From around the near corner of the Bastion, he heard the horses on the training grounds, the stables bright with light as he’d stolen past them out of the gatehouse. He deliberated for what seemed like a long while over how serious Lauresa had been when she’d threatened to go alone, then deliberated again over whether he could go through with what he suspected was his only way of keeping that from happening.
“Which way shall we go?” the princess said again.
“Come,” Chriani replied.
Through the shadows of the apartments and the garrison kennels that spread beyond the low side of the courtyard track, Chriani led her on, kept her behind him as he watched for movement on the walls above. Around them, the keep was shut down for the day but Chriani didn’t feel the silence yet. Something else hanging this night against the pulse and sound of the city around them, the same sense of distraction he’d been feeling since the morning of Barien’s rites.
In the shelter of a narrow alley mouth that cut between a gallery and the private residences that flanked it, they lingered in shadow for a short while, Chriani watching as a pair of grooms led two horses in from the light of the distant training grounds. As they reached the stable doors, he pulled Lauresa forward, slipped in carefully behind them.
Beneath the shadowed ceiling of the loft above, Chriani quickly led the princess to the leatherworks where he’d come across her father two nights before, empty now. He told her to stay there until he returned, slipping off into the distant din of horses bedding down for the night, someone straightening nails with a faint echo of steel on steel.
In the bustle of movement that surrounded him, none of the half-dozen grooms so much as looked at him where he passed, just one more guard whose orders were best avoided. The stables were warm against the night air where it pushed in at the door, the scent of dung and hay dust heavy as Chriani slipped through shadows toward the stable gate. And even as he scanned the open edge of the loft overhead in the hopes of avoiding Kathlan, she rounded the corner from the harness room in front of him, a dozen paces away.
Her eyes were emerald-green in the light of the evenlamps across from her, the risk of fire making the stables one of the few places outside the Bastion where they’d be found. Chriani stopped, tried to speak but could only nod. He’d been hoping against hope that she’d be gone, still in the dinner hall across the courtyard from the Bastion gate, but in the back of his mind, he’d known that with horses being ridden late, this was where she’d be. He felt her smile as much as saw it. Felt an uncertain pain trace its way around the certain pain that the name of a princess made against his skin.
He adjusted the set of the dagger belt, shifted into the shadows as she crossed the floor to meet him. She kissed him more fervently than he wanted, looked up at him as she stroked his face, his own hand straying to the fringes of her rough-cut hair.
“I looked for you at the rites,” she began, Chriani pressing a finger to her lips.
“I know,” he said. “I couldn’t talk then. I’m…”
“I know. I understand, I mean. I’m so sorry.”
But even as she kissed him again, he felt her pull back. Watching him as if she could feel the reluctance that caught at him. Words hanging, Chriani clinging to the silence like he hoped he wouldn’t have to speak them.
“I’m on duty,” he said at last, almost the truth. “I need access out to the city, then back in later. No one else can know.”
“I’ll be here,” she said. She squeezed his hand, cast a glance over her shoulder to see who might be watching. And then Chriani saw her freeze suddenly, looking with her to see a figure emerge from the farrier’s stalls. Lauresa’s face was shadowed where she’d pulled the hood of the cloak up, but Kathlan’s nod told Chriani she recognized the princess all the same.
“Highness,” she said quietly, but she didn’t look to see the nod returned. Watching Chriani instead as she turned and limped away.
Where Kathlan led them to it, the stable gate was a wain-wide slab of steel-bound oaken beams likely stronger than the wall it was a part of. The bars were chained and locked like they usually were, but with a sinking feeling, Chriani saw a Bastion guard sitting there in a way that wasn’t usual at all. The keep in lockdown, he thought.
He recognized the guard. Garyan, tyro to Waltevi before he’d made rank at High Summer past. Two years younger than Chriani.
Where Kathlan waved him and Lauresa back to the shadows, she stomped out ahead of them. From a nearby bench, she grabbed an empty saddlebag, closed and cinched it tight.
