Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  She stepped back to let Chriani climb to the saddle, pulled herself up behind him without taking the hand he offered.

  “You judge by anger and by fear, Chriani. You judge by the instinct of emotions that have their own will, and you never understand that will until too late. You never learn to think except by your rage. The soldiers’ fields are full of men like you.”

  In his mind, Chriani heard echoes of that anger, unleashed at Lauresa in her father’s tent. He was more tired than he thought possible, and he focused on his still-throbbing shoulder and side as a means to clear his head. And in that clarity, he was forced to admit that far beyond all concerns for the princess’s security, escorting her to Aerach even on a safe road was suddenly the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

  “Princess…”

  “Ride, Chriani.”

  He felt her arms wrap around him again, but there was a distance in her touch far wider than the space that separated them. Silently, he spurred the horse, slipping back along the line that marked off the forest’s edge from the sand hills ahead.

  For the better part of the day, they rode easy, Chriani conscious of a lingering weariness in the roan’s step, still not completely rested from their frenzied flight of the night before. Along the least-traveled side trails, he kept them to the rocky ground when he could, balancing the noise of their passage against the increased difficulty of their being tracked.

  Where they pushed ever-eastward, the wind was against them, and he was increasingly grateful for it the three times he felt the horse suddenly shy at some scent carried on the breeze. Where they pulled back to the deeper woods each time, they managed to slip past whatever the horse had sensed without seeing it, Chriani alert to a degree that belied his fatigue. Desert wolves and white lions were common across the desert and the wasted badlands beyond, and the scorpions that the patrols of the Clearwater Way called the sandreapers. Some were as large as dogs, they said, laying silent for days where they sought for the footsteps of those passing too close to their shrouds of wind-driven dust.

  They made camp of a sort before dark fell, the last fingers of light streaking the underside of the clouds that had rolled steadily in above them for the balance of the day. From a thinly wooded spur of the forest to the south, a bluff extended out to great height above open ground below. Across rough scree and sand, Chriani saw the land thrust upward in the distance, a league away perhaps. Like twisted shadows, the sandstone pillars of the exile badlands rose to the south and east, the relative safety promised by the Clearwater Way lost beyond them.

  On the bluff, a kind of thicket rose, a stand of twisted shrubs Chriani didn’t recognize screening the top of the rise while still allowing anyone on it a clear view of the forest behind and the desert below. On rocky ground, he set the bedroll out for the princess, the saddle blanket for himself. They risked no fire but had Lauresa’s spellcraft to keep the cold at bay again, and they sat in silence as the sun set and the moons rose. The only movement in all that long waiting was the wind-whipped trees behind them and the black shadows of a flight of griffon riders, far to the south where they crossed the half-shadowed circle of the Darkmoon’s mottled face.

  They had refilled the water skins at the icy stream they crossed earlier in the day, but Chriani had found nothing edible on a short foray through the nearby woods. The roan had found winter rye in plenty, though, eating heartily before collapsing into a soundless sleep Chriani envied.

  Where she sat across from him, Lauresa was as quiet as she had been most of the day, but the anger and the fear that had prefaced that silence were replaced by a kind of distant thoughtfulness now. She was staring out to the northern skyline, the haze of moonlit white there that marked the desert of the exile lands, her eyes bright where Chriani’s own gaze pushed the shadows back.

  “You should sleep,” he said. “I’ll keep a watch.”

  “Aside from your short stint unconscious, when is the last time you slept?”

  “I’ll be fine…”

  “You’ll be dead, as will I, the first low-hanging branch we meet with you fallen asleep on the horse.” She motioned toward the bedroll laid out a safe distance between them. “I’ll wake you.”

  But even as Chriani tried to find the argument he felt lurking in him somewhere, he knew she was right. He nodded, laid down on the bedroll and felt a wave of fatigue drop across him like a black veil. The ache in his shoulder was just enough to counter it, though, and he was still shifting, trying to ease it into a more comfortable position, when Lauresa spoke.

