He faltered. He didn’t know where Barien had been. Had no idea how the mysterious summons had even come to him.
Chriani felt a sudden chill. Konaugo watched him darkly, expectant. Out of uniform.
In the hall of records, the floor had been streaked red-black, signs of a bloody struggle. Handprints clutching the stones. All the garrison around him, all the guards he’d passed as he ran the outwall had worn the uniform of the watch. All of them except the watch captain himself.
Trust him not.
“Because I am troubled,” Konaugo continued, “with wondering why, if Barien’s concern for the princess was so great, did he simply not stay with her himself? Shout to raise the alarm, any regular patrol passing by in time even if he wasn’t heard at first?”
“I met him in the barracks corridor,” Chriani said. “On the way from our quarters.” It was first thing he could think of, trying to keep the fear he felt from his voice. “He must have been on his way to the princess’s chambers himself through the warden’s door. He ordered me there. I went.”
“And Barien went where?”
“I do not know, lord. I saw him return through the barracks, I mean.”
“You sound unsure.”
“No, lord…”
“When you found him dying in the archives quarter, you said you were making for the great hall from the prince’s court. Do you routinely make your way between adjacent wings by way of the opposite side of the Bastion, tyro?”
The stinging seemed to flare suddenly, faint pinpricks of fire across Chriani’s shoulders and scalp.
“I ran the outwall first, lord. I had no orders, I was looking for an officer but there were none…”
“The notion of finding an officer in the great hall at the service of the prince high escaped you?”
“Having been given no order, I was still under the order of Sergeant Barien, who I presumed would be in barracks or the staging ground…”
“And what were you doing out of quarters when he met you?” Chriani felt a pressure pushing down on him, tried to focus past the chill of Konaugo’s eyes.
“I had returned from duty in the armories.” Past Konaugo, at the far doorway, a courier rushed in, met by Ashlund. “I had been delivered a message,” Chriani said instantly, grasping at that image. “For Barien. I did not find him in quarters, and so was proceeding to search for him.”
“A message from who?”
“A merchant.” In his mind, a randomly caught memory, the last person he’d seen pass along the courtyard track that day. A bookseller, his pushcart laden with scrolls and folios and bound volumes whose covers had been stamped with Ilvani glyphs. “A courier delivered it, no one I knew. Barien was at the armory earlier but had left. From the tone of the courier, I suspected it might be important.”
“What was his mood?” It was Chanist who spoke, Konaugo stopped on the point of speaking again. “Barien, I mean? When he ordered you to my daughter’s protection, what was his mood?”
The prince’s expression was dark, Chriani saw. Something like worry there, the bones of age showing suddenly through the strength and skin of leadership, like the ripple of an undercurrent across still water. He knew how long Barien had stood in Chanist’s service. Warden to a nation’s heir, the trust that had been there.
“His manner spoke of great concern, my lord prince. I had not seen him like this before.” That part of it not a lie, at least. “He was afraid, my lord prince.”
“And he said nothing to you before his passing?”
Where Chriani felt Konaugo’s gaze boring into him, he slowly shook his head.
“No, my lord prince.”
Then behind him, there was movement at the side doors. The prince’s private entrance hall, the northern arm of the prince’s court and the residence behind it. Chriani saw something change in Chanist’s expression, the shroud of age cast off to reveal the strength again. He knew who approached quickly behind him even before he heard her speak.
“Is it true?” Lauresa called. “Barien?”
Chriani felt Konaugo’s hand on his shoulder, moving him back from the princess with as much force as he could get away with. Where she swept in, Lauresa wore a cloak of dark wool held tight at the shoulders, the sweep of a white nightdress visible beneath it. Her hair was down, clothes changed while Ashlund was held at the door, Chriani thought. Her father met her gaze, nodded slowly.
She looked to Konaugo, the captain’s dark look softening just slightly.
“I am sorry, highness.”
Chriani almost believed it.
He made a point of inclining his own head only as deep as the captain did, watched Lauresa’s gaze flick across his without slowing. She held her father’s hands, slipped into his tight embrace, her slight frame dwarfed by him.
“Is the rest of it true?” she said quietly. Her hand strayed to his wounded shoulder, but he held it away, gently. The business of Barien over with a word, Chriani thought. On to more important things.
“True enough,” the prince high said. “Though I daresay it will take more than one of them to ever finish me.” There was an edge of attempted humor in the prince’s voice, but neither smiled. “It is said that Barien may have attempted to come to you tonight. What do you know of that?”
“Nothing, my lord,” the princess said. Chriani felt something tighten in his chest. Where it still rested on his shoulder, Konaugo’s hand twitched. “Unless it concerned the matter of a message which I had asked to have delivered through him.”
“What manner of message?”
“I had asked Barien a week or more ago to seek out a volume of poetry on my behalf. The Lay of Ysabrylla, a copy in Movyan’s own hand if it could be found. A farewell gift to be sent to my mother in Aldac before my departure.” Where he watched her, Chriani thought he saw a trace of self-consciousness cross the mask of sadness she wore. “You had said once that it was her favorite,” she said.
