“Very good of you to have it delivered thus.”
She slipped the cloth into his hand, rose abruptly. Chriani ignored her, continued to scrape the crust of blood from his face and neck even as he tried to hold onto the anger that was fading suddenly.
She’d saved his life. He tried to grasp that thought, wanted to hang onto it against all others. He felt the anger rise white-hot like it always did, wanted to push it away for once. He wanted to thank her.
“You lied to me,” he said instead.
“I lie to everyone, Chriani. All my life is lies. You are just unlucky enough to have seen through them.”
“It was you all along,” he said, not a question. “In the war room. The shadow, the sorcery that saved us in the fall. Outside the throne room, and your voice in my head. None of it was rings or pendants or any other thing. Just you.”
“The rings are real,” she said quietly. “Without them, I can send you my thoughts but cannot hear yours in return. The pendant has protective power of its own, but not the power I pretended it to have. It was me.”
Chriani stood. In a mirror that hung close to the door, he caught a glimpse of himself, wiped the last of the blood from his face and hair. The faint marks of the split lips and the gash that had opened up across his cheek were still visible.
“You have no right,” he said coldly.
“I have no right to what, tyro? To my life?” She matched his tone where she paced away from him, stood at her father’s chair. “No right to my mother’s blood? I did not choose what I am, Chriani, it chose me. The arts of my people have been handed down from mother to daughter, father to son since before the Ilmar tribes crossed the mountains.”
“What you are is your affair, princess. Choosing to hide it within the Rheran court makes it mine.”
“One should have standing in court before one presumes to speak for that court…”
“You ordered me to lie to the prince high to protect your own actions against that court. Whose eyes do you watch your father with, princess? Andreg’s? Your mother’s? Was it on her orders that you stole into the tower that night?”
“I was in the war room as I have been many times in order to practice my art, you obtuse fool. I did not hear the alarm that night because I was in the midst of working a silence charm. In my own chambers, my father’s court wizards would sense me wielding the power within me. I practice in the war room because its sorcerous wards prevent detection of the spells I study, the same wards that prevent others seeing within. No space in the Bastion is more secure.”
“And your father approves?” Chriani said coldly.
In Lauresa’s face, Chriani saw the sudden fragility again that he’d seen in the throne room that night. He almost believed it.
“If my skills were known, my life would be over,” she said. She pushed the chair in abruptly, turned from him where she paced. “I’d have been made to become one of my father’s court wizards in the tower, or sent to one of the warmage outposts for military training.”
“Many have endured more for the land and its people,” he quoted back to her.
Lauresa turned on him, cold.
“I love this land, but I am not of it. Not enough for my father’s advisors, at any rate.” A lifetime’s practice had almost hidden the edge in her voice. Almost. The princess faltered for a moment. “The Leisanmira blood does not still easily. The prince high knows this.”
Her Leisanmira lackey, Konaugo had said.
Chriani had circled back to the basin, watched its water swirl red where he squeezed the blood-slaked cloth out. In the captain’s words, he felt another thing pressing on him suddenly, mind numb beneath the weight of one more secret to add to all the other things he should have known, should have suspected but was too blind to see.
He understood finally. Barien’s voice in his head that night.
“Barien was of the Leisanmira,” Lauresa said as if in echo, and where Chriani spun, he sent the basin toppling to the floor. He saw the prince’s carpets stained pink at his feet where the water soaked in.
“Stay out of my head,” he whispered.
“I am not in your mind, Chriani. The fear in your face can be read easily enough. Barien was my mother’s warden from the moment she and Chanist were wed. They were cousins, had been friends since childhood. Sorcery and music in their blood, commingling.”
Outside, sudden footsteps approached, Lauresa slipping to the gap at the corner to peer out. Slowly, the noise faded away. Chriani was conscious of the stillness around them, distant shouts echoing from the perimeter, the guards silent around the prince’s tents.
“The Leisanmira summon sorcery that way, with song. The court wizards and the necromancers write their spellcraft. They need their books to study and their spellwords to utter. Ours is passed from person to person, voice to voice.”
To all sides, Chriani heard the evenlamps hissing soft against the silence, had never noticed before that they made sound. He remembered Lauresa’s voice in his ear at the library, remembered stealing her song away with a kiss as they’d fallen. He remembered her voice twisting in with her mother’s against the storm.
“I’ve spent my whole life training in secret. Trips taken yearly to my mother’s in Aldac, the two of us riding out alone.” Chriani heard an air of confession in her now, but all it made him feel was how little the confession meant. “We would spend weeks in the wilderness, exploring. There are ruins throughout the hills and the western mountains, steeped in dweomer. Some predate the Empire and the Ilvani alike.”
He felt a dull fear circling like distant shadow, visible but unformed. He tried to imagine hearing the words Lauresa spoke now, but from Barien. The warrior telling him the truth of who he was, of what he was.