“You!” she shouted. Garyan looked like he’d been drowsing as he started to his feet. “One of your gaumless couriers dropped his horse and left whatever message he was running still on it. Deliver this to wherever it’s supposed to go, now.”
Where she threw the saddlebag, the startled youth caught it just short of his head.
“I’m to watch the gate…”
“Before Ashlund decided you falling asleep in front of it would be better guard, watching the gate was my job, lack-knob. By contrast, running errands for your shite-sotted halfwit riders is most definitely not.”
Garyan looked like there was something he wanted to say, but whatever it was got quickly lost under the weight of Kathlan’s gaze. He half-nodded as if he’d half-forgotten he outranked her as he jogged for the door.
Kathlan checked to both sides as she fit a key at her belt to the lock, Chriani and Lauresa slipping up behind her. She pulled the chain as Chriani slid the bars, a pulse of frigid air hitting them as the door cracked inward. Kathlan waved Chriani back again, put her eye to the gap to carefully check outside before she pulled one door wide enough for him and the princess to slip through.
“My thanks,” he said. “We won’t be long.”
“I’ll be here,” she said again, but there was a cold edge to the voice this time. As Lauresa slipped out after him, the narrow breach of the gate slammed shut behind her. Chriani motioned her back into the darkness of the wall as he checked the road to both sides, clear. Then he motioned the princess forward, pulled the hood of his cloak up as he led her out into the intermittent light of the night markets beyond.
Outside the sheltered island of the keep’s walls, the city was alive, a distant pulse of noise and movement rising like a tide against the refined silence at its heart. And in the thought of that silence, something came to Chriani’s mind suddenly. Kathlan hadn’t asked dismissal of the princess, hadn’t nodded as she and Chriani had gone.
The air was chill, the night clear with a taste of the winter that had so far kept its distance, Chriani thought. Even with the early dark, the crowd that spilled out from the taverns of the trade quarter was heavy. Beyond the formal stalls of the night market, hawkers and merchants spilled over almost to the residential lanes, thick with the day laborers heading home from the taverns, or heading out to them. More than once as they made their way for the heart of the quarter, they passed off-duty garrison guards looking for drink or dice.
“Go slowly,” Lauresa said where she leaned in close to Chriani’s ear. “I wish to listen.” Chriani nodded, slipped the steel ring from within his sleeve, but Lauresa stopped him with a touch. She shook her head, moved closer to him as they walked. He felt her arm brush his side.
“Two people keeping silent in a crowd such as this will raise far more suspicion than the same two speaking.” Her voice was raised against the noise of that crowd, Chriani not hiding his discomfort as he gauged the reaction of the faces around them. “There are many means of concealment,” Lauresa said, “including hiding in plain sight. Growing up always under the scrutiny of others, you learn them all.”
Through a throng of acrobats whipping burning brands above the heads of an appreciative crowd, they drifted slowly, content to let the market’s movement carry them along. The urge to slip into the adjacent shadows of a half-dozen twisting streets was sharp in Chriani, a sense of being exposed fairly burning in his mind. But with every pair of eyes that passed
across him without seeing, he realized that the princess was right. The same distance in everyone around them, he saw. Taking them in without notice, the crowd a shield that hid them in plain sight.
“Keep speaking,” she said.
“What do you hope to find here?” Chriani asked. In the throng around them, he focused, a dozen intertwined conversations spilling past with every step.
“Where my father is gone.”
Across from him, a dust-streaked courier talked worriedly to a thickly muscled smith. He was afraid, Chriani realized. He caught frantic words, something about fire along the frontier, getting his family north before it was too late.
“Why not ask Ashlund?”
“Because Ashlund was not told to where the prince himself and the guard were riding, as were neither I nor my stepmother.”
In an alcove, he saw a young street gamine carefully present a dagger to a pair of lean farmhands. The blade was new enough that it had clearly been stolen, the boys inspecting it with a care that suggested they’d never touched one before. They had salt pork and copper to trade. The girl laughed them away.
