Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  That look melted away once they saw Chriani’s arm, though, and the insignia of the guard there. They nodded to him as he passed, Chriani nodding back as he spurred on. But in their eyes, he saw the same tangible energy he’d felt in the Bastion the morning of Barien’s burning. And as the sun finally rose and he spurred on against the chill of frost and the scent of woodsmoke that spread from the sparse settlements to the west, Chriani thought he could feel that same undercurrent of tension hanging across the silence. As unmistakable as the slow change in the weather promised by the freezing mist that the dawn burned away. Only days since the attempt on the prince’s life, and the peace that Chanist himself had wrought thirteen years before seemed ready to unravel now. The eastern frontier already alive with the expectation of war.

  All along the western flank of the road, a barrier of scrubland marked off the extent of the farmsteads as if a knife had sliced its way along the fields’ edge. Beyond it, a swath of land a day’s ride across was given over to willow and wolf-grass, the black loam of the delta as rich as any farmland in the Ilmar, forever left fallow for the fear that lived on both sides of the trees.

  Through the fringe of the Greatwood, the scout trails cut their barely visible pathways through ever-present shadow, Chanist’s rangers and local garrisons from Addrimyr patrolling there endlessly, watching for signs of movement, of any plotting from the far side of the Valnirata frontier. Like the rangers on the Brandishear side, the Valnirata had their elite carontir patrols, ceaselessly patrolling the Greatwood as the first line of defense against the invasion that both sides seemed to have been expecting since the Ilmar treaty was signed. How much longer they’d have to wait, Chriani didn’t want to guess. Old hatreds died hard, it seemed.

  It was nearing dusk when he came to Caredry’s walls at the mouth of the Locanwater, the river winding between low ash hills where terraced fields lay heavy with frost. The broad city-keep was the last stop and way station for those travelers and traders heading out along the Clearwater Way. It was a hard day’s ride each leg of the journey to the four keeps that were the only safe stopping places along the Wayroad — Gleoran, then Durrant, Talimeth, Rhercyn, then a last day to pass through to the city of Werrancross in Aerach.

  The fortified keeps existed only to protect the meager flow of riders from the perils that dogged the road. Those who walked it would have to fend for themselves on the longer journey between those isolated stops. However, those foolish enough to walk the Clearwater Way typically either had skill enough to deal with its dangers, or carried with them a wish to die that the exile lands were only too eager to answer.

  Chriani guessed that Konaugo’s company would have ridden past the city without stopping, not wanting to tip anyone’s suspicions that his troupe was anything other than a scout party on routine patrol. As close to the hostile frontier as Caredry lay, patrols would have been commonplace even before the stepped-up tensions of the past week. He pulled the roan up in front of four gatekeepers, made sure his right arm and the insignia there were in plain view.

  “I seek the patrol that rides from Addrimyr,” he said in what he hoped was an echo of Barien’s voice. “I have a message.”

  “There was a troupe passed just after daymark, lord,” a scarred veteran said where he stepped up. “Twenty and a captain, I counted, if that was who you’re looking for. They took water and headed straight out the Wayroad.”

  The unfamiliar tone of respect in the voice caught Chriani by surprise, and he clumsily nodded thanks and spurred off. That much time since Konaugo had passed meant that the captain was moving even faster than he’d thought. Darkness falling already meant he had no hope of even getting close to them that night.

  He was just out of sight of the gates when he saw the ranger marker at the forest’s edge, the tracks of a dozen horses bearing south into the wood. Konaugo would have left the road the moment its curve had masked the troupe’s movements from the city, a force that strong likely facing no risk of ambush or attack from within the trees.

