CLEARWATER DAWN
Chapter 6 • The Ode of Seilonna
Chapter 8 • Things Left Unsaid
Chapter 9 • The Clearwater Way
Chapter 11 • A Good Way to Die
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales
Part One — The Name of the Night
CLEARWATER DAWN
An apprentice guard in the royal household of Brandishear, Chriani is a capable young warrior held back from attaining his full potential by a lifetime of dark anger. Lauresa is a princess about to be set aside as heir and married off for the sake of treaty — and the only woman Chriani has ever loved. When his mentor is murdered preventing an assassination attempt within the palace, Chriani is forced to become Lauresa’s protector — the two reconciling a forbidden passion even as they find themselves caught up in a maelstrom of political intrigue, ancient racial hatred, a society living in mortal fear of sorcery, and a decades-old plot to plunge five nations into genocidal war.
The princess faltered. Chriani saw the flick of her eyes, the gleam of blue catching the light as he twisted to follow her gaze. He’d left the dark door open behind him. In the faint light of the corridor, his eyes caught the ripple of shadow that meant movement in the distance. Footsteps, almost silent.
“You fool,” she whispered.
Chriani wasn’t listening, sheathing his sword with effort as he turned for the door, made to call out to whoever was racing toward them. No idea what he was supposed to say, but he was fairly certain that begging for mercy would be a large part of it.
Then the princess was moving behind him, one hand across his mouth even as the other brought the dagger up, close to his throat as she dragged him back. Chriani was startled, as much at being grabbed at all as he was at the strength in her arm. As he stumbled back, though, he felt instinct override any uncertainty. Her blade was a hand’s-width from him, more than enough space to go for her wrist. No room to get a decent strike in with the other hand, but her flank was vulnerable and in easy reach, or the soft muscle of her thigh, one sharp blow that would drop her.
But even through the instinct, through all the memory of all the hand-to-hand training he’d done at Barien’s side, he knew he couldn’t do it.
No idea what any of this was about, but he couldn’t hurt her. Not anymore.
He went for the dagger, though. No point in having his throat slit, by accident or otherwise. But even as his hand clamped around her wrist, Lauresa sang…
CLEARWATER DAWN
A Novel of the Endlands
Book One
of
The Exile’s Blade
by
Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Published by Insane Angel Studios
Copyright © 2010 Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Smashwords Edition
For Colleen
Braern ar nay min leinn…
One owes respect to the living.
To the dead,
one owes only the truth.
— Voltaire
Click either map to download a PDF version from
http://www.scribd.com/doc/59270511/Clearwater-Dawn-Maps
— Chapter 1 —
THE WARDEN’S DOOR
LOOK TO THE PRINCESS…
Even in the half-waking dreams of his own exhaustion, Chriani thought he could hear the command ringing in his head where he lay in his alcove in Barien’s chambers. Waiting for the sleep that he knew would come if he could only quiet the ache at his chest and in his gut.
Where he shifted on the thin tick, the pallet beneath it barely long enough for him, he felt the chill airflow through the narrow gap that passed for a window in the closest corner of the room. Originally an arrow slit when the Bastion was new-built a hundred generations past, it had been knocked out and roughly widened as the open fields and huts it once overlooked and defended had turned to the alleyways and flagstoned court of the outlying keep long years ago. The wind still blew in from over the southern walls, though, twisting across him now. Just past High Winter, the Brandishear coast had yet to see snow, but the unseasonable warmth of the past two weeks’ sun had disappeared as quickly as the day’s light.
As he walked along the walls of the keep not so long before, Chriani had watched the lights of the sentry towers echo the light of the city beyond, threescore thousand strong. Like he always did, he felt the specific stillness that was the keep at night. From the southlands, from the farmsteads that spread and surrounded Aloidien and Quilimma and Cadaurwen and the fertile steppes at the mountain’s feet, the trade roads ran non-stop by day with the past season’s grain and cheese and salt beef bound for the docks. Destinations east and west, ports in Elalantar and Aerach and Holc. Beyond the walls of the keep that was its heart, Rheran was alive with a light and a noise and a movement that ran all night and only began to fade as the noise and movement of the next day started up all over again.
