Clearwater Dawn (2 page)

Barien was warden to the princess and had been since before she was born, they said. Chriani was Barien’s adjutant from the day he’d been taken into the keep, ten years past now. Barien had asked him to ride out with the princess’s party that morning, hanging back behind the warrior for the day’s ride. Chriani had begged off sick, though, just as he’d managed to work his way out of three other invitations to accompany Barien on some outing or another with Lauresa the past month.

Over breakfast in the garrison mess, Barien had appraised him coldly where Chriani did his best to look pale, but the warrior hadn’t bothered speaking the disbelief that was obvious in his dark eyes.

“If you can keep from coughing up blood long enough, see what Konaugo’s got for you,” Barien had said, which sounded simple enough. But meetings with the prince’s notorious captain and Chriani had a way of complicating themselves, and so it was that he’d found himself in the armories since just after dawn, a battalion of the prince’s rangers returning from a two-month tour of Aloidien province the previous day. A full troupe’s worth of weapons had been left for inspection and honing, most of their blades so notched that Chriani suspected the south-west townships had been granted a reprieve from the wolves that prowled the foot of the mountains in favor of attack from an army of rocks that the troupe had valiantly bashed into submission.

From the stables, the Princess Lauresa in white made her way with two escorts along the steady rise of the courtyard track for the main gates of the Bastion to the south, circling the upthrust stones on which the citadel rose. Chriani thought he saw her glance his way. He backed farther up, slipped easily into deeper shadow. Waited until she’d passed before he moved back to slam the armory doors.

Marriage of convenience, it was said in the city and among the garrison who speculated on the suddenness of the announcement. A marriage of treaty. Politics. Chriani pushed the word and the thoughts from his mind then. He was far too tired to think.

It had been three years since the last time the Princess Lauresa had spoken to him. One month since the proclamation and Barien seeming to take some great interest in having Chriani at his side while he rode out the last days of his obligation as Lauresa’s warden. Two weeks more of Chriani finding excuses to keep the distance of the last three years before it was over.

He’d gone back to the stone wheel and the pile of shortspears and blades still there, another lamp lit to vanquish the shadows when he heard the doors open behind him.

“So what was it this time got you on solitary detail?”

Where Chriani looked up, Barien’s hulking figure was dark against the light outside. He pulled a waterskin from within his cloak, the dust of the road falling from him where he slapped it away.

“If you’ve already heard, you likely already know,” Chriani said coldly. He arced three spears end-first across the room, watched them slam one by one into their rack without touching the steel to either side.

“I didn’t hear it, I smelled it,” the wind-tanned warrior said with a grin. “Konaugo burning, all the way from the south city-gate. General insubordination? Specific insubordination?”

“I reportedly called his parentage into question,” Chriani said evenly.

Barien laughed.

“And how did our fine captain find that out?”

“I may have inadvertently said it to his face.”

Barien laughed louder. He helped Chriani finish up, though, both of them working the wheel in silence, and what would have been a grueling day and a night became just a grueling day in the end. The short day’s sun had already set as Chriani racked the last sword, bundling up a dozen that he’d spotted too-serious flaws in, readying them for the forges. But where he dumped the damaged blades at the doors, he saw a figure moving at the stable gates across the way, and in his mind, a hundred different impressions shifted and locked into place.

Through the armory, twenty different types of weapons spread across four times that many racks and shelves, but Chriani knew them all. Beneath the shock of black hair that he brushed aside, he had his father’s grey eyes that would spot the faintest blemish or deviation in a single blade, or sort and catalog every shadowed rack in the room at once. He had his mother’s attention to detail that would take those things in, etch them permanently and effortlessly into memory like it had long ago etched the slender figure across from him.

Where Kathlan stormed out from the stables, Chriani caught a glimpse of dark hair cut ragged above whipcord-tight shoulders. Her bare arms were tanned where a too-large tunic was belted with black leather, a silver-edged buckle on it that had been her father’s. The trace of a limp was visible where she grabbed the reins of an exhausted horse, and the Elalantar lilt of her deceptively soft voice rang out across the courtyard where she cursed the Aerach courier who had overridden it, trying in vain to make the Bastion before last light.

“Blood, mother, and fucking moonsign!” Kathlan rattled off a string of epithets that Chriani had only heard half of before, her slight frame making her gift for profanity that much more of a shock to its generally unsuspecting victims. “By your prince’s balls if you can sotting find them,” she shouted, “you ever bring a horse through my gate in a lather again, you’d better have the fucking whole of the Valnirata riding up your overstuffed ass!”

Chriani watched the courier backpedaling for the courtyard track as if he expected Kathlan’s tongue to suddenly lash out across the distance between them. Deep down, Chriani wanted to smile, but he knew that even if he’d searched for it, any mirth in him was long gone.

He drank thirstily from the waterskin Barien tossed, not realizing that he was staring past him until he saw the warrior turn to follow his gaze.

“Second shift at the stables tonight?” Barien said with a broad wink as Kathlan gently led the horse inside. “You’d let me know, I’d have worked faster for you.”

“No,” Chriani said as he turned away quickly. “I’m for bed.” Off Barien’s look, he added, “My own bed.”

“You telling me the bloom’s off that rose already? Night and daylight, boy, I’d have thought you might find someone yet you don’t push to want to kill you inside six months.”

“You thinking anything would be a great first,” Chriani said as he handed the waterskin back. A calculated taunt, intentional. He felt the same numb pain circling in his gut now that he’d felt when Lauresa had ridden in, wanted nothing but for it to go away. Not wanting to hear the words in Barien that would reflect the words unspoken in himself.

“Seems to me the longer that mouth of yours stays open, boy, the less chance of anything worth hearing coming out of it.”