“Even with what has happened, there are precious few things I can think of that would inspire my father to secrecy that severe.”
War, someone said.
Chriani glanced around him, couldn’t see who had spoken, loud enough that the voice carried across the crowd. He felt the reaction to it, though. He heard it echo back from all around him, heard the speculation.
…be at both ends of the Locanwater by tonight, someone said.
At the edge of the night market, he saw the wains and stalls of the weapons dealers doing brisker than normal business. He saw battered short swords change hands for twice the silver they were worth.
…a message they’ll understand.
At the edge of the market, two Ilvani wains were pulled to one side, the city guard inspecting them with a diligence that belied both the lateness of their watch and the innocence of the crystalware the wagons carried. Like he had on the wall before Barien was burned, like he had within the keep not so long before, Chriani felt the tension hanging, the sense of expectation sharp in the voices that filled his ears and the sudden memory of Barien.
There’s peace now.
So they say…
Behind him, he heard glass breaking, voices raised. He didn’t look back.
“We have arrived, highness.”
Where Five Hog’s House squatted at the corner junction of the trade road and the market court, its weathered white stones took on the blackness of the winter sky, stars impossibly bright overhead. Like anyone else who had spent a life in Rheran, Chriani had lost count of the number of times he’d passed through its doors.
By day, the tavern was packed with the merchants and laborers and guards of the market district, standing shoulder to shoulder at the bar for first call, or lined up four deep if the weather was bad and the crowds couldn’t spread to the nearby lanes. By dark, the caravan traders and the dockworkers and the keep garrison would descend on the torchlit cobblestones and the constant echo of talk and laughter there.
Where Chriani shouldered his way through the crowd at the door, he scanned the close shadows of the tavern’s interior as he made a mental note of the half-dozen guards he recognized, grateful for the shroud where the smoke of the open kitchen vented to the chimney high overhead.
The owner of the place was a dark-eyed teller of tales that Chriani had heard called Ceiya. He did service behind the bar, filling flagons with an unnatural speed as Chriani snatched one up along with a pair of tankards. One of the siolans he’d brought with him was tossed to the tavern master, who caught it without looking.
At his neck, visible only when he wanted it seen, Ceiya bore the wizard-brand that marked its bearer as a sorcerer with fealty to the crown. Stories circulated as freely as the steady flow of mugs to and from the taps that he’d gone by the name of Narthia when he was one of Chanist’s warmages, long years before his quiet retirement. While no one Chriani knew had ever seen the barkeep summon so much as a hint of spellcraft, the reputation of that brand kept Five Hog’s House one of the more sociable establishments in the city.
As he slipped back to Lauresa’s side, Chriani spotted two well-dressed traders rising on shaky legs from a corner table. But where he motioned the princess toward it, she nodded instead to a single vacant space at the open benches along the nearest wall.
Stepping past Chriani, she slapped the shoulders of the two men sitting to either side of the empty space, dockworkers by the look of them, arms tattooed and tar-streaked where they grudgingly moved down. And where she pushed Chriani to the bench, she slid in next to him as he sat, wrapping her cloak around them both as her body pressed close.
Chriani felt her leg alongside his as she shifted her weight along rough planking. From his first tankard, he drank more deeply than he’d planned.
Along the walls, braziers were burning against the cold, but even over the aroma of charcoal and charred meat at the kitchen fire and the close reek of a hundred laborers, Lauresa’s scent filled him. Soap and lilacs, he thought, suddenly conscious of the crust of sweat and dust that the long day had left still clinging to him as a serving tray careened past them, a boy no more than twelve hefting it like it weighed nothing. Lauresa grabbed another flagon as it passed, tossed a clutch of copper to the tray and filled the mug still in Chriani’s hands. She spoke only to him, close enough that she didn’t need to lean in.
“Listen,” she said again.
