Clearwater Dawn (28 page)

The guards were still there when Chriani slipped back outside, not knowing whether they’d heard the heated exchange within the tent or not. With even the meager trappings of court there, it was easy to forget that the walls were only canvas. Little more than curtains, he thought, protocol alone hedging off the space and life of a prince, of a princess, officers, rangers, foot soldiers holding the most private custom of the night within sight and earshot of a thousand others doing the same.

At all the High Summer celebrations he’d attended since he came to the city, there’d been shadow plays, the market court opened up and cordoned off. He remembered backdrops of black silk that seemed to swallow the torchlight and the expectant eyes of the crowds that thronged there. He’d accompanied Lauresa and her stepmother once, long ago. The first year that they’d begun to train together, Gwannyn apparently finding more initial charm in the idea of Chriani as her step-daughter’s comrade-at-arms than she later came to.

And as he walked with no goal but to keep to the empty spaces where the camp was in constant motion around him, Chriani realized that all around him now was that same feeling. The backdrop of star-pierced cloud that screened the forest and the sky, white canvas awnings tugged at by the rising wind that screened the lives that had intruded on this place. The wall of the forest so close that he felt he might touch it, might drown in its depth, caught up in that shadow like it was set out for his eyes alone.

Not afraid of that shadow. Likely the only one in all of Chanist’s company who could say that.

He heard the return of the prince and his riders before he saw them, six horses pounding back through a haze of firelight along the central track. He didn’t see the warmages, still out riding the perimeter, he guessed. Setting sorcerous wards outside the sweep of the sentries.

The blur of motion that was the camp shifted toward Chanist, a bonfire burning high at the edge of the archery yard where Chriani cut past it, screening himself. He saw Konaugo emerge from the officers’ pavilion and move for the prince where he dismounted.

The captain had cleaned himself, Chriani noted coldly. No blood where his uniform had been changed.

But as Chanist tossed gauntlets and helmet to a waiting attendant, he stepped past Konaugo and through the shifting wall of troops that flanked him. And Chriani felt a sudden chill as a ripple of movement threaded through the mass of bodies to all sides, every face turning as it was realized that the figure the prince strode toward was him.

Chriani stopped short because he didn’t know what else to do. He nodded low where Chanist slowed before him, Konaugo and a half-dozen others following at the customary five paces. Around them, all the movement of a moment before had frozen fast.

“Any man who stands against dark magic and an assassin’s blades single-handedly is more like to end up a corpse than a hero,” the prince said gravely. Beside them, the fire spit sparks to the sky. Konaugo’s eyes in the haze of light were stark points of red. “I thank Brandis’s blood for your sake and my daughter’s that you have not, master Chriani.”

Chriani felt the familiar stillness in his tongue. The subtle inflection and qualification of rank that his response demanded slowed his thoughts.

“I would call myself more fortunate than heroic, my lord prince,” was all he could say.

“Fortune favors those who do not fear.”

“Only a fool forgets there are things worthy of fear,” Chriani said. Impulsive words, pulled from memory before he had time to realize how inappropriate they were. Chanist only smiled, though. Recognition there, Chriani thought.

“Barien said so to me as well. More than once.” The prince high set his hand on Chriani’s shoulder, the sword-hand grip firm there, a finger’s-width from the hidden war-mark and his own daughter’s name. For the first time since he’d punched that name into his skin, Chriani realized that the pain was gone.

“Barien was right in that as he was in most things.” Chanist was thoughtful as he continued, his voice pitched louder, Chriani realized. Carrying across the space of bodies. “As he was right about you. In his name, and in the name of my daughter whose life you saved tonight, I offer you commission in the prince’s guard.”

The hiss of the fire where the cold breeze fanned it was the only sound in the half-circle of five hundred figures that flanked them both. Chriani stared for what seemed like a long while.

“I am not of rank, my lord prince,” he stammered at last.

“You are now, Squire Chriani.”

At his side, Chanist gestured to a thickset sergeant, motioning him to unhook the falcon’s band from his left arm. He did so carefully, looking none too happy about it. Chriani’s hand was shaking as he watched his own arm rise as if it might have been lifted by an unseen force. Chanist slipped the insignia on, incongruous against Chriani’s over-patched tunic, the weather-stained cloak. The prince high bound it tight above the unseen mark of Chriani’s father, his company looking on.

Chriani felt something, then. A tightness in his chest and in his throat where all the memories that had sifted through him the past days spun suddenly through his mind at once.

I know what you should be, well as you know it,
Barien had said, and without wanting to, Chriani found himself thinking that except for chance, that might have been the last time he ever saw the warrior alive. Only the broadest twist of fate had led him to his dying mentor’s side that night, and to the command that in its own way had brought him here.
Keep her safe.
More time on the wall, a different corridor taken where he’d run for the central court, and he would have heard the news when all the rest did, too late.

He should have made rank at least a year before, but all the lingering darkness wrapped up that thought where it had dogged Chriani for even longer than the last year was gone suddenly. Replaced by a dark anger that this moment had finally come too late for Barien to take the pride in it that Chriani knew he would have taken. The same pride he felt now, so unfamiliar to him where it fought against the self-consciousness of five hundred pairs of eyes on him, and where it reflected the prince high’s weary smile that summoned up Barien’s smile that was gone now.

Chriani hadn’t seen where Konaugo had moved within the crowd as it slowly dispersed. He didn’t want to see him, but the captain stepped in close, an anger without bound or limit crossing the darkness between them. Konaugo’s shattered nose was whole again somehow. The captain with healing of his own, Chriani guessed. The privileges of rank.

“My lord prince,” Konaugo said with careful detachment, “I have further questions for our newly installed Squire Chriani regarding the events of this night.”

