Clearwater Dawn (39 page)

There was movement in the trees. He saw Dargana slip back through the shadows.

“They feared a war that would destroy the Ilvani and the Ilmari alike,” Chriani said. “They fought hit-and-run skirmishes against the Valnirata from the south. He was killed.”

“My father and uncle were exiled for daring to dream that the Valnirata might reclaim some of the glory that Chanist’s fathers stole from us,” Dargana said coldly.

“My father believed the Valnirata’s march to war would extinguish that glory in a way that even Chanist’s fathers never could.”

Chriani said nothing more. Dargana was silent for a while.

“We have a fallback point on the northern flank of the forest,” she said at last. “My troupe will be regrouping there, riding west. The gavaleria will likely presume we have the princess and follow from the air. Come in after us, your horse will be there.”

Chriani only nodded. His heart was hammering in his chest, pain scouring his lungs like embers each time he breathed.

Where his numb hands clutched her, he thought he felt Lauresa stir.

“There have been scout reports of Ilmari forces scouring the Wayroad,” Dargana said. “Looking for Chanist’s lost treasure, I expect.”

“We can’t trust the road.”

Dargana nodded, thoughtful.

“Follow the forest edge north and around. Bear east along the stream you’ll cross, then make for the northernmost point of the Greatwood, west of the Hunthad. Cross the water and you’ll be in Aerach.”

Lauresa stirred again, Chriani holding her with what felt like the last of his strength. As her eyes slowly opened, he tried to smile, fought the pain that wracked his body like the crippling fear that wracked his mind.

He wasn’t watching as Dargana slipped away.

—
Chapter 12 —

IT WAS RAINING COLD, almost turning to snow as he passed alone through the last of the crossroads villages marking the southern extents of the Rheran hills. The escort he’d traveled with along the Clearwater Way from Werrancross had been left behind in Caredry four days before. The high cloud that pushed south across the Sea of Ehadne had finally swallowed the sky after the unseasonable sun of High Winter, but the true cold was likely still a week or two away. To the south as Chriani rode, mist had shrouded the Greatwood, silent and dark where it spread unseen.

For the five-day ride back along the Wayroad, he’d hooked up with an Aerach cavalry unit for safety, passing himself off as a messenger, cloaked and hooded. When they stopped each night, he kept to himself. He watched the faces in the barracks of each of the Clearwater keeps in turn, not yet sure how safe he was. Not sure if he ever would be.

It was pushing to evening already as Chriani and the chestnut mare he was riding now came in along the well-traveled road through the coastal farmsteads. He was weary, fighting to stay awake against the rhythm of the horse’s light steps beneath him. Dark was descending quickly enough that he should have stopped for the night. He meant to arrive in Rheran late, though. Easier that way.

The roan had been found saddled and ready where Dargana had said it would be, field rations and water left beside it. They’d hidden in the trees after Lauresa awoke, waiting for the forest to fall silent again before they moved. Even still, Chriani led the horse out along a roundabout route on the least-trodden paths threading the wood, not completely trusting that silence even after it was clear that the crithnala and the griffon patrol pursuing them had gone.

Even with the healing draught, Lauresa was still shaky, had come closer to death than Chriani wanted to dwell on. He’d hoped to save the second draught that Dargana had given him in the event the princess needed it later. She saw him try to slip the vial away inside his sleeve, though, next to the picks and the two bloody insignias hidden there. The one that Barien had torn away from the prince’s own cloak. The other, Konaugo’s, who that same prince had sent to his death with a word. She forced him to take the draught himself, Chriani adamant that he could ride with a broken arm until she told him she’d walk out alone unless he relented.

The draught’s life-magic worked quickly enough, but they waited until the sky was darkening before making their way carefully past the Ghostwood’s edge. Where they followed the tree line south and east, they saw no sign of pursuit, but they rode hard until nightfall nonetheless, pushing on more slowly until dawn when they finally stopped to rest.

As they rode, Chriani told the princess what had happened as she fell, filled in the missing pieces. He told her of Dargana’s role in saving both their lives, but in response to the princess asking how it had happened, he said only that his being of her own blood had changed the exile leader’s heart in the end.

They made camp at the edge of a small horn of forest that pushed out from the unbroken green of the Greatwood. They were close enough to see the muddy brown line of the Hunthad where it wound its way north, the scrub turning to terraced farmland across its opposite bank.

There was a warmth in the crystal-clear air that seemed to hint of the spring that was still a long way off, and they stayed close all that long day and into the next night. Always one sleeping while the other kept watch, but never leaving each other's arms. And while he watched Lauresa rest, Chriani almost managed to convince himself that he could do what he wanted to do. Almost convinced himself that he could deliver Lauresa to her new life in Aerach without telling her what he knew.

If Chanist were the father of one I loved,
Dargana had said. Chriani hadn’t even wondered at the time how she could have known his feelings with the certainty her voice displayed. And in the end, in a way he hadn’t expected, it was the exile’s contempt that forced his hand, made him find the words that he knew would cut deeper than any blade.

If he was to kill her father, Chriani thought, Lauresa deserved to know why.

The princess wept that next morning as though she’d somehow known the truth even before Chriani spoke it, her father’s betrayal absolute beyond any imagining. And as he had when he’d told Dargana of his own father — as he had when he’d first made that same confession to Kathlan — Chriani found himself thinking about that absent father in a way he almost never did. Thinking about how much of his own life had been defined by his belief in who his father was, of what he had done. The secrets his mother had told him to never forget.