  “Last night,” she said quietly.

  Where he lay with his back to her, Chriani felt his heart quicken.

  “Last night,” Lauresa said, “you told me you loved me. The night before that, you told me you couldn’t trust me. How do those things reconcile, do you think?”

  Slowly, he turned to face her where she sat with legs drawn up. She had his cloak wrapped tight around her, a faint sliver of the white shift showing at her chest.

  “How do they reconcile in me?” he asked.

  “In general. It seems a foolish thing to profess to love someone you can’t even trust.”

  “You’re set to love a man you’ve never even met,” Chriani said. He felt the words tumble out through the weariness. He didn’t care. “What’s the greater foolishness?”

  Lauresa looked away. Inside, Chriani felt a shard of spite rise from nowhere. He tried to seize it, tried to break it. His felt his mind slow like it always did when the anger took him, all the words he should have spoken twisting away somehow, just out of reach.

  Along the edge of the bluff wall below them, something moved.

  Chriani was over and across the ground toward the princess in an instant, motioning her down where he slid in behind her. He glanced to the still-sleeping horse, weighed whether to leave it that way and hope for silence, or to wake it in case of the need for fast escape.

  “What is it?” Lauresa whispered, but he only shook his head, senses as suddenly sharp as if he had slept a month. Where the Clearmoon broke behind the scudding face of cloud that drifted fast above them, he saw a single figure shifting carefully across the sands, silent in the shadows that Chriani’s eyes stripped away. A cold wind hissed around them, the figure not looking up where it moved low to the ground.

  “Even coming across the sands, the Valnirata would have killed us long before we saw them.” Lauresa’s voice was in Chriani’s ear, her breath warm against his neck where he nodded.

  Some thirty strides across the scree field, a jutting spine of wind-etched stone rose like an island from the sand. The figure was making its careful way there, just enough shelter for someone to hide behind.

  “With or without me, be ready to ride,” Chriani whispered as he pulled the bloodblade from within his shirt. But as he slipped forward, Lauresa reached for his hand, squeezed it hard. Chriani glanced back, surprised. He squeezed back, uncertain. Tried to read the emotion in her eyes, but there was no time. He felt her fingers slip from his, then he was through the encircling wall of shrubs and into the shadows beyond.

  Where an ancient rain gulley dropped from a narrow cut at the head of the rise, Chriani slipped down the edge of the bluff, feeling his way along a soft chute of sandstone without a sound. The Clearmoon slipped behind cloud again as he hit the bottom, but where he emerged, the figure was gone.

  He checked the light, tested the wind as he scanned the shifting darkness. He saw the single set of tracks running in from the northwest, already obscured by drifting sand where they swung around behind the low rise of stone and disappeared. At best guess, it was a lone exile wanderer seeking shelter in the wrong place at the wrong time. A bad reason to have to kill someone, he thought, but attempting to fight a Valnirata exile to submission on his own ground presented odds that Chriani didn’t like.

  He tested the weight of the blade in his hand as he circled the low rise. In his head, he heard Lauresa’s words from that morning. A madness you delude yours
elf into thinking you control…

  Where he circled around across the silent sand, Chriani slipped toward the low rise of stone from behind. He felt the pain in his shoulder only as a distant distraction, felt the adrenaline surge that had long since pushed all the fatigue away. He felt for the anger, let it push him to what he knew he had to do.

  He didn’t see the shape erupting from the sand at his feet until it was too late. His first thought was he’d stepped into a scorpion field, but even as he twisted out of the way, he saw the figure rise to almost his height, shrouded in a sand-grey cloak that seemed to absorb the shrouded moonlight. Then there were four other figures rising from where they’d been buried all around him, silent as the soft hiss of sand where it flowed from them like water.

