“Look at me, then, and it will be the last time.”
“Get out, Chriani.” He heard the coldness in her, feared for a moment that someone outside the tent would hear them.
“I’ve loved you since we were children,” he said. He felt the rush of words within him open up like some long-drawn sluice gate had been suddenly and finally freed. “I would have done anything for you. Anything to win you. Anything to make you happy.”
For most of the past month, he’d tried to remember the last time he’d seen that look, tried to remember when the feeling that had wrapped itself up in that shared childhood had finally broken, but he couldn’t. He could remember the times it had been there, could remember a time when it was incontrovertibly gone, but the transition had slipped past him somehow. Unseen.
“Please go,” she whispered. The anger still there, but something else twisted in with it now. Something familiar.
Outside, Chriani heard footsteps approach but he didn’t care, the ragged cadence of his pulse seeming to twist in with the regular rhythm of those footfalls as they passed away again.
“Look at me.”
“Leave…”
“From the moment I stood behind you and guided your hand on the range that day, I loved you, Lauresa. Every moment I spent with you. Look at me.”
“We were children…”
“Children younger than we were then have known war. Children can know madness, children can know deceit, can know fear. Tell me they can’t know love.”
Beneath each word, Chriani thought he saw her flinch. Some trick of the light, Lauresa suddenly frail where she twisted from him, held her hand to the tent’s central pole as if she was steadying herself.
“And children can know friendship,” she whispered hoarsely. “Children can know devotion that crosses lines of rank and class, but these things aren’t love.”
“I was there, Lauresa. I know what it was. Look at me…”
She turned then.
Chriani saw the tears where they tracked her cheeks, saw the eyes in the glow of evenlamps burning the blue of a High Summer sky.
He saw the look he remembered, felt it flood through him like warm rain.
“I loved you, too, Chriani…”
And then she was against him, her hands in his, her mouth at his, and there was no sound, no movement, no time.
He understood then. He understood it in the taste of her, and in her hands at his head now, holding him tightly, and in her tears where the blue eyes squeezed them to trace her cheeks. All the distance in her, he thought. All the arrogance, all the false pride designed to push him away because she’d spoken the truth.
She had known this day was coming. Her obligation to marry in the name of the state, and the pain of them losing each other like she knew they would some day. Easier to turn away before it ever had a chance to happen.
Lauresa hid her secrets well.
That night in the war room, he’d looked for recognition but there’d been none, but in the blue eyes where they opened now, he saw a familiarity that seemed to burn with its own clear light. He thought he saw himself reflected in those eyes, knew that was impossible.
I remember you…
Outside, the bird-sound shifted with the wind, a trace of woodsmoke drifting where the chill breeze must have turned. The thin shift bunched in his hands as Lauresa’s own hands found his neck and pulled him close, and her breath in his ear was a music as sweet as any song she’d ever made.
Where she held his face in her hands, she gently closed his eyes with her lips, kissed him again to the salt taste of her own tears. She was in his lap and his cheek was wet where they both wept now, Chriani not remembering how they’d slipped to the floor. And over and over, she whispered words that he had to focus to finally understand.
“I’m sorry…”
He found the strength to place his hand to her mouth. He felt her breath trace chill fingers where she kissed them, not sure how long they held each other until he became suddenly aware of laughter at the distant fire, punctuating the silence of the night and the sound of his own heart in his chest.
Chriani froze.
Where his hand came up, it seized Lauresa’s where she stroked his cheek. Outside, he could hear the ripple of wind where it plucked at the canvas, but the plaintive song of the dusk-thrushes had faded in a way it shouldn’t have. He hadn’t heard it go.
Then there was a distant hiss that Chriani recognized with an awareness rooted deeper than memory, and he pulled Lauresa under him as he rolled, the sheepskin up and over them both as a volley of ash-grey arrows shredded the tent.
From the camp, the shouts of alarm and the screams of the dying came with no measured space between them. Chriani didn’t remember pulling Lauresa out through the gap he’d cut in the tent wall, didn’t feel the freezing night against the wetness of his eyes where he frantically wiped them. He had his hand locked to hers, taking in the scene in a single glance. A frozen moment of time.
