There’s more than one reason the general never tried to rebuild the  damned city - who ever decided it was a good idea to build in the swamp, in the first place?  Probably a couple of poncy old senators looking at a map.


    <ul>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">The Life and Times of Legionary Titus Nasica</li>


    </ul>


    ?


    13th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297


    Auberon lowered the tip of his sword, settling into the stance Trist recognized as Fool’s Guard, inviting an attack.  Beneath the surface of his body, Trist glimpsed a burning knot of bright white and blue, pulsing and shooting out flares of barely restrained power.  Without eyes, Trist saw in every direction at once.


    Trist raised his longsword above his head, tip pointed to the sky, in High Guard.  Other than the rustle of wind in the leaves of the trees overhead, the world was silent.  He could hear the beat of his own pulse in his ears, feel his heart in his chest, and he was aware of every breath that passed in and out of his body.


    If the faerie king was inviting Trist to make the first attack, then he would oblige.  The tip of Trist’s boot ripped moss from out of the earth, sending it flying back behind him, and he closed the distance between in less time than it took a man to blink. Though his body still ached, he pushed through the pain.


    With a ring of metal, Auberon set aside Trist’s blade, ending in an Ox Guard, the hilt of his sword raised to his ear, blade parallel to the ground.  Trist was knocked back by the faerie monarch’s casual strength, but managed to recover, withdrew a step, and began to circle.  The faerie king showed no indication of concern or effort at all.  “I am surprised that you use the same guards that we do,” Trist admitted.  “Zepar the Scarlet did, as well.  I thought you all came from some other place, some other world.”


    “So we do,” Auberon said, lowering his blade again into Fool’s Guard.  “This place was meant to be our refuge and escape, where we would be free to live as we wished.  Nonetheless, within the restrictions of this world, and the limitations imposed by a physical body in the shape of a human, their most efficient ways to move with a blade are geometrically inevitable.  Hit me if you can.”


    Trist cut down from the left to the right in a feint, lunging halfway into distance and then pulling back again, leaving his blade in Rear Guard to keep from encountering the unstoppable force of Auberon’s blade.  The feint drew a parry, as he’d intended, and as soon as the faerie king’s sword had passed, Trist leapt back in with a rising cut behind the passing stroke.


    “Good,” Auberon said, with a smile, and his shadow rose up to parry Trist’s blow.  Auberon and the shadow slid to opposite sides, then began circling Trist so that it was all he could do to keep either of them from slipping behind him.  “When you go to the Gate of Horn, you must expect to be opposed.  You have never yet defeated more than a single daemon at a time, but you must break that limit now.  You must dance among them like a leaf driven before the storm, or they will stop you in Vellatesia.”


    “You could send Cern to help me,” Trist grumbled.  He lunged at the shadow, but before it could parry, Trist ripped a portal open in the world directly in front of him.  It brought him out behind Auberon, sword still in motion, but too fast for any eye to follow the King of Shadows spun and parried again.


    “Excellent,” Auberon praised him again.  “Bathin is too cowardly to make effective use of his portals in combat, but I see you do not share his weakness.  Unless he is pressed to utter desperation, he prefers to move troops and other daemons about, rather than risk himself.”


    “If you won’t go to Vellatesia, what will you do?” Trist asked.  “The Winter Queen went to war against Forneus.”


    “Yes, Beira.  My dear wife did not act without reason.  Your Clarisant bought her alliance,” Auberon said, then went on the attack.  Around them, the world stopped.  Trist’s perception shifted to that place which had become so familiar to him in the rush of combat, when the speed granted to his body by the Boons of the faeries put him in another realm entirely.  There was no wind; the leaves ceased to shake, and branches bent by the breeze did not spring back up.  Only Trist and Auberon moved - Auberon, and the king’s shadow.


    Trist parried, rising up to Ox Guard, then ducked out of the way of the shadow’s slice.  He spun on his heel and unleashed a series of doubled cuts on Auberon, the faerie slipping aside from each without even using his blade.  For an instant, Trist experienced what it must be like for a normal man to fight him: Auberon was simply too fast to touch.


    With a grimace, he pushed harder, and the world hazed in a white glow that soaked Trist’s muscles and drove him to greater and greater speeds.  Strike, parry, feint, withdraw, lunge - he could not hit Auberon, but neither could the faerie king hit him.  With a shock of thrill, Trist realized that he was better than Auberon.  At nothing but swordplay, of course - the Shadow King’s strength and speed were beyond him - but Trist had practiced his entire life to be a knight, while the faerie king moved in a manner that suggested someone who treated swordplay as a hobby or a pastime.


    Trist feinted at Auberon, then turned and cut at the shadow, faster than he’d ever moved before in his life.  His longsword flashed past the shade’s guard, cutting it from root to stem, and the shadow dissipated.  The world returned with a boom like thunder, and a wave of pressure exploded out from Trist, ripping leaves from the trees and sending a spray of dirt flying in every direction.


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    “There it is,” Auberon said, lowering his blade and allowing it to dissolve back into mere wisps of shadow.  “That is how you will need to fight in Vellatesia.”


