The new governor arrived in Velatessia today, and after the welcoming parade, with the men dismissed back to their barracks, I met him. At first I thought he’d brought his wife, but it turns out she’s only his sister. An odd thing to do, but the boy is odd, in general. You hear rumors, of course, but not many of us actually meet the Emperor’s son in person, so it could just be that - rumors. Not this time. There is something wrong with Decimus Avitus, and simply being in the same room as him makes me uncomfortable. I’m taking the legion back out in the field for maneuvers as soon as I can.

* The Campaign Journals of General Aurelius, volume I

☀

10th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

“That’s impossible,” Clarisant said, from Trist’s side. “That would make her over three hundred years old. People don’t live that long.”

“Exarchs can,” the spirit of Rience said.

“Mother wasn’t an Exarch,” Trist protested. “If she had been, she would have survived the plague.”

“Let me start this properly,” his father said, after a moment, pacing about the clearing. Trist noticed that he avoided looking at the funeral pyre, and that his boots left frost wherever he stepped. “When the Caliphate came north, it had only been a month, perhaps a little more, since Percy’s mother Elaine died. I was broken by grief, Trist. At the time I didn’t know it, couldn’t see it in myself, but looking back I understand. I hardly slept, and left your brother to the nurse while I drank. It was a relief to go to war, and a relief to see my friend Tor again.”

“I never knew your first wife,” Trist mused, reaching out for Clarisant’s hand. “Not as anything more than a gravestone in the boneyard.”

“She was a good woman,” Rience said. “But that is another story, for another time. They knew we had the pass well fortified, so their general at the time - this was Mukhtar - sent skirmishers into the mountains, trying to find a route that he could use to get past us. It was brutal fighting, no pitched battles, just small groups of men meeting each other in some ravine and coming to blows, often with little warning. It went on through the winter, and there wasn’t enough food to go around. The king decided to purchase supplies from Raetia.”

“That makes a certain amount of sense,” Trist admitted, nodding along with the story. Surprisingly, the strain it placed on him to hold his father here was not yet more than he could handle. Perhaps it only showed how much stronger he had grown, or perhaps it was because he was closer to his father than he ever had been to Sir Tor. “It’s still a good distance, but Raetia is in the right direction to supply fighting in the mountains. They could sail south and find some secluded bay on the west coast of Narvonne to drop anchor.”

“That is exactly what they did,” Rience confirmed. “And the Prince of Raetia sent an envoy, along with the supplies, to represent his interests. A Raetian noblewoman named Cecilia Valle, whom it was my duty to escort to meet with the king.”

“Mother,” Trist said, and his father nodded.

“Aye,” Rience said. “She was beautiful, and I was smitten from the moment I saw her,” he explained. “It didn’t help that we spent days taking those wagons east from the coast, through the foothills. Not much to do around a campfire at night but talk and get to know each other. And she struck me as so sad - she put a brave face on it, but it was the same kind of hollowed out inside that I was feeling. Maybe that is what did it.” The ghost shrugged. “Four days from the coast, a Caliphate raiding party hit us.”

Trist had enough experience now, both at the south end of the Passe de Mûre, and up in the mountains, to picture how that would have gone. “Horsebows?” he asked, and the ghost of his father nodded.

“They ripped us to pieces,” Rience admitted. “And then pulled back before we could pin them down. And during the course of the fighting, I took an arrow for your mother.”

“Romantic,” Clarisant commented with a smile.

“Maybe she thought so,” Rience said, then sighed. “Things were different, after that. Even once we got the supplies back to the army, we kept seeing each other. I hadn’t been looking for another wife, but - you know how it is, now, son,” he said, meeting Trist’s eyes. “When you don’t know whether you’re coming back from the next battle, whether you’ll ever see each other again. It has a way of making everything more... desperate.”

“Aye,” Trist said, looking to his side and examining Clarisant’s profile. “I understand.”

“But there was something standing between us, and I couldn’t figure out what it was,” Rience continued. “Until the night before Mukhtar made his big push at the Tower of Tears. By that point, it’d been almost a year of probing the mountains, and he’d finally realized there was no way to move an army through the Hauteurs Massif, except to break us at the pass. So he pulled in all his scouts and skirmishers and encamped in sight of the tower, and started his engineers putting siege engines together. And the night before they hit us for the first time, I woke up and my bed was empty.”

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“I went out looking for her,” the ghost continued, “and something told me to take my sword. You could feel the rain coming, and the night was full of the sound of owls. I found her at the supply wagons, crying.”

Clarisant reached out to the hilt of Trist’s longsword, and placed her hand over his. A breeze picked up, blowing the smoke from the pyre away from them and off into the woods.

“That was the night I got the truth,” Rience explained, looking down at the ground where the frost picked out crystalline shapes on the forest floor. “The scheme. She’d been sent to bring us supplies by the Prince of Raetia, aye - and she’d also been sent to infect the supplies with plague, by her brother.”

“Owls. Plague...” Clarisant put it together first. “You don’t mean...”