From the downwind side of the camp, a rain of dark bowshot cut through the frantically running troupe and the screaming horses. He saw archers returning fire, but they were pushing back toward the remains of Lauresa’s tent, trying to protect her rather than take the cover that the hollow of the hill would have given them.
He saw the Valnirata, then. Some twenty strong, they raced in on horseback behind the hail of their own missiles, rolling across the perimeter guards where they fell. Chriani recognized the lean horses they rode, woven reins clutched tightly where they hurtled up the low rise of the hill. In the light of the Clearmoon just risen above the trees, he recognized the knotted lines of the war-marks on their cloaks.
In the center of it all, one rider swept through on a coal-black charger. Chriani saw sharpened steel at the stallion’s hooves, heard it screaming in rage as it reared and slashed at the troops that tried desperately to circle around Lauresa’s tent. He saw the two warmages already down, bodies riddled with arrows where they were crushed beneath a flurry of hooves. As he pulled the princess with him, Chriani instinctively wrapped his own cloak around her to cover the white shift, slipping through the shadows as he sought a point of safety in the chaos.
He saw Konaugo then.
On the opposite side of the encampment, the captain was a blur of motion where he whirled with an axe in each hand, dropping two Valnirata on foot even as he spun to take the legs out from under a horse as it tore past him, its rider screaming as he fell. Chriani didn’t know how he managed it, but Konaugo saw him somehow. From across the encampment, through the haze of flying hooves and the frantic shouting of his troops, he turned. The rage in his eyes was one Chriani recognized.
He pulled Lauresa behind him as Konaugo charged, but the time it took him to fumble the bow from his back was all the captain needed to cross half the horse-churned ground between them, moving at a speed that belied his thickly muscled bulk. Even as he notched an arrow, Chriani knew it was too late, Konaugo screaming as both axes left his hands in a single fluid motion. Then Chriani saw the scything steel arc past him to the left, and he instinctively shot his arm around Lauresa, dragging her down as the two Valnirata stealing up on foot behind them were cut down.
Where he rolled up again, Chriani managed two shots, a horse bearing down on Konaugo from behind narrowly twisting past him where its rider took both shafts to the chest. Konaugo had somehow pulled the sword from the dead rider’s saddle scabbard even as the horse careened away, already running again, and Chriani realized that it was the princess his eyes were locked to, hacking through two more faltering horses where they tried in vain to scramble back.
Neither Chriani nor the captain saw the black stallion.
Konaugo was still running, didn’t have time to check himself where the steel-shod horse slammed into him. Chriani watched him fall where the sword was torn from his hand, close enough that he heard the sharp crack of bone. Close enough that he could lurch for him, grabbing without thinking, trying to pull the bulky body out of the horse’s
path but catching only his cloak.
Konaugo was there, then he was gone. Chriani felt a stabbing pain lance through both arms where his fingers felt like they’d been torn free of his hands, and the force of even that secondary impact knocked him from his feet as the screaming stallion’s hooves drove Konaugo to the ground.
Chriani saw the stallion bear off, hooves striking sparks from the shale rise at the crest of the hill. As he crawled close, he had time to watch his captain die. Konaugo’s left arm was shattered, the hand of his right clutching frantically at the air as Chriani forced himself up, tried to clear his head.
“Princess…” the captain whispered, and Chriani realized that he was speaking to Lauresa where she scrambled through the mud, helped Chriani rise.
Konaugo said nothing else after that.
Where the black stallion skidded and wheeled, it churned the frozen hillside to mud again. Chriani recognized the rider then — the scars across the pale cheeks visible to his eyes where the hood of the cloak had shifted. No sound from the assassin as he slammed the steel boots hard into the screaming horse’s side, bearing straight for them.
“Move,” Chriani said.
