Just short of the road, he saw the scout trail open up where he knew it would, the stone marker there that he recognized now but that anyone not looking for it would miss in the darkness. Though the Ilvani of the exile tribes harried the Clearwater Way whenever possible, Chriani already knew that these were no exiles behind them. No idea why one of the carontir, the elite Valnirata ranger patrols, would push so far into the unclaimed northern forest, but the hope that they wouldn’t know to look for the track straightaway was the only hope he had of escape now. Chriani turned the horse hard, Lauresa’s sorcery still in effect where they plunged into the shadow of the trees without a sound. He risked a glance back to see pursuit pass by behind them, the Valnirata riders heading for the road where they thought he’d gone.
Along the side of the trail, a fast-moving stream still flowed between shoals of ice hanging along its banks. Chriani took the roan in, raced him silently through the water for a short while, wanting to obscure their trail even if the Valnirata doubled back.
Lauresa was still slumped against him, both arms aching now where he held tight to the reins and her. Then ahead, he saw another ranger-trail marker, nudged the horse up across icy gravel and into the trees again, and they were gone.
— Chapter 10 —
THE CRITHNALA
THEY RODE HARD for the rest of the night and long into morning, Chriani watching the roan for signs of exhaustion even as he watched behind them for the pursuit he knew would end the chase the moment it came. The horse ran without effort, though, and the forest behind them stayed silent even as a stain of blood-red light spread in the east.
Lauresa had regained consciousness almost as soon as they left the stream, but even after the dweomer of silence around them had faded to the steady pounding of the horse’s hooves, she’d stayed mostly silent where she clung to Chriani. More than once, he’d wanted to break north for the road but she’d directed him to stay on the trail where it pushed northeast along the forest’s edge. There was marsh there, a wide spread of bog that the stream they’d followed earlier must have emptied into, and the air was thick with fog that Chriani hoped would obscure any pursuit as effectively as it obscured the trail before him.
He knew they should have been safe enough, no traffic or settlement to speak of within the narrow strip of forest and scrubland they traversed. The Ilvani of both the Valnirata and the exile lands stayed back to avoid the well-armed Clearwater Patrols, even as the patrols stayed back to avoid the Ilvani. But in Chriani’s mind, in the aftermath of the attack, too many questions still turned.
The subterfuge of an assassin’s troupe posing as a Valnirata warband. The real Valnirata hunting far closer to the exile lands and the Clearwater Way than they should have been. The idea of Lauresa being followed in the first place. He didn’t understand any of it, not yet. Pieces of a puzzle whose edges he couldn’t make out, couldn’t set into place.
But even as he allowed himself a moment’s acceptance that they seemed to have evaded pursuit for a time, Chriani had to force himself to focus on the fact that it would be a long road back to Caredry. The unseen final outcome of the battle the night before was still very much in his mind, and in particular, the fact that he hadn’t seen the black stallion’s rider on the field in the end. No idea whether the assassin had escaped or been brought down with the rest of his troop. No idea what might be waiting for them as they made the journey back, alone.
At some point, he became conscious that he didn’t feel the cold he should have felt with his cloak wrapping Lauresa behind him. More of her spellcraft, he guessed. It was nearing dawn when they finally stopped in the shelter of a fir grove, a dark island in a brighter sea of snow-streaked rock and sand. The roan was spent, Chriani likewise, but it wasn’t until he dismounted that he felt the pain at his right shoulder, the arrow wound he’d somehow forgotten spiking in sudden agony that drove him to his knees.
Where Lauresa dropped to Chriani’s side, she pulled his cloak from her own shoulders, draped it across him as she knelt to examine the splintered shaft.
“On your side,” she said, and Chriani lay down without arguing. She looked shaken, he thought, mouth set as she carefully flooded the wound with frigid water from the skins in the roan’s saddlebags. The Valnirata dagger still concealed at his stomach was the only blade Chriani carried, and he saw her hand shaking as she pulled it from its sheath.
