Clearwater Dawn (8 page)

“A fool…” Barien retched again, fighting to breathe now. “A fool forgets there are always things worthy of fear…”

Where Chriani touched it, the warrior’s forehead was cold.

“Lauresa. Keep her safe…”

And then, as if the effort of speaking the words had drained away the last of his will, Barien slumped slowly back.

Chriani stared. Shook his head, mute. He pressed a finger to the warrior’s neck to feel for the life that should have been there, but Barien’s blood was still.

On his arm, the thick fingers slowly loosened their cold grip.

He didn’t remember standing. Didn’t remember grabbing up the sword again where it had fallen. He ran, not for the healer who would have come too late now, not for the closest garrison post to raise the alarm that had already been raised, but along the trail of blood where it snaked out before him.

Through the intersection, he raced down the hall of records, the central court only forty strides away from where the trail began. Dark doors were shut fast to either side, a wider spray of blood across the floor there, the marks of large hands streaked where they’d clutched at the stones. Barien struck on this spot, falling. Rising again to run. Pursuing his attacker? Or trying to flee?

And then in the hall behind him, movement, four figures where Barien had fallen. Garrison uniforms but no faces he could remember in the fury that sent him racing towards them. He saw their lips moving but he couldn’t hear the words over his scream as they stepped across the body, swords drawn. Then they were on him before he could swing, hauling him down easily in the frenzy that consumed him.

He felt something hard strike his head, the pain already there redoubled. He felt his arms pinned, boots striking him in the stomach and back. Then he was moving across cold stone and his legs didn’t work anymore.

A frozen moment of time, the ceiling sliding endlessly past above him. Then darkness took him away.

—
Chapter 3 —

THE SECRET CHRIANI HAD KEPT since the day he walked into Rheran through the dust of the trade way meant that he could see better than anyone else in the keep that he knew of, but that same sharpness of sight blinded him now when he finally awoke. He blinked, found himself staring up into the singular brilliance of a dozen evenlamps, a massive hanging fixture directly above him that he looked away from at once, overwhelmed by the shadow that had burned into his sight while he lay there unconscious.

As he slowly forced his eyes open, he saw an intricate pattern on the floor beneath him, blue and white tile cold against his face. An interleaving pattern of knots twisted around a blurred mosaic as he slowly looked up and across. The falcon of Brandis, ancient standard of the first princes. Its wings unfurled across the floor as it climbed, empty eyes fierce in their coldness where they seemed to watch him through a blur of movement all around.

The throne room, he thought.

He tried to focus, felt all the disparate pain from the number of times he’d been struck in the head that night twist into one solid knot. He felt rough cords at his wrists and feet, thought about trying to sit up but decided against it. The blood at his tunic was still wet, hardly any time passed. He was in the throne room but he was bound, which meant that they wanted something from him but were expecting to be able to get it without beating him in the dark holding cells behind the outwall. That was a good thing.

Barien was dead.

Where the terrible truth had circled half-remembered in his daze, it flooded him now like a plunge into ice-cold water. Against a sudden spike of anger, Chriani forced himself upright as a knife-edge of pain cut through him. Across from him, he saw three guards suddenly alert, more around them, spread across the room where his vision blurred.

You will do as I command
, the princess had said.

Only she hadn’t commanded him on what to do in the event that his mentor was murdered and he found himself taken down and bound by the Bastion garrison. He should have run that scenario past her, Chriani thought bitterly. But then the anger wilted beneath a sudden fear, and he wondered what might happen if they used truth magic on him.

He wondered what might happen if they simply took off his shirt and the bandage beneath it.

For the mark his mother had made at his shoulder long years before, they’d kill him outright, he guessed. If the princess’s name freshly tattooed along its edge was seen by anyone who could read the delicate Ilvani script, Chanist or Konaugo or the ranger captains, they’d likely torture him first.

The pain in his head flared suddenly. Chriani squeezed his eyes shut.

It had been his eleventh summer when it had started. The Princess Lauresa a year older than him but showing no signs of growing out of the breeches she still wore then and into the robes her stepmother and younger sister favored. He’d been at the keep and under Barien’s hand almost three years, but even as tyro to the princess’s warden, he had yet to see her at anything less than a distance. Chriani had shoveled the stables while she rode out with Barien and her father. He had watched from the wall as she walked through the gates to explore the market court with her stepmother and younger siblings.

It had been a bright spring day whose light had long-burned into permanent relief in his memory. The orchard trees were blossom-white above the walls, the training grounds wet with brief rain the night before. Images that he wished on his mother’s blood he could forget.

On that day, Barien had told him to meet at the archery yard when his duties in the armory were done. Chriani was eleven then and was already outshooting Barien six times in ten, not sure why the warrior thought he needed more practice. But when he arrived on the training grounds, she’d been waiting for him. The Princess Lauresa, smiling shyly where he approached.

She’d already been shooting, a brace of arrows lying in the mud a half-dozen paces past the target and conspicuously few of them sticking in it. Like the rangemaster who watched her, like any member of the garrison who carried arms within the Bastion, Barien was standing five paces away from the princess by Chanist’s own orders. It was a rule that all who served under the prince knew as well as they knew their names, Chanist’s will in this regard dating back to the days of Lauresa’s mother Irdaign, the first princess high.

Chanist and she had been married just five years before the death of his father, brother, and sister marked the sixth year of the Ilvani Incursions, the war of invasion from the Valnirata Greatwood. And while most in the garrison thought the prince’s caution excessive against the backdrop of peace that Chanist himself had wrought from the raw destruction of that war, it was a caution they adhered to nonetheless. The prince high had seen too many of the family he’d grown up with murdered, Barien had said. He would take no chances with the family he’d made since then.

