Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  They rode in silence through that morning, Lauresa’s mood dark in a way that seemed to go far beyond this last meeting with the mother she was leaving behind. Chriani’s mood was no lighter, and the silence hanging between them was welcomed for a while. In the light of day, the memory of the night before seemed distant, Chriani holding Irdaign’s words close like he hoped they might shroud the memory of what he’d seen her do.

  Lauresa and her mother. Exiles heading in different directions, Chriani thought. Rheran the place where both had begun, closed off to them now.

  Lauresa was a problematic peerage, they’d said. Whispered voices had spread the words within the Bastion the week her marriage was announced, the same thoughts repeated more loudly in the keep and the city beyond. With her mother set aside and her younger sister’s blood linked to the Elalantar line, Lauresa was half a princess in the eyes of too many. Safer, then, to have her relinquish any possible claim to the crown in favor of accepting title in another land. And so she would be the Princess Lauresa of Brandishear for another seven days. Another nail in the framework of arranged marriages that bound the Ilmar principalities in treaty and blood.

  “What do you know about this husband of yours?”

  Chriani hadn’t wanted to say it, but the words spilled too easily into the long silence of the ride. He heard Irdaign’s words from the night before, fear and understanding. He wished he could have thought to tell her then that there was some understanding which fear was meant to prevent.

  Lauresa didn’t look back.

  “A duke,” she said coldly. The question one that she’d been asked enough times in the past weeks that she perhaps didn’t hear the bitterness beneath his version of it. Or didn’t care. “Allenis Andreg, his holdings in Teillai, cousin to Prince High Vishod. He was a captain of some renown, granted title after the Incursions. Warden of the Clearwater Steppes.”

  It had been thirteen years since the Ilvani Incursions had ended. Chriani did the math, guessed at this former captain’s age and got a number he didn’t like.

  “It isn’t fair.” He might have only meant it as a thought, but it came as words. Lauresa turned back this time.

  “Many have endured a great deal more than a marriage for the land and its people to prosper,” she snapped. “Your father was killed in the Incursions, Barien said. You forget him and all who made that same sacrifice so easily?”

  Where he stared, Chriani felt his blood quicken, a trace of unfamiliar emotion twisting in him suddenly. It was no secret, certainly, this story he’d adopted on the day Barien took him in, but in all the years since he’d first spoken it, he’d gotten used to hearing it in only his own voice. He wasn’t sure why it bothered him now.

  He felt the pain, then. Deep in his chest, spreading to the skin at the spot where her name would stay, he felt the sudden spike of frenzy that had driven him to trace those seven letters in blood in the first place. And with a rush of insight that swelled like the sudden ache that had risen behind his eyes, Chriani recognized for the first time this pain that had threaded through him for as much of his life as he could remember, but which he’d never before named.

  The pain of living a lie, he thought.

  He had no memory of his father in him but what his mother had told him. But even that had been buried long ago beneath the lie that had let him survive in the Ilmar village of his birth, and along the desolate road that had taken him from his mother and grandfather’s graves to Rheran, and that had brought him into the Bastion at Barien’s side. Now a princess’s name etched on his skin over one night of anger would become a new lie that twisted in with the old like the lines of that name twisted in with the mark his mother had made. And for the very first time, Chriani recognized the ache that had twisted in his gut that long night. He recognized the pain that had echoed the searing of his skin where the needle-sharp tip of the pick punched down again and again.

  This was the pain of never knowing who he was, he thought. The pain of never knowing who he might be. This was the pain that drove him to routine rage in the face of a captain’s arrogance and a princess’s dismissal and all the host of other missteps, confusions, and calculated conflicts that had been a part of his life within the hierarchy of the Bastion.

  Fear and understanding. He felt the pulse of anger flare where its name had finally been spoken, seeking an outlet now.

