Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  But even as he packed up, Chriani froze. Stared.

  There beside his saddlebags, he saw a scrap of parchment, folded tight and bound with a ribbon of tattered green silk. Across the top edge, Chriani was written in an angular hand.

  “I found it in my saddlebags,” Lauresa said simply. Chriani nodded, didn’t look at her. He gently pulled the ribbon free, sure he was only imagining that he could sense Kathlan’s scent still clinging to it.

  Where he unfolded it, the parchment was blank.

  “A message from the girl at the stables?”

  “Take care of the horse or she’ll line her saddlebags with my spleen,” Chriani said. “She’ll do it, too.” He laughed, the sound wrong somehow.

  They ate in silence, headed out under a red dawn that turned to a dark day, cloud still pushing in from the north where the winds across the distant Sea of Ehadne scoured the Clearwater basin and the steppes beyond. As the forest around the line of the trail they followed thinned to scrubland for a brief space just past daymark, Chriani saw what he guessed was the Glaeddynfield road to the south, a faint scar marking off green farmland beyond.

  “A storm coming,” Chriani said. “Evening at the latest.” Where she glanced to the sky, Lauresa nodded agreement. “We should take to the road. Make a village by dusk, find somewhere to shelter.”

  “No,” she said. She cantered on, wind tugging at her cloak. Chriani glanced again to the darkening sky, wondered if she knew something he didn’t.

  He was about to speak again when he spotted the rider. Alone, faint against the darkening sky to the west. Chriani slowed to watch, calculated distance and trajectory along the edge of the fields where the figure bore fast toward them, perhaps a quarter-league away.

  “It’s all right,” Lauresa said. He wheeled to see her following his gaze, spurring her horse forward. “Come.”

  Where Chriani followed her, he slipped the battered short sword from its scabbard, scanned the horizon to all sides but saw no sign of other movement. Ahead, the black sky had swallowed the last light of day, and he strained to pull detail from the shadow.

  He’d never seen the figure before, but in the end, he knew there was only one person it could be. She rode easy where she raced toward them, features slowly coming into clear focus in the half-light. The tightly curled hair was deep bronze, the first streaks of grey only showing where it flew behind her, but Chriani recognized the blue eyes all the same. Even sharing the color of her father, Lauresa had her mother’s eyes, it was said.

  Where Lauresa spurred towards the Princess Precedent Irdaign, Chriani slowed the roan, held back to a canter as the two came close. Irdaign was riding bareback and without reins, he saw, her black stallion slowing with just a word as Lauresa came alongside her.

  Where he saw the princess embrace her mother in the dying light, Chriani saw her tears. But where she clung to her daughter, the princess precedent’s gaze lifted to seek him out, and he looked quickly away. Turning the roan, he paced around them in some vain attempt at setting up a one-horse perimeter. Trying not to watch.

  When she was younger, when she trained at his side, he’d felt a strength in Lauresa. Eldest daughter of a youngest son, born in wartime and raised by a father who seemed convinced that every new dawn might bring the final wave of Ilvani invasion from the Greatwood’s endless shadow. And though it had taken him until this moment to recognize it, Chriani realized that he’d seen that same strength in her again that fateful night in the library. Honed and shaped to a different tension, but still drawn from the same source. The strength of will and personality that marked one accustomed to having to prove herself. A strength of hand and word, like that of Barien in brawl and debate alike. The strength of the leader she’d never get a chance to be.

  But in the princess precedent’s arms, that strength was gone now. And Lauresa was a girl who’d spent her life estranged from the mother she loved, and who had seen her father nearly struck down in her own house, and who was nine days now from the fanfare and the boat that would take her forever from the home she’d been sheltered in since the day she was born.

  A sleet wind was rising, the scent of far-off thunder sharp as Chriani rubbed his eyes. He heard the low thud of hooves, turned to see Irdaign and Lauresa pacing toward him side by side, hand in hand. He sheathed the sword with what he hoped was suitable ceremony, nodded low in the saddle.

