At the end of the short hall, another set of double doors stood closed. Chriani felt a quick twinge of apprehension at the thought of an ambush waiting beyond, or coming up on him unseen from the prince’s court behind him, or of what power his attempts to pick the lock might unleash.
In the end, he simply pushed at the plain brass ring that marked the center of the left-hand portal. At his touch, the door swung wide with the faintest creak.
Within the throne room, the fire was burning high, just as Chriani remembered it from any of the long nights of celebration he’d seen there. The countless times he’d sat by the hearth to watch Barien and Chanist together at the head table, laughing like brothers.
Chanist was beyond that table now as Chriani slipped silently inside. The prince high was in a plain tunic of grey flannel, a jacket of the guard draped across a chair close by. He was standing with arms folded behind him where he watched the fire, not looking back at the sound of the door in a way that told Chriani he was expected. He felt a knife-edge of fear push through him, buried it quickly beneath the anger that he welcomed this time as he never had before.
What kind of madness?
Save for the two of them, the chamber was empty, and somehow even larger than it usually seemed. Chriani’s voice echoed sharply from distant walls as he spoke.
“I’m afraid I could not stay for your daughter’s wedding after my escort duties had been fulfilled, my lord prince. But I bring two messages from the bride.”
Where he turned back slowly, Chanist gave him a withering look, Chriani feeling the weight of all the power in that gaze. All the history, all the strength that had been purchased with deed and bravery and a will that had made Brandishear great. A lifetime spent dedicated to keeping a nation safe. He had to feel for the anger where it flagged, had to force his mind to the thoughts he would have given anything to forget.
“If I might be so forthright, my lord prince, your security measures need improvement.”
“My security followed your progress from the moment you entered the city and passed within the keep by way of the stables, master Chriani. You are here are at my indulgence. You are alive at my whim. Do not forget that.”
“My life will be spent as I wish it, my lord prince.”
The prince high laughed, then.
“Do you come to kill me, boy?” In the booming voice, Chriani heard the same warmth that he had lost himself in as a child. It sent a chill up his spine now.
“No, my lord prince.”
Chanist shook his head, a trace of weariness in him suddenly.
“So what keeps me from killing you, then?”
“The same thing that stopped you from having me killed anywhere along the road from Aerach. The number of those who know the truth your daughter and I know, and their instructions to make that truth known to all should either the Lady Lauresa or I come to harm.”
Chanist paced around the table slowly. He had wine there, Chriani saw. He filled two goblets of black glass, beckoned closer. Chriani approached, balled his fist before seizing his drink so as to quell the trembling in his hand.
The prince high drank, thoughtful.
“A man might die many ways, squire.”
“Then for the sake of your rule and your name, you should hope that none of those ways find either the Lady Lauresa or myself for some time.”
Close as he was, Chriani saw a flash of blue at the prince’s neck, a lapis pendant there to match the one Lauresa wore. The court sorcery that had saved Chanist and him both in the end.
“You escaped that way,” Chriani said slowly. There it was, a thought given voice, summoned up from the long contemplation of the road. “Barien fell but not before taking you down. It was your blood and his in the hall of records that night. You used the pendant to escape to the throne room.” All the way back, nine days ridden in silence, he’d tried to put the last pieces of the puzzle together. Questions still hanging around the events of that night when everything had changed.
“You are to be complimented on your intuition, master Chriani. Perhaps Barien did teach you something after all.”
“Speak the name of Barien in my presence again for any reason, my lord prince, and despite my vows to the contrary, you will die.”
In his voice, there was a deadly earnestness that Chanist heard. Chriani locked his gaze to the prince’s, didn’t look away. He had to set his jaw against the trembling that traced its way up from his shaking fists, squeezed tight again. The prince’s blue eyes were colder than he’d ever seen them.
“I would give anything to have avoided what happened that night, master Chriani. You can take that truth for what it’s worth.”
“The truth of a man who would kill his daughter for ambition’s sake is worth very little, my lord prince.”
Where the prince turned away to refill his goblet, Chriani caught the tremor in his hand.
To die alone is a thing we all face one day…
When Chanist had said it in his pavilion, Chriani had heard the pain. He wished now to be able to seize that pain, drive it like a slaughterhouse spike into the prince high’s heart.
To die betrayed…
It had been the fear in Barien’s voice that had awoken him. He understood now.
“Barien uncovered your plot,” he said quietly. “He intercepted the dagger where it had been left for the Uissa assassin to procure that night. You would have used spellcraft to conceal it. To code a message, perhaps. You never guessed that Barien had sorcery of his own that would reveal it.”
Chanist turned away, paced back toward the fire, but Chriani followed.
“When he confronted you with the dagger, you attacked him, but you weren’t good enough. Not young enough anymore. A struggle. Barien recovered the dagger and struck. He would have killed you with a second stroke, but you used the pendant’s power to escape. Court sorcery. It took you back to the throne room.”
