“Well, yes, a bit,” she admitted. “But actually, I remember Enid De Lancey and I looking down at you and Percy in the yard, all those years ago.”
The bedchamber was silent, for a long moment.
“I miss him,” Trist said. Then, he shook himself, took a drink of juice, and lifted his knife to cut another piece of steak. “You said you met Lady Valeria at the King’s court? I wonder whether she was already an Exarch back then, or if it happened since.”
“The King has half a dozen Exarchs at Cheverny,” Clarisant said, using her knife to add cherry preserves to a slice of bread. “I can’t imagine they would have missed the presence of her and her daemon.”
“I do not know,” Trist mused. “I did not notice her, until she revealed herself. That might be put aside,” he said. “I have only been an Exarch for a moon or so. But Sir Bors has much more experience, and he had been accompanying the Crown Prince the entire time. I cannot imagine he would have ever let her alone with him if he had any suspicion at all.”
“Which means,” Clarisant said, after swallowing a bite of her bread, “That she can conceal her nature, and that of her daemon.”
“A Boon of some sort,” Trist guessed.
“If she can do it, Trist,” his wife asked, “What is to say that any servant of a daemon cannot do the same? Who is to say there isn’t another one hiding in the city right now, or among the court at Cheverny?”
“I do not know,” Trist said grimly. “But I think that we had better raise the possibility with the Prince.”
Of course, there was quite a bit that had to happen before they could speak to Lionel Aurelianus, even after everything that had occurred during the battle. For one thing, even after Trist and Clarisant had finished eating, they had to wash up and dress for the day. While this was a relatively quick process on Trist’s part, they had to finally open up the door to the sitting room where Henry and Yaél had been sleeping.
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Trist had been too distracted to notice, but his wife’s maid had journeyed with her from Camaret-à-Arden: a slip of a girl named Anais, who now went through the long and convoluted process of dressing Carisant. Trist made himself comfortable on the bed, piling up cushions behind his back to prop himself up, and watched.
“Is m’lord going to do this regularly?” Anais asked Clarisant in a voice that reminded Trist of a field mouse squeaking.
“If my lord husband wishes to watch me dress,” Clarisant said, casting a smile back at Trist, “He may do so whenever he wishes.”
“It does not make you uncomfortable?” Trist asked.
“According to my mother,” Clarisant said, as Anais pulled off her morning robe, leaving her standing bare in the morning breeze, “So long as you still enjoy looking at me, you are unlikely to be dragging servant girls off when I’m not around. So look as much as you like, Trist.”
His cheeks burned at her words, but Trist did not turn his eyes away.
It ended up taking until after the next ring of the bells from the Center Tower before Trist escorted Clarisant down the stairs, arm in arm, with Anais and Yaél trailing behind them, to find Prince Lionel in Baroness Arnive’s solar. Henry, it seemed, had chosen to sleep in the barracks last night, so that Anais could be near her mistress.
One advantage of Yaél not being a boy, Trist reflected, was that they did not have to worry about her and the maid sleeping in the same room. That was a conversation he still needed to have, but it would keep.
Servants in the red and black livery of Arnive’s late husband opened the door for them without objection, and they found a gathering much like the one Trist had attended in the Prince’s pavilion, just before he’d been ordered up into the mountains. Some of the faces had changed, but they had dragged out the map table again. Trist immediately took a knee, while Clarisant, at his side, performed a curtsy.
“Rise,” Prince Lionel said, from beside the table, where he had grouped wooden markers representing the reduced Caliphate and Narvonesse troops together. The figurines were arranged at the north end of the pass through the Hauteurs Massif, where Falaise was located. “Lady Clarisant, have you been introduced to everyone present?”
Trist scanned the room at the question, noting that Anais and Yaél had found places along the walls with other squires and servants. Baroness Arnive was present, as well as Baron Urien, Sir Divdan and Sir Bors, and Dame Chantal, who wore a bandage over one eye and had an arm in a sling. It gave her the look of a grizzled veteran, which, compared to him, she was. No one seemed inclined to make her rise from her chair, where she had a good view of the low table. One of Urien’s dogs seemed to have taken it upon himself to keep a watch over her, while the other snored next to his master. Besides Trist’s own wife, the other addition to the group was Lady Ismet, who had brought along with her a lancer that Trist recognized: Fazil ibn Asad, who had ridden with her in the mountains, then survived the battle before the gates at the Tour de Larmes.