“Pass them to someone else,” the prince said curtly. He stepped away, a flick of his gaze bidding Konaugo to step close, the prince’s words unheard by all except the captain and Chriani. “Prepare a dozen horse and your best riders. Take a squad of rangers with you. The Princess Lauresa rides for Aerach tonight.”

The look of surprise on Konaugo’s face seemed as genuine as the sudden shock as Chriani stared.

“The Valnirata have argument with me,” the prince high said to his captain, “and I will not return to Rheran until it has been answered. But their assassins seeking me here and the attack that this squire prevented tonight shows it far too dangerous for the princess to stay. She’ll ride early and in secret for Teillai and the safety of her husband’s house. Her goods and servants can follow from Rheran once she’s there.”

And where Chriani stared, he felt all the anger shatter suddenly. All the betrayal, all the emptiness that he’d felt since the night of Barien’s death suddenly flooded back like the moonless tide.

Marriage in Aerach means the end of this life
.

What true freedom the world offered almost always lay in the ability to choose, Barien had liked to say. Chriani heard the voice in his head like the warrior might be calling to him from the other side of the fire, the memory slipping through him like the icy wind that the heat drew from behind him.

“Someone else offers you a world’s worth of options, you’ve still got no choice of your own,” Barien told him once. “Choice is you deciding that what’s important is the one thing they don’t offer.”

Chriani had laughed then. They were riding outside the walls of Tarenic, the princess high and the children finishing a month-long stay there. The summer that Chriani and Lauresa’s training would soon be ended.

“That’d be good talk coming from anyone else,” he said. “You spend your whole life taking other people’s orders. What kind of choice is that you’ve made?”

“Prince, peasant, or in between, everyone does someone else’s bidding one way or another,” the warrior said. “You think the prince high sits through trade and treaty talks for the laugh it gives him? Take on a country’s worth of people needing to be fed, safe, and sheltered before you get the time to think about what you need, tell me how it feels.”

“Chanist still makes choices I’ll never get to make. What about you?”

Barien considered for a moment.

“The choice I made is to get to a place where I take the prince’s orders and none other.”

“Orders are orders,” Chriani laughed again. “Your prince gives you an order one day you can’t stand to see carried out, what’ll you do?”

“Choose loyalty,” the warrior said evenly. “Or choose my conscience. Still my decision either way.”

Where Konaugo’s eyes bored into him, Chriani saw the captain nod and turn away. He heard gruff orders barked, a dozen of the guard scrambling for the stables, but he was distracted suddenly by Chanist’s hand on his shoulder.

“Sit with me,” the prince said.

In the mess tent, Chanist and Chriani sat alone at the officers’ table, a steaming joint of beef fresh from the spit set beside them. The prince had water and wine at his side, pouring both for Chriani but only the latter for himself.

To sit alone at meat across from the prince high was an honor so singular that Chriani had never let the dream of it cross his mind. When he was younger, when he was a child, he had dreamed of other things, though he had become ever more loathe to recall those dreams the older he got and the farther from him they seemed to slip. Title and rank, a place in the prince’s guard at Barien’s side. Once, he’d fancied himself captain of that guard some day, back in the day of the dead Hammeran who Konaugo had been promoted to replace the winter before.

But like the trappings of rank that Barien had so often ignored, Chriani felt how uncomfortably this honor fit him now. There was a tightness in his chest that had seemingly replaced the pain that had been there, the new insignia heavy somehow on his arm. Sitting silently, he watched where the prince hacked still-dripping meat from the joint to a trencher that he pushed between them.

“I put you on edge in the yard,” Chanist said as he ate. He motioned Chriani to do the same, Chriani trying to summon back some of the hunger he knew he should be feeling. “With my offer of commission. You have my apologies.”

“I was simply surprised, my lord prince,” Chriani said.

“As was I when Lauresa burst in to tell me you had bid her run while you fought an assassin and his sorcery to the death.” Chriani could imagine that performance, but something in the prince’s words caught at him. In her father’s tent, Lauresa had said that the warmages would assume that the eldritch fire had been the assassin’s magic used against Chriani, sure of herself then because she’d already set that story in play.

Chanist raised his tankard, Chriani clumsily lifting his own as the prince nodded formally.

“The things on which we set our sights are a pale measure of our worth when compared to the times at which fate sets its sights on us,” Chanist said.

He didn’t know, Chriani realized. Didn’t know what his daughter was, what she could do.

As he drank, he could see movement all around them, could feel movement even beyond the range of his sight. The perimeter guard still redoubled, couriers and sentries vague shapes in the half-light where the evenlamps gleamed along the distant edge of the prince’s pavilion. In the center of it, he and Chanist seemed to be the fulcrum point around which all the movement turned.

Around them, the empty mess tent was thick with the scent of mud and woodsmoke, and for a moment, Chriani caught himself watching the prince where he ate with thickly callused fingers. A world away from the Bastion, Chanist seemed suddenly more at home that Chriani could remember ever having seen him before. None of the trappings of court around him now, nothing even of the white linen that marked his tents.

This was the Chanist he’d met in the stables, Chriani thought. A prince with a love of simple pleasures that reminded him suddenly of Barien in a way he couldn’t express. A third-born heir, accepting of a life as soldier and father, perhaps even looking forward to that life. Then pressed to sudden service as a prince.

“You must have felt that way,” he said, the words out even before the thought had fully formed.

“What do you mean, master Chriani?” Chanist spoke evenly, appraised him.

Even watered, Chriani felt the potency of the prince’s wine slurring his thoughts, just as it had allowed the words just spoken to spill from those thoughts unbidden. He wondered at the stamina that allowed Chanist to drink it unmixed.