  For the most part, the exile bandits that Valnirata and Ilmari alike called the crithnala stayed clear of the wide swath of patrolled territory to either side of the Clearwater Way. The exiles called that broad territory Crithnalerean and claimed it in their own name, but the forces of Brandishear and Aerach held the Wayroad with a deadly and almost casual defiance. Their patrols swept constantly east and west, the ranger trail that Konaugo had taken marking the southernmost extents of their watch. Chriani checked behind him, no sign of anyone on the road as he made for the forest’s edge ahead, but he had made only minimal headway along the trail before he was forced to stop for the night, Lauresa somewhere ahead in the frigid dark. He lit no fire himself, sleeping close to the roan when he could.

  He was up before dawn the next morning and rode hard, the tracks of Konaugo’s company leading him on as he watched for signs of rearguard patrols. He was alone on the trail for the better part of the day, though, conscious of the chill silence that swallowed the horse’s steady steps, wrapped him tightly.

  Within that silence and the tight web that Konaugo’s security would make for her, Chriani knew that Lauresa would stay as safe as she would have within the walls of Caredry or the Clearwater keeps ahead. Chanist’s order had been about security in the end, and setting camp in isolation meant avoiding the eyes that would have inevitably asked as to the reasons for a twenty-strong escort and to the identity of the noble they rode for. On horseback, in the cloak of Konaugo’s company, she would have passed for a ranger easily enough along the road, but within the city, it would have had to be private chambers and three guards on every door.

  As dusk fell, Chriani saw the lights of the camp long before anyone in it would have spotted him approaching. In the dark that loomed within the fringe of the Greatwood, he left the roan tethered in a small copse a safe distance away, felt for the wind and circled around to keep it in front of him. He’d left his sword with the horse but slung the bow he’d liberated at the camp across his back, as much for comfort as anything else. Not much chance he’d live long enough to use it, he knew, should he come up against Konaugo one last time.

  In a stand of twisted fir turned white with rime, a flock of northern dusk-thrush had settled. He came in from the south, slipped below them silently as their sharp-edged twilight song rang clear in the chill air.

  Konaugo’s company had set themselves atop a low rise. The mound of shale and ragged turf would come alive with green in the spring, but was a frozen expanse of wild-rose hedge and brambles now. Between him and the light lay a field of loose scree that would betray every misstep with sound. Konaugo had guards circling at regular intervals where Chriani lay low and watched.

  In the gleam of the fires, he saw only one tent, standing opposite the bedrolls set up along the crest of the rise. He knew who’d be within it.

  At trees staggered around the camp, the horses were tethered in twos with soft harnesses, ready to be ridden in an instant even if the need for fast escape meant no time to saddle them. It was a cavalry tactic stolen from the Incursions, Chriani knew. The Ilvani had ridden without saddle then, too many night-time ambushes claiming too many Ilmari lives in their wake. The Ilmar forces adopting the enemy’s tactics like they’d adopted their weapons, the shortbow of the cavalry giving way to the more powerful Ilvani horsebow in all the years since.

  He’d eaten only half of the first day’s rations since the previous morning, his appetite gone as he rode. He felt a dull hunger now, though, watching Konaugo’s patrols circle as he pushed slowly closer. He watched for long enough to feel the unconscious rhythm of their pacing, looked for the opening he’d need. He watched the halo of light at the eastern horizon mark the promise of the Clearmoon rising, knew he’d have to move before it broke.

  And there, a quick gap where a narrow shelf of rock below the camp was clear, two guards passing each other to leave a space between their movement and the passing of a third, still circling out beyond the princess’s te
nt.

  Low through the shadows, Chriani moved, the whisper of the wind and the thrush-song around him the only sound. As he slipped across the boundary of the camp, he let the instinct take him, watching the faint shifting of movement as he stood quickly, walked casually away from the firelight, his own cloak a close enough match to any of the others at the distance he meant to keep.

  He was behind the princess’s tent in a dozen paces, took a moment to scan to both sides, no one around. Then he was on the ground again, a shadow where he slipped up against the canvas. He had his mother’s pick between his fingers, used the sharpened edge to cut his way quickly through each thick stitch along the corner seam.