  “Enough of that,” the princess precedent intoned. Her face was set but he heard the smile in her voice. She wore a cloak of midnight blue that he’d taken for black at first, bracelets of lapis at her wrists to match her earrings. “It’s been a great number of years since anyone was compelled to defer to me, master Chriani. I don’t intend to have to get used to it again.”

  He nodded again anyway.

  “Highness.”

  “I know a place close by,” she said. “Come.”

  They headed back down and across the track they’d followed at the stream’s edge, Chriani guardedly watching the shadows that rose around them now, the storm whispering its approach in the hissing of the wind-whipped trees. To the southeast, he saw a low rise of wooded hill that Irdaign seemed to be leading them toward, the darker stain of stone barely visible against grey-green shadow where he squinted. Ruins of some sort, almost overgrown.

  “There,” Irdaign said, almost as if she could sense him staring to the darkness, and where her horse turned up the hill, he saw a narrow track emerge in a twisting sea of tall grass. Single file, they advanced to the top, Chriani fighting the urge to spur ahead and check for ambush. But even as they climbed, he found himself wondering at the princess precedent’s sudden arrival, Lauresa clearly expecting her.

  The princess could have gotten word to her by spellcraft, he guessed. He still had the ring Lauresa had given him tucked up inside his sleeve. But even as exhausted as her horse looked, it was six days hard road riding to the Glaeddyn farmsteads from Irdaign’s home near Myrwater. Even assuming that Lauresa had sent word of her leaving the night she’d given Kathlan the order to prepare a horse, the numbers didn’t add up. Changing horses twice a day, it still would have been a ride to challenge the best of Chanist’s rangers. Chriani felt a lingering uncertainty, didn’t know where it came from, but once or twice, he almost thought he saw Irdaign’s black steed casually turn its head back to watch him.

  At the crest of the hill, two stone walls still stood, an ancient fir growing up around the ruined cornerstone between them, enough shelter under its boughs to hopefully deflect the weather that was coming. Across the hillside, other clumps of stone punched up from the grass like breakers on a frozen sea. More than one building here originally. A watchtower village, perhaps, dating from the first wars to judge by the extent of the ruin. Too long ago to remember even dates now. The forests of the Valnirata had pushed this far once, the Ilvani dominion extending beyond them and across all the Ilmar. The Ilvani tree-cities were long gone, but the stones that the Ilmari had raised to shelter themselves through the long wars endured.

  Where Chriani dismounted, he lashed the roan to a low branch, started a slow circle of the clearing to look for firewood. Behind him, Lauresa tied her horse, unhitched saddle and tack as it began to crop the tall oat grass, still full. Irdaign slipped from her own horse with the grace of someone much younger than Chriani knew she was, motioned it to follow her where she walked it to the clearing’s edge.

  She had no way to tie it, Chriani realized. Not even a halter hanging from it. He wondered if the beast could possibly be well tamed enough to simply be told to stand by for the night.

  But then he watched Lauresa’s mother lean in close, whisper a word in the horse’s ear. It seemed to nod as she stepped back. Then all at once, a light that brought Chriani’s hand up to cover his eyes flared all around the animal’s form, bright as any evenlamp in the falling dark. And like it had suddenly been shredded on a grate of the hottest coals, the horse collapsed in on itself as Irdaign stepped back, its skin shot through with an all-cons
uming white flame that raced across it like wildfire in summer grass.

  Then it was gone. No flame, no ash remaining. Just Irdaign pacing slowly across the clearing toward where Lauresa had watched it all impassively, carefully setting her saddle in the shelter of the wall.

  Where Chriani’s hand had shot to his chest to make the moonsign, Irdaign hadn’t seen. Lauresa did, though, watching him now where he stumbled back. Chriani saw Irdaign follow her daughter’s gaze before he was able to turn away.

  The rain hit early that night, the lightning not far behind it. Where the three of them ate in silence beneath the fir, the smoke of the fire twisted up through the canopy of branches. Chriani sat a discreet distance away, ostensibly to give mother and daughter the privacy they seemed to want. What he was watching had been a large part of Lauresa’s wanting to make this journey alone, he’d realized belatedly, but the fear still twisting in his gut made him grateful for the distance.

