Every battle, there are less and less of the men who came with me from Etalus. We recruit native Narvonnians from my wife’s tribe, and train them so that we can replace our numbers. But every time the Butcher’s Bill comes due, I say farewell to my dwindling legion. I do not have a name for what I’ve created as a replacement.

* The Campaign Journals of General Aurelius, volume IV

☀

10th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

They burned Sir Rience’s body, for lack of a boneyard to bury him in.

John Granger had pointed out that smoke might lead their enemies right to them, but Henry had simply shrugged. “It won’t take smoke to do that,” the hunter had said. “Hundreds of people tromping through the woods with carts and everything they can carry? A blind man could follow us.”

“Anyway,” Yaél said, from where she lay on a blanket, “Lady Acrasia said she’d protect us once we made it to the woods.”

Surprisingly, it was Clarisant who agreed. “Nothing short of a few daemons will be able to face her in this forest,” she said. Her riding skirt was dirty at the hems, torn on brambles, and generally covered in leaves and all other manner of woodland detritus. Trist let them talk. For his part, he simply began gathering deadwood and laying it down for a fire.

Once begun, the work went quickly: all the men of the village helped, and the boys, as well. They laid down a series of interlocking squares to form a rectangle nearly six feet long, and filled the empty spaces with kindling, and with herbs that Henry scrounged from the forest. Across the top of the entire thing, they put down strong branches as thick as a man’s wrist, to make a surface upon which a body could be laid.

As the old knight’s daughter-in-law, it fell to Clarisant to wash the body and prepare it. The other women of the village helped her, carrying buckets of water up from the stream. Yaél, who was no longer in danger of dying but certainly not ready to walk, was given the task of cleaning Sir Rience’s armor and weapons, something she could do from where she was laid out on the forest floor.

While they were laying the wood, at least Trist could focus on the work. One of the woodsmen fetched him an axe, and he used it to split logs and cut branches down to the proper lengths. He laid his gauntlets and his helm aside while he worked, and handed both the armor pieces and his sword to Yaél, to be cleaned along with everything else. When his wife urged him to take the rest of his armor off, however, he refused. “I need to be ready to fight if they come again,” he explained to her, and went back to seeing the fire built.

The hard part came when there was only one thing left to do: when they’d laid his father’s cleaned body, wrapped in bed clothes taken from one of the wagons, on the wooden pyre. Then, everyone gathered around in a circle, staring at him, and Trist abruptly realized that they expected him to say something that would make them all feel better. Their village was burnt, their homes and everything in them destroyed, their lord dead, and he was supposed to somehow find the words to tell them that everything would be all right in the end.

Trist wondered what his brother would have said.

It was exactly the situation that Percy had always been trained for, and that Trist had always been utterly lost at. He looked around the crowd of faces: children lifted onto their fathers’ shoulders, women with soot-blackened cheeks who’d escaped the burning village, men at arms with blood still streaking their armor and bandages wrapping their wounds. Trist wanted nothing more than for them to leave him alone.

“My father,” Trist began, but he had to pause as his face twisted with the effort to hold back a sudden rush of tears. “My father told me that whatever happens during war, we do not bring it home to our families. We protect them from it. But today war came home to us.” He looked down at his father’s pale face: already, it did not seem real, more like a painting than a man.

“The entire ride here,” he continued, “I could not stop being afraid that we would come too late. That all we would find would be a burned village, and a pile of bodies. The village is burnt,” Trist admitted, looking back to the edge of the forest. “But you are all still here. And I knew my father well enough to know that if his life was the price to pay for that, he would be well satisfied.” He took a step back, and when Clarisant reached out for his hand, he accepted hers in his own, and returned the squeeze she gave him.

Brother Alberic stepped forward. “Today, I witnessed Sir Rience du Camaret-à-Arden charge a daemon. He knew that it would be the last thing he did,” the monk said, voice rough. “I could see it in his eyes. But he was a true knight. He did it to protect this village, and he did it to protect his daughter-in-law.”

“He did it to protect his grandchild,” Clarisant said, resting her left hand on her dress, over her belly. A murmur ran through the villagers crowded around them in a circle.

“It is customary,” Brother Alberic continued, “to speak of the Cataclysm when we lay our dead to rest. We do this to remember all of those lost during those dark days, but also to remind us that no matter what grief comes to us, the sun will rise again tomorrow. We will rebuild, and our children will follow after us in their time. Today, our lord has passed; join me in prayer to Saint Kadosh, that his scales will be weighed with mercy.”

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After all the prayers were said, Henry struck flint to steel and made a spark in the kindling, first in one place, and then another. The air was filled with the scent of burning wood, and the herbs that the hunter had strewn about the kindling.

“M’lord,” John Granger said quietly, coming up on Trist’s right, on the other side from Clarisant. “We should get the people moving. We need to make a camp somewhere with fresh water.”

Trist resisted the urge to punch the man. “I have to see this done,” he said.

