Clearwater Dawn (29 page)

“Fate setting its sights on you,” Chriani said awkwardly. “When the crown passed to you. Unlooked for.” And it wasn’t until he’d actually said it that Chriani recognized the subtle pressure that had forced the words to his mind.

What do you mean to do?
Irdaign had asked.

Chriani didn’t know where it came from, just felt it welling up inside him, born of a hundred different thoughts only half of which he could name.

Still my decision either way.

Chanist filled both their cups again, added less water to Chriani’s this time.

“Yes,” he said. “That part of my life is one I reflect on only rarely, master Chriani. But I was put in mind of it tonight by you.”

Chriani didn’t understand.

“I’m sorry, my lord prince?”

“Barien was as a father to you,” Chanist said simply. “I know this by how very much like a son he treated you. Barien is dead, and as an accident of that death, you have been given a chance to prove who you are. As my father’s death gave me that chance. The dreams our fathers have for us that they will never see.”

Chanist soaked up the juice of the trencher with bread, broke it and offered half across the table. Chriani took it, nodded thanks but couldn’t meet the prince’s gaze suddenly. He ate in silence, had to work to swallow where something caught at his throat. In the sharp hiss of the fire, he heard the echo of Chanist’s words hanging, twisting in with the dream of the banquet that he’d woken to, and with the smoke funneling up to the steel chimney that was Barien’s pyre suddenly. The burning that marked the passage of the night, or of a life.

“My grandfather once said to me that every man’s station is a place worthy of respect if carried well.” Where Chriani forced himself to look up, he saw Chanist staring past him, the blue eyes almost black in the firelight. “He was regent to the Empire when the Lothelecan fell, but he petitioned the Imperial court and the lords to allow him to rule not by virtue of his title but of his quality. History judges too often on the basis of blood, not deed, he said. After his own example, and my father’s, I hope to continue to change that.”

Chanist rose suddenly, strode to the fire to toss more wood to the flames. His face was lean in the orange-white light that streaked him, eyes narrowed against the heat.

“For dying at the hands of the Valnirata, my father’s name is remembered by a nation,” the prince said quietly. “Your father who died likewise is remembered only by you, I would expect. But in the end, the memory that sons carry means far more.”

He raised his tankard again, Chriani awkwardly lifting his. The snarl of the fire as it flared twisted between them as they drank.

When he spoke again, the prince seemed distant.

“I have often thought that it is some small comfort to lose those we love to the haste of death when it comes. We are given leave to lament that we had no chance to speak our love to them. But I wonder if we should know what to say to those we love if we knew that it would be the last time.”

The face was impassive, but Chriani heard a weariness in the voice as the prince closed his eyes. The sense of age he’d seen in the throne room that night. Not sure who the prince was speaking of now. His own father. Barien. Lauresa, bound for Aerach on his orders. A last goodbye in the rough surroundings of a war camp not what father or daughter would have expected, he guessed.

“This sacrifice she makes…”

Chriani barely heard the words.

The prince high opened his eyes. He was silent a long moment, Chriani not daring a response. He drank again, drained his tankard and set it down. Chriani saw Chanist glance past him, over his shoulder to where the lights burned at his own pavilion.

“So many things that are left unsaid.”

It was well toward dawn when they finally broke, Chriani watching from the edge of the barracks as Chanist made his way back toward the lights of his pavilion. At the distant stables, he saw Konaugo inspecting a dozen field horses, no telling how long it had been since the captain slept but no sign of fatigue in him. Chriani was surprised to feel himself as awake as he was, some side-effect of the healing draught that Chanist had given him, he guessed.

At Chanist’s tents, he saw three couriers slipping in and out in the space of time it took the prince to cross the open yard. The night was bright where the Clearmoon alone rode the sky now, a beacon that would wait out the coming of the dawn. Lauresa would be awake like everyone else in the camp, he knew, preparing to ride.