He grabbed Lauresa’s hand in his, slick with blood. Where it lay in the open mud before him, he snatched up one of Konaugo’s handaxes as he headed for the woods, cutting by instinct for the frosted shadows of the rose hedge that edged the steeper slope of the hill. Behind him, he heard the stallion pounding closer, then at the last moment, he pulled to the left, leading Lauresa in a leap from a plunging bluff of shale and sand that the rider would have to circle around in order to descend. He heard the horse skid to a frenzied halt, didn’t look back.
They skidded along a narrow cleft where loose scree skittered underfoot, then hit the grass at a run, a horse and rider suddenly looming up. One of the outrider archers, bow dropped where a handaxe whirled in the moonlight. Chriani broke from Lauresa to dive beneath the startled horse, swinging himself up the other side. He had even less aptitude for the axe than he had for the swordplay Barien had taught him, so he let the rage carry him, let it drive his arm where he slipped beneath the rider’s slashing attack and hit hard. With Konaugo’s weapon, he smashed down relentlessly to the sound of breaking bone and the warm spray of blood and the Valnirata rider’s strangled scream.
As he fell back to the ground, Chriani ran for Lauresa. The horses that Konaugo’s troupe had ridden were dead or scattered, but the Valnirata steeds were an unknown he didn’t want to contend with. Not sure whether the aggressive Ilvani horses would take a rider other than their own. But even as he grabbed the princess’s hand, an image fixed in Chriani’s racing mind. The quickest glimpse of the fallen archer, twisting from one stirrup where the frantic horse tried to shake the dead weight that pulled it to one side. Only it wasn’t an Ilvani whose slack features slipped from the bloody cloak as it tore free.
It was no face Chriani had ever seen before, but the woman who wore it was unmistakably Ilmari. Her dark hair was cut rough and short in a style that no woman in Rheran, warrior or not, would have ever worn. Across her face, he saw the same ritual scars that lined the cheeks of the assassin play out, the skin pale as if it had never seen the sun.
Chriani felt a chill he didn’t understand, but there was no time to think. He sensed the shape and movement of the battle around him as he set a straight-line course for the copse, hoping that the roan was still tethered there more then he’d hoped for anything in his life. He could separate out at least six horses in the storm of hoofbeats that followed them, tried not to judge the distance that remained to the trees against how fast the sound was moving.
And then at the forest’s edge, he saw a faint shimmer of shadow. Movement played out across the endless wall of green-black, and there was a rustling that rose above the hiss of the wind.
He pulled Lauresa to the ground again without knowing why. Even later, even thinking about it in the exacting detail with which his mind remembered that moment like it remembered all moments, he could never put a name to the instinct he’d answered where it spoke to him at a level beyond words. Like some voice calling to him from the edge of the Greatwood that was the place his father had been born.
From the tree line to the south, a wall of shadow erupted like the one that he’d seen in the war room that night, and from within the shadow, a hail of arrows shredded the moonlit night. He heard the screams of the riders behind them as they were cut down, heard their Ilmari voices shout out in strangled cries, but he couldn’t look back as another Valnirata warband emerged at full gallop from the trees.
The livery and the arms and the cloak that the dead rider wore were all the same as those the new troupe of Valnirata that bore down on them, but they seemed to have as little trouble picking out the original band that the imposter had been a part of as Chriani did now. No comparison in their tactics or their movement where the two forces smashed against each other. He saw the tight lines of the war-mark on the half-dozen of them who rode bare-chested, including one who bore down on them with a longspear and a fury in her eyes that cut Chriani to the core.
At his ear, he heard Lauresa sing. In her hand where she tore it from his grasp, he saw the twisting bird-shape flare, a bolt of eldritch fire fanning out. The panicked horse cut hard left even as Chriani cut right, swinging up to hit hard with Konaugo’s handaxe, feeling it break through leather and bone and stick there fast as he rolled away.
From the chaos around them, Chriani heard a clear voice utter words in a tongue he’d never heard before. It was Lauresa who pulled him to the ground this time, rolling with him as the night around them was split by a flash of spell-lightning that blinded him. He heard more screams from behind as he stumbled up, didn’t know whether it was the last of Konaugo’s troop or the false Valnirata who were dying now. He pushed Lauresa ahead of him, running hard again as they slipped into the trees.