In the end, it was still all supposition on his part, but the expression on Chanist’s face when he finally looked up told Chriani he was close enough to the mark. The pieces complete, finally. A Valnirata revenge scheme unfolding over two generations, but no one would ever suspect which side it was taking that revenge.
“Your apparent astuteness would have served you better in seeing through how completely and effectively you have been used in this unfortunate matter, my lord squire.” Chanist’s tone was mocking.
“Even for all that, I survived, my lord prince.”
“Apology accepted, master Chriani.”
“How is it possible to hate as much as you do, my lord prince?”
Chanist laughed again, but where he turned, he hurled the goblet to the fire, black shards shattering with an explosive crash.
“I order men to battle knowing full well that they may die before the end of it. Do I hate them, my late-anointed squire?”
Chriani hurled his own glass straight at Chanist’s head. The prince high grabbed it from the air almost without looking, the wine it had carried spraying out to the tile behind him.
“Your own daughter…” Chriani whispered.
He thought he caught the shadow in the prince’s gaze, the weariness of age and rule clouding the bright blue eyes, but Chanist turned away.
“Blackmail is a sport for harder men than you, master Chriani. State your demands and be on your way.”
“I have no demands, my lord prince. But I will take what has been offered by you, in public and before witnesses.”
Chanist looked back where he refilled the goblet and drank again.
“Commission.” He managed a thin smile. “You would serve me after all this? To what end, master Chriani?”
“To watch you, my lord prince.”
The smile faltered just slightly.
“To remind you,” Chriani said, “of the price of your ambition. And to give you the chance to redeem your name in the name of a daughter and her mother who both beseeched me spare your life.”
And at the m
ention of Irdaign, Chriani saw a crack in the facade of strength the prince high wore. There again, the weariness he’d seen that night in the throne room, the same uncertainty when Lauresa had used the mention of her mother to distract Chanist from the truth in front of him. A memory of a happier time.
“I’ll need an adjutant,” Chriani said, “as I was to Barien. Kathlan, the stable master’s assistant.”
“The two of you will make fine company.”
“Kathlan can outride most of your company as it stands now. She’ll do better once your healers have made her leg whole again.”
“No healer will ever mend the essential weakness of your own heart, master Chriani.”
“I was told once that every man’s station is a place worthy of respect if carried well.”
“This meeting is over, squire.”
The prince high paced slowly back to the fire, footsteps hard across the tiles where the falcon of Brandis dived. Chriani felt himself summarily dismissed, fought the urge to run for the door. So much that had happened, so much that would never be the same. All of it swept away with a prince’s word.
Chriani called from where he stood.
“If you had been successful then, when you first crafted the treaty, would you still be fighting your war to this day? The Valnirata purged and all the Ilmar under siege while you crafted the kingdom your father never made?”
“Get out.” Chanist spoke to the air, stared ahead as if he was already alone.
Chriani stepped closer, tried to pace around the prince high.
“You would sacrifice your name, your history for this? You would bring war to the Ilmar again regardless of what its people want?”
“Get out, boy.” The voice was colder. Chanist still wasn’t looking at him, shifting to keep Chriani behind him.
“Regardless of what the Valnirata want…”
“I ceased to care what the Valnirata want on the day they cut my father’s living heart from his body!” The prince’s voice was a terrible sound, filling the empty room with a fury that echoed from cold stone. And where Chriani watched Chanist spin back, he saw the prince high finally break. His voice trailed off to dark silence, choked off with age and an anger that Chriani recognized because he’d seen it every day for ten years. A dead numbness in the prince’s eyes that he recognized from the small steel mirror that hung between pallet and wall in Barien’s chambers.
On that terrible day that his father, brother, and sister had fallen, Chanist had been spared.
Where he stood now, the face of the prince was gone, melted to the shadows of the firelight. In its place, Chriani saw the son who should have been there to stand at his father’s side at the end. He saw the young princeling whose heart had burned for fifteen long years with the question of whether his being in the ranks of his father’s forces at Welbirk might have made some difference. He saw the warrior who had woken each night from the empty dream that his sword, his strength, his will might have single-handedly turned back the Ilvani tide that washed over Goffree’s forces that day like a bloody storm.
He saw the king who had never wanted the crown, and who had wished every day since it was set upon his head that he had died in his father, his brother, his sister’s place.
This was hating what you were.
And slowly, Chriani unclasped his cloak, let it fall to the floor. He pulled his tunic over his head with one hand, stood naked to the waist so that the red and black lines of the war-mark could be seen, stark in the firelight. No bandage covered it. Lauresa’s name was still a seamless extension of the intricate web of black line, but three more joined it now, just as seamless by virtue of the healing draught he’d traded for in Caredry that morning. Chriani had watched the days-old web of scabbing skin slough off, the dark glyphs beneath it that he’d carefully etched in by night on the long road back. Lauresa, Barien, Irdaign, Kathlan, who had all taught him what he needed to understand.
