Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  The draught’s life-magic worked quickly enough, but they waited until the sky was darkening before making their way carefully past the Ghostwood’s edge. Where they followed the tree line south and east, they saw no sign of pursuit, but they rode hard until nightfall nonetheless, pushing on more slowly until dawn when they finally stopped to rest.

  As they rode, Chriani told the princess what had happened as she fell, filled in the missing pieces. He told her of Dargana’s role in saving both their lives, but in response to the princess asking how it had happened, he said only that his being of her own blood had changed the exile leader’s heart in the end.

  They made camp at the edge of a small horn of forest that pushed out from the unbroken green of the Greatwood. They were close enough to see the muddy brown line of the Hunthad where it wound its way north, the scrub turning to terraced farmland across its opposite bank.

  There was a warmth in the crystal-clear air that seemed to hint of the spring that was still a long way off, and they stayed close all that long day and into the next night. Always one sleeping while the other kept watch, but never leaving each other's arms. And while he watched Lauresa rest, Chriani almost managed to convince himself that he could do what he wanted to do. Almost convinced himself that he could deliver Lauresa to her new life in Aerach without telling her what he knew.

  If Chanist were the father of one I loved, Dargana had said. Chriani hadn’t even wondered at the time how she could have known his feelings with the certainty her voice displayed. And in the end, in a way he hadn’t expected, it was the exile’s contempt that forced his hand, made him find the words that he knew would cut deeper than any blade.

  If he was to kill her father, Chriani thought, Lauresa deserved to know why.

  The princess wept that next morning as though she’d somehow known the truth even before Chriani spoke it, her father’s betrayal absolute beyond any imagining. And as he had when he’d told Dargana of his own father — as he had when he’d first made that same confession to Kathlan — Chriani found himself thinking about that absent father in a way he almost never did. Thinking about how much of his own life had been defined by his belief in who his father was, of what he had done. The secrets his mother had told him to never forget.

  As he held the princess who had been a bright pain in his heart since he was eleven years old, he wondered what would happen if all that was taken from him now. How would it feel if all that he’d believed in — all he thought he was, all he’d ever loved — were suddenly to be revealed as lies?

  For most of the next day, Lauresa sat alone while Chriani gathered snowberries to supplant the dark bread and jerky Dargana left them, and though he sat close to her beneath the canopy of sun-touched boughs, he knew there were no words he could make that would take away the pain behind her tightly closed eyes.

  Sunset was streaking the sky when he finally spoke.

  “Come away with me,” he said.

  She was silent a long while. “To where?”

  “To anywhere. We can go to Cresthan province, find my mother’s kin. Elalantar, sail to the islands. Somewhere far from everything.”

  The sky was darker when she finally spoke again.

  “How far will we need to go to escape the war that begins when we disappear?”

  Chriani said nothing after that, but she moved to settle herself against him. Despite her spellcraft that pushed the winter chill away, she was shivering, and he pulled the bedroll around them, held her tight against him as all the words he’d said that night in the encampment twisted through his mind. All the words he’d waited his whole life to say, that he wanted desperately to say again, but even as he opened his mouth to speak, she put a finger to his lips, kissed him gently.

  “Don’t speak anymore,” was all she said.

  Even beneath the steady drizzle that filled the gutters to overflowing, Rheran was loud as it always was across the market court, and Chriani felt the familiar sense of movement around him as he led the mare through the late-night emptiness of the trade road. He didn’t know whether the city guard would be watching for him like the keep garrison almost certainly were, but he kept to the well-lit spaces and the huddled crowds, hiding in plain sight. Lauresa’s words coming back to him from when they’d walked that night.

  He slipped into shadows only in the last stretch along the wall, carefully watching movement at the distant guard posts above him as he knocked at the stable gates. He’d sent the message on that morning with a city-bound rider under cover of a merchant’s bill, but he didn’t know whether Kathlan would be inclined to answer it until he heard the bars slide back, her face in shadow as one door cracked slowly open.

  He saw an expression in her eyes that he couldn’t read as he pushed the hood back. Then she looked to the mare.

  “What the sotting fuck have you done with my horse?”

  Chriani led the mare in as the gate was shut behind them, the stables deserted. Kathlan seemed more interested in the horse’s state than in his at any rate, only glancing his way once to level a dark look at the well-run swelling in the chestnut flanks as she unsaddled her. He splashed water to his face at a basin near the stove, sat resting in the shadows for a long while as the mare was carefully groomed and shod. When the horse was fed and stalled, Kathlan hefted the saddle, stalked past Chriani where he was sitting. She slowed, though, turned back to appraise him.

  “You find what you went for after all that?”

  “I have now,” he said.

  Kathlan said nothing, carried the saddle to a workbench across the room. The limp was more pronounced, he saw. Her leg bothered her sometimes when the weather changed.

  “They said you were dead.” Her voice was even but Chriani felt a faint pain twist through it. “Along with her and her escort.”

  “Don’t believe all you hear.”

  Kathlan inspected the overly ornate riding saddle, pulled out needle and cord to cinch a loose fitting that probably only her eyes could see. Her hand was shaking, just a little.

