Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  “Off the road? Why?”

  “War, half-blood.”

  Chriani heard the implicit coldness in the epithet, felt something twist in his gut. He wasn’t sure how Dargana would even have been able to tell who he was, what he was, but where he felt her gaze appraise him, he glanced away.

  “War in the Ilmar would be news to me.”

  “News travels a great deal faster within the Muiraìden than beyond it. The Prince Chanist has already ridden out against positions beyond the Locanwater. They’ll be fighting as we speak.”

  Chriani laughed.

  “Brandishear break the treaty…?”

  Dargana laughed louder. Chriani played his uncertainty to the hilt, glancing from her to the other exiles watching him darkly. His expression one of hoping to get in on the joke they shared.

  “Chanist’s mission in forging the Ilmar alliance was in the hope that the Valnirata would fight the two-front war he challenged,” Dargana said. “Domination over the Muiraìden as a first step to controlling all the Ilmar. Caught between Aerach and Brandishear, their destruction at his hands would be assured. It’s said that when the Valnirata sued for peace was Chanist’s darkest day.”

  “News to me if Brandishear’s moving against the Valnirata,” Chriani murmured. A hint of indifferent pride, not too strong.

  “No doubt.” Dargana smirked, still watching him darkly. “But what interests me more strongly is why…”

  Then from above, a steel shriek suddenly cut the night. Against the moon-backed clouds, a flight of six griffon riders passed into view, soaring fast along the forest’s edge.

  “Move,” Dargana hissed.

  Through shadow, the exiles fell back, slipping to where the horses waited, skittish suddenly at the griffons’ cries, loud on the wind. As the crithnala jumped to their mounts, Chriani saw Dargana take the reins of the roan.

  “You won’t keep the trail on your own. Ride with Abrindra. You, with me.” She pointed to Lauresa, swung herself up to the saddle and extended her hand. Lauresa waited for Chriani to gently push her forward, the same carefully crafted dread on her face as Dargana dragged her up. Playing the part of the frightened girl, Chriani thought. But he caught her brief glance as he swung up onto a desert-lean grey stallion, the tall exile riding it holding out a rough hand for him.

  The griffon riders had split, three following the assassin and his escort where they disappeared into the forest, the other three circling over the bluff, searching. Dargana’s company was spotted almost as soon as they broke from cover, the griffons’ shrieks loud above them. Chriani had never heard anything like it before, a chill dread filling him as they raced across open sand. All the crithnala riders except Dargana and the one who carried him had bows out, firing freely above them as their horses ran seemingly of their own accord.

  But even as the griffon riders closed in, Chriani felt a sudden lurch, and then they were descending into a narrow channel he hadn’t seen before, a hidden cleft cutting hard into the tortured canyons ahead. Walls flashed past so close he could have touched them, and then they were through and into a narrow maze of scree and sculpted rock that cut the faint light of the sky. Above them, Chriani heard the shrieks of the griffons slowly fall away.

  They rode for what seemed the whole night through the tortured badlands grottos, the Ilvani horses moving faster than they had any right to along a twisting maze of rough trails that even Chriani could barely see. Three times, he sighted scorpions scuttling across the ledges above them, archers driving off the first two, the third destroyed with spellpower cast by one of the crithnala riding behind him. Against the thundering echo of hoofbeats, wolf-song sounded out more than once, filtered down through the twisted canyons in ghostly echo. At no time did they slow.

  The sky was still dark as they hit open sand bearing southeast, and he followed Dargana’s gaze up and back where she rode ahead of him. He saw griffons where the Clearmoon’s diffuse light pulsed behind cloud at the horizon, but they were low in the distance, circling the scrubland at the forest’s edge to the south.

  Lauresa was clinging to Dargana where they rode, Chriani trying to make eye contact with her where the horse he was on pulled up steady alongside the crithnala leader. The princess’s eyes were squeezed shut, though. No response from her through the ring as he tried to send his thoughts to her.