He nearly blacked out when she used it to carefully cut the flannel of his tunic out from where it had been punched in through his skin. Then he did black out when she pulled the shaft free, the pain a flash of white light in his head that suddenly shifted through to shadow where his eyes flickered open. The sweat that had beaded his face was frozen. Where he lay, he’d been covered by the bedroll from his pack. The pain at his shoulder had spread down his side and his spine, but it had faded slightly. Slowly, Chriani raised himself up on his good arm.
Across from him, the roan was sleeping. The wind in the trees was a faint rustling, and he had to groggily look around him to see Lauresa on the far side of the grove, knees folded where she sat against the bole of a single towering tree. On her face, in the set of her body, he saw a distance he’d never known in her before. Her eyes were closed but she hadn’t bothered to wipe the frozen tracks of her tears away.
As he tried to stand, Chriani felt the blanket rub the bare skin of his chest where she’d stripped his shirt off. She’d taken the grimy bandage from his left shoulder and used it to bind the wound on his right. Exposed to the sun as it never was, below the princess’s own name where it had been gently etched, the tight lines of the Valnirata war-mark swallowed the light.
“It appears that we both had our secrets,” Lauresa said quietly.
When Chriani looked up again, she was watching him, but the words he wanted to say were lost somewhere in the tightness that had seized his chest and throat. An oblique realization struck him, twisted through the fear and the nausea that flared with the pain.
He remembered her words in her father’s tent. He’d wondered then if she’d known what the bandage hid, whether she’d seen it with sorcery, or read the secret in his or Kathlan’s thoughts. She hadn’t. All of it bluster, all of it part of the delicate game of deception the princess played.
Chriani winced as he reached for his tunic, saw that the bloodstains and the jagged gash through front and back were gone. He remembered Irdaign fixing the torn cloak under the subtle shifting of her fingers, had to fight not to make the moonsign as he carefully slipped it on.
Where he’d set its delicate lines into his own flesh, Lauresa’s name had healed, Chriani saw. Some kind of side-effect of Chanist’s draught, not even noticed. The black lines he’d scribed had meshed in with the older mark now, indistinguishable. And he realized as he glanced to where the princess sat that it would have been the war-mark alone that she wept for. Her own name was scribed along that mark’s edge in plain sight, but she wouldn’t have been able to read the delicate Ilvani glyphs.
Chanist’s captains and rangers all spoke and read the Ilvalantar tongue of the common Ilvani, close enough to the Valnirata dialect to allow for interrogating prisoners and understanding the rarely intercepted intelligence of the carontir patrols. Outside the military, though, there was an understandable distance from Ilvani culture within the prince high’s court.
“I’ve cleaned the wound as best I can, but the arrow nicked bone.” Lauresa wasn’t looking at him. “You’ll need a healer within two days at best or the blood-fever will finish you.”
Chriani only nodded. He could see his breath in the chill air but couldn’t feel the cold, still comfortable despite the wind that twisted through the trees, sent a faint shimmer of frost between him and the princess where she sat.
Should I fear you? Lauresa had said to him three days before.
Between them, Chriani felt a sudden emptiness that had swallowed all the emotion of that brief moment the night before. The memory of her against him was a waking dream now, a coldne
ss in her where she stared out to the wastes before them. The same distance in her that he’d felt in the mock anger of the war room, but the emotion that wound tightly through that distance was very real now.
Fear and understanding, Irdaign had said.
“I must sleep,” she said. “If I’m to regain my strength.” Sorcerous or otherwise, she didn’t say, but Chriani shook his head.
“We must ride now if we’re to make Caredry before dark. We’ve tarried too long.”
“We won’t be taking the road,” she said. “We ride for Aerach, and we will not make it unless I rest.”
Chriani stared. Lauresa still wasn’t looking at him where she shifted to softer ground, seemed to sense it anyway.
“It was the assassin’s force that struck the camp last night. The Valnirata saved us in their own way.”