“And still is, I would expect.” The prince managed a smile, but Chriani thought he saw an unfamiliar sadness in Chanist’s eyes. An uncertainty there that he’d never seen before.
“Barien did not want me seeking it myself through the collectors’ houses. Too many tongues wagging in the city in advance of the wedding as it stands, he said. He thought to not let them also wonder what secret paramour I might be sending such a work to. I had asked for confirmation from the bookseller that it had been received and sent on to my mother’s house.”
Chriani tried not to stare. There was no chance that she could have heard him speak the desperate fabrication only a moment before, no way she should have been able to summon up a story that tied to his so neatly.
“I have been told that Barien was coming not with a message, but to guard you. Did you see or speak with him this night?”
“No, my lord.”
Chanist nodded, asked nothing more.
Chriani remembered the stinging sensation, realized it was gone now. Truth magic. His head was spinning.
Where he watched the prince high and his daughter move for the side doors, they were speaking too low for him to hear. Chanist turned once, nodded to him and Konaugo in turn. Lauresa didn’t look back.
Whatever had happened was over, and Chriani was aware suddenly of a sense of displacement threading through him. Voices around him, guards in constant motion. There were more people at the other end of the table, he saw, rangers with them this time. A cavalry captain bent low with the garrison commanders, her voice angry where she spoke, discussions threaded by a tension he could feel. Chriani isolated, frozen. Not a part of it.
He should have made rank at least a year before, most tyros taking the arms of the guard by seventeen if not earlier. It was the anger holding him back, he knew, though Barien had never been direct enough to say so. Now Barien was dead, and there was a sudden void in him that he hadn’t felt for long years.
As the side doors closed behind Chanist, Konaugo’s hand on Chriani’s shoulder spun him hard. He lo
oked down at the dark eyes, the white scar.
“Take your things from Barien’s chamber to the gatehouse barracks. Wait there until you receive further orders from me. Move.”
“I would help in this action if you would so order me, lord.”
“Barien’s killer needs no more help from you.” Konaugo’s gaze was steel where he turned away, Chriani watching him for a long while. Then he turned, slipped past the guards at the main doors and away.
From when his mother died, Chriani remembered the feeling that was in him now as he ran through the great hall for the central court, not meeting the looks of the guards he passed. A numbness that wasn’t numbness, he thought. Not like cold, not like the sweet release of dull pain that follows the sharper pain of a blow. This was the opposite of that, as if he’d been opened up to all sensation at once. Every touch, every sound, every glance, every scent, every memory all pushing in on him, overwhelming his ability to take it in so that he felt none of it in the end.
He could feel his skin separate from him, detached. He let his fingers brush along stone walls, watched them as if they belonged to someone else. As he approached the intersection of the four garrison corridors, he heard bootsteps moving ahead at speed, felt their echo push through him as if he was mist.
Chriani slowed in the intersection, stared. There was no one there, the footsteps already fading to the north, running flat out but he hadn’t even seen the runner pass. His sight dulled, detached like the rest of him.
The barracks were all but empty as he passed through to Barien’s door for the last time, still unlocked from when he’d fled. The lamp was long-cold, Chriani filling it in the spill of light from the corridor. He lit it, quietly closed the door behind him.
Within the room, Barien’s presence was already gone. Chriani had hoped even as he’d run there that some trace of the warrior, some feeling of him would linger, even for a while. Something to bid farewell to like he hadn’t had a chance to bid farewell to the man himself. So afraid then, he realized. He hadn’t tried to speak the sword rites, not that he would have properly remembered them. He knew that Barien probably didn’t care, his roots in the northern borderlands always inspiring a discrete distance from the mainstream Brandishear customs that seemed to almost contradict his dedication to the land and the crown.
Chriani sat heavily on his pallet, dragged a battered locker from the corner where it sat. His clothes and effects were already in it, barely covering the bottom. He folded his cloak, set his spare boots in carefully on top of it before he realized that the pair he wore had long since gone significantly thinner across the sole. He swapped them, brushed the grime from the older pair as he packed them alongside a small purse of silver siolans he’d never had the chance to spend. The wooden dagger that had been the first one he practiced with was there, along with a fingerguard that Barien had given him but that Chriani had only shot with twice.
The dagger Barien had carved himself, and he’d laughed when he saw Chriani secreting it away even after his tyro’s writ had been handed down, allowing him to train with real steel. The fingerguard interfered with his feel for the bow, Chriani had realized early on. He needed to feel the draw of the string beneath his fingers to find his accuracy, ignoring the pain there as the calluses slowly built up. His mother’s picks he carried with him always. He realized now how little he really cared about the rest of it.
There was a silk scarf as well. Blue-green with darker blue trim, and a ripple of white cross-stitch that marked off a flowing ‘L’. Chriani pulled it slowly from where it lay neatly folded in the corner of the chest, fingered it absently. The princess had given it to him on that Elalantar trip five years before, slipping it into his hand as they’d crossed the River Daryan at Recla. She’d slowed to ride beside him along the bridge, whispered conspiratorially that it was custom in her stepmother’s land that they were entering now. A lady chose a champion that way, she said.