  They rested twice that day, sighting griffons three times in the sky above them. They rode on throughout the night again, their route a blur of shadow in Chriani’s mind. When they stopped, Lauresa would lay with eyes closed, drinking sparsely when water was offered. Saying nothing through the ring, not meeting Chriani’s gaze. None of the crithnala spoke to them, though he could pick out a handful of words in the whispers that passed between Dargana and the others. He heard Chanist’s name more times than he liked.

  The second night’s ride was nearly done when they reached the forest.

  Where their horses swung east along the chute of a rubble-strewn canyon, the twisting pillars of the badlands fell away, and in the distance, perhaps a league off, a wall of trees rose dead black against the lightening eastern sky. To the south, he could make out a white scar of sand hills that cut an island of forest off from the Greatwood, towering limni spreading their branches to form dark archways into deeper shadow.

  Along an unseen trail, the horses plunged into that shadow without breaking stride, and almost before they’d even passed within its walls, Chriani felt the scent and the sense of the forest threading through him like something alive.

  The day was fading, light swallowed by the shadow of the towering trees when Chriani saw the ruins.

  Across a massive clearing, a dim light shone. Moss glowed where it clung to the boles of the great limni that rose around them, but whether some natural effect or the result of sorcery, Chriani didn’t know. He saw what looked like enormous flagstones set into the ground as the troupe slowed, the clearing some kind of building long-gone to decay and the encroaching wood. And like an extension of that wood, tiered terraces of mottled green and brown radiated out from the surrounding trees, their massive branches slung with spires and trusses that might have supported dwellings once. All of it rotted now, long loops of mossy rope trailing down like cobwebs in the shadows.

  Chriani realized he was staring as his horse slowed, and he slipped down from behind its rider to stretch life into his cramped legs. In his heart, in his head, was a sensation he’d never felt before. An ache he couldn’t name. He remembered when he’d looked on the Greatwood from the edge of Chanist’s camp, the awe he’d felt then eclipsed now by the weight and the fear of a window into a past that he could remember without knowing how.

  Something was moving deep in the shadow inside him, deeper even than the lost feelings of his mother. Memory or longing, he didn’t know. Where she dismounted from behind Dargana, Lauresa ran to him, slipped shaking into his arms.

  Snaking through the maze of trunks that surrounded them, Chriani saw ruined walls of mosaic stone rise up from the tangle of vines. Some kind of courtyard, he guessed. Scattered through the ruins, he saw a dozen encampments, archers posted in the ruined platforms above the trail they’d passed along. He counted at least sixty crithnala, all watching Lauresa and him where the riders of Dargana’s troupe stood close by. He felt Dargana’s gaze on him even before she circled around to face him. For once, he didn’t try to hide the uncertainty he felt.

  “What is this place?”

  “Nyndenu,” Dargana said. “The Ghostwood.”

  Where Lauresa stared around her, Chriani saw a wonder in her eyes that the mock fear couldn’t hide. Even in the dankness of decay, there was a beauty there that cut him, but Dargana’s dark gaze as she paced past him sent it away.

  “You see before you the seat of the exile kingdoms,” she said. “Abandoned by the Valnirata even before Muiraìden fell. The gavaleria won’t follow us here.”

  “Why?” Chriani asked.

  “Because they fear this place. And because
they don’t know you’re here.”

  As Dargana raised her hand, the two crithnala at Chriani’s side were on him before he could move, Lauresa grabbed up as quickly. One of the Ilvani had to stifle the scream she tried to make, Chriani catching the song hidden within it, not fast enough. He watched them gag her, saw her bound even as his own hands were tied before him. Even still, he managed to slip the ring carefully to his first finger, kept it hidden beneath his thumb. He tried to catch Lauresa’s gaze, but she was playing the fear to the hilt, eyes shut tight to squeeze out tears.

  Dargana sat down on a shadowed stone block that Chriani realized was a cistern. From a bucket, she drew water with a wooden dipper, drank deep.

  “Who hunts you?”

  “I don’t know,” Chriani said, that much true at least of everything going on around him. “The Valnirata patrols…”

  “If the carontir wanted you dead, you would be. Even assuming you escaped them, they would have simply flushed you north. In the scorpion wastes between the forest and the road, you’d be nothing but bones by morning.”

