Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  All around them, the platform shuddered.

  As the assassin backpedaled, four of the ropes stretching from the edge of the terrace to the trunk of the massive limni twisted and sheared away. As the weight of the platform pressed down on it, one rotted spar snapped, the rope attached to it unraveling in a blur of grey and green.

  The terrace lurched, then fell.

  Chriani pulled Lauresa to him as the floor tilted beneath them. In the twisting field of his vision, he saw the forest dark below, his good arm grabbing at the tail end of a rotted line where it snaked past them, a fall of rotting timber sliding past to precede them to the ground.

  When the rope snapped taut, the force of the impact slammed through his arm and shoulder, and he screamed against the pain that threatened to tear him in two where he locked his other arm to Lauresa, held her tight.

  A frozen moment of time.

  He felt Lauresa’s body against his, felt the pain smash through him in slow waves as he fought to keep from blacking out. Below, the forest floor twisted through the haze of his sight where the collapsed edge of the platform crashed down, maybe four stories if they dropped, too far.

  Above, he could see two hands on the rope, had to focus to realize that Lauresa had grabbed on with him, was holding him up as much as he was holding her. He could hear her breathing hard in his ear, could feel her other hand fumbling between them where she’d locked her legs around him.

  She was silent, hadn’t cried out as they’d fallen or when the assassin struck at her. No power left in her that her voice might have made.

  Without her weight, he might have been able to climb. Without his weight, she might have been able to, but at the edge of what was left of the platform above, he saw the assassin stagger into view. Nowhere to go.

  At her throat, beneath the torn shift, he saw Lauresa pull the lapis pendant free.

  Above, he saw a hint of triumph break the impassiveness of the dark gaze where the assassin appraised the rope, angling back to the exposed beam it was lashed to.

  Chriani felt Lauresa’s hands in his, something cold against his skin.

  The assassin swung back with the hooked blade, struck hard at the rope where it stretched taut. Chriani felt a lurch, and then the pain in his arm was muted as the rope’s pull on him suddenly failed.

  In his ear, he heard Lauresa sing. And all at once, he felt a joy so unexpected that it had no name.

  She was staring upward, seemingly watching the assassin as he smiled coldly, watching them fall. But she had power left, Chriani thought as the song filled his mind, filled his heart. Something held back in reserve.

  She would make it to Aerach in the end. She’d be safe there, would never have to know what he knew now, the thing that would have killed her as sure as the fall would smash his battered body like glass.

  Everyone has secrets, Barien had said.

  The pendant has power of its own. Lauresa would save herself, was strong enough to make it to her new home.

  Keep her safe, Barien had said, and he’d done his best, he swore he’d done his best.

  This was a good way to die.

  The ground was spinning toward them. Then he felt the princess slip the lapis pendant around his wrist, one finger touching it as she pushed herself away from him into the timeless dark of their descent. He heard the song fade away, and then she was gone.

  But no. Lauresa was there, but farther below him now. The scene around him had changed suddenly, the ground a more distant blur where he plunged toward it through green shadow.

  At his wrist, the pendant was flaring with pale blue light. Below him, he saw the platform and the figure of the assassin, and he realized that he’d moved upward somehow — shifting through the air to a place above where they’d fallen even as he continued to fall, picking up speed.

  He had the bloodblade in his hand. Instinctively, he twisted, lining up along the path of his descent.

  He saw the assassin suddenly falter, staring around him as he spun, trying to see where the suddenly vanished Chriani had gone. Too late, he looked up.

  Chriani saw fear in the dark eyes as he hit.

  Where he slammed down with all the speed of the fall, the force of his impact punched up through his arm where the blade drove into and through the assassin’s chest. Chriani felt something hit him hard, and then there was darkness, and when the darkness cleared, he was at the edge of the ruined terrace, the lifeless body beside him. He felt a sharp flare of pain as he tried to breathe, felt broken ribs and his injured arm hanging lifeless at his side.

  Where he dragged himself to the edge, he saw a figure in white, lying unmoving on the forest floor below.