  The bardic odes also had much to say about the spellcraft of the Leisanmira, but Chriani had never paid them much mind. Watching Irdaign now, though, he felt the chill that had traced his spine when the horse had vanished, had to fight to keep himself from shivering. There was something in her manner as she whispered in Lauresa’s ear, some sense of unseen power where she gazed around her, taking in the hill and the countryside below.

  It was said that the old Ilvani blood flowed in Leisanmira veins. Rumors from a time before the Ilmar settlements, before the long wars that drove the Valnirata warclans deep into the forest. One blood from long ago. Where they wandered Elalantar and the steppes of the western frontier, the Leisanmira had a reputation as hedge wizards and midwives, dabbling in charms. Darker rumors spoke of even greater power among them, somehow kept secret from the always-watchful eyes of the rangers and the local garrisons in the towns they passed through.

  Until now, he’d never believed it.

  When dinner was done, he banked the fire up and bid both women a formal goodnight that only Irdaign answered. He heard snatches of song as he checked and stowed his gear for the morning, Irdaign’s voice beautiful beyond any description where she sang quietly to Lauresa curled at her feet.

  On the other side of the wall, Chriani found a space for himself that was only partly soaking, and he tried for some time to find a sitting position that would keep the tear in the cloak away from the rain. He closed his eyes once or twice, but the lightning was a constant eruption within the clouds now. The hillside pulsed daylight-bright, thunder reverberating with a fury that kept him from hearing Irdaign where she slipped up behind him, her hand on his shoulder as she kneeled.

  Chriani started, fought to still his hand where it wanted to trace the crescent above his pounding heart. In the intermittent light, he might have taken Irdaign’s face for her daughter’s, but she smiled in a way that he couldn’t remember seeing Lauresa smile for so long now.

  “One who grew up under Barien’s charge should be too smart to be as afraid as you seem,” she said quietly.

  “Forgive me, princess precedent.”

  “My name is Irdaign, Chriani.”

  He could only nod. She was thoughtful, slowly placed her hand on his as if she knew its plan.

  “When one must make five days’ ride in two, one needs a horse beyond what any stable in Myrwater or Rheran can hold.”

  “I understand, Irdaign.”

  “But you fear nonetheless. Barien was fond of saying that fear and understanding will make war in any mind so long as both live. You need to choose which rules you.”

  We end up afraid of only the things we see…

  Irdaign’s hand on his was warm, and in that warmth Chriani felt a shame that he hoped she couldn’t see. This matron, this woman of royalty, scaring him.

  In the entire garrison, Barien had been the only one to Chriani’s knowledge who paid Chanist’s court sorcery neither the reverence nor the superstition it seemed to demand. It had been High Winter two years previous, and the news had just come in from Quilimma in the southern marches of the rangers putting down a rogue mage. In a lost fortress high on the steep slopes of the Analatias, he’d settled himself and laid claim to the lands around him, and a half-dozen had died in the attack that finally brought him down. When the story was told in the barracks halls, all men made the moonsign but Barien.

  “Folk should rightly respect what they don’t know, but most folk forget that they don’t know much,” he’d said later that night when Chriani had asked him why. “Sorcery and life-magic are like any other craft. There’s danger in the wizard’s craft, to be sure. But if a man knew how much danger he was in riding a badly-shod horse at full gallop, he’d find as much respect for the blacksmith’s craft in a grand hurry.”

  When Chriani glanced up, Irdaign was watching him closely. He hesitated.

  “You knew Barien,” he said.

  He saw the smile leave her eyes for just a moment. “I did. And I am truly grieved.”

  Then she touched his cloak, her voice a gentle whisper of song as faint light flared beneath her fingers. Where Chriani looked to see her run them along the cloth, the cloak was whole again, the jagged tear repaired with no stitch or seam.

  “It is dry on the other side of the wall,” she said. “Sleep there, please. Lauresa and I must walk.”