Within earshot, Chriani reckoned he must have heard a hundred different voices. Merchants, workers, mercenaries. A clutch of half-bloods whose tattered robes marked them as monastics from the frontier lands of the south. A cross-section of laboring Rheran, a hundred different lives intersecting in a crowded tavern on a clear winter night, and there was one thread alone that worked its way through every conversation.
Attempt on the prince’s life…
All around them, word of the failed assassination was all that anyone talked of, and in that talk, one word was whispered repeatedly with the edge of a dark curse.
Valnirata.
Where a bench had been pulled close to the warmth of a brazier, a broad-shouldered Elalantar caravan chief held forth to his rapt crew on the Ilvani plot to assassinate the Ilmar’s four princes, one by one. Chanist was first, he said, and even now his riders had split south and north to send warning to Holc, Aerach, and Elalantar alike. Beyond them, loud oaths against the warclans spiked a dozen conversations, Chriani recognizing a scattering of Holc caravan guards by their habit of spitting when they spoke the Valnirata name. Closer by, he heard snippets of a heated argument between two regulars of the city watch, and though he couldn’t make out where it had started, it finished with a clanking of mugs and a whispered oath.
Chanist will see all the fucking Valnirata burn…
Konaugo’s slip hadn’t mattered in the end, Chriani thought. The prince had been right. Word that the guard rode out against the Valnirata was on all lips, confirmation likely coming in from every courier and wagon that had passed Chanist’s troupe on its way. A kind of eagerness to the discussion, as if this truth had been expected somehow.
Even the Rheran Ilvani where they mingled amongst the room’s Ilmari patrons said it, a little too loudly, Chriani thought. Artisans and armorers, most of them, trading with the caravans from their craft-houses that rose in tiers above the garden quarter. He remembered the scene from the wall the morning before, the bare-edged anger of the Ilvani and the sentry who’d challenged him. The loyalty of crown over race suddenly seemed a thing that a great many were anxious to prove.
They sat for long enough that Chriani felt the beginning of a stiffness in his legs. The two of them listened, all the while talking of nothing against any gaze or ear that might have passed by them in the ever-shifting crowd. Chriani found himself explaining in greater detail than he ever would have wanted to what life in the gatehouse guard entailed, trying not t
o let his bitterness show. In the end, though, he answered more than he asked, no questions that he could think to put to Lauresa that didn’t involve the wedding in ten day’s time now.
Chriani downed three tankards in that time, hoping vainly that it would dull the sensation of Lauresa’s body warm against his. She’d made more room for herself when a pair of caravan guards who’d been flashing a conspicuous amount of silver staggered for the door, but in shifting down, she’d had to slide her arm behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder beneath the cloak now. It was the appearance that the place demanded, he knew, the two of them effectively invisible where they drank and spoke low in each other’s ears and took in the drifting conversation all around. All the while, though, he felt the dull burning of the princess’s name at his breast, her own fingers close enough to trace it out if she’d known it was there.
Along the adjacent wall, they heard someone speak of having seen the Prince’s Guard riding southeast, shadowing the Glaeddynfield road that ran from Rheran to Addrimyr along the northwest flank of the Greatwood. Lauresa was telling him of a time the summer before when Peran had hidden out in the throne room in order to eavesdrop on a half-day’s excise negotiations, and who had been discovered when she’d burst out from behind a curtain to indignantly order the ambassador to reject the Holc delegation’s offered terms.
Then, from across the room, a murmur drifted through the haze of conversation. Chriani’s senses were duller than he wanted them to be, but these words were sharp, hanging as if they were meant for him somehow.
Piss-sot Bastion guard can’t take out one Valnirata with a knife, don’t know what Brandishear’s come to…
Chriani was already heading for his feet, not even feeling the familiar surge of the rage within him until he felt Lauresa’s hand on his shoulder, pushing him back. He fought to slow his breathing, glanced to the figure who had made the comment. A laborer, nearly as broad across the middle as he was tall. He had a half-dozen empty tankards before him and a wide-set emptiness to his eyes. A fool mouthing words he wouldn’t remember in the morning.
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