“Don’t get no ideas,” the warrior had whispered with a wink as he waved Chriani in, but the boy hadn’t understood what he meant. Then Barien formally announced that the Prince High Chanist had seen fit to allow Chriani leave to serve as the Princess Lauresa’s personal mentor in archery, close blade combat, and riding. The warrior had somehow convinced the prince that he could allow a tyro this slight contact with his daughter but still keep the precepts of his orders intact. Chriani could only nod, wide-eyed.

With the warrior’s prodding, Chriani approached Lauresa awkwardly, steadying her aim over the length of that first day. Close at her side, his hand wrapped around hers where he adjusted the set of her arm, told her how to breathe, how to open her eyes but focus with her whole body on the distant target.

Chanist himself had appeared across the range just past second daybell, Chriani only realizing it when he saw Barien and the others salute. He was at the age then when he didn’t understand how clearly this new duty of his marked out the trust that ran from Chanist to Barien. He didn’t understand enough of the machinations of power and politics in the Bastion to realize until much later the resentment both he and the warrior would carry because of it.

Chriani looked up now to the sound of footsteps approaching across the throne room floor, and the faint thought flitted through him that his long-ago ignorance was something he would have done well to hang onto.

Above him, a face loomed, dark-eyed. Seamed with years of hard service, a jagged scar running jaw to ear, white like the hair and the narrow beard. Konaugo, captain of the guard, was shorter than Chriani but easily twice as broad. He was in riding leathers, out of uniform, Chriani only dimly registering it where the captain motioned two guards to pull him roughly to his feet.

“Move,” he said.

As they half-carried, half-dragged him toward a wide table of dark wood, Chriani’s vision cleared. Ashlund was there, a look passing between him and Konaugo that he didn’t like. In the press of guards around the main doors, he saw two that he remembered at Barien’s body. He remembered running at them, felt the rage that had filled him then twisting away to shame now as it always did.

Though the garrison still called it the throne room, it had been untold years since it had been used as such, no throne there since the time of Chanist’s father at least. This was the prince’s workroom — a council chamber, a planning area, an impromptu dining hall for those occasions when guests of the court outnumbered the regular hall’s ability to hold them. Before this night, those were the only times Chriani had ever been past the doors. Occasional revels Barien had dragged him to when he was younger, sitting quietly off to the side of the prince high’s table where the warrior most often sat, dreamily lost in the laughter and the warm light of the central fire that burned on banquet nights.

Tonight, that fire was burning but hadn’t yet cut the cold. Behind the council table, the prince high sat in quiet consultation with a woman in black robes, and Chriani found himself staring. Chanist’s chest was bare where he wore an unbuttoned shirt of white linen, a pendant at his neck and a jagged scar running from shoulder to elbow in the same flesh-torn pattern he’d seen on Barien’s body. It took Konaugo slapping the back of his head for Chriani to remember to nod low.

The dark-clad woman was speaking softly, a monotonous incantation delivered in a tongue Chriani didn’t recognize. She held Chanist’s head in her hands, touched his shoulder, his hair. He saw the prince breathe deeply, a kind of vigor coming to him. And as faint as it had been when he first saw it, the jagged scar faded still more, almost gone as Chanist nodded dismissal, the healer slipping away as the prince buttoned his shirt.

Chriani fought the urge to make the moonsign, though he’d seen the healing life-magic before. Two springs after Lauresa’s training at his side had started, he and Barien had been among the company escorting the Princess High Gwannyn and the four heirs on the road to Elalantar, the princess high’s mother buried there after long illness. On the road, they’d met wolves, Barien and two others left with savage wounds that Chriani had watched disappear beneath the hands of the princess high’s healer.

He’d wondered then how it was that the spells of the healers could dispense with the wounds of sword and fang but not of the age that had taken the princess high’s mother. He wondered now what difference it might have made to Barien had Chriani gone for help like he wanted to, brought a healer back before the warrior’s blood and life had ebbed away across cold stone.

He wondered not for the first time since that long trip north what difference it might have made to his mother, her body broken when her horse had been spooked by a scrubsnake breaking from a stand of witchwillow, throwing her on the road to the trade fair at Quilimma. Chriani and his grandfather could do little more than watch, helpless around her as she died over the length of an agonizingly long blue-skied summer day.

Where Chanist rose, he took whispered orders from a harried sergeant, one nod enough to send her running with two others in tow. All around, there was an undercurrent of tension, of movement. On the table, Chriani saw maps spread, Konaugo noting his gaze and carefully stepping across to block his view.

Where his escorts stopped, Chriani staggered to a halt. Chanist glanced up, blue eyes cold beneath the blonde hair still not entirely gone to white, appraising him.

“Untie him now,” the prince said.

“Lord, I would urge extreme caution…” Konaugo began.

“You think him the assassin, Konaugo? Are you mad, or do you simply wish to pretend so quickly that this is over?”

From a mostly safe distance, Chriani had heard the prince giving orders for most of his life, but there was still a power in that voice that could seemingly take even those used to it by surprise. Konaugo only nodded, a gesture to the two guards alongside Chriani setting them to quickly cut his bonds. He rubbed his wrists, flexed his ankles where he stepped back. Not knowing whether to nod to the prince in thanks or not, he glanced to Konaugo instead, caught the dark look there.

“My lord prince, he was detained in the act of attacking members of your own watch,” the captain said evenly, speaking to Chanist, eyes never leaving Chriani’s. “He carried a weapon without charge. Barien’s blood was on his hands…”

“You know as well as I that no sword laid Barien down as you found him.”