  “What else do they say?” Chriani asked.

  “I expect you know more than I do.”

  “Tell me what you know just the same. Who attacked them?”

  She gave him an odd look.

  “Bandits from some monastery north of Aerach. Some axe to grind against the lord she’s marrying down there, so they thought to make him a widow before the wedding.”

  “How many survived the attack?”

  “None’s what they said. Konaugo and two score others gone. Ashlund’s captain now. They said you…” She broke the cord, tied it tight. Chriani heard her fighting to slow her breathing. “They said just the princess escaped, but she took her sweet time doing it.”

  “That’s what they say?”

  “That’s what I say.” Kathlan inspected the stirrup straps, saw something she didn’t like as she bent low with an awl. “It looked like war for a while. Word from the frontier that it was the Valnirata ambushed the escort. Then word came through one of the prince’s seers that she was safe, that it had been the monastics who did it. Got that same word in from traders coming in on the Clearwater.”

  Chriani nodded, thoughtful. The story that Lauresa had crafted, that she had told upon her arrival, had made it to where she knew it needed to. Her own lie given life in the streets and the markets and the taverns in order to counter the lie that her father had needed to make it all work.

  “Wedding’s over and done a month early, word out of Five Hog’s House says. Lady Lauresa Andreg now. The Bastion had to scramble to have Peran declared heir, big ceremony four days past. Prince came back from the frontier in a hurry.”

  “He’s still here?”

  “Last anyone told me,” Kathlan said, but there was an uncertainty in her tone now. As if she’d felt the sudden chill that threaded Chriani where he sat in shadow.

  “Are you all right?” she said at length.

  “You remember what you asked me before?”

  “I
remember asking you a lot of things over time, Chriani.”

  He nodded. As he stood, he stretched the ache from his back that the long ride had given him, crossed to where Kathlan worked. He kept a watchful eye on the awl still in her hands as he slipped close, kissed her gently.

  “And what was that for?” she said as he broke off, but her voice had abandoned the anger.

  Chriani slipped the green ribbon into her hand.

  “I know what I’m meant to do,” he said.

  Two days’ ride from the forest horn, the two of them had crossed the frontier at sunset, waiting out the cover of darkness they’d need to steal a horse from one of the outlying farmsteads. In the stables of a vineyard estate, Lauresa used her dweomercraft to enchant the stablehands there to a sleep they didn’t wake from in the time it took Chriani to get the chestnut mare saddled and ready. Lauresa rode the roan as they headed out along the low lines of stone fence that marked the western acreages. Chriani would take the stolen horse north with him. One less question to be asked.

  The night was as clear as any he’d ever seen as they made their slow way east and north, intermittent light in the windows of distant farmhouses the only witness as they passed.

  Both moons were up when he saw the faint spread of light and shadow that marked the city in the distance. As they slowed, his hand found Lauresa’s, riding close beside him.

  There were no words.

  Chriani slipped out through the stable doors to the shadows of the courtyard track. He’d told Kathlan to stay back, but he saw her in the faint light of the loft window, watching him as he nodded to her, then was swallowed suddenly by shifting shadow, gone from sight.

  On his right hand, he wore the ring of plain steel. On his left, he’d slipped on the black band he’d taken from the assassin once Lauresa had awoken and he’d been healed. Both of them had made their careful way up to the fractured terrace, then. He’d searched the body carefully without telling her why, hoping for some token or sign that would connect the assassins to Chanist, but at the level of the bargain they’d struck, he knew he’d come up empty. He’d taken the assassin’s ring though, felt its power as he’d slipped it to his finger and watched his hand shimmer and fade like the dawn-faint shadow it cast.

  Though he’d felt their power in the speed they gave the assassin’s relentless attacks, he left the steel-shod boots behind. Their echo along the corridors of the barracks that night was a memory he wanted to forget but knew he never would. The assassin’s eyes had stared sightlessly up the whole time, the emotionless set of the face taken to the grave.

  He’d never even learned the killer’s name, Chriani thought now as he slipped south across the staging ground. Never heard him speak. The last one to die in the name of Chanist’s ambition? Or simply one of many who would die if that ambition came to pass?

  What kind of madness? Dargana had asked, and not for the first time since that terrible moment of realization, Chriani hoped he’d never find out.

  From the steps of a narrow alley, he watched the guards and the dogs at the Bastion gate for just a moment, slipping silently between them as he sent a scattering of pebbles and horse dung across the courtyard where Barien’s body had been burned. A moment’s distraction of sound and scent, but it was all he needed to send him silent and unseen along the bright marble of the central court. There would be no way in past the guards in the great hall, he knew, so he went the old way, through the barracks to the warden’s door. The familiar corridors to Barien’s quarters, walked ten thousand times.

  The dining halls were alive with raucous laughter as Chriani slipped through the garrison quarter, twice flattening against the wall as he was passed by guards he recognized, but it seemed as though their features had changed somehow. Faces from a dream he might have had once. Less than three weeks since he’d passed through these corridors for the last time. Less than three weeks since Barien had fallen to save five nations from war without knowing it.