As he held the princess who had been a bright pain in his heart since he was eleven years old, he wondered what would happen if all that was taken from him now. How would it feel if all that he’d believed in — all he thought he was, all he’d ever loved — were suddenly to be revealed as lies?

For most of the next day, Lauresa sat alone while Chriani gathered snowberries to supplant the dark bread and jerky Dargana left them, and though he sat close to her beneath the canopy of sun-touched boughs, he knew there were no words he could make that would take away the pain behind her tightly closed eyes.

Sunset was streaking the sky when he finally spoke.

“Come away with me,” he said.

She was silent a long while. “To where?”

“To anywhere. We can go to Cresthan province, find my mother’s kin. Elalantar, sail to the islands. Somewhere far from everything.”

The sky was darker when she finally spoke again.

“How far will we need to go to escape the war that begins when we disappear?”

Chriani said nothing after that, but she moved to settle herself against him. Despite her spellcraft that pushed the winter chill away, she was shivering, and he pulled the bedroll around them, held her tight against him as all the words he’d said that night in the encampment twisted through his mind. All the words he’d waited his whole life to say, that he wanted desperately to say again, but even as he opened his mouth to speak, she put a finger to his lips, kissed him gently.

“Don’t speak anymore,” was all she said.

Even beneath the steady drizzle that filled the gutters to overflowing, Rheran was loud as it always was across the market court, and Chriani felt the familiar sense of movement around him as he led the mare through the late-night emptiness of the trade road. He didn’t know whether the city guard would be watching for him like the keep garrison almost certainly were, but he kept to the well-lit spaces and the huddled crowds, hiding in plain sight. Lauresa’s words coming back to him from when they’d walked that night.

He slipped into shadows only in the last stretch along the wall, carefully watching movement at the distant guard posts above him as he knocked at the stable gates. He’d sent the message on that morning with a city-bound rider under cover of a merchant’s bill, but he didn’t know whether Kathlan would be inclined to answer it until he heard the bars slide back, her face in shadow as one door cracked slowly open.

He saw an expression in her eyes that he couldn’t read as he pushed the hood back. Then she looked to the mare.

“What the sotting fuck have you done with my horse?”

Chriani led the mare in as the gate was shut behind them, the stables deserted. Kathlan seemed more interested in the horse’s state than in his at any rate, only glancing his way once to level a dark look at the well-run swelling in the chestnut flanks as she unsaddled her. He splashed water to his face at a basin near the stove, sat resting in the shadows for a long while as the mare was carefully groomed and shod. When the horse was fed and stalled, Kathlan hefted the saddle, stalked past Chriani where he was sitting. She slowed, though, turned back to appraise him.

“You find what you went for after all that?”

“I have now,” he said.

Kathlan said nothing, carried the saddle to a workbench across the room. The limp was more pronounced, he saw. Her leg bothered her sometimes when the weather changed.

“They said you were dead.” Her voice was even but Chriani felt a faint pain twist through it. “Along with her and her escort.”

“Don’t believe all you hear.”

Kathlan inspected the overly ornate riding saddle, pulled out needle and cord to cinch a loose fitting that probably only her eyes could see. Her hand was shaking, just a little.

“What else do they say?” Chriani asked.

“I expect you know more than I do.”

“Tell me what you know just the same. Who attacked them?”

She gave him an odd look.

“Bandits from some monastery north of Aerach. Some axe to grind against the lord she’s marrying down there, so they thought to make him a widow before the wedding.”

“How many survived the attack?”

“None’s what they said. Konaugo and two score others gone. Ashlund’s captain now. They said you…” She broke the cord, tied it tight. Chriani heard her fighting to slow her breathing. “They said just the princess escaped, but she took her sweet time doing it.”

“That’s what they say?”

“That’s what I say.” Kathlan inspected the stirrup straps, saw something she didn’t like as she bent low with an awl. “It looked like war for a while. Word from the frontier that it was the Valnirata ambushed the escort. Then word came through one of the prince’s seers that she was safe, that it had been the monastics who did it. Got that same word in from traders coming in on the Clearwater.”

Chriani nodded, thoughtful. The story that Lauresa had crafted, that she had told upon her arrival, had made it to where she knew it needed to. Her own lie given life in the streets and the markets and the taverns in order to counter the lie that her father had needed to make it all work.

“Wedding’s over and done a month early, word out of Five Hog’s House says. Lady Lauresa Andreg now. The Bastion had to scramble to have Peran declared heir, big ceremony four days past. Prince came back from the frontier in a hurry.”

“He’s still here?”

“Last anyone told me,” Kathlan said, but there was an uncertainty in her tone now. As if she’d felt the sudden chill that threaded Chriani where he sat in shadow.

“Are you all right?” she said at length.

“You remember what you asked me before?”

“I remember asking you a lot of things over time, Chriani.”

He nodded. As he stood, he stretched the ache from his back that the long ride had given him, crossed to where Kathlan worked. He kept a watchful eye on the awl still in her hands as he slipped close, kissed her gently.

“And what was that for?” she said as he broke off, but her voice had abandoned the anger.

Chriani slipped the green ribbon into her hand.

“I know what I’m meant to do,” he said.

Two days’ ride from the forest horn, the two of them had crossed the frontier at sunset, waiting out the cover of darkness they’d need to steal a horse from one of the outlying farmsteads. In the stables of a vineyard estate, Lauresa used her dweomercraft to enchant the stablehands there to a sleep they didn’t wake from in the time it took Chriani to get the chestnut mare saddled and ready. Lauresa rode the roan as they headed out along the low lines of stone fence that marked the western acreages. Chriani would take the stolen horse north with him. One less question to be asked.