  How he managed to descend the stairs without blacking out, he didn’t know, but he was conscious all the while of the distant sounds of battle over the pounding of blood in his head. He fell the last half-dozen steps, slamming through rotting timbers to hit the soft loam of the forest floor below, but he was beyond pain now. Driven by some instinct, some energy that ignored the white-hot fire in his chest.

  But as he stumbled toward Lauresa where she’d fallen, he froze. In his good hand, he squeezed the bloodblade tight.

  Ahead, the princess lay face up, arms splayed, skin pale like the ilvanweave that draped her. Over her, Dargana crouched, dark eyes watching him, an arrow through her arm that seemed to bleed the same black as her leather in the half-light.

  As she watched him approach, she pulled the shaft free without so much as a grimace, emptied the contents of a crystal flask into her mouth. Chriani watched her shudder, saw the haze of pain clear from her eyes, the bleeding suddenly slowing where the wound at her arm scarred white. She tore a chunk of cloth from Lauresa’s shredded hem, wiped the grime from her face.

  “Get away from her.” Chriani’s voice was hoarse, throat raw as he staggered closer.

  “You’re not looking like a person in much of a position to give orders.”

  “Touch her again and you’ll join her just the same,” he whispered.

  “What, dead?” Dargana said mildly. “Not this one. Not yet.” She flexed her arm carefully, touched her finger to Lauresa’s throat. “Not like you.”

  Where she stood, the exile pulled the long-bladed handaxe from her belt, spun it easily.

  “You, I’ll kill for touching that blade with your half-blood hands. You, I’ll make suffer for every time you’ve thought yourself worthy of my family’s name.”

  Chriani felt the anger twist in his heart, felt the pain fuel it with every ragged breath even as he fought it.

  “Listen to me…”

  “For the lives of my company that are lost today, this one will go back to her father in pieces. When I’ve done with you, you’ll have nothing to do but watch.”

  “This is the Princess Lauresa of Brandishear…”

  “And for her, twelve that followed me are dead,” Dargana shouted. “Twenty of the Uissa have hunted the Crithnalerean for a week and more, twice that number of gavaleria after them. Chanist’s guard push farther into the Greatwood than any army since his father’s. The carontir are concentrating their offense across the entire northern frontier. Tell me what it is that makes her worth all that, half-blood?”

  “The war that starts if she dies today…”

  Dargana laughed. The rage in her as strong as it was in his own heart, Chriani realized.

  “The narneth móir was to be used to slay her,” he said. “The assassins of Uissa were commissioned to do it, to take the part of a Valnirata warband ambushing the princess and her escort on the way to her wedding in Aerach.” He spoke quickly, erratic, words tumbling from him because he knew that if he thought on them for any length of time, the anger would freeze them in his mouth. “The bloodblade that Chanist would give them was to be the proof that would start total war.”

  “You talk madness, half-blood…”

  “The madness of a prince who hates the Valnirata enough to have his own daughter killed as a means to destroy them…�
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  Trust him not…

  A wave of pain hit him, made him stagger where he stood. He felt faint, heard his heart hammering in his head. Barien’s dying voice was in his ear again. The prince…

  The truth in front of him the whole time, but some truths are too terrible to know. Easier to think only with the rage, with the fear.

  He was a fool.

  “If she dies today, you’ll follow her.” He felt himself hanging desperately on the edge of consciousness, one blow from Dargana likely enough to kill him.

  “You talk bravely for a man half-dead.”

  “By my hand or not, and not just you. Your people, the exile tribes, the warclans, all of it. If the Princess Lauresa dies, all the Valnirata will burn…”

  We tell ourselves these things we do have purpose that overcomes the pain they bring, Chanist had said. Speaking of Barien who was dead, or of Lauresa who was meant to die, Chriani didn’t know. The martyrs in whose name the Valnirata plague would be extinguished at last.

  The dreams our fathers have for us that they will never see…

  Over the length of that meal, the prince high had played him with the grace of a Caella troubadour bent to the bandore’s strings. Sending him off on a fool’s mission to unleash his feelings for a princess, those feelings as obvious to Chanist as they had been to Kathlan, to Lauresa herself. Ensuring that the earnest young squire could be blamed for leading a Valnirata patrol straight to the company’s camp. There would have had to be survivors, ready to tell the tale. He knew he wasn’t meant to have been among them.