The prince high could read the Ilvani lettering. Chriani saw the anger in Chanist turn to cold shock for a moment, then twist back to a greater anger that showed red in the prince high’s face. His lip was trembling, as were his hands.
“My father was Halobrelia,” Chriani said, “and for standing against the same warlord Caradar who you stood against, he died in exile for his pains. Does that make any difference to your madness, my lord prince?”
In Chanist’s hand, Chriani’s goblet shattered. The prince stared down in apparent surprise, blood and wine spilling freely from his fingers.
All that endless day, Lauresa and Chriani had lain together in the shadowed glade, Lauresa’s magic keeping them warm. She would have a daughter, she’d whispered to him in the end, Chriani not asking how she could possibly know. Thinking that he could feel that different sorcery where it shifted just beneath her skin, his hand on her belly as she slept beside him.
All that day, there were no tears, but Lauresa cried when Chriani gave her the dagger. Give this to her when she’s old enough, was all he’d said. Tell her I cannot take back the evil it has done to her line. Warn her of the hate and love that is her birthright.
“I have, my lord prince, brought two messages.”
Tell her she is the crossroads, he’d said to Lauresa. Tell her she is the place where two worlds meet…
From within the pocket in his sleeve, Chriani pulled the slip of parchment Lauresa had stolen from the stable master’s quarters in the vineyard estate that night. She’d had no quill or wax in the glade, had used spellcraft to write and seal it. He read it from memory.
“To the Prince High Chanist, I bring word by her own voice and hand that the Lady Lauresa Andreg, Duchess Teillai of Aerach, hereby relinquishes all power vested in her as Princess Lauresa of Brandishear, daughter to Prince High Chanist Brandis and Princess Precedent Irdaign Leisana, and in such act abandons all claim to title, throne, and family.”
Chriani did his best to twist the last word as he tossed the sealed packet to the floor. He thought he saw Chanist flinch.
“To the father who would have had her murdered, I bring Lauresa’s second message, my lord prince.”
From within his sleeve, Chriani pulled two scraps of grey cloth. One pristine, the other blackened with blood. Barien and Konaugo. The eagle of Brandis in gold thread gleamed in the firelight as he dropped two insignias of the prince’s guard on top of the packet at Chanist’s feet.
When Chriani spoke, he felt the same pain thread his voice that had worked through Lauresa’s that day. Her final question to her father, given to Chriani to carry.
“How many more good men will you watch die in order to further your ambition?”
“As many as it takes ere I see the Greatwood burned to ash and spread on the Ehadne winds…”
Where Chanist turned to him, the strength had returned. A prince’s might in the great voice, straight-backed where he spoke.
“Do you think to stop me, master Chriani?”
Chriani slipped his tunic on again, pulled the cloak around himself.
“Good night, my lord prince.”
He didn’t nod as he turned away.
His footsteps were a faint whisper on the stones as he made his way to the doors of the great hall. The guards beyond were shocked in a way that told him they had no idea how he’d gotten there. Wary in a way that told him they weren’t ever going to ask.
He walked the Bastion outwall once, then scaled down the rough stone of the tower beneath Peran’s window to the courtyard below. For a long while, he hiked the walls of the keep, the guards he passed recognizing him, letting him pass without challenge. Chanist’s word had reached them already, Chriani didn’t know how.
The first hint of light was in the east when he finally slipped back to the stable, found his way up the ladder and to Kathlan’s bed. She’d been waiting for him, was asleep almost the moment he slipped into the nest of blankets beside her. He’d thought throughout the whole night’s walk about what he’d say, what he’d vow to her, but in the end, there
were no words. He felt the change in himself, felt the truth and all it promised.
At the window, the Clearwater sky was brightening, the east free of the cloud that had blown off in the night. Chriani watched for a long while, felt the chill breeze twist against the heat of the stove below the loft and Kathlan’s body against his.
It was later, the morning blue-white outside, when he finally slept.
— Colophon —
Acknowledgements and gratitude are owed to
the following, for those things they do.
Special Thanks and Honors of the Prince’s Guard
Jennifer Landels
(The spare keys to the Ilmar
are always under the mat.)
The Bastion
Colleen, Shvaugn, and Caitlin
The Court Scribes of Rheran
Diana Cox, Gabriel Duclair
Artistic Acolytes of the Princess High
Pawel Lyczkowski, Ben Goode, Peter Polak, Dragi Stankovic, Veronika Vasilyuk
Tales Told in Five Hog’s House
Luka Bloom, Jeff Buckley, Elaine Cunningham, John Debney, Evanescence, Lisa Gerrard, Ed Greenwood, James Newton Howard, Guy Gavriel Kay, Howard Shore, Mary Stewart, Margaret Weis, Gene Wolfe
CLEARWATER DAWN
Published by Insane Angel Studios
(insaneangel.com)
Copyright © 2010 Scott Fitzgerald Gray
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, objects, and incidents herein are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual things, events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Except that Kathlan with her clothes off looks an awful lot like… well, never mind.
Clearwater Dawn Page 30