  Lauresa seemed to sense it, something changed in her manner. Still the anger she’d carried from when she’d seen Chriani make the moonsign against her mother, but softened somehow.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

  But her voice cut off where Chriani wheeled, reined in one-handed as the other hand whipped the short sword from its scabbard with a hiss. He flipped his cloak behind him to free his arms, seized Lauresa’s reins and pulled them hard, the palfrey skidding to a halt. The hand with the reins came up close to her mouth, but she’d already seen the warning in his eyes.

  Behind them, beyond the shelter of the elm line, he heard hoofbeats. Muffled, running, the sound far but fading. To the south, a flight of starlings lifted from a stand of white pine, their shimmering cries cutting the silence.

  “Stay low,” he whispered, close to Lauresa’s ear. He left his reins in her hand, slipped from the saddle and into dull grey shadow along the side of the track. Pushing straight through, he listened, no sound except the faint bleating of sheep in the distance, a dog barking farther off. He was conscious of Lauresa alone behind him, but the open expanse of fields to all sides told him they were alone. No way for anyone to get to her before he would.

  He saw the tracks where the horse that followed them had stood. Pressing low to the ground, he studied the telltale marks of its wheeling to spring northward, back toward the forest and away from them. Someone riding alone, carefully following the trail through the wind-whipped grass that the two of them had made.

  And at the top of the slope, footprints. Someone stepping down from the saddle to watch through the trees, a perfect view of Chriani and Lauresa as they made their way along the field’s edge.

  He bent low to the ground, measured out the impression with his hand. Against the scent of moss and mud, he caught a familiar tang of metal even as he recognized the heavy print of a steel-shod boot.

  “What is it?” Lauresa asked when he slipped back a moment later, vaulting up to the saddle beside her.

  “Nothing,” he said as he spurred forward. “Farm boy thinking he can teach a draft horse to run. Making more noise than a warband falling down a flight of stairs.”

  He kept close to her, though, one hand always within reach of her saddle where he rode just behind her. Lauresa didn’t see him glance back at regular intervals until they finally passed the bluff. Chriani rode them up it, scanned the empty countryside around them for a long while. At the far edge of sight, he thought he saw movement to the north, but it was gone when he blinked so he pushed them on again, headed down towards the evening smoke already rising from Chanist’s camp.

  — Chapter 7 —

  LAURESA’S SONG

  CHANIST HAD HIS OUTRIDERS running a wider perimeter than Chriani expected, spotting him and the princess where they rode in almost as quickly as he saw them. One horse turned to bolt back for the camp, two more advancing. Lauresa had thought well enough ahead to have packed the Rheran standard, Chriani holding it aloft where he rode alongside and behind her.

  The riders’ strangled looks when they finally got close enough to recognize the princess made up for the length of time it took them to lower their bows in Chriani’s mind, but just barely. By the time they passed through the perimeter, the two who flanked them were joined by four more, a regular procession riding down the ranks of troops pressing in along the sides of the muddy track that split the camp. An impromptu honor guard by the look of it, Chriani guessing at a hundred figures surrounding them, only a quarter in the grey leather of Chanist’s guard. Beyond them, more astoundingly, he estimated ten times that many troops spread acr
oss a trio of low-rising hills. The troupe Chanist had ridden out with had expanded fiftyfold, riders and foot soldiers coming in from Addrimyr and Glaeddyn and beyond. How many more troops might still be on their way, how far Chanist’s summons had carried, Chriani didn’t know.

  The encampment itself was a sprawling mass of tents and platforms that he could see only part of as they turned up a rough path of gravel toward the prince’s pavilion. Chriani had seen it as they’d ridden in, a clutch of five-pillar tents with a wide awning around them. Three banners were flying there — the falcon of Brandis in ascent, then the four interlocked spears of the Ilmar standard, and below that, the horse-and-axe insignia of Chanist’s house.

  When the prince’s troupe had ridden out, they’d carried nothing with them. The flags, the tents, the pavilions, the canvas canopies and walls of mess and armory and the practice range — all of it must have been summoned and commissioned from the frontier settlements. Chanist had likely ordered it all provisioned there for long years, ready to be set up on a day’s notice. Just as he kept the prince’s armory stocked, its weapons always honed.