“Your mother was an Exarch, Trist,” Rience said, raising his head to meet his son’s gaze. “She was the Exarch of The Queen of Plagues - Agrat, the Dancer. Near as I could tell, from her story, she was the second Exarch ever, her first Tithe paid as Vellatesia burned.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Trist said, shaking his head. Clarisant’s fingers were cool and soft on his hand. “If that were the case, she couldn’t have died of the plague.”

“Agrat was gone by the time the plague came,” Rience said. “We saw to that, her and I, after the battle. We rode north along the old Etalan road into the Ardenwood, to the ruins of Vellatesia, and that is where we broke her free. The same place it began three hundred years ago. She was already carrying you by that time, you know. I think that was what did it: she loved me, yes, but she loved you more, and she didn’t want her child to grow up like that. She wanted you as far away from the daemons as she could get you.”

Voices echoed from Trist’s memory. Cecilia gave up too much to have you, the daemon Agrat had told him. A mewling babe, and for what? To die the same way she did? I can smell Cecilia on you, Vinea had said. And just this morning, the daemon Zepar had said that it could smell Agrat on him. He found himself shaking his head, but his father’s words explained all of these things that until now had caused him only confusion.

“They all know me,” he admitted. “Agrat, Zepar, Vinea. Each one acted like they recognized me, and they would say Mother’s name, or yours, but I never understood why.”

His father reached out a hand, and when it touched Trist’s shoulder, it was like hard-packed winter snow. “We both hoped that you would never need to know,” Sir Rience admitted. “That what we did twenty years ago would be enough, and that this trouble would not come in your lifetime.”

“What did you do?” Clarisant asked, slipping her arm around Trist’s waist and hugging him to her. He wanted to rip off his cuirass and mail and tumble into a bed with her, forget all of this and sleep in her arms.

“We threw a stone in her brother’s water-wheel,” Rience said, with a grin, “and ground his plans to a halt. Or at least delayed them,” he admitted, then frowned. “But with more and more daemons loose from their bindings, not as long a delay as we had hoped. He’s your enemy,” the ghost of Trist’s father continued. “Decimus Avitus, the first Exarch. The one who brought Sammāʾēl to this world, and broke the Etalan Empire in the Cataclysm. Your uncle, boy.”

“Uncle?” Trist repeated, stupidly. He’d always been told that his mother didn’t have any family left in Raetia, but of course he’d also never known that she’d been an infernal Exarch when she met his father.

“Aye,” Rience confirmed. “Cecilia was his sister. When he broke the empire, he forced her to become Agrat’s Exarch, and to Tithe to the Queen of Plagues. He is a cruel, twisted man, son,” the dead knight explained. “Abusive. Manipulative. She told me how he would use anything she cared about as a tool, a lever to move her to his own ends. A pet, a friend, a lover, even a piece of artwork or a favorite dress. Anything that he could threaten to take away. He’d scream at her for hours, throwing the things he’d forced her to do at her feet, telling her that she was a horrible person, just like him. I don’t know how she survived it, all those centuries, and kept any piece of herself from falling apart. She was stronger than me; I would have gone mad, or tried to kill the bastard. It was you that changed everything for her, though.”

“Me?” Trist looked up, meeting his father’s eyes.

“She knew that if she went back to her brother, you would just be one more thing Avitus could use to control her,” Rience said. “That was what finally convinced her to leave. Oh, she loved me, too; but she loved you more.”

“I think I can understand that,” Clarisant said, resting a hand over her belly. “It does change things. It makes you think differently.”

Trist’s eyes fluttered, and then his body jerked as he forced himself out of a brief doze. He was exhausted, and he suspected that a large part of it was keeping the ghost of his father here for so long. This wasn’t like having Sir Tor fight at his side for a moment or two; this was like a day’s hard labor.

“I do not believe I can keep you here any longer,” Trist said, gathering himself.

“We can talk more later, boy,” his dead father said, with a nod. “I saw how much you did today. You need to rest, both of you. Let me go.”

Trist hesitated. Tor came everytime he was summoned; there was no reason to think this was the last time he would be able to speak with his father. And yet, the man’s body was burning at the center of the clearing, on a pyre he’d built himself. The fear was unreasonable, but it was there, all the same.

“Until next time, Father,” Trist said, letting the thread of power slip and uncoil back into the sword.

“I’m proud of you, Trist,” Rience said, as he dissolved into motes of light. The summer heat returned to the clearing, as the frost coating the leaves melted. A warm breeze carried the stench of the pyre back over to him - the smell of his father’s corpse burning.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion, perhaps it was because the two of them were finally alone, but Trist couldn’t hold it back any longer. He felt his face twist with the effort not to show it, and wet gather at the edges of his eyes.

“You can let it out,” Clarisant said. “Husband. Trist. If you can weep in front of anyone, it is me. Come here.” She wrapped her arms around his head, and pulled him against her dress. Trist embraced her, letting his fingers feel the soft fabric, and the muscles of her back beneath, and he closed his eyes, sucked in a shuddering breath, and began to sob.

“My entire family is dead,” he mumbled, as her fingers stroked his hair.