“I understand,” the Master-at-Arms said. “And I grieve your father’s passing with you. But we have two hundred people here, and our first duty is to care for them.”

Gasps carried across the pyre from the other side of the gathered circle, and the villagers parted. Clarisant’s fingers tightened in his own, and she gripped his hand hard enough to hurt, but she neither spoke nor moved. Trist raised his eyes from the flames.

Acrasia stood on the other side of the fire, with her hand on the extended arm of her brother, Cern the Huntsman. The Horned Lord’s face was impassive, almost bored, and he paid no more mind to the people edging away from him than a farmer did the scrambling of his chickens as he walked through the yard on another errand. The faerie held a turned wooden bowl in his right hand. Acrasia herself was dressed in light, gauzy black, her pale hair long and loose about her shoulders. Unlike everyone else gathered around the pyre, she looked untouched: not a strand of hair out of place, not a speck of dirt on the hem of her dress.

“As was agreed,” the faerie spoke, her voice echoing through the trees, “Auberon, King of Shadows, grants the people of Camaret-à-Arden safe passage in the Ardenwood, and the protection of his Court from all enemies. My brother and I will lead you to a place where you may camp safely. The king reminds you, Sir Trist, to keep your end of the bargain. Fail to do so, and this protection will be revoked.”

“I understand,” Trist said, dropping his eyes back to the fire. “Master-at-Arms,” he said, keeping his voice loud enough that all could hear.

“Yes, m’lord?” Granger said.

“You will see that all our people follow Lady Acrasia and Lord Cern,” Trist commanded, doing his best to imitate the tone Lionel would have used. “I will follow when I have finished standing vigil over my father.”

“Aye, m’lord,” John Granger said. “You heard Sir Trist! Gather your things! Help the wounded up onto the carts.”

Yaél used the trunk of a tree to scramble to her feet, but it was clear for anyone to see she couldn’t put her weight on her injured leg. “Your blade’s cleaned and oiled,” she told Trist, hobbling over to him, and he accepted it from her, and then the gauntlets, as well.

“Thank you,” he said. “Catch a ride on a wagon. Rest that leg, and have Brother Alberic take a look at it. We will catch up with you.”

The squire hesitated, but when Alberic offered her an arm to lean on, she accepted. Slowly, the space around the pyre emptied of people, as they followed the Horned Hunter into the Ardenwood, on foot or riding in the back of a wagon. The flames caught Sir Rience’s flesh, and Trist was glad they’d left, for the few herbs Henry had found couldn’t obscure the stench of burnt human flesh. He coughed, and took a step back, and his wife raised a hand to cover her face.

“You don’t have to stay with me,” Trist told Clarisant, but she shook her head.

“I told you,” she said, simply. “I’m not leaving you.”

Trist worked that over in his mind for a moment. He had thought to speak to his father alone, because he did not know exactly what would be said, and he had suspicions that not everything would be easy to hear. But if he was going to trust anyone, he supposed it was going to be his wife.

“Let us sit, then,” he said, and they walked over to a log that had been dragged out of the forest, but judged too large to use in the pyre. Clarisant gathered her ruined skirts about her when she sat, just as if they had been taking their places at the feasting table at some grand hall, but Trist just winced and sighed as he finally got some of the weight of his armor off his back. He drew his longsword again, the sword that Yaél had just finished cleaning, and rested the tip on the packed earth of the forest floor, his hands on the hilt.

“Sir Rience du Camaret-à-Arden,” Trist said, softly. “I summon you.”

A chill settled over the forest, and pine cracked as frost crawled along the log, the ground, and the trunks of the nearby trees. The only heat came from the pyre, and where before Trist had been eager to get away from the smell, now he yearned to be closer to the warmth.

Pale and not entirely solid, fully armored as he had been in life, but without the slump to his back or the tired circles under his eyes, Trist’s father appeared before them. The strain of his coming was less, or perhaps Trist was more used to the effort. Never before, since first speaking with Sir Tor De Lancey, had he tried to hold one of the ghosts of the sword for a conversation, relying upon them only for brief aid in battle. He wondered whether he would be able to keep the spirit here long enough for everything that needed to be said.

“It worked, then,” his father said.

“Aye,” Trist agreed, his face crumpling, and again he refused to let a tear fall, instead looking up, to where the leaves of the trees rustled in the breeze, and somewhere beyond was a blue sky.

“I have questions,” Trist said, when he was able to look back down.

“You will have your answers, my boy,” Rience said, gruffly. “But perhaps it would be better to begin with a story. A story you have only heard pieces of, until now.”

“What happened twenty-four years ago?” Clarisant guessed.

Rience nodded. “Yes,” he said. “You know, son, that I met your mother in the Hauteurs Massif, the last time the Caliphate came north, and that she was already carrying you in her belly when we came back from the fighting.” Trist nodded. “I brought you home to my eldest boy, and your mother cared for you both alike. What you do not know,” Rience continued, “Is that your mother was born Cecilia, daughter of Sevrus the Fourth, last Emperor of Etalus.”