  Or had he known? The thought came from nowhere, circling in Chriani as he slipped past what had been Barien’s door, what would have become the new warden’s quarters, whoever had inherited the title and the responsibility for Peran now. That night, had whatever intelligence Barien stumbled upon laid all Chanist’s dark plans out and unconcealed? Or had it been simple instinct, protecting the princess without ever knowing why? Just trusting that it would make a difference in the end?

  At the edge of the farmsteads surrounding Teillai, seat of Allenis, Duke Andreg, Warden of the Clearwater Steppes, Chriani and Lauresa parted, and it seemed to him then that continuing on for the road north and west as she spurred the roan ahead was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

  He slipped the steel ring to his finger then, the mate to the one she said she’d put on if ever she needed him again. Wear yours always, she’d said, and he knew he would.

  He rode slow, saw where she was sighted from the city walls, an escort riding out to meet her. He waited, turned his mind to listening in desperate hope for one last word from her, but there was only the silence of his own dark thoughts.

  As they picked her up, he saw one of the riders swing past her, gazing westward like he might have seen Chriani lingering there, the Clearmoon setting in the sky behind. Chriani turned quickly, spurring the mare west to meet the long road ahead.

  The lock in the storeroom wall looked like it had been rekeyed, but it didn’t slow Chriani as he opened and closed the warden’s door behind him one last time. In the children’s court, the evenlamps were burning bright but he was less than a shadow as the ring’s dweomer wrapped him, no sound coming from any of the dark doorways he passed. At Peran’s chamber, which had been Lauresa’s chamber, he saw light beneath the door. She was twelve, the same age Lauresa had been that first day on the training grounds. Princess High Peran someday.

  Though he tried to hold it back, he felt the dark anger flooding him now. He felt the chill in the shadowed stones, felt an oppressive weight in the nighttime Bastion silence. A place he loved once. A place he dreamed of spending all his life, but there was an emptiness in its pristine stillness that galled him now.

  Once, he’d dreamed there was greatness here.

  Four days before, Irdaign had been waiting for him on the road just outside Caredry. She was wrapped tight in a cloak of black wool, but Chriani caught the flash of bronze hair even at a distance. As he approached, the same horse she’d ridden before watched him with its unnatural gaze.

  Chriani was as surprised to see her as he was relieved, an anger he could sense in her telling him that she already knew of the things he didn’t think he could have brought himself to speak of. Lauresa had gotten word to her somehow, Chriani thinking he might have caught a glimpse of a steel ring at the princess precedent’s finger.

  “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say where he slowed next to her.

  “You have nothing to be forgiven for, Chriani. And much to be thanked for in the end.”

  “Thank me when the end comes.”

  Her look told Chriani that she would have known what he was thinking without him ever speaking it. Would have known just as Lauresa had known it. The thing she’d begged him to not do, an unearthly echo of her mother’s words now.

  “Spare him,” Irdaign said.

  In that last morning together, Chriani had met the princess’s plea with silence, but Irdaign reigned in close to him, held his gaze in a way that forced his voice.

  “Why?”

  “Because whether you are successful or not, you will most certainly die. And because there remains good that he can do.”

  Chriani laughed, cold.

  “You can forgive him?”

  But he felt the laugh cut off, the bitterness in him buried beneath a sadness in her eyes that took his breath away. Lauresa had her mother’s eyes, it was said.

  “I will never forgive him,” the princess precedent said softly, “and he will know that from me. But there are forebodings in my heart which I have
learned to trust, and those tell me that without him, the land will suffer. Young Peran has the seed of statecraft in her but not the years that will let that seed bloom. For her sake, for the sake of the land that Lauresa has given her love and freedom to strengthen, let him live, Chriani.”

  Along the shadowed north hall of the prince’s court, he moved with no sound, like Barien had made him practice, day in and out. Sending him to the kitchens some mornings before dawn to fetch a loaf of the prince’s own bread, hot from the ovens. Or to the servants’ quarters more than once. Delivering invitations to Marjir, the princess high’s tailor, long after the Bastion had been locked down for the night.

  Barien had always done his best to confine those requests to the warmer nights of spring and summer, and it was on those evenings spent alone outside his rooms that Chriani had first settled himself in the old sentry post. Watching Lauresa’s windows from the shadows of the wall, hearing her voice as song spilled out from her balcony to the darkness.

  At the smaller entrance hall to the throne room, the doors were open like they shouldn’t have been.

  Chriani slowed, pressed flat to the wall. He felt the power of the ring thread through him, saw no shadow behind him that the evenlamps should have cast, but he knew his concealment likely wouldn’t last for long. The throne room was alive with sorcerous wards, it was said.

  He’d left the sword behind at the stables, the idea of what he was going to do to get past the guards a thing he told himself he’d work out when he got there. The throne room or the prince high’s quarters alike, there should have been guards. Now, though, their absence seemed even more of a threat. As he approached, Chriani slipped the assassin’s ring off, his shadow suddenly flaring to either side of the corridor.