  The one closest to him had a handaxe, a wicked curve to the overlong blade that he’d never seen before, the rest wielding the scimitars that the Ilvani of the eastern woodlands favored. Chriani spun with the dagger in hand, shifting side to side to prevent a quick strike from behind. The one with the axe feinted as Chriani dropped back, swinging around to kick the legs out from under another behind him. Then he was rolling past, through to the other side of the circle so that he stood between them and the bluff where he knew Lauresa would be watching.

  Chriani dropped to a crouch, shifting back as they spread out across from him. No hope of standing against them, he knew, but he could slow them. Give Lauresa enough time to get onto the horse and away.

  Then the figure with the axe held up a hand, some complex flash of finger-signals making the others freeze.

  Chriani could see his breath, white on the chill air. Beneath the hooded cloak as it was slowly pulled back, he saw a woman standing before him, canvas tunic and patched leather the same black as her hair and eyes. She was lean like some bird of prey where she stepped back slowly from an attack stance, muscles knotted along her arms and stomach where the armor had been cut away for speed.

  And from an unseen scabbard at her back, she drew a blade that Chriani recognized. He saw her hand lock tight to a haft of steel and bone, saw the razor edge of the spiked guard catch the Clearmoon’s light as cloud was shredded away on the wind. A bloodblade of the Valnirata, its red-black glyph a twin to the one held steady in his own hand.

  He saw her face, the sweep of brow and ear that marked the Ilvani. He watched her pull the loose tunic down to reveal her breast and shoulder, and the red and black warclan mark there that was the same as the one scribed on her blade. The same mark as that etched on his blade. The same tattoo that had marked his own shoulder since the day he was born.

  Halobrelia forest-heart, his mother had sung to him.

  Awkwardly, he pulled his tunic down at the shoulder, showed as much of the mark as he could without revealing Lauresa’s name there. The woman stared for what seemed a long while. When she spoke at last, it was in an Ilvani dialect Chriani recognized at a level below memory, but which he didn’t understand. He caught her glance to the bluff behind him and ‘How many’ before he lost the thread of her words.

  “Only one,” he replied in the common Ilvalantar he knew. He spoke carefully, too long since he’d had any practice with the complex tongue. “Decide which two of you die before you reach her.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed as she appraised Chriani. Then with a flourish, she spun the axe to a scabbard at her hip, slipped the bloodblade to her belt. All around her, the others lowered their blades, Chriani slowly following suit.

  “You had best retrieve her yourself, then.” She’d switched to the Ilvalantar with no apparent effort. “You don’t have much time.”

  Where Chriani raced back up the bluff, the woman followed close on his heels, her band scattering to points unseen at another flurry of hand signals. Chriani stayed low as he approached the cut but climbed with as much noise as he could risk. He wanted to make sure Lauresa heard them coming, didn’t like the idea of being caught at the wrong end of the power he’d seen her wield.

  Where he pulled himself up to the rocky summit, Lauresa and the roan stood back in the shadows of the forest’s edge, already packed and saddled. Her relief where she met his gaze told him she’d watched it all, but then Chriani faltered as he saw that relief suddenly melt to a stark fear he recognized.

  He glanced behind him, saw that Lauresa was watching the Ilvani where she’d clambered up effortlessly. He recognized the look on the princess’s face, but not from any time she’d been afraid before. It was the pose, he realized. The affectation that came so easily to her, and that had fooled him too many times.

  The woman gave Lauresa a quick appraisal, her gaze lingering longer than Chriani liked on the Ilvanweave shift, pale in the moonlight. A noble’s garb, Chriani thought, recognized now.

  “Any more in hiding? Any other horses?” the woman said to Lauresa, but the princess said nothing, glancing to Chriani with exaggerated uncertainty.

  “She doesn’t speak Ilvani,” Chriani said. “No,” he added. “There’s no one else.”

  “Dargana.” The woman offered her name up to Chriani and Lauresa in turn. She slapped right hand to left shoulder, some kind of salute.

  “Leisana,” the princess replied, barely a whisper. She nodded in a clumsy rendition of Brandishear custom.