But where he found himself walking the firelit perimeter of the encampment, Chriani found himself coming back to the prince’s words. Something was pulling at him that he’d managed to bury all the time since that terrible night, forcing him to think now on what he might have said, what he should have said to Barien if he’d known it would be the last time. Telling himself he should have known to speak his thoughts where Barien lay bleeding to death beside him. Silently cursing the silence that his fool’s hope had made.

In those last terrible moments, for everything that Barien had said to him, he’d offered nothing in return. The words trapped inside him like they so often were, too late now. Quick enough with the jape or the angry insult, he thought. Slow to speak when it might mean something.

He heard horses on the move. Sprinting back across the archery yard, he kept his gaze from the Valnirata corpse still there, slowed behind the shelter of an exposed awning, canvas cracking with each gust of cold wind.

He watched a dozen riders pacing slow along the track that he and Lauresa had followed in only that day, the horses’ breath twisting in with the steam that rose from the half-frozen ground beneath their feet. Konaugo’s broad form was in the lead, cloak wrapped tight around him. To either side of a dozen escorts, four archers rode, outriders and vanguards already gone to sweep the perimeter. He made out two warmages, counted four packhorses laden with tents and supplies.

In the center, Chriani saw a slender figure, the palfrey she rode the same grey as the cloaks that she and the company wore.

Chanist had made his goodbye a brief one. Easier that way.

Around the princess, Konaugo’s company would ride with bows in hand until they made the bridge at Werrancross — the end of the Clearwater Way that wound across the desert scrubland between the forest and the Sandhorn. The northern steppes of Aerach lay beyond it, where Lauresa would land in a week and be married in a month to Duke Allenis Andreg who was old enough to have fought along the Hunthad when the armies of the Valnirata had poured out across the river and into the heart of Aerach like a knife.

So many things that are left unsaid…

From the pocket within his sleeve, he pulled the tattered ribbon of green silk. He grasped for its scent, summoned up the memory of Kathlan’s body against his three nights past, waiting out the dawn as she slept.

Chriani made his decision, then.

He slipped into the stand of poplar to the south of Chanist’s tents, waited there a while. Long enough for the troupe to have disappeared into the distant darkness of the track that twisted off below the rise of the encampment, but still well ahead of the coming dawn. Then he slipped back to the tents of the barracks, grabbed the first saddle blanket and pack he found there, checked to find a bedroll, a week’s supply of hardtack and salt pork. He filled four flasks at the water barrels, slipped back as a pair of perimeter guards stalked wearily by.

At the makeshift stables, the roan had been tethered apart from the troupe’s horses, standing where he’d been woken by Lauresa’s palfrey being saddled and the noise of Konaugo’s force heading out. He was quiet, only glanced over to Chriani’s hand on his neck where he slipped in from the muddy track behind the tents.

He would have liked to have gone for one of the faster courier’s steeds, but they were stabled more dangerously close to the guards than he liked, and his own saddle and tack had been hung at the post where the roan and Lauresa’s horse had been stabled alone. He bunched tack and reins into his pack and lashed the saddle blanket to it. He slung the saddle to his back, stirrups muffled where he slipped his forearm through them. Silently, he slipped the roan’s tether from the twisted spike on the post, led him into the darkness beyond the fire.

He would saddle the horse later, when he was clear of the camp. He didn’t know how far Konaugo would have walked before making speed beneath the Clearmoon’s last light, but he wanted Lauresa’s party a little distance ahead of him. They’d be on their guard, he knew. No point in being seen in pursuit and picked off by an outrider ambush. He still carried the battered sword he’d taken from the stables, but he had to steal his third bow of the night from the empty officers’ pavilion, virtually the entire camp still patrolling the outlying perimeter, it seemed.

He waited within sight of that perimeter only a short while, watching for a break in the patrols where they circled, the smoke of the night’s fires shrouding him as he pulled the roan through. And from the light of the prince’s pavilion behind him, Chriani didn’t see the shadowy figure of Chanist watching him for a long while, the prince’s gaze cold as he slowly turned and slipped back to the white haze of his tents.