But where Chriani lay now within the Prince’s Bastion, that life had never seemed more distant. As the walls of the keep marked off the heart of the city, the Bastion marked off the heart of the keep, and within that twice-isolated space, the closing of the gates marked off the end of the day with a sense of ritual formality. Whatever business carried on into the night around him now was the quieter commerce of court. Consuls and emissaries would be plying their trade in the apartments of the master-merchants and barristers and petty nobles who had long ago secured the keep’s scant supply of apartments. In the prince’s tower that rose just above and to the north of Barien’s chambers in the garrison wing, a steady stream of servants would even now be making their way along the stairs to the guest chambers where Chanist housed whatever foreign dignitaries the tide or the road had brought in that day.
The Bastion was the place of princes that Chriani had been a part of for ten years now, and it would be a part of him for two weeks more.
Two weeks until it was over, he counted from the space where sleep beckoned. Time enough.
He’d heard the words that day, found himself hoping that it might be for the last time. Ringing out across the courtyard of the keep from the stable gates, the Princess Lauresa had swept in along the city road with a half-dozen riders around her.
“Look to the princess!”
It had been Barien’s voice, the deep tone of command ringing out like it always did. To the side and the customary distance behind the Princess Lauresa, Chriani saw the tall warrior rein in, dark cloak and lighter dust swirling around him as a pair of grooms took his horse, then he in turn leapt down to take Lauresa’s reins in his own hands.
Chriani had been resting, slouched in the doorway of the outside armories as the twisting breeze of a bright daymark funneled through the main gates, the scent of dust and dung and roasting meat carried in from the market court beyond. The armories and the stables framed the gates like bookends, but where Chriani lingered within the doors, he was hidden where sunlight glared off the stones of the courtyard track.
Lauresa was in white, as she usually was, draped in a shawl of ilvanweave that the Mearinn of the Tannwood made, the dust of road and trail never clinging to it. Her horse was a white palfrey mare that had been given to her by her father to mark her nineteenth year the autumn just passed. Curls of sunflower yellow twisted where she gently returned Barien’s nod of salute, blue eyes catching the light even from where Chriani stared darkly.
He was tired suddenly, watching her. He hadn’t slept well the night before. Hadn’t slept at all the night before that.
The Princess Lauresa is to marry in Aerach, the sudden proclamation had read a month before, and all Brandishear will join in tribute for her happiness.
Barien was warden to the princess and had been since before she was born, they said. Chriani was Barien’s adjutant from the day he’d been taken into the keep, ten years past now. Barien had asked him to ride out with the princess’s party that morning, hanging back behind the warrior for the day’s ride. Chriani had begged off sick, though, just as he’d managed to work his way out of three other invitations to accompany Barien on some outing or another with Lauresa the past month.
Over breakfast in the garrison mess, Barien had appraised him coldly where Chriani did his best to look pale, but the warrior hadn’t bothered speaking the disbelief that was obvious in his dark eyes.
“If you can keep from coughing up blood long enough, see what Konaugo’s got for you,” Barien had said, which sounded simple enough. But meetings with the prince’s notorious captain and Chriani had a way of complicating themselves, and so it was that he’d found himself in the armories since just after dawn, a battalion of the prince’s rangers returning from a two-month tour of Aloidien province the previous day. A full troupe’s worth of weapons had been left for inspection and honing, most of their blades so notched that Chriani suspected the south-west townships had been granted a reprieve from the wolves that prowled the foot of the mountains in favor of attack from an army of rocks that the troupe had valiantly bashed into submission.
From the stables, the Princess Lauresa in white made her way with two escorts along the steady rise of the courtyard track for the main gates of the Bastion to the south, circling the upthrust stones on which the citadel rose. Chriani thought he saw her glance his way. He backed farther up, slipped easily into deeper shadow. Waited until she’d passed before he moved back to slam the armory doors.
Marriage of convenience, it was said in the city and among the garrison who speculated on the suddenness of the announcement. A marriage of treaty. Politics. Chriani pushed the word and the thoughts from his mind then. He was far too tired to think.