“My mother knew from the moment she was set aside that I must be married off one day. For the good of the crown, for the good of the treaty. If it was known what I could do, if it was known even that I had dabbled in the Leisanmira spellsong as a child, I would carry a cloud of suspicion with me all my days. Andreg and Vishod alike co-opting the power in me even as they would wonder to my death whether that power still served my father from afar.”
The witch-princess. In Chriani’s mind, Konaugo’s spite was as sharp as the memory of the hands at his throat, sharp as the memory of Chanist and Barien laughing together in the soft glow of firelight. All the trust that Chriani had seen run from the prince high to the warrior, and he wasn’t sure now how much of it was real.
He tried to tell himself that if Barien had told him the truth, he wouldn’t have been afraid.
“You are your father’s daughter,” he said numbly. He dug hard, tried to find the words he knew were hidden somewhere in the dark silence. “You had no right to take this power in secrecy. Your mother had no right to seed it in you…”
“Blood and moonsign, Chriani, think on it. I was the daughter of a princeling third in the line to a throne held by a man most thought would live forever. There should have been no responsibilities placed on me, no expectations. She thought I would be free to choose my own path, and so my mother began the training with me. I began to learn the music of my people before I spoke my first words. Then everything changed.”
“She had no right…”
“Once the song of the Leisanmira comes to life within you, it cannot be silenced. Not by a father’s will, not by a husband’s fear.” The princess turned away, then. “Only by me,” she said quietly. “For the sake of what I must become.”
Chriani wiped again with the pink-stained cloth, watched it come away this time no dirtier than it already was. He dropped it where the basin still lay overturned on the floor.
“How do you expect to keep this secret?”
“The warmages will assume that the assassin used the magic that burned the glade tonight…”
“Not tonight. I mean the secret of what you are, what you’ve been all this time?”
Lauresa laughed quietly, then, almost to herself. A kind of
weary acceptance in her suddenly.
“While my mother was a youngest prince’s wife, many knew that she carried the Leisanmira song within her,” she said. “When she became princess high, those truths were quickly made to seem like rumor by the carefully placed falsehoods of my father’s Rheran councilors, and those who clung to them were branded superstitious fools. Make the truth seem laughable and you give life to the lie.”
He felt the urge to turn from her, run from the tent and the dull ache that was her face in the half-light where she sat now at her father’s work table. He saw her hands shaking.
“None of it matters any more,” she said, and Chriani heard the strength fade from her voice. And suddenly, he saw a resemblance to her father he’d never seen before. More than just the golden hair, more than just the darkness that lurked beneath the fair features.
He remembered Chanist where he’d stood in this tent before, letting Lauresa hold him against the weight of a fear that seemed ready to drag him down. He saw that same fear in her, now. A kind of age in her eyes that no one as young as her should have ever shown, the expression of courtly demeanor shrouding it like fine silk might drape the bones of a starving man.
“Marriage in Aerach means the end of this life,” she said. “For Brandishear’s sake.” Chriani felt himself pulled from the storm of thought twisting through him. From the moonlit copse, he felt the sharp tug of memory, tried to fight it. “You have much distrust in common, you and Andreg,” she said. “A shame you’ll never meet.”
I used to watch you at the harvest fest…
“I trust what I can see,” Chriani said, but there was an emptiness in his voice. He could feel the shape of all the things he longed to say pushing up beneath the careful mask of the words he actually spoke.
“You trusted the power that saved your life in the war room when you thought it was trinket spellcraft…”
“Because sorcery in a ring, I control. Sorcery within a living heart, hiding from the authority of crown or law, who controls it?”
“The one who attacked you tonight, the one who killed Barien, who tried to kill my father, was no sorcerer. The power that might well have killed you came from what he wore. A ring, an amulet. Do you feel better, now?”
“Yes.”
“And why?”
“Because I can cut the rings from his fingers and twist the chains from around his neck before I cripple him cleanly, man to man. But what’s inside him, I cannot touch.”
“You could kill me for what lies inside me,” she said quietly. “And I would not be the first Leisanmira to die for the sake of a peasant’s fear.”
“Funny to hear one talking of fear who’s spent her whole life in hiding.”
“And what do you hide, Chriani?” she said bitterly, voice raised now. “Beneath that bandage under your tunic which somehow never needs to be changed? Some wound that never seems to heal…”
And Chriani stared blankly. At his chest, he felt the pain twist through him suddenly, felt her empty eyes bore a hole through him. He slipped the steel ring from its inside pocket, tried to force the shaking from his hand where he tossed it to her feet. He felt the ache again, twisting through the words he wanted to make, but in the end, it was the anger that spoke as it so often did.
“All this talk about how badly you want not to be controlled, and yet you seem to enjoy control a fair bit. Don’t you princess?”
“Goodbye, Chriani,” was all she said, and he turned for the curtain and was gone.
The guards were still there when Chriani slipped back outside, not knowing whether they’d heard the heated exchange within the tent or not. With even the meager trappings of court there, it was easy to forget that the walls were only canvas. Little more than curtains, he thought, protocol alone hedging off the space and life of a prince, of a princess, officers, rangers, foot soldiers holding the most private custom of the night within sight and earshot of a thousand others doing the same.