  He nodded again as she rose, waited until she’d turned away to make the moonsign with a shaking fist. In the staccato shimmer of the clouds, he saw Lauresa a dozen paces off, cloak wrapped tight around her. She stepped in behind her mother, the two of them pacing off through the storm.

  Chriani made sure they saw him pull his sodden bedding around to the fire, waiting until they were out of sight beyond a twisted stand of low-growing spruce before he followed. Across the mud-slaked hillside, he moved within the storm’s dark spaces, stuck to the shadows as the lightning flared.

  “Sorcery won’t kill you any better or faster than the countless other ways to die,” Barien had told him that night two years before. “Be wary of them all.”

  He saw Lauresa and her mother stop some dozen strides above a rocky basin, a tumbled cairn below them. For the long while that they stood there, he watched them, rain-soaked. They sang together, voices clear like crystal above the guttural rumble of the slowly fading storm. And all the while, Chriani’s hand was tight to his chest, scribing the moonsign until his arm ached as he watched Irdaign dance in the lightning-shadow. Watched her summon her own storm of fire that slammed down upon the cairn like a living wave.

  In the shape of the unearthly flames that rose and twisted around the princess precedent, he thought he saw some great bird spread its wings, shrieking with a sound that drove through him like nails. Rain-shadow shrouded the power she hurled with her hands, Lauresa standing to watch a short distance away, expressionless as she matched her mother’s voice.

  At one point, in the darkness and the blinding rain that blurred his sight, Chriani would have taken Irdaign for her daughter. The bronze hair was lit to wet gold by the staccato pulse of lightning, all the lines of age blurred by distance and stormlight and the power that coursed through her body and struck the stone as fire again and again.

  When they finally headed back, Chriani sprinted along the hillside ahead of them, pretended to be asleep as they returned to sit by the fire. He was still awake when dawn came, uncomfortably dry inside his shredded cloak made whole again.

  At some point in the time that Chriani had saddled up his own horse, Irdaign’s black stallion had reappeared. He said nothing, tried not to meet the gaze of the unnatural beast. But as though it could sense his fear, he thought he saw its sidelong glance seek him out as they descended the track.

  Across the hillside, the cairn stood in the hollow where he’d missed it the night before, stone and grass and crusted moss charred black where it had burned. Chriani looked away.

  Irdaign rode with them only a half-league or so, stopping to turn east where the road could be seen across a short stretch of open pasture and milling sh
eep. Along the field’s edge, Chriani held back again, saw Lauresa cry once more as her mother held her. Irdaign turned back to him, though, rode up close beside him where he waited. She clasped his hand again.

  “What do you mean to do?”

  There were any thousand things that she could have meant, but Chriani knew which one she spoke of. The same answer either way, though.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Barien wanted you to seek your commission.”

  “He had more faith in my ability to get it than I.”

  “Barien understood that you have the strength to walk that path. Yet you have the fear that prevents you from seeking it. Fear and understanding, Chriani.” Her words had a softness to them that he remembered from his mother’s voice. This woman he’d met only a day before but who seemed to know him somehow.

  He nodded, Irdaign slipping her hand from his. A whispered word to the horse, then they were off. Lauresa watched for a long while, Chriani silent behind her. When the princess finally turned, her eyes were dry.

  The track was mud but they made good time that day and the next, the sky bright and warm. As they rode, the tree line meandered to the south above open pasture, handfuls of farmhouses scattered like the white-faced sheep that clustered in the fields around them. As they broke from the forest track early on the second day, Chriani set them following a line of border stones along a tall trail of spectral elms. Down a steep slope beyond them, a straight-line path made toward a distant poplar bluff.

  Beyond the bluff, Chriani could see the haze of the encampment that they were headed for, the faint white of tents a brighter mark against a sheen of fog. And beyond it, a further day’s ride in the distance, he could see the forest wall rise up to blot the land beyond. These would likely be the last farmsteads they saw, he knew. A day’s ride wasn’t enough distance to keep a rogue Valnirata warband at bay.