  In the light of the evenlamps that burned outside the prince high’s tents, Chriani saw sudden movement. Chanist himself burst out past the guards stationed at the entrance, the runner who must have brought him the news trying to keep up. The prince slowed for just a moment, stared in stark disbelief as Lauresa slipped from the saddle to the ground. Her cloak pulled tight and raised above the mire, she slipped through a cordon of bodies toward him, her father stepping forward to embrace her without a word.

  Where he dismounted, Chriani still had the prince’s standard in hand, only belatedly noticing the impatient page at his side waiting for it. And even as he handed it over, he found himself overwhelmed by a feeling of sudden exposure. As they had at the keep the day before, all eyes were shifting from the princess to him, Lauresa’s bearing regal where she moved for the pavilion at her father’s side. The roan and the palfrey were led away in the opposite direction, Chriani not sure in which direction he was meant to follow.

  But where her free hand strayed from her cloak, Chriani saw the flash of the steel ring at Lauresa’s finger. He absently scratched his arm within his sleeve, slipped his own ring on from its secret pocket.

  I will need time to convince those who will be listening that my journey had no purpose but youthful indiscretion. As the princess’s voice rang clear in his head, Chriani fought to control his sudden fear, a shadow still twisting in him where the memory of Irdaign’s sorcery burned.

  We will need to speak to my father alone, she said. It must be arranged.

  Certainly, Chriani thought, though he was far from certain. I’ll wait.

  No, she said. More alone than that. You will need to arrange this.

  Arrange this how? Chriani asked, a hint of anger twisting through the link.

  Wait for the sun to clear the mountains. I will be ready then.

  Where she walked, Lauresa slowed, turning back almost as an afterthought to where Chriani waited. He nodded deeply.

  “Thank you for your service, tyro. You must be hungry.”

  “Highness.” He nodded again, turned with what he hoped was a suitable amount of indifference and headed back down the path. A hundred eyes watched him go, Chriani not glancing back until he was a good two-dozen strides into the slowly dispersing crowd. Behind him, Chanist and Lauresa slipped in through the open canvas doorway, four guards, a secretary, and the two outriders who had intercepted them all following.

  Around him, Chriani felt the chill of night advancing, caught the tang of roast meat and ale on the breeze. He glanced to the mountains, the Eberedar peaks distant where the sun was dropping, a copper sky shining beyond still-breaking cloud.

  But there was something else. Something in the air, he thought. Some edge of exhilaration in the movement and voices of the troops where they milled to all sides. He heard laughter and well-intentioned threats where a company worked with sword and spear on a muddy small arms field further south of the mess.

  From somewhere came a snatch of song. Prince Goffree fought, that good old man. Across the Ilmar, from Rheran to the Greatwood frontier, they remembered a sovereign’s murder in a children’s rhyme.

  He turned his course, then. He swung past the mess to slip through the barracks, small fires dotting the field of canvas shelters that stretched along the encampment’s southern flank. He pulled his cloak tight around him, met no one’s gaze, pulling in snatches of conversation as he surveyed the layout of the camp. They’d ridden the first sortie that morning — that much he got even before he’d passed the first ranks of tents. A dawn raid into the forest against a half-dozen Valnirata outposts that Chanist’s intelligence had placed there.

  Around the fires, he saw gambling and wine in abundance, and a sexual tension that was tangible. Chanist had only a handful of women in his own guard, but they were in abundance here. The borderlands had lost more than their share of men and boys enlisted to stand against the Ilvani tide of the Incursions, and a generation of orphaned daughters in Welbirk and further south had grown up to take their place. They’d learned that from the Ilvani, he knew. The Valnirata always rode out as men and women in equal number, the balance of sex and strength mattering as little to them as the balance of life and death.

  Between the men and women of the prince’s troupe, there was the air of unplanned passion that Kathlan had talked of. He watched partners he suspected hadn’t known each other two days before slip into the deepening shadows, matching blankets and bodies against the cold.