At all the High Summer celebrations he’d attended since he came to the city, there’d been shadow plays, the market court opened up and cordoned off. He remembered backdrops of black silk that seemed to swallow the torchlight and the expectant eyes of the crowds that thronged there. He’d accompanied Lauresa and her stepmother once, long ago. The first year that they’d begun to train together, Gwannyn apparently finding more initial charm in the idea of Chriani as her step-daughter’s comrade-at-arms than she later came to.
And as he walked with no goal but to keep to the empty spaces where the camp was in constant motion around him, Chriani realized that all around him now was that same feeling. The backdrop of star-pierced cloud that screened the forest and the sky, white canvas awnings tugged at by the rising wind that screened the lives that had intruded on this place. The wall of the forest so close that he felt he might touch it, might drown in its depth, caught up in that shadow like it was set out for his eyes alone.
Not afraid of that shadow. Likely the only one in all of Chanist’s company who could say that.
He heard the return of the prince and his riders before he saw them, six horses pounding back through a haze of firelight along the central track. He didn’t see the warmages, still out riding the perimeter, he guessed. Setting sorcerous wards outside the sweep of the sentries.
The blur of motion that was the camp shifted toward Chanist, a bonfire burning high at the edge of the archery yard where Chriani cut past it, screening himself. He saw Konaugo emerge from the officers’ pavilion and move for the prince where he dismounted.
The captain had cleaned himself, Chriani noted coldly. No blood where his uniform had been changed.
But as Chanist tossed gauntlets and helmet to a waiting attendant, he stepped past Konaugo and through the shifting wall of troops that flanked him. And Chriani felt a sudden chill as a ripple of movement threaded through the mass of bodies to all sides, every face turning as it was realized that the figure the prince strode toward was him.
Chriani stopped short because he didn’t know what else to do. He nodded low where Chanist slowed before him, Konaugo and a half-dozen others following at the customary five paces. Around them, all the movement of a moment before had frozen fast.
“Any man who stands against dark magic and an assassin’s blades single-handedly is more like to end up a corpse than a hero,” the prince said gravely. Beside them, the fire spit sparks to the sky. Konaugo’s eyes in the haze of light were stark points of red. “I thank Brandis’s blood for your sake and my daughter’s that you have not, master Chriani.”
Chriani felt the familiar stillness in his tongue. The subtle inflection and qualification of rank that his response demanded slowed his thoughts.
“I would call myself more fortunate than heroic, my lord prince,” was all he could say.
“Fortune favors those who do not fear.”
“Only a fool forgets there are things worthy of fear,” Chriani said. Impulsive words, pulled from memory before he had time to realize how inappropriate they were. Chanist only smiled, though. Recognition there, Chriani thought.
“Barien said so to me as well. More than once.” The prince high set his hand on Chriani’s shoulder, the sword-hand grip firm there, a finger’s-width from the hidden war-mark and his own daughter’s name. For the first time since he’d punched that name into his skin, Chriani realized that the pain was gone.
“Barien was right in that as he was in most things.” Chanist was thoughtful as he continued, his voice pitched louder, Chriani realized. Carrying across the space of bodies. “As he was right about you. In his name, and in the name of my daughter whose life you saved tonight, I offer you commission in the prince’s guard.”
The hiss of the fire where the cold breeze fanned it was the only sound in the half-circle of five hundred figures that flanked them both. Chriani stared for what seemed like a long while.
“I am not of rank, my lord prince,” he stammered at last.
“You are now, Squire Chriani.”
Chriani felt something, then. A tightness in his chest and in his throat where all the memories that had sifted through him the past days spun suddenly through his mind at once.
I know what you should be, well as you know it, Barien had said, and without wanting to, Chriani found himself thinking that except for chance, that might have been the last time he ever saw the warrior alive. Only the broadest twist of fate had led him to his dying mentor’s side that night, and to the command that in its own way had brought him here. Keep her safe. More time on the wall, a different corridor taken where he’d run for the central court, and he would have heard the news when all the rest did, too late.
He should have made rank at least a year before, but all the lingering darkness wrapped up that thought where it had dogged Chriani for even longer than the last year was gone suddenly. Replaced by a dark anger that this moment had finally come too late for Barien to take the pride in it that Chriani knew he would have taken. The same pride he felt now, so unfamiliar to him where it fought against the self-consciousness of five hundred pairs of eyes on him, and where it reflected the prince high’s weary smile that summoned up Barien’s smile that was gone now.
Chriani hadn’t seen where Konaugo had moved within the crowd as it slowly dispersed. He didn’t want to see him, but the captain stepped in close, an anger without bound or limit crossing the darkness between them. Konaugo’s shattered nose was whole again somehow. The captain with healing of his own, Chriani guessed. The privileges of rank.
“My lord prince,” Konaugo said with careful detachment, “I have further questions for our newly installed Squire Chriani regarding the events of this night.”
Clearwater Dawn Page 20