  Make the truth seem laughable and you give life to the lie.

  “Chanist wants war,” Chriani whispered. “An excuse to raze the Greatwood as a first step to controlling all the Ilmar. You said it yourself.” All the stories from across the Greatwood borders, repeated and laughed at in the barracks and the alehouses as proof of the paranoid race-madness that lived in the Valnirata blood. Rumors that Barien himself had shaken his head at.

  Old hatreds died hard.

  I wonder if we should know what to say to those we love if we knew that it would be the last time. Chanist had said it to him, a father’s unspoken words to a daughter he loved and knew he would never see again. This sacrifice she makes… Chriani’s stomach turned.

  Above them, he heard the shriek of griffons again, the battle swinging closer. But where he tried to move for Lauresa, Dargana dropped to her knees, snapped the unconscious princess’s head up by the hair as she raised her axe.

  “Think on it,” Chriani shouted, desperate now. “A score of the Uissa within Valnirata lands. What kind of wealth could have commissioned that number for so dangerous a raid? Who could have obtained the livery and weapons of a full Valnirata carontir patrol except for one who had captured it over a decade of border skirmishes? Chanist pays for Uissa’s loyalty, but their own hatred for Aerach and the Valnirata distances him from this deed should that loyalty ever break.”

  “Chanist could make war on the Valnirata in a heartbeat…”

  “And he’d never win that war. Not alone.” In the exile’s face, he saw the anger weaken. Something else now in the black eyes where they watched him. “Think on it,” he said again. “A Brandishear princess betrothed to Vishod’s cousin in Aerach. A noble of two nations murdered by a Valnirata warband while traveling to her wedding day. War on both fronts of the forest, east and west. And once the Valnirata is purged, what then? Brandishear’s borders pushed by Chanist to Aerach, then beyond. Holc and Elalantar have no hope of standing against him.”

  “What kind of madness would murder its own issue for the sake of blind ambition?”

  Trust him not…

  Chriani remembered the prince being treated by the healers, the blood-streaked tunic there. The insignia of the prince’s guard missing from it, but no one would have thought to look for it. He felt the sickening sensation overwhelm him again, felt his thoughts slipping into shadow.

  “But for providence, the princess would already be dead and the Valnirata would be watching the armies of two nations amassing on their borders. But if she dies now while you stand and watch, all that will pass. On your decision, all Chanist’s plans will come complete.”

  Dargana looked once to Lauresa, back again. Slowly, she lowered the axe.

  From within her tunic, she pulled another crystal vial, the same healing draught she’d taken herself. She set it carefully to Lauresa’s lips as her fingers touched the princess’s throat again.

  Where Chriani stumbled to kneel beside her, he waited for an impossibly long moment. Then he saw Lauresa shiver, a spasm shaking her as her breath started up again. Like the wash of warmth across chilled skin, color flooded her face.

  Where Chriani looked up, Dargana was watching him. There was nothing to say.

  The exile slipped a third flask into his hand, and the blood-spattered steel rings with it.

  “Take the draught before you drop,” she said coldly, and then she was sprinting for the close edge of the wood. Chriani made sure that the vial was stopped tight, kept it clutched in his good hand.

  “What will you do?”

  In the shadow of the trees where she’d stopped, Dargana called to him, watching where he cradled Lauresa in his arms. He knew what it was she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Her gaze carried a familiar contempt, but it took him a moment to recognize Konaugo’s look. The same dismissive assessment that the captain had always made of him. The sense of failure that Chriani had always carried.

  “If Chanist were the father of one I loved, I would cut his living heart from his body,” she said. “No Halobrelia blood flows in your veins, laóith.”

  And as she slipped into the darkness, Chriani felt the words twist inside him that he’d only ever spoken to two people before. Barien, who had taken him in and showed him a strength that Chriani had never known was in him. Kathlan, who had showed him that he had the will to use that strength, and who had been the only person besides Barien to have ever seen the mark at his shoulder.