Barien had spoken of having seen even hardened combat horses panic at the signs of spellcraft, but the roan was waiting where Chriani had left him, clearly on edge but mercifully making no sound. He hefted Lauresa to the saddle like she weighed nothing, her arms seeming just as strong where she grabbed him by the jacket and hauled him up, not giving him the time to decide whether to send her off on her own.
“I cannot ride and work my spellcraft at once.” Where she whispered in his ear, Chriani realized the princess was fighting for breath, and for the first time, he noticed the burn along her exposed arm where the lightning she’d saved him from must have caught her. He shifted forward, felt Lauresa wrap herself tight around him as he pulled hard to turn the roan for the clearing ahead.
In his hand, wet against the reins, he felt something. He glanced down, saw Konaugo’s blood-soaked insignia held tight there. Pulled free from his cloak when the horse had overrun him, Chriani guessed. He must have carried it the whole time and never known.
In the haze of moonlight, the real Valnirata were sweeping the hillside with a precision that made the lightning-fast attack of the first group of riders seem clumsy by comparison. Lauresa’s tent was burning now, Chriani frantically scanning for an escape route along the shadows of the tree line even as Lauresa whispered in his ear.
“Straight on…”
Ahead of them, he saw Valnirata archers ranking themselves to both sides, Lauresa presumably not seeing them where the moonlight shone as brightly to him as it did to them. He pulled to the left as the horse ran, thought he spied what looked like a trailhead, but she reached forward to pull the reins back.
“Straight,” she said again. “All speed. Hold on.”
Chriani heard the conviction in her voice. He spurred the roan.
Ahead, the column lined up, Lauresa singing again even as she pulled both of them low against the horse’s neck. Chriani heard the order to fire barked over the sweetness of her voice in his ear, saw the hissing wall of ash-grey shafts erupt in front of them.
Where Lauresa’s song peaked, Chriani had to force himself to keep
his eyes open, had to fight the urge to leap from the horse in the expectation of it being cut down. And where a score of arrows arced in against them, a faint haze of eldritch light flared as they shattered like glass, deflected harmlessly off the horse’s flanks. The roan didn’t so much as flinch. I trained him myself, Kathlan had said.
They’d fired as one against the charge Lauresa had ordered him to make, shooting head-on in rank. Now, they’d have to waste the precious time in which they might have managed side-on shots, Lauresa understanding the Valnirata tactics far better than he ever would have. The sound of intermittent bowshot rose behind them, but the roan was already hurtling around the far edge of the hill, running at a speed that belied how little it could actually see of the ground ahead.
But as Chriani cut hard against the sight of two outriders closing from the right, he felt something heavy slam into him. He clutched the horse’s neck against a wave of sudden darkness, a razor-tipped Valnirata shaft protruding from his right shoulder. He reached behind with one hand, screamed ahead of the pain as he snapped the end of the arrow off, pushing into the forest and under cover. But before he could wrench the head free, he felt Lauresa’s grip across his chest suddenly weaken, his free hand clutching at her.
She was still singing, fighting to force the eldritch melody from her. And as Chriani felt her collapse against him, a shroud of sudden darkness boiled out from the air around them even as an unnatural silence fell. Chriani couldn’t hear the shouts of the Valnirata behind them, couldn’t hear his breathing or the pounding of the horse’s hoofs or his voice as he called Lauresa’s name.
With his good hand, he clutched both the princess’s hands where they started to slip from his chest, pulled her tight against him. With his other and his knees, he banked the roan hard left, fighting the searing pain of the arrow where it lanced like fire down his arm. More arrows whipped past behind them, fired blindly at the point where they’d been a moment ago. Ahead, he could make out the narrow cleft through the hills that marked the path back to the road, and he bore straight for it along a well-used rocky track, wanted to make it an easy guess where they’d gone.
Clearwater Dawn Page 23