  From inside, then, he heard Lauresa sing.

  At the canvas, his hand faltered as it almost never did, and twisting through him like some sleek shadow of her voice, Chriani felt a sudden rush of strength he couldn’t explain. He felt himself opened up to the night, the faint shifting of movement and voices distant around him, in touch with himself in a way he couldn’t remember feeling since his dogged pursuit of a missing princess that terrible night.

  And though he wouldn’t have recognized it at the time, the feeling of two long days’ ride filled him now with the unmistakable sense of purpose whose absence had hit him hard as he’d walked Chanist’s camp the night before. He was tired to his core. He felt the memory of the pain burning at his breast as if Lauresa’s sweet song was brandy across the open wound her name made. He felt the tightness of the insignia that flanked that name now, remembered the fear and the uncertainty and the pride he’d felt when Chanist had bound it to him, only two nights before but somehow a world away now.

  And even as it came and just as quickly flitted away, Chriani realized that he wanted that feeling again. He wanted that purpose, wanted all the unspoken faith in the salute the prince high had given him. But even as he thought it, he realized with dark humor how unlikely that all was for him now. Two nights after receiving the commission that every Bastion tyro coveted from the first time they set eyes on the central court, two nights after the singular honor of eating across from the prince high himself, he was without leave, on the run, and breaking into the Princess Lauresa’s tent.

  What was he thinking? Or, more to the point, when would he start thinking? Or was this the same turbulence that had always seemed to rule his life, just taking different shape now? Fear when he was younger, growing to anger through his long adolescence at Barien’s side, and now turned to something else. Some impulse of self-destructiveness, Chriani somehow obligated to tear down any bridge before he might even attempt to cross it.

  Or had it always been fear all along?

  Without feeling any hint of it rising, Chriani felt himself overwhelmed now with the same desperation that he remembered from the death of his mother and grandfather. The fear of the long month he’d walked the road to Rheran on the meager strength of berries and the eggs he could steal from farmhouses along the way. The fear of the mark at his shoulder and the world around him that his mother had warned him against but that she had never meant to let him face alone.

  He’d been afraid of being alone until Barien took him in, and then had been afraid of failure until Barien taught him that he had the strength to succeed. And then he’d been afraid of succeeding because always in the back of his mind, he felt the weight of the secret that he had carried with him since the day he was born, and that had taken on darker urgency with his mother’s death.

  The section of the tent wall he’d carefully split was wide enough to admit his shoulders. He tested it with his fingers to make sure there was no second layer beyond it.

  He felt the pride falter. He felt the memory of Chanist’s smile and of Barien’s faith in him that had never been repaid twist cold in him suddenly.

  Like Barien, Chriani knew what he should be. He could feel it, could see it some days like a waking dream. And even as he felt it, he felt the fear that told him what he was would never allow what he should be to come to pass.

  He heard Lauresa’s song again, sharp in the silence, and without his even looking, her voice told him that she was on the opposite side of the tent and that she was alone. The two things he most needed to know as he slipped his cloak off, pulling it through behind him as he twisted through the narrow gap of shadow he’d made. All the long years he’d watched her, all the time spent atop the walls across from her balcony, he’d never once heard her sing in anyone else’s presence.

  Where he carefully pressed the gap closed again, Chriani found himself within the princess’s own bed, the near half of the tent given over to thick layers of sheepskin piled on a narrow palette. A pale scrim of gauze hung against the other half, a shrouded evenlamp burning close to where the flap at the opposite wall was sealed tight.

  Beyond the gauze, he saw her. Four steps away, she stood turned from him, naked except for the plain steel band at her finger and the chain of the lapis pendant where it gleamed at her neck. She was washing at a steaming enamel basin, her voice a delicate echo of glass where she half-whispered, half sung the same song he’d heard on the road. The Ode of Seilonna. The song of leaving.