“I saw it as well as you did,” Chriani said. “The one who attacked us, when she fell.”
“You should have known long before that,” the princess said. “The Valnirata do not attack with the moon behind them. Their elite carontir patrols use only the sword, never axes.”
In her tone, Chriani thought he heard a measured condescension. The same dismissiveness he’d heard the night before, more than artifice now.
“Brandishear patrols the Clearwater Way east of Rhercyn.” Her voice was even but Chriani felt all the emotion held in check there. “Whoever is behind this plot, the insignia that Barien hid proves that they reach to the highest levels. I don’t know how deep within the guard this treachery goes. I cannot go back.”
“Your father the prince high can better protect you than any greybeard duke…”
“I ride for Aerach with or without you, squire.” Lauresa pulled his cloak around her as she turned away.
Chriani managed to make himself stand, walked once around the outskirts of the grove to confirm that they were still alone as far as he could see. To the south, the forest loomed. To the north, he thought he could see the haze of white that marked the Sandhorn, and the darker line that must have been the Clearwater Way in the distance.
By the time he’d circled around again, Lauresa was sleeping where she lay. He set the blanket over her as well, kept walking because he knew it was the only way he’d be able to force himself to stay awake while he watched her.
The sun had climbed to a cloud-streaked zenith and crossed over when she awoke, the roan already up and eating. Chriani had the meager remainder of biscuits and pork from the saddlebags out, set them down before her where she stretched.
“I’ve already eaten,” he said.
She didn’t bother showing her disbelief as she took half of the half-day’s ration remaining. Chriani quietly bundled the rest away.
“You can eat while we ride,” he said. He hefted the saddle to where the roan greedily cropped silver-grey stalks of winter grass along the edge of the clearing.
“We must reach Aerach before word of what’s happened can reach my father,” Lauresa called from behind him. “As long as I’m missing, he’ll search for me. He’ll burn the Valnirata to the ground if that’s what it takes.”
Chriani heard a subtle shift in the tone of her voice. As he looked back, he thought he saw her looking to his shoulder before she quickly glanced away. But she circled slowly around him as he finished saddling the roan, looking up to her approaching footsteps as he picked stones from the horse’s shoes. She looked past him, Chriani following her gaze to the wall of shadow where the forest loomed behind them.
“You’re not afraid of this place,” she said. Not a question.
“No.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“No. My father…”
“I don’t want to know.” A sudden chill in her voice as she turned away.
Considering the ride they’d made, the white shift was still unnaturally clean in the manner of the ilvanweave, but she must have used the Valnirata blade to cut it off roughly at the knees, fashioning and tying a twisted belt from what was left of the hem once the burn at her arm had been wrapped. Her feet were still bare, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
“The Valnirata will be seeking us,” Chriani said. In the time that she slept, his resolve to see her back to Caredry and into the protection of a Brandishear garrison had hardened, even as he suspected the argument he’d spent all that time preparing was already fated to fail.
“The carontir don’t patrol into the exile lands unless their need is great,” Lauresa said where she stowed the bedroll and the waterskins.
“Their need was great enough to bring them to the camp…”
“Because my father’s sortie forces brought them to the borders.” Chriani found himself rankling at the impatience in her voice again, wondered whether that was her goal. “Likewise, those forces will keep them along the Brandishear frontier. Both they and the exiles will be that much fewer along the Aerach side.”
“If there were survivors, they might have talked. The knowledge that Chanist’s daughter is at large in the exile lands would suit the carontir or the crithnala just as well.”
“Konaugo hand-picked his company. They would die first.”
Chriani said nothing as he cinched the saddlebags on. He felt a sudden darkness twisting in him that he realized he’d been working hard to avoid since the bloody chaos of the attack. All the anger he’d always felt from Konaugo to him, all the certainty he’d had that the captain had been the one that Barien’s last words had warned him of.
Konaugo had died, like Barien, saving the life of a woman he was sworn to protect.
“We ride for Rheran,” he said darkly. “The risk is too great.”