“I know my father and brother, of course, and Baroness Arnive and I have met,” Clarisant said, after a quick hug for the Baron. “Sir Bors and I met at the feast, and I believe Sir Divdan accompanied the Baroness the last time we were at Cheverny together.”
“May I present General Ismet ibnah Salah, in that case,” the Prince said, “And her captain, Fazil ibn Asad, who have both been kind enough to join us in considering the challenges ahead. Challenges which face both our peoples,” he added.
“General Ismet.” Clarisant offered another curtsy.
“Lady Clarisant,” Ismet greeted her, and instead of a curtsy, took each of Clarisant’s hands in her own, then leaned in to kiss her cheek, which Claire accepted with grace and no outward sign of surprise. Instead of her helmet, which was what Trist was used to seeing her in, Ismet wore a bright red scarf of some kind, wrapped about her head so as to cover her hair entirely. Beneath that, the southern knight wore a black dress, without so much as a single other color, but with textured patterns for ornamentation.
“I am told that I have you to thank for the fact that my husband is still alive,” Clarisant commented, with a slight smile.
“I am still amazed with my own decision not to kill him,” Ismet commented, looking Trist over with arched eyebrows. “Though it appears to have been the right choice, given the rest of the battle.”
“I would love to speak with you more, after this,” Clarisant offered. “Perhaps we can take a ride, if there is time and opportunity.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Ismet agreed.
“Time may conspire against you both,” Prince Lionel warned with a frown. “Now that Exarch Trist is here, I feel I must tell you all that late last evening, a message from Cheverny arrived by pigeon.” He unrolled a small piece of parchment, and read aloud.
“Lutetia under assault by troops flying a wheat sheaf, Or, on a field Vert, and Kimmerian mercenaries. City has fallen, King’s Island and Cheverny besieged. 13th Day of the Flower Moon. Margaret, Exarch of Rahab.”
In the silence that followed, the Prince passed the rolled scrap of parchment to his right, where Baroness Arnive happened to be. After a quick glance, she passed it on, as well, and the message made its way around the room. A knock sounded on the door to the chamber, and the Prince’s squire, Kay, hurried out.
“It appears the father is just as rotten as the daughter,” Baron Urien remarked, without even waiting to examine the note.
Ismet frowned. “The father?”
“The heraldry,” Trist explained to her. “The wheat sheaf on a green field. That is the sigil of Lady Valeria’s father, Maël, Baron du Champs d'Or.”
“The timing of the attack on Cheverny,” Lionel explained, “is too precise to be a coincidence. There is no way that he could have received word of what happened here, and then mustered his troops, hired mercenaries besides, and marched across half of Narvonne to siege Lutetia, all in the span of a single day.”
“Which means the two things were planned to coincide,” Baroness Arnive reasoned.
“It was the owl - Agrat, Valeria’s daemonic patron - that broke the last chains on Adramelech,” Trist recalled. How much longer might those chains have held, if not for the daemonic owl breaking them? How many people - people like Luc - would still be alive?
“The plan was three daemons,” Lionel said. “To kill both Bors, and General Shadi, and then cripple both armies, which were already worn down by fighting each other. Perhaps Valeria was to take me hostage and force a marriage. In the meantime, her father would have seized the capital and control of the king. We simply had more Exarchs than they expected.”
“And they certainly did not expect the Faerie King to take a hand,” Clarisant mused aloud.
“Which gives us the barest chance,” Lionel agreed, “To save this kingdom. None of us were meant to still be here, or at least not free to act.”
The door opened, and the Crown Prince’s squire, Kay, returned. “Your Royal Highness,” the young man said. “Guiron, Exarch of Penarys, has arrived from Lutetia. I think that you will wish to hear what he has to say.”