Clearwater Dawn
Authors: Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Tags: #Romance, #mystery, #Fantasy, #magic, #rpg, #endlands, #dungeons, #sorcery, #dungeons and dragons, #prayer for dead kings, #dragons, #adventure, #exiles blade, #action, #assassin, #princess
Chapter 6
• The Ode of Seilonna
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales
Part One
— The Name of the Night
An apprentice guard in the royal household of Brandishear, Chriani is a capable young warrior held back from attaining his full potential by a lifetime of dark anger. Lauresa is a princess about to be set aside as heir and married off for the sake of treaty — and the only woman Chriani has ever loved. When his mentor is murdered preventing an assassination attempt within the palace, Chriani is forced to become Lauresa’s protector — the two reconciling a forbidden passion even as they find themselves caught up in a maelstrom of political intrigue, ancient racial hatred, a society living in mortal fear of sorcery, and a decades-old plot to plunge five nations into genocidal war.
The princess faltered. Chriani saw the flick of her eyes, the gleam of blue catching the light as he twisted to follow her gaze. He’d left the dark door open behind him. In the faint light of the corridor, his eyes caught the ripple of shadow that meant movement in the distance. Footsteps, almost silent.
“You fool,” she whispered.
Chriani wasn’t listening, sheathing his sword with effort as he turned for the door, made to call out to whoever was racing toward them. No idea what he was supposed to say, but he was fairly certain that begging for mercy would be a large part of it.
Then the princess was moving behind him, one hand across his mouth even as the other brought the dagger up, close to his throat as she dragged him back. Chriani was startled, as much at being grabbed at all as he was at the strength in her arm. As he stumbled back, though, he felt instinct override any uncertainty. Her blade was a hand’s-width from him, more than enough space to go for her wrist. No room to get a decent strike in with the other hand, but her flank was vulnerable and in easy reach, or the soft muscle of her thigh, one sharp blow that would drop her.
But even through the instinct, through all the memory of all the hand-to-hand training he’d done at Barien’s side, he knew he couldn’t do it.
No idea what any of this was about, but he couldn’t hurt her. Not anymore.
He went for the dagger, though. No point in having his throat slit, by accident or otherwise. But even as his hand clamped around her wrist, Lauresa sang…
A Novel of the Endlands
Book One
of
The Exile’s Blade
by
Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Published by Insane Angel Studios
Copyright © 2010 Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Smashwords Edition
For Colleen
Braern ar nay min leinn…
One owes respect to the living.
To the dead,
one owes only the truth.
— Voltaire
Click either map to download a PDF version from
http://www.scribd.com/doc/59270511/Clearwater-Dawn-Maps
—
Chapter 1 —
LOOK TO THE PRINCESS…
Even in the half-waking dreams of his own exhaustion, Chriani thought he could hear the command ringing in his head where he lay in his alcove in Barien’s chambers. Waiting for the sleep that he knew would come if he could only quiet the ache at his chest and in his gut.
Where he shifted on the thin tick, the pallet beneath it barely long enough for him, he felt the chill airflow through the narrow gap that passed for a window in the closest corner of the room. Originally an arrow slit when the Bastion was new-built a hundred generations past, it had been knocked out and roughly widened as the open fields and huts it once overlooked and defended had turned to the alleyways and flagstoned court of the outlying keep long years ago. The wind still blew in from over the southern walls, though, twisting across him now. Just past High Winter, the Brandishear coast had yet to see snow, but the unseasonable warmth of the past two weeks’ sun had disappeared as quickly as the day’s light.
As he walked along the walls of the keep not so long before, Chriani had watched the lights of the sentry towers echo the light of the city beyond, threescore thousand strong. Like he always did, he felt the specific stillness that was the keep at night. From the southlands, from the farmsteads that spread and surrounded Aloidien and Quilimma and Cadaurwen and the fertile steppes at the mountain’s feet, the trade roads ran non-stop by day with the past season’s grain and cheese and salt beef bound for the docks. Destinations east and west, ports in Elalantar and Aerach and Holc. Beyond the walls of the keep that was its heart, Rheran was alive with a light and a noise and a movement that ran all night and only began to fade as the noise and movement of the next day started up all over again.
But where Chriani lay now within the Prince’s Bastion, that life had never seemed more distant. As the walls of the keep marked off the heart of the city, the Bastion marked off the heart of the keep, and within that twice-isolated space, the closing of the gates marked off the end of the day with a sense of ritual formality. Whatever business carried on into the night around him now was the quieter commerce of court. Consuls and emissaries would be plying their trade in the apartments of the master-merchants and barristers and petty nobles who had long ago secured the keep’s scant supply of apartments. In the prince’s tower that rose just above and to the north of Barien’s chambers in the garrison wing, a steady stream of servants would even now be making their way along the stairs to the guest chambers where Chanist housed whatever foreign dignitaries the tide or the road had brought in that day.
The Bastion was the place of princes that Chriani had been a part of for ten years now, and it would be a part of him for two weeks more.
Two weeks until it was over, he counted from the space where sleep beckoned. Time enough.
He’d heard the words that day, found himself hoping that it might be for the last time. Ringing out across the courtyard of the keep from the stable gates, the Princess Lauresa had swept in along the city road with a half-dozen riders around her.
“Look to the princess!”
It had been Barien’s voice, the deep tone of command ringing out like it always did. To the side and the customary distance behind the Princess Lauresa, Chriani saw the tall warrior rein in, dark cloak and lighter dust swirling around him as a pair of grooms took his horse, then he in turn leapt down to take Lauresa’s reins in his own hands.
Chriani had been resting, slouched in the doorway of the outside armories as the twisting breeze of a bright daymark funneled through the main gates, the scent of dust and dung and roasting meat carried in from the market court beyond. The armories and the stables framed the gates like bookends, but where Chriani lingered within the doors, he was hidden where sunlight glared off the stones of the courtyard track.
Lauresa was in white, as she usually was, draped in a shawl of ilvanweave that the Mearinn of the Tannwood made, the dust of road and trail never clinging to it. Her horse was a white palfrey mare that had been given to her by her father to mark her nineteenth year the autumn just passed. Curls of sunflower yellow twisted where she gently returned Barien’s nod of salute, blue eyes catching the light even from where Chriani stared darkly.
He was tired suddenly, watching her. He hadn’t slept well the night before. Hadn’t slept at all the night before that.
The Princess Lauresa is to marry in Aerach
, the sudden proclamation had read a month before,
and all Brandishear will join in tribute for her happiness.