Lauresa swung on him with the same backhand that had tagged him that first night he kissed her, but even with the pain that twisted through him, Chriani was faster this time. He had her down in a moment, both hands locked tight in one of his where he dropped to the ground behind her. Lauresa’s rage was tangible where she tried to break away, but he had his other hand across her mouth, wary of the havoc her voice could wreak.
“I am sworn to protect you,” he whispered to her ear, “in your father’s name. He sent you on this journey with a full company and his best captain, and you know as well as I that he would not have you attempt to complete it with me as your only escort. I will protect you by returning you to him.”
Lauresa did nothing. Made no move, waiting. Slowly, Chriani took his hand from her mouth.
“My father is the one who I protect, Chriani.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “I am the one this assassin seeks.”
He let her up, slowly. Her hands slipped from his as she turned to face him, brushing herself off and not bothering to hide a contempt that reflected the uncertainty Chriani knew she saw in him. Something twisted in his mind, impressions that had previously locked into place suddenly shifting. New patterns emerging that he realized had been hidden by the patterns he’d made before.
“Think,” Lauresa said coldly. “At the camp, it was more than chance that found he and I both outside the perimeter. He sought me there but saw your dogged pursuit of me as a barrier to be overcome first. At the Bastion, Barien told you to keep me safe, my father an afterthought.”
“On the road to the camp…” Chriani remembered the tracks of the steel-shod boots following them. Following her. He cursed himself silently.
“Whether the assassin meant to kill me and was thwarted by Barien, or whether he sought Barien as a first step to getting to me but was forced to take flight, I don’t know,” Lauresa said. “But my presence in Brandishear puts my father, my family, the entire court at risk.”
Around them, the wind picked up, whipping the branches above. Chriani tried to make sense of it, too much anger in him suddenly. Too many things he should have seen.
“Why?” he said simply. All he could think to ask, not caring that he was admitting he didn’t know.
“Someone wanting to prevent this marriage. The Valnirata hoping to undercut the treaty, I don’t know.”<
br />
“The Order of Uissa,” Chriani said. He remembered suddenly what Chanist had said. “Andreg fought them…”
“And having fought them, who better to protect me now than him? Who better than my father to deal with the Valnirata that they serve? But my father does not realize the extent of this plot because he does not know that I am its target, and he will not know until we reach Aerach and can send safe word back from one of Andreg’s seers to his. And we are wasting time.”
Where she stalked toward the roan, Chriani stood where he was, a familiar tightness in his chest. Something dark had passed across his vision suddenly, grey shadow blotting out the faint warmth of the sun.
He was the one who led the assassin to Konaugo’s camp.
There it was, the thought finally freed from the darkness of his mind in which it had circled unseen all the while since the attack. Locking into place now with all the other understanding, no other explanation he could think of. His own arrogance, his own need driving his actions, clouding his mind. So concerned with the road ahead that he hadn’t bothered to think on the road behind, or on who might be taking it.
He looked up to see Lauresa watching him, silent for a long while. Something had softened in her expression, he saw. Hesitant.
“When I was eleven,” she said quietly, “I was summering at my mother’s house in Aldac. While riding one day, a band of disgruntled Elalantar mercenaries with ransom on their minds struck my escort down. I hit their leader with a force ward. The white knives you saw, but from as close as I am to you.”
Chriani paced slowly toward her, fumbled the horse’s reins from the tree he’d lashed them to.
“I lost control,” she said. “I let the fear and the anger in me decide my actions. One moment his face was there, the next it was gone. I can still hear his scream.”
“Princess…”
“All the years I’ve known you, I’ve seen that anger and that fear in you, Chriani. I’ve seen you fail because of it, seen it cripple you. Last night, you would have killed Konaugo without a thought if you’d been able to, just as you butchered a rider we could have evaded with ease. I look at you and I see what I felt that day I was attacked,” she said. “At the mercy of a madness you delude yourself into thinking you control.”
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