  There was a degree of amusement in her tone that set Chriani on edge more than any antagonism would have. A game had been set in play that he and Lauresa had little chance of winning, and he had to fight to punch the rage down where it flared in him, seeking for the appearance of helplessness beneath the crithnala leader’s cold gaze.

  “What lives here that the Valnirata fear?”

  Dargana laughed.

  “The past, half-blood. Remembering the greatness they once came from. They fear to remember the cities they built across the Ilmar that themselves were only shadows of Nyndenu at its height, their glory turned to tent cities and war camps in a hundred generations since then. The Valnirata need to cast themselves as vengeful victims so as to starve their hunger to fight.”

  In her words, Chriani tried to seek some sense of whether these were things he should know, should agree with, should violently deny. He needed to sketch out some sense of who he should pretend to be in order to get past her scrutiny.

  “You have walked the Muiraìden, half-blood?”

  Lauresa was still silent in his thoughts, no advice there. He didn’t understand why.

  “No,” he said. “My family turned its back on the weakness there before I was born.” Around him, he heard a ripple of sound, whispered voices twisting through the silence of the night.

  Where his tunic suddenly shredded across his stomach, Chriani saw the dark lines of Dargana’s bloodblade in her hand. He flinched in spite of himself as it flashed twice more in the faint light. On his stomach, two razor-thin lines bled faintly where she’d cut the hidden scabbard from him, her look dark as she unsheathed his blade that matched her own.

  “Carrying a narneth móir of House Halobrelia is to invite slow torture before the merciful death that your lineage warrants in the first place,” she said. “Had you not borne the war-mark, I would have slain you on the sands.”

  “I wear that mark by right,” Chriani said quietly. “My father was a Halobrelia exile. Like you.”

  Dargana struck him with a backhand blow that darkened his vision for a moment with the force of it. Even sharper was the touch of Lauresa’s mind, and the sudden spike of fear he felt there that made Chriani understand suddenly what had driven her silence all this time. All the fear in her that she didn’t want him to feel. All the truth in him she didn’t want to hear.

  “No half-blood compares its fallen father to what I am,” Dargana said coldly. “Do not make that mistake again.”

  But before Chriani could respond, the exile leader had turned to Lauresa where she was held.

  “And then this one,” she said.

  As the princess shrunk back, Dargana had to lift her head, glanced back once to Chriani. “Even without that mark, you’re no closer to Brandishear nobility than I am. But this one’s never been more than a week away from a featherbed and a suite of servants. You make for strange traveling companions.”

  What did you tell them of me last night? Lauresa’s voice in his head for the first time was a cool breeze against the heat that had risen in him. No trace in it of the fear she feigned for the crithnala’s benefit. Dargana’s words were being translated for her again, clear through the ring as they echoed in his own mind.

  I told them I would die for you, Chriani said. No hesitation. And even as they formed in his mind, he knew the words had never been more true. In the emotional undercurrent that slipped beneath his thoughts, he felt her reaction. She closed her eyes again, something more than fear there this time.

  I am Leisana, daughter to the master merchant Keithan at Glaeddyn. You are a young bravo of the thieves’ guild, hired to intimidate the father but desiring the daughter instead.

  “She’s from Glaeddyn,” he said. “Her father’s Keithan, a merchant lord there. She’s with me, now.”

  “With you how?”

  “I was sent by my guild to encourage the father in a commercial alliance of sorts,” he said with what he hoped was suitable evasiveness. “I decided to take an additional commission on the job.”

  Dargana smirked. Good, Chriani thought.

  “Where did you ride from?” she asked, still watching Lauresa where the princess tried her best to look away.

  We hid out at Caredry for a day and a night, hoping to find a caravan across the Clearwater Way. Even as Lauresa thought it, Chriani echoed the words, feeling them spill from her mind to his voice in a continuous stream. When the Glaeddyn garrison came first, we stole the horse and fled. We couldn’t take the Wayroad, we didn’t know where else to go.

  “Kidnapping, then? How did you plan to collect a ransom in the crithnala lands?”

