Clearwater Dawn (24 page)

“I do not know the name, my lord prince.”

“Few outside the highest levels of the guard would. They are a martial order active in the west of Aerach.”

“Mercenaries?” Chriani asked.

“Assassins, master Chriani. Amoral and deadly. They had holds across the Hunthad, years ago. Andreg whom my daughter is to marry was involved in action to push them back into the fringes of the Valnirata lands. A reaction to their attempting to place members of the order as spies within the Aerach court. Spies or worse.”

Chriani took it in, added the new pieces of the puzzle to the old. He felt one question fall into place, but it was Lauresa who asked it.

“The assassin by whom Barien was slain was Valnirata.” She was still at her father’s side, holding him. “What connection is there between them?”

“The Valnirata hate the monastic orders nearly as much as they hate the peoples of the Ilmar,” Chanist said. He shook his head. “If there is a connection there, it is not known to me.”

Carefully, he broke from Lauresa’s embrace, paced to the corner of the tent to peer out through a sealed window flap to the night beyond. Chriani was suddenly aware of movement around them, distant voices, orders shouted and received. At the desk, Chanist fingered the blood-stained insignia once more.

“Do I need to ask your suspicions in this matter, master Chriani?”

Chriani answered without hesitation.

“Konaugo…”

“Captain Konaugo, tyro.” Chanist’s voice was even, but Chriani heard the warning.

“Of all the guard who I saw, only Captain Konaugo was not in uniform the night Barien was murdered, my lord prince. If his uniform was changed, I would be greatly interested in hearing his reasons for it.”

Where Chanist filled the goblet again, his gaze met Chriani’s. Something there. Resignation? Chriani wasn’t sure.

“To whom else have you spoken of these things?” he asked at length.

“To none but the princess and yourself, my lord prince.”

Chanist nodded slowly.

“You are wrong in your assessment of Captain Konaugo. That is my last and only word on that matter.”

“Yes, my lord prince.”

“On all other matters, I thank you. To hold allegiance to the ideals of truth even against the ideals of duty demonstrates a rare strength of heart, master Chriani.”

“Yes, my lord prince.”

Like Lauresa, Chanist wouldn’t touch the dagger, Chriani saw. As he set the insignia down beside it, he motioned for Chriani to put both away.

“Keep it hidden,” he said. “Show that blade to anyone in this troupe and not even my order will be enough to save your life.”

Outside, footsteps. Chanist unhooked the flap so that it could be opened from outside. Hardly any time alone, but it was all they would get.

“Speak to no one of what you know,” Chanist said again. “Speak to no one of what you suspect. We will talk more on this. On your way.”

Chriani nodded, pressing back at the flap as three guards pressed in, then stepping out silently behind them, no one seeing him go. He heard Chanist within, asking for word from outside, the formal give and take of report and questioning.

Across the archery yard, the mud had been churned by the passage of untold feet. As soldiers ran past him on all sides, Chriani quickly realized that he was the only one without bow or sword in hand, a conspicuousness that was drawing more sidelong glances to him than he wanted.

The armory tent he’d seen earlier had guards on all four sides now, so he headed for the officers’ pavilion instead, no one there. He had to slip beneath the canvas of three tents before he found what he was looking for, helping himself to a brace of the arrows he’d packed a week before, along with the unstrung shortbow racked with them. Best to walk the perimeter, he thought as he slipped out again. If he could catch a glimpse of Konaugo at a safe distance, he could arrange to look like he was patrolling wherever the captain wasn’t.

Where he wandered the fringe of the barracks tents, he felt isolation wrap him even within the frantic activity of the camp, locked down on an alert that had no purpose, he knew. He heard horses circling around the perimeter, saw the dark lines of the forest rise like a wall against the light of the Clearmoon, just risen.

In the Ilmar, the forest was often just called the Valnirata, as if the dark wood and the Ilvani warclans within it were one and the same. Outside of the rangers who rode the constant patrols of the Clearwater Way and the trails of the Locanwater, most folk of the Ilmar had never even seen an Ilvani of the Valnirata. Those who had called the forest the Greatwood, a rough translation of the
Muiraìden
, the Ilvani name that was older than the trees themselves. A four-hundred league expanse of towering limni — the great conifers that grew only in the forest the Valnirata called home.

Chriani stared to the distant wood for a long while. Something twisted inside him that he couldn’t put a name to.

The encampment was on a rise, and where he strode up toward the eastern perimeter, he saw the Darkmoon break behind thin cloud, approaching gibbous where its faint light gleamed black-red above the dark green stain of the trees. To the distant south, he saw a dull glow that he tried to imagine was the brightness of desert scrubland, the Sandhorn pushing its hooked claw of scree and wind-carved dunes into the Clearwater.

His father had died in the Sandhorn, or at least that’s what his mother had told him. Into the broken desert steppes north of the Greatwood, the Valnirata exiled their criminals, their degenerates, their outcasts and insurgents. She’d told Chriani where, told him when, told him why his father had died. All the details he’d asked her for as a child but that she’d refused him until that day she lay dying herself at the side of an empty road.

She had his father’s last words, held inside her for six years. Waiting, she said, until Chriani was old enough to understand.

If I make it back
, his father had said,
there’ll be a place for us in any part of the Ilmar that sets faith in freedom.

He’d left the village before dawn, his mother said, only shortly before the rangers had come looking for him. He’d known it was coming, the round-up of those Valnirata Ilvani who had made the Ilmar their home. Up the roads from Welbirk and Cadaurwen, whispers of war had been drifting for a month.

If I don’t make it back, tell the boy of who I was.

Like him, his father had set out to prove himself. Like him, his father had never found his chance.