—
Chapter 9 —

WHERE KONAUGO’S TROUPE rode the unmarked ranger trails within shadowing distance of the Glaeddynfield road, Chriani could read the signs of their passage with relative ease. In the light of the Clearmoon that dwindled west even as the eastern sky dawned blue-white, their tracks had churned the frozen turf to mud, Konaugo balancing pace and stealth. Should the speed of the road ever be needed, they could be on it in a heartbeat. Until then, however, they were effectively out of sight where they threaded the twisting contours of the bracken-choked hills. Those hills marked the boundary between the rich farmland of the Locanwater delta and the slowly rising scrubland that bordered the exile deserts and the Sandhorn, some fifty leagues north and east.

Twice before the sun rose, he heard patrols passing on the road, and he slowed the roan so as not to draw their attention. Silently, he cursed himself for not bringing anything with him from Chanist’s camp that might have passed for a courier’s charge, but he sifted through a dozen half-believable stories as he rode, kept them close at hand on the off chance he was stopped.

He had to take the horse off the trail and quickly into the trees at one point, the thud of hoofbeats ahead barely warning him of the approach of two rangers, moving at speed. Bound for Chanist’s camp, he guessed, both riding with bows drawn and eyes to the south-east, the forest closer now, mist rising like a wall before it.

At a darkened dairy farmstead, he saw cloaked figures crouched on guard behind a low stone wall adjacent to the house. Barely boys, watching him as he passed. At another farm, he saw a rough palisade of hastily erected birch staves skirting a hilltop shed, flimsy enough that a sow might have barreled through it with little effort, but it spoke to a need for the feeling of security. Walls to hide behind.

He passed through his first real village at dawn, watched by a trio of farmhands walking the narrow track where it skirted the woods. Two had flails in hand, one with a short sword that looked only slightly less battered than Chriani’s own. The three of them made up some kind of patrol that would have been laughable but for the dead-serious challenge in their looks.

That look melted away once they saw Chriani’s arm, though, and the insignia of the guard there. They nodded to him as he passed, Chriani nodding back as he spurred on. But in their eyes, he saw the same tangible energy he’d felt in the Bastion the morning of Barien’s burning. And as the sun finally rose and he spurred on against the chill of frost and the scent of woodsmoke that spread from the sparse settlements to the west, Chriani thought he could feel that same undercurrent of tension hanging across the silence. As unmistakable as the slow change in the weather promised by the freezing mist that the dawn burned away. Only days since the attempt on the prince’s life, and the peace that Chanist himself had wrought thirteen years before seemed ready to unravel now. The eastern frontier already alive with the expectation of war.

All along the western flank of the road, a barrier of scrubland marked off the extent of the farmsteads as if a knife had sliced its way along the fields’ edge. Beyond it, a swath of land a day’s ride across was given over to willow and wolf-grass, the black loam of the delta as rich as any farmland in the Ilmar, forever left fallow for the fear that lived on both sides of the trees.

Through the fringe of the Greatwood, the scout trails cut their barely visible pathways through ever-present shadow, Chanist’s rangers and local garrisons from Addrimyr patrolling there endlessly, watching for signs of movement, of any plotting from the far side of the Valnirata frontier. Like the rangers on the Brandishear side, the Valnirata had their elite carontir patrols, ceaselessly patrolling the Greatwood as the first line of defense against the invasion that both sides seemed to have been expecting since the Ilmar treaty was signed. How much longer they’d have to wait, Chriani didn’t want to guess. Old hatreds died hard, it seemed.

It was nearing dusk when he came to Caredry’s walls at the mouth of the Locanwater, the river winding between low ash hills where terraced fields lay heavy with frost. The broad city-keep was the last stop and way station for those travelers and traders heading out along the Clearwater Way. It was a hard day’s ride each leg of the journey to the four keeps that were the only safe stopping places along the Wayroad — Gleoran, then Durrant, Talimeth, Rhercyn, then a last day to pass through to the city of Werrancross in Aerach.