  They’re after me, not her. She came of her own will, but her father is having trouble adjusting to that. We were making for Aerach. Get far enough from the Brandishear guard to make a life.

  “You’re scaring her,” Chriani added to Lauresa’s words. “There’s no need.” The necessary illusion, the subtle undercurrent that Lauresa’s story wove, was of uselessness, he realized. Anything that Dargana thought she might get from the pair of them, she had more than enough power to take it.

  Dargana turned to him, held the bloodblade that had slain Barien up before him.

  “What of this, then?”

  There was no voice in his head this time, Lauresa and Dargana both waiting.

  As he almost never had in all the years since his mother died, Chriani found himself thinking of her cairn again. The separation between life and the things that life touches, that his grandfather had talked about.

  “My father left the blade to me,” he said. It was the only answer he had in him, the connection between the narneth móir and the mark at his shoulder requiring an explanation that even he didn’t have yet.

  Dargana nodded thoughtfully, spun the blade in her hand. Then she punched down in a fluid motion. And where Chriani’s bound arms were held in front of him, she hacked the steel ring and its finger cleanly off. No mark at all on the thumb that had hidden the ring. No mark on the other finger beside it.

  Chriani fell to his knees, fought back the scream that welled up in him. He tried to fight the wave of nausea and the dull echo of Lauresa’s fear, very real now, that had shunted itself into his mind as the connection between them had broken, a pain in that break almost as great as the one shooting up his arm now.

  Where Dargana stooped to pull the ring from Chriani’s severed finger, she glanced darkly to the rider who’d searched him, directed him to Lauresa with a nod. The princess didn’t struggle as her own ring was pulled roughly from her hand, but the fear was gone from her look now, replaced with cold rage.

  Dargana met that look and sent it back in kind, but it was Chriani she turned to.

  “That dagger belonged to my uncle, half-blood.” In her voice, in her eyes, her movement where she stepped slowly toward him, there was a menace that told Chriani he was already dead. “I am Halobrelia,” she whispered. “I can rea
d the cipher of that blade’s engraving as easily as I read my own name. Something you should be able to do if you had any claim to that name yourself.”

  “My father was Halobrelia…” Chriani said through clenched teeth, but Dargana kicked him hard, doubled him over where he fell.

  “Your father was a race-traitor and a laóith-whore’s mate. My father was Halobrelia, as was his brother, the warlord Caradar, my uncle whose weapon this was. The simplest Valnirata child knows how your Prince Chanist dropped him with an arrow to the back, then slit his throat with this blade as he pulled it from his dying hands.”

  “So you thought to revenge him by slaying Chanist and his heirs with that same blade?” Chriani shouted. “The assassins of Uissa doing the work you fear to do yourself?”

  She kicked him again, pulled him up by his bound and bleeding hands and slammed him against the courtyard wall. Chriani felt what was left of his tunic shred as she seized it to spin him, one hand snapping his head back by the hair, the dagger held to his throat with the other.

  “Your lies are as weak as your traitor’s heart, half-blood. That blade has been in Chanist’s hands since the day he claimed it in his dead father’s name. For the sake of my uncle’s memory, tell me where and how you obtained it that I might slay every laóith and half-blood hand to have touched it since, and I may let you die quickly.”

  But Chriani wasn’t looking at her where the razor tip of the dagger hovered a hair’s-breadth above his throat. He was staring past her, watching Lauresa where she watched him.

  She hadn’t heard what Dargana had said. Hadn’t understood the Ilvani, the link of translation gone with the ring.

  He forced himself to look away, then. Not wanting Lauresa to see the realization in his eyes that he knew he couldn’t hide. He felt memories, images, impressions pushing through him in a flood even as he fought to push them back, tried to deny the sudden understanding that had rooted in him.

  “So what was it?” Dargana’s voice where she circled around him brought him back, forced him to focus. “You stole the dagger from some museum of Chanist’s, then set your eyes on bounty more fair? Some prize rich enough that a company of Ilmar riders and a force of Aerach assassins would venture off the Clearwater way and into the crithnala lands in search of it?”