It had been three years since the last time the Princess Lauresa had spoken to him. One month since the proclamation and Barien seeming to take some great interest in having Chriani at his side while he rode out the last days of his obligation as Lauresa’s warden. Two weeks more of Chriani finding excuses to keep the distance of the last three years before it was over.
He’d gone back to the stone wheel and the pile of shortspears and blades still there, another lamp lit to vanquish the shadows when he heard the doors open behind him.
“So what was it this time got you on solitary detail?”
Where Chriani looked up, Barien’s hulking figure was dark against the light outside. He pulled a waterskin from within his cloak, the dust of the road falling from him where he slapped it away.
“If you’ve already heard, you likely already know,” Chriani said coldly. He arced three spears end-first across the room, watched them slam one by one into their rack without touching the steel to either side.
“I didn’t hear it, I smelled it,” the wind-tanned warrior said with a grin. “Konaugo burning, all the way from the south city-gate. General insubordination? Specific insubordination?”
“I reportedly called his parentage into question,” Chriani said evenly.
Barien laughed.
“And how did our fine captain find that out?”
“I may have inadvertently said it to his face.”
Barien laughed louder. He helped Chriani finish up, though, both of them working the wheel in silence, and what would have been a grueling day and a night became just a grueling day in the end. The short day’s sun had already set as Chriani racked the last sword, bundling up a dozen that he’d spotted too-serious flaws in, readying them for the forges. But where he dumped the damaged blades at the doors, he saw a figure moving at the stable gates across the way, and in his mind, a hundred different impressions shifted and locked into place.
Through the armory, twenty different types of weapons spread across four times that many racks and shelves, but Chriani knew them all. Beneath the shock of black hair that he brushed aside, he had his father’s grey eyes that would spot the faintest blemish or deviation in a single blade, or sort and catalog every shadowed rack in the room at once. He had his mother’s attention to detail that would take those things in, etch them permanently and effortlessly into memory like it had long ago etched the slender figure across from him.
Where Kathlan stormed out from the stables, Chriani caught a glimpse of dark hair cut ragged above whipcord-tight shoulders. Her bare arms were tanned where a too-large tunic was belted with black leather, a silver-edged buckle on it that had been her father’s. The trace of a limp was visible where she grabbed the reins of an exhausted horse, and the Elalantar lilt of her deceptively soft voice rang out across the courtyard where she cursed the Aerach courier who had overridden it, trying in vain to make the Bastion before last light.
“Blood, mother, and fucking moonsign!” Kathlan rattled off a string of epithets that Chriani had only heard half of before, her slight frame making her gift for profanity that much more of a shock to its generally unsuspecting victims. “By your prince’s balls if you can sotting find them,” she shouted, “you ever bring a horse through my gate in a lather again, you’d better have the fucking whole of the Valnirata riding up your overstuffed ass!”
Chriani watched the courier backpedaling for the courtyard track as if he expected Kathlan’s tongue to suddenly lash out across the distance between them. Deep down, Chriani wanted to smile, but he knew that even if he’d searched for it, any mirth in him was long gone.
He drank thirstily from the waterskin Barien tossed, not realizing that he was staring past him until he saw the warrior turn to follow his gaze.
“Second shift at the stables tonight?” Barien said with a broad wink as Kathlan gently led the horse inside. “You’d let me know, I’d have worked faster for you.”
“No,” Chriani said as he turned away quickly. “I’m for bed.” Off Barien’s look, he added, “My own bed.”
“You telling me the bloom’s off that rose already? Night and daylight, boy, I’d have thought you might find someone yet you don’t push to want to kill you inside six months.”
“You thinking anything would be a great first,” Chriani said as he handed the waterskin back. A calculated taunt, intentional. He felt the same numb pain circling in his gut now that he’d felt when Lauresa had ridden in, wanted nothing but for it to go away. Not wanting to hear the words in Barien that would reflect the words unspoken in himself.
“Seems to me the longer that mouth of yours stays open, boy, the less chance of anything worth hearing coming out of it.”
“Shut yours, then, old man, and show me how it’s done.”
The backhand blow that Barien threw was fast enough that it would have caught most people, but long experience meant that Chriani knew to watch for it. He twisted back, felt the air behind the warrior’s hand where it slammed past. He missed Barien’s