  Where Dargana looked to him, Chriani thought about returning the salute but simply nodded in return. Something in her eyes as she watched him that he didn’t like.

  “Chriani.”

  “Move quickly,” Dargana said.

  Where they ran for the short edge of the bluff and a low bank that the horse could negotiate, Dargana pointed out a high outcrop of sandstone a hundred paces distant, a narrow spit of winter grass sheltered beneath it.

  “There,” she said.

  The sand was firm where Chriani led the horse across, Lauresa running quietly alongside him. Behind them, he saw Dargana back slowly down the trail they’d followed, casting handfuls of sand in what seemed a random pattern. On the flat, she moved more quickly, her cloak trailing behind her as she twisted it side to side. Beneath it, their footprints and the horse’s heavy tracks disappeared, no trace of their passage that Chriani could see.

  He felt Lauresa’s hand in his suddenly, couldn’t understand why until he felt the chill touch of the steel ring there.

  Within the grass, Dargana’s troupe lay waiting, eight in all now. Along the wall of rock behind them, Chriani had to blink to see four horses standing motionless, the long cloaks covering them somehow blending into the mottled darkness of the stone. He slipped the ring on as he dropped, Lauresa close to him, Dargana on the other side of her. The princess was trembling in a way he knew was meant to demonstrate the fear she was feigning, but she was silent in his mind.

  They waited only a short while in silence before they saw movement along the edge of the wood ahead. A party of four on horseback, moving at speed despite the darkness. As the leader leapt from the saddle of the black stallion, Chriani saw the scarred cheeks as lines of shadow, the dark eyes scanning the bluff.

  “You know who they are?” Dargana whispered.

  “No,” Chriani said.

  “Monastics of the Hunthad Wood. The order of Uissa. They attacked a camp off the Wayroad last night.”

  In his mind, Chriani felt the faint sensation of contact, like fingertips across his skin. Lauresa was listening, he realized. The Ilvani that Dargana spoke was somehow translated across the bond that the rings made. He tried to look surprised as he glanced across to meet the exile’s gaze, hoping to read what he saw there.

  “You saw them?”

  “Afterward. What was left of them any rate. They were dressed as Valnirata, and the Valnirata don’t take kindly to their livery being worn by the laóith.” The Valnirata epithet for the Ilmari had no translation. Dargana spat it with a venom Chriani could feel.

  “Why would they take on the uniform of the Valnirata?” Chriani asked carefully. Like with every exchange he’d ever had within the rigid formality of Bastion military prot
ocol, he felt the importance of how he spoke, felt Dargana seeking for the meaning beneath the words themselves.

  “I don’t know. Not yet.”

  On the bluff, he saw the assassin on hands and knees, following their tracks down to the bank where they’d descended. But when he came up against the screen Dargana had laid across their trail, he slowly pushed past it, continuing on into the trees.

  “We owe you our thanks,” Chriani said evenly.

  “More than you know. We shadowed them for two days where they rode north from across the Hunthad. They’d set themselves up on both sides of the Wayroad the night of the ambush.”

  In his chest, Chriani felt something twist. A single facet of understanding, of knowing, suddenly shunted into place where it had been set wrong, all the pieces adjoining it cascading into new alignment.

  “It’s a long way from Uissa to the Brandishear borderlands,” Dargana said, “especially at such urgent speed.”

  He hadn’t led the attack to Konaugo’s camp. The assassin’s forces had lain in wait for them there, in wait for Lauresa, Chriani thought. Knowing somehow that she would be taking the road, some sorcery at work to get word to Uissa’s forces from the camp. The unknown traitor who he thought was Konaugo, still there.

  Dargana was watching him. Chriani shook his head, tried to show an ignorance that was only partly feigned.

  “Who was it they attacked?”

  “A company of the Brandishear guard. Or so it appeared from what was left of them.”

  Chriani felt the pain at his shoulder flare, felt something sharper in his heart. He did his best to shape it as a questioning look.