  Where a thin shift of ilvanweave hung at the tent pole, she slipped it on, draping herself in white as her voice slowly trailed off, and Chriani crouched there for a long while, expecting her to turn in surprise at some point, then needing to correct for the silence of his entrance when she didn’t.

  “That was very beautiful,” he whispered.

  Across from him, Lauresa flinched. She didn’t look back.

  Chriani had half-expected her to wheel on him in fright or anger, some echo of what he’d seen in her that night in the war room. Knowing that it had all been artifice then. Some part of the elaborate strata of lies that had always made up Lauresa’s life. Expecting it to be real now, real for once and the last time. But when she finally spoke, all that he heard in her was a kind of expectation he didn’t understand.

  “How did you get here?” she said quietly.

  Outside, Chriani heard voices rise above the thrushes’ song, someone laughing at an unheard joke. In his mind, he picked through a half-dozen different explanations that would likely have made a better impression than the truth, but there was no point anymore.

  “Stole a horse and rode after you,” he said. “Broke across Konaugo’s perimeter. Cut my way in through your tent.”

  Chriani heard her laugh, but there was no mirth in the sound.

  “You came to prove how easy it will be for the assassin to undo all my father’s intent to protect me?”

  “I came to tell you I love you.”

  He saw her start, look back to meet his gaze, just for a moment. She was in shadow, the white of the shift that draped her seeming to flow and merge with the pale throat, darkness clinging to it where it tented gently across her breast. Chriani saw that breast rise and fall with her breathing, loud in the stillness. And in her eyes, in the brief instant before she’d turned away once more, he saw a look that he’d never expected to see again beyond the dreams that he’d always known would haunt him.

  “I’m sorry,” Lauresa said. There was an edge in her voice that Chriani could almost place.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for.” All he could think to say.

  “I have my deceit to be sorry for,” the princess said. And through the clear tone, he heard the girl’s voice he remembered from all those days together. All the rides that had taken them out across the Rheran farmsteads and beyond. “I have my anger from that night in the war room, when all I could think was that you were working for my father. That my own lack of care had seen you discover my secret.”

  “I would never betray you,” Chriani said.

  “You wear the armband of the Prince’s Guard.” Chriani hadn’t seen her note the insignia in that quick glance, but she would have heard the news from her father’s own lips, he realized. “You serve my father and his court. Betraying me is your duty now.”

  Choice is you decidin
g what’s important, Barien had said.

  Where he pulled the armband from his sleeve, Chriani was fairly certain she heard it tear. He tossed it to the floor in front of her, saw her glance down.

  “I know my duty, princess…”

  She was silent a long while, Chriani still watching her back, the slight tremor that threaded the rise and fall of her shoulders.

  “Please go,” she said at last. It was the voice from the war room again.

  “Look at me first…”

  He had no idea why he said it. No idea why it was suddenly as important as it seemed, the need to see the blue of her eyes one last time. The need to seek what he thought he’d seen there a moment before.

  “No rank that you will ever have gives you the right to order me, tyro. Get out.”

  “Squire,” Chriani corrected her, knowing how little difference it made. “Look at me.”

  Lauresa laughed then.

  “Do you not understand? Two day’s ride with nothing else to think about, and not even now is this clear to you? I saw this moment coming, Chriani, since the day our training ended. This laughable obsession. Love me? You are a fool.”

  There was a measured anger in her now, and where she paced away from him, Chriani followed, trying to circle around her but she was quicker, her face always shifting away.

  “Every knight who serves a princess falls to this same pathetic sickness of the heart,” she said. “Barien himself said as much to me before the princess high ordered my training ceased, but I had no idea until now how right he was.”

  Chriani felt something twist inside him, Barien’s name like a knife in his gut.

  “Look at me.”

  “In the midst of what looks like it may be war between the Ilmar and the Valnirata, I am married in a month. Do you imagine that I have the time for your puerile fantasies?”