“Shut yours, then, old man, and show me how it’s done.”

The backhand blow that Barien threw was fast enough that it would have caught most people, but long experience meant that Chriani knew to watch for it. He twisted back, felt the air behind the warrior’s hand where it slammed past. He missed Barien’s leg where it twisted between his and dropped him, though. Too busy waiting for the other hand, not watching.

As Barien helped him up, the warrior laughed again.

“You had enough, then?” Chriani said where he calmly dusted himself off.

“Yeah, on account of I can’t afford to have to carry you in. I’m late for the watch.”

He slapped Chriani on the shoulder, tossed him the waterskin again and headed out. But at the doors, he stopped, turned back. Stars in an endless black sky behind him cast their faint light on the weathered stone walls opposite, the gatehouse flags twisting in the chill breeze.

“Konaugo’s no friend to anyone I’d want to call that, but he’s captain whether you and I like it or not,” Barien said. “You want to make rank before you’re older than whatever captain takes over for him one day, you stay out of his way.”

“I’ll wait for you to take over for him.”

“You’ll be older still.”

Chriani finished the waterskin, sprayed the last dregs across his dust-streaked face. He found an inside corner of his tunic slightly less dirty than the rest and wiped his eyes.

“I don’t need the advice.”

“When you stop telling me you don’t need it is when I’ll know you don’t,” Barien said. An evenness in his voice, no sign of the impatience that Chriani had often thought should have been there by now. “I know what you should be, well as you know it. Only one of us gets to decide whether it happens or not, though.”

Across at the stables, Kathlan reappeared to hurl the courier’s saddle unceremoniously into the frost-streaked dust of the courtyard track. She slammed the doors behind her as she disappeared inside.

“I’ll work on it,” Chriani said simply. In the doorway, Barien nodded and was gone.

Where Chriani doused the lamps and pulled the doors shut, he felt the fatigue suddenly. A dull ache in his gut settled below the deeper pain there, reminding him he hadn’t eaten yet that day, but he was too tired suddenly to want to.

The gates of the keep opened northward to the crowded city slopes that dropped to the harbor and the seawall beyond. The Bastion gate looked south, the long twist of the courtyard track sweeping east between its walls and the crowded rise of buildings pushing up against it. Chriani cut west, though, crossing the empty training grounds where the garrison practiced. He pushed himself up the narrow steps that rose along the wall that separated the grounds from the clutter of buildings to the south. Along the inside walls of the keep, the exclusive apartments and offices of the ground-level alley maze were locked up tight, lamps burning in the upper windows. In their secure island at the center of the city, the keep’s residents were an elite — gem merchants and goldsmiths, scribes and sages. The offices of the silk guild and of a dozen of Brandishear’s largest private trade concerns were here, as were a half-dozen merchants of spellcraft. The branded sorcerers wise enough to set up shop as close to the watchful eye of the prince’s court wizards as possible.

At the prince’s stables, he thought he might have caught another glimpse of Kathlan at the open window of the loft, but then he was around the Bastion wall that blocked his sight of the opposite yard. As he slipped through eddies of dust and chill wind for the steeply winding lane ahead, he didn’t look back.

Tired as he was, Chriani had walked the keep walls until well past second evenbell, the starlight stained with red where the Darkmoon rode alone in the east. On one pass hiking above the orchard, he glanced around to make sure he was alone, swinging down easily along the rough ladder that the stones made to pluck three of the prince’s last snow oranges for his pockets. From a perch above the courtyard, he let the sweetness of their slow-frozen fruit numb his tongue, watching the guard change on the stepped tiers of the staging ground that opened up before the Bastion gate. He’d expected to see Barien there but didn’t, wondered absently if the warrior would be staying on for fourth watch to make up for his arriving late.

Within the sharp lines of stone and steel that rose from the rock, the Bastion’s design reflected its martial origins, and the twisting of its high banners in the wind seemed almost defiant sometimes. It had been the original keep when the city was little more than a spread of sod huts around the rocky rise that overlooked the harbor, and as Rheran grew up around it, the stepped walls of the current keep had been built to wrap around the old like a salt-snail’s new shell.

The rocky foundations of the bluff had been chopped away to form the near-vertical base of the outwall that ringed the Bastion now, its shattered stone giving rise to the walls of the new keep as the slope within those walls was stepped and leveled. Now, it seemed to Chriani that the place had some sense of how it had been long ago demoted to family life and court. A once-muscled sword arm turned to the lute, he thought.

Long past the point of any living memory, the Bastion had been the house of the Brandishear princes, then had been the regent’s palace under the long years of the Lothelecan, the great Empire that existed now as little more than the insignia of the sun that marked the leaguestones of the roads. Then sixty years before, Chanist’s grandfather had been steward when the Empire and its fifteen centuries of history had suddenly fractured, and the Bastion had had its prince once again.

It had always seemed odd to Chriani that even as Barien had let him maintain a blissful ignorance of the political structures and subtle power struggles of the present-day Ilmar nations as a youth, the warrior had maintained an almost obsessive interest in beating into him the historical highlights of the Empire that had built that power.

“The Empire’s gone, though,” Chriani had said, only a year into his service but already grown impatient with the impromptu history lessons with which Barien liked to fill the empty waiting of a watch. “What’s the point in studying the road behind when you know you’re not turning back?”

“History’s use comes in using what was as a gauge for what’s to come,” Barien had said. “You’ve got to make the trip the first time to sketch the map. Second trip’s easier because of it.”

“What was it like?” Chriani had asked. “Living with the Empire?”

Barien laughed.

“How old do I look, boy?”

Chriani shrugged.

“What was it supposed to be like?”

“Peaceful,” Barien had said after a moment’s contemplation. “Or so they say.”

“There’s peace now.”