On the other side, Barien had ridden up as she’d cantered ahead again, the scarf squirreled away within Chriani’s vest but his face still flushed with an unfamiliar heat.
“Don’t get no ideas,” the warrior said. Chriani was only two years older than when he’d heard the words before, but he understood the second time.
In the chamber proper, he looked around, wanted to find something worth the risk of taking. Something to bring a little bit of Barien with him, but all of it was empty now. The boots and uniform, the books of lyric poetry that the warrior would read aloud on particularly dreary nights, the dress sword and the fighting blade, either of which Konaugo would have cheerfully taken back along with Chriani’s head if he so much as drew them from the scabbard.
He remembered his mother’s gravesite, and the stones they laid there. Taking them from the foundation of the house where they’d lived, his grandfather had built a low cairn that the moonstone capped, the carved crescent set to ward off the spirits of the night. Within the frame of stones, they placed one of her chisels, and a ring that her own mother had given her, and a bracelet that was beautiful in a way that meant it was Ilvani. From his father, Chriani guessed, but he never found out for sure.
When he’d asked his grandfather why they’d done all that, Chriani was told that the spirit of a person touches the place they live, and the things that come to represent that life. When people die, his grandfather had said, their life force passes back into the world — passes back again to the realm of life like the body that contained that life will pass to the earth in time. But the spirits of the dead lose their memory of life, and so those left behind build a place where they can look to hold some of that memory for them. A place for the living and the dead to touch again through the things their lives once touched together.
Even then, Chriani hadn’t believed it. He blew out the lamp.
At the door, the locker on his shoulder, he glanced back once, slipped into the light of the corridor.
Then he stopped, turned back slowly. He stared for a long while.
Where the dress sword hung, it had shifted. Except that Chriani hadn’t touched it, only glanced to it as he walked once around the chamber. He hadn’t noticed the movement then as he did now, hanging in the wash of faint light from behind him at an angle just slightly differently than the angle it had always hung. Barien hadn’t worn the blade in over two years, and only rarely before then. He had a great knack for somehow always managing to be on detached duty whenever official events threw the keep into formal dress, most often dukes and high lords from Aerach and Elalantar stopping by to pay respects or beg favors.
Slowly, Chriani slipped back in, set the locker down. He lit the lamp again, shut the door behind him. He paced close to the wardrobe where the scabbard hung.
With no effort, he remembered every other time he’d ever seen it, comparing the memories to where he stared now. And then, looking around him, he felt a sudden spike of uncertainty as he took in Barien’s quarters — pallet and footlocker, wardrobe and rough shelves, a weapons chest that held a brace of daggers and a crossbow the warrior never used. Something changed, subtle differences. Someone there, going through the room but doing their best to leave no trace of disturbance.
Things he noticed that no one else would. The gifts that parents give.
The door had been unlocked when he came back, the way he’d left it when he burst out. But if any of the garrison guards had come, they would have locked it behind them, all the barracks doors opening to the same key.
He remembered the bootsteps. Someone passing unseen, sound fading down the north garrison corridor where it led away from the barracks wing.
He was out into the corridor at a run, knowing he was far too late to do anything but wonder what he’d missed. His steps were a whisper along the dark silence of the stones, the dining halls empty of the sounds of voice and drink they’d be full of on any other night.
At the intersection of the four garrison corridors, he dropped, gazed intently across well-lit stone. He’d heard boots movi
ng fast, mentally sketching out the distance of the stride that pace represented.
There. Two faint scuff marks, matching where they stood two arms apart. A faint crescent the thickness of his little finger, the toe of a hard-soled boot hitting the stones at a run.
Where Chriani crawled to the closest mark, he inhaled carefully, tried to place the faint scent that was there. One finger touched the grey-black mark, then was carefully tasted. His mother’s lessons. The senses work in concert, she used to say, so spread your faith past only sight and sound. The creatures that will track you do so with scent, taste, touch. Don’t stifle those gifts in yourself.
Steel, he thought. The faint tang that kissed his fingers when they held a blade against the whetstone or worked the picks. Steel-shod boots, passing at a run. The sound he’d heard, no one there when he passed through.
Chriani pushed along the floor, the trail picked up easily where it turned along the barracks corridor, but he still didn’t understand. The boots that had made these marks were a luxury for the front lines of wars the likes of which they hadn’t fought in Brandishear for a generation. As he approached the armory corridor again, Barien’s chamber at the end of it, he knew which way the marks would turn.
Then behind him, footsteps. It took a moment for Chriani to realize how long he’d been hearing them already, the sound registered faintly but shunted off by the racing of his thoughts.
He got to his feet barely in time, so that he was only walking in the empty corridor instead of crawling along it when they appeared. Three guards in uniform, and Konaugo still out of it where he led them. They rounded the corner away from him, heading for the southeast tower and the armories there, opposite Barien’s chamber at the other end of the hall. Chriani tried to fall back to the shadows, but he saw Konaugo glance back. He felt the steel of those eyes again as the captain raised his hand, the others halting without a word.
Slowly, Konaugo approached.
“Explain.” The voice came low from the barrel chest.
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