  It was a warrior’s mentality, Barien had said once. Telling yourself that you were never sure whether the morning would bring your death, so you spent the night as the night was intended. No attachment, no caring. And though it had been two generations since any soldier of Brandishear, man or woman, had lived in the shadow of real war, old habits died hard. Or were kept alive for specific reason, Barien had often said.

  Chriani passed three empty wains and the carefully piled mass of crates and supplies that flanked them, oilskin roped off and tied down against rain and wind. The two guards who walked a tight perimeter around the stores gave him suspicious looks, Chriani nodding to them. He didn’t know what supplies exactly had been set there, but whatever it was had been stored in abundance. The look of a long campaign expected.

  To the north, he heard horses restless in makeshift stables, a field of straw marked off by hitching posts driven deep in the mud. Beyond it, a broad tent was sealed tight, the two guards at the entrance telling him it must be the armory. Adjacent to that, a nondescript pavilion with a standard he recognized from the neck of the Five Hog’s House barkeep. The quarters of the warmages, he guessed, and he felt a shiver trace his spine.

  They trained in the hills south of Cadaurwen, it was said. Some kind of arcane college there where they took the brand and gave over their lives to the crown in exchange for the right to practice their dark arts. It would have been more than a six-day ride for them. He remembered Irdaign’s horse consumed by flame, made the moonsign as he turned away.

  To the west, the officers’ pavilion sat across from Chanist’s own tents, but the urge to put off what Chriani knew was an inevitable meeting with Konaugo was strong. He slipped from the path to cut across an empty training ground, mentally tallied all the possible points of diversion he might make use of within the camp as he’d seen it. The armories were probably his safest bet, but their proximity to the warmage’s tents was a wild card. Perhaps the horses. Startle them, raise enough noise to put the camp on alert even as he tried not to get killed for his trouble.

  He checked the sun again, not so long to wait. Time enough for a fast bite of real food while he tried to come up with a plan. After four days of jerky and bread on the road, the smell of roast meat again reminded him suddenly how hungry he was. He oriented on its source, stepped past a pair of couriers cantering past through the mire of the track.

  But as he slipped along th
e edge of the archery yard, Chriani slowed. Stopped.

  He felt his pulse quicken, felt the hammer of the anger strike against the dark places inside him. He pulled the steel ring from his finger, held it tight in a shaking hand. Too conscious of the thoughts rising in him that no one else could hear.

  At the edge of the muddy field, a dozen target butts had been set up before a stand of young poplar. He saw the body there. A Valnirata woman, leanly muscled, an outrider archer, he guessed. Her throat had been cut, at least a dozen old wounds flagged red-black with the dried blood that smeared her naked frame. Over and around those wounds that had killed her, three dozen arrows pierced her through, chest and legs, arms and neck. She was hanging with limbs spread, lashed to the trees with rough rope where she’d been used as a target. Her mouth was open, sightless eyes long gone to the crows.

  In the fading light as he slowly approached, Chriani saw the tattoo that wrapped her shoulder, a tight knot of black and green line stark against dead-white skin. A different coloration, a different design than the one his own shoulder wore. The one that reflected the mark on the dagger he could feel at his stomach where his breath came fast now.

  A single broadhead shaft had pierced the tangle of ink at the Ilvani’s shoulder, but whether because only one archer was good enough to hit it or because he’d called the hated symbol for himself alone, Chriani didn’t know.

  It was one of Konaugo’s black-fletched shafts. Chriani stared for a long while.

  When he finally turned away, he scanned the shadows, no one watching as he wrenched the black arrow free. He pulled five undamaged field-point shafts from the nearest butt, held the arrows straight along his arm as he walked, the blades of the broadhead locked between his fingers.

  In the barracks, he stole a bow from a Bastion sergeant he recognized, stole into his tent as he watched him slip into the tent adjacent with a buxom ranger he didn’t know. It was a black-oak recurve, a little soft for Chriani’s arm, but the balance was good. He slipped it within his cloak, wrapped tight around himself as he slipped outside.