  “My father was exiled before the Incursions,” Chriani called, not sure if Dargana could even hear him. “For arguing against the move to war. He traveled to the Ilmar, lived with my mother’s folk. When the conflict started, he came back to the crithnala lands. He joined the factions here allying themselves with the Ilmar.”

  There was movement in the trees. He saw Dargana slip back through the shadows.

  “They feared a war that would destroy the Ilvani and the Ilmari alike,” Chriani said. “They fought hit-and-run skirmishes against the Valnirata from the south. He was killed.”

  “My father and uncle were exiled for daring to dream that the Valnirata might reclaim some of the glory that Chanist’s fathers stole from us,” Dargana said coldly.

  “My father believed the Valnirata’s march to war would extinguish that glory in a way that even Chanist’s fathers never could.”

  Chriani said nothing more. Dargana was silent for a while.

  “We have a fallback point on the northern flank of the forest,” she said at last. “My troupe will be regrouping there, riding west. The gavaleria will likely presume we have the princess and follow from the air. Come in after us, your horse will be there.”

  Chriani only nodded. His heart was hammering in his chest, pain scouring his lungs like embers each time he breathed.

  Where his numb hands clutched her, he thought he felt Lauresa stir.

  “There have been scout reports of Ilmari forces scouring the Wayroad,” Dargana said. “Looking for Chanist’s lost treasure, I expect.”

  “We can’t trust the road.”

  Dargana nodded, thoughtful.

  “Follow the forest edge north and around. Bear east along the stream you’ll cross, then make for the northernmost point of the Greatwood, west of the Hunthad. Cross the water and you’ll be in Aerach.”

  Lauresa stirred again, Chriani holding her with what felt like the last of his strength. As her eyes s
lowly opened, he tried to smile, fought the pain that wracked his body like the crippling fear that wracked his mind.

  He wasn’t watching as Dargana slipped away.

  — Chapter 12 —

  THE ROAD HOME

  IT WAS RAINING COLD, almost turning to snow as he passed alone through the last of the crossroads villages marking the southern extents of the Rheran hills. The escort he’d traveled with along the Clearwater Way from Werrancross had been left behind in Caredry four days before. The high cloud that pushed south across the Sea of Ehadne had finally swallowed the sky after the unseasonable sun of High Winter, but the true cold was likely still a week or two away. To the south as Chriani rode, mist had shrouded the Greatwood, silent and dark where it spread unseen.

  For the five-day ride back along the Wayroad, he’d hooked up with an Aerach cavalry unit for safety, passing himself off as a messenger, cloaked and hooded. When they stopped each night, he kept to himself. He watched the faces in the barracks of each of the Clearwater keeps in turn, not yet sure how safe he was. Not sure if he ever would be.

  It was pushing to evening already as Chriani and the chestnut mare he was riding now came in along the well-traveled road through the coastal farmsteads. He was weary, fighting to stay awake against the rhythm of the horse’s light steps beneath him. Dark was descending quickly enough that he should have stopped for the night. He meant to arrive in Rheran late, though. Easier that way.

  The roan had been found saddled and ready where Dargana had said it would be, field rations and water left beside it. They’d hidden in the trees after Lauresa awoke, waiting for the forest to fall silent again before they moved. Even still, Chriani led the horse out along a roundabout route on the least-trodden paths threading the wood, not completely trusting that silence even after it was clear that the crithnala and the griffon patrol pursuing them had gone.

  Even with the healing draught, Lauresa was still shaky, had come closer to death than Chriani wanted to dwell on. He’d hoped to save the second draught that Dargana had given him in the event the princess needed it later. She saw him try to slip the vial away inside his sleeve, though, next to the picks and the two bloody insignias hidden there. The one that Barien had torn away from the prince’s own cloak. The other, Konaugo’s, who that same prince had sent to his death with a word. She forced him to take the draught himself, Chriani adamant that he could ride with a broken arm until she told him she’d walk out alone unless he relented.