Above the tree line, then, Chriani saw faint black shapes flying low against the Clearmoon’s shadowed horn. He felt his pulse ratchet up, decided that perhaps the camp being on alert wasn’t such a bad thing.

Gavaleria!
Chriani heard the call go up from at least three points around him, and he moved quickly toward the light of the perimeter fires, all eyes around him on the sleek shapes of the Valnirata griffon riders as they tore past overhead. He heard a distant shriek that cut the darkness like a knife, and even as high as the griffons and their unseen masters flew, he heard the horses suddenly frantic at the stables.

But even as he skirted close to the patrol line, Chriani saw a lone figure moving slowly through the shadows of a narrow stand of poplar beyond it. Like him, like everyone, Lauresa was watching the griffons circle overhead as they scouted the position and extent of Chanist’s camp. Unlike the rest of them, though, she was following their movement from the other side of the perimeter, having managed somehow to slip across it. She was alone, the midnight-blue cloak wrapped tight around her, just invisible enough that she was probably equally likely to get taken out by a nervous archer within the camp as by whatever might be lurking outside it.

Chriani felt a profound antipathy that he was suddenly thankful for. He judged the movements of the guards, waited for his moment even as Lauresa bore off toward a thin glade that edged a low hillock northeast of the camp. Where he slipped through the line, he made no sound, left no sign where he melted into the shadows. It didn’t take him long to find her trail in the frost already settled on the grass. He moved up the slope behind her, his footsteps the faintest echo of the wind that stirred the naked trees. He heard the song the princess sang, recognized a fragment of melody from the war room that night.

“Highness.”

She wheeled at the sound of his voice, Chriani seeing her hand move quickly to her waist. The dagger was there that she’d turned on him that first night, but she checked herself.

“You startled me.”

“As you would have startled any of the dozen patrols circulating through the area. In the interest of your not getting accidentally shot by your father’s own troops, we should return.”

“I am perfectly capable…”

“We have had this conversation, highness.”

Above, another endless shriek split the night. Lauresa’s eyes were cold where she turned from Chriani, the gavaleria patrol changing direction overhead. As one, the griffon riders arced back toward the east, hanging against mottled cloud as they slowly disappeared from sight.

Where he paced around the princess, Chriani felt something twist within his chest. As she looked to him finally, a shock of hair twisted from beneath the hood of her cloak, frosted gold in the Clearmoon’s light. Her eyes were the blue of the summer sky he’d screamed his heart out to on that day his mother died. In the ten years since he’d first come to Rheran, in the four years Lauresa had trained at his side, in the three years since over which he’d watched her at a distance, she had never seemed more beautiful.

From the poplar wood, he heard the call of an owl, another answering it from the distant forest, a faint echo. He felt the familiar pain again, felt the new lie twisting inside him in the deep place where all the other lies had been buried. He felt the scar her name made burning on his skin.

“What is it?” she asked.

In her look, he saw an uncertainty that he wanted to believe reflected his own. She took a step toward him.

Three words, Chriani thought. All it would take to end it, end the lie, end the pain that he only just realized had been crippling him for so long.

“Nothing, highness.”

He watched indifference fall across her like a veil, the same anger, the same distance in her that he still didn’t understand. She turned away, moved for downslope and the distant firelight of the camp beyond.

“I am ordered back to Rheran in the morning,” she said, “under Captain Konaugo’s escort. Under the assumption that you would rather not be part of his company, my father says you may remain here.”

Chriani wasn’t sure whether that was a choice he was supposed to decide upon or one that had been made for him. He hoped it was the latter.

At the bottom of the rise, a frozen creek bed crossed their path as it split a copse of willow, Chriani following Lauresa at the accustomed five paces. He would watch her ride out in the morning, he thought, and it would be over. No more waiting, no need to stand among the throng bidding her farewell from the Rheran docks alongside the rest of the city, because he’d be with the prince’s company a hundred leagues away. Silence from him, Lauresa gone, his life back to what it should be.

Easier that way.

“Why have I angered you?” he said abruptly. He heard the words hanging in the night air even before he felt the anger spit them up. In his gut, he felt the darkness twist like a creature separate from him. The anger following its own will, its own mind.

Lauresa stopped dead. She turned back, appraised Chriani coldly. Behind her, the arms of two ancient trees twisted together to form a kind of arch at the edge of the copse, moonlight through bare branches catching silver thread in her cloak that he hadn’t noticed before. A faint shimmering traced the princess where her chest rose and fell for a long space of silence.

“I thought you were different,” she said at last. “I was wrong.”

“Different from what?”

“Different from all the rest of them. The ones who fear what they can’t see, the ones who live by their superstition and their moonsigns. Regardless of the less than storied upbringing that saw her sent from my father’s court, my mother is still princess precedent and a lady of Brandishear,” Lauresa said evenly. “You would do well to remember that should you meet again.”

Chriani remembered the fear when he’d seen the horse vanish back to the fire it had been summoned from. He’d been feeling that fear all the time since, he realized suddenly. Feeling it feed the anger without knowing it, without knowing how to stop it.

“Superstitions are for children,” Lauresa said. “I expect it in those who know no better. I did not expect it in you.”

“Forgive me, princess, but I don’t recall word or rumor of the princess precedent being a court wizard during her time in the Bastion.” Chriani felt the words torn from the place where the darkness coiled. Where she turned back, Lauresa’s eyes flashed. “But that would be, perhaps, because she never was,” he said.

“My mother’s knowledge and gifts are her business…”

“Your mother carrying eldritch art in secrecy is a dangerous breach of law and custom.”

“What do you know…”

“I know that such power must be pledged to the crown…”