    “What just happened?” Trist asked.  He hesitated, but once he was certain the test was truly over, he walked over to where he’d left his sheath lying on the moss, and bent to pick it up.


    “The tip of your sword moved faster than sound,” Auberon explained.  “It disrupted the very air itself, creating a shockwave.  No daemon can match your speed.  But keep in mind that, even with all the power you have gained, you will never be able to defeat their strength - not any but the weakest among them.  If you allow them to get a hold of you, they will win.”


    “I have learned that already,” Trist admitted, sheathing his sword.  “Do I pass your test?”


    “Aye,” Auberon said.  “For now, at least.  Make your preparations to depart.  I imagine you will want your armor.”  Shadows swirled around the faerie monarch, and then Auberon was gone.


    ?


    Trist’s armor had been cleaned and reconditioned: even the holes left by Adrammelech’s claws, during the fighting in the Hauteurs Massif, had been repaired with such skill that he could not find anything to mark where they had been, no matter how closely he looked.


    “Hywel would be amazed,” Trist observed in awe, turning the cuirass over in his hands.


    “We do have a few tricks that mortal smiths have not yet learned,” Queen Niviène observed with a smile.  Her daughter, the Princess Osma, finished securing Trist’s cuisses over his thighs, while Acrasia waited with his pauldrons.  Having three people to help made the process remarkably efficient.


    “Did you ask your brother about horses?” Trist checked with Acrasia.


    “I did,” she said.  “He will loan two steeds, one for each of us.”


    “Thank you,” Trist said.


    “I don’t see why you can’t just gate your way into the ruins,” Osma said, straightening and then heading over to sort through his vambraces and gauntlets.


    “I do not know precisely what we will be walking into,” Trist explained to the faerie princess.  “Nor have I ever visited that cursed place before.  Even after strengthening the Boon with Tithes, I mistrust opening a gate to somewhere I do not know.  Look what happened when we arrived at Maddoc’s grave.  That was not my intent, and things could have gone much worse.  This time, we will be entering enemy territory.  No, we will go to the bridge where Acrasia and I fought the Addanc, and follow the Etalan road north from there.”


    “I see the wisdom in your choice,” Queen Niviène said.  “Perhaps approaching by the old road will even keep our enemies from noticing you, for a time.”


    “I wish I had a copy of the Codex here,” Trist groused, not for the first time.  Or Clarisant to read it.  “I recall Aurelius and his men bound some number of daemons in the city, but I cannot for the life of me recall how many or which.”


    “They will be weak,” Acrasia said, “even if they are able to break their bindings.  They will not have fed on new Tithes for three hundred years.  Perhaps even weaker than Adrammelech was, when he first rose.”


    “He was strong enough to beat me, at the time,” Trist pointed out.


    “You are not the same man now as you were then,” Acrasia said, and Trist thought he detected a hint of bitterness in her words.


    “I have not forgotten my promise to you,” he assured her.  “Once we have destroyed the Gate of Horn, I will set you free.”


    “And I will hold you to it,” Acrasia returned.


    Once Trist was fully armored, and his sword buckled around his belt, the Hunter brought two horses to the edge of the pool.  “They will see you to Vellatesia,” Cern promised, his eyes still sharp and cruel as a hawk’s.  “Then, they will return to me.  Should you survive, your escape from that accursed place must be of your own making.”


    “Thank you,” Trist said, inclining his head.  Out of habit, he turned to Acrasia, to offer to lift her into the saddle, but the lithe faerie slipped up onto her steed’s back as easily as she had once skipped through the Ardenwood with him.  Trist set his own foot in the stirrup, instead, and hefted himself up, then swung a leg over the saddle and settled in.


    “We have healed you,” Auberon said, striding out of the trees and up to the pool.  “We have taught you, and tested you, and given you what gifts we can.  What happens now is on your shoulders, Trist du Camaret-à-Arden.”


    “And what will you all be doing while I fight your battle?”  Trist asked once again.


    “Do not concern yourself with that,” Auberon replied.  A smile graced his perfect lips.  “There is enough and more to be done before this is all over.”


    Trist scowled; he was tired of being a piece to be moved on Auberon’s board of Six Soldiers.  “Very well, then,” he said, for a knight was courteous.  “I thank you all for your hospitality, and your aid.  Perhaps we will meet again one day.”


    “Perhaps we shall,” Queen Niviène said.


    Trist raised his hand, and allowed threads of orange fire to unspool themselves from his core, reaching out before him to take hold of the world itself.  The threads of his stolen Boon ripped and tore, until a yawning portal tall and wide enough to ride through opened, from the faerie glade out to a dark world.


    Acrasia nudged her own steed with her knees, turned the mare’s head with her reins, and rode through the portal first.  After she was through, Trist followed, and then allowed the gate to close behind him again.


    The two riders sat their horses on the edge of a dark lake.  Overhead, the stars and the white ring where once a sun had been were the only light in a vast sky.  In the lake, the stars and the remnant sun were reflected back from the still water.  All around, the once verdant grass which had carpeted the banks was dead, curled and dry.  The leaves of the trees, as well, had withered and fallen, as if it were winter and not the height of summer.


    Trist turned his horse to the bridge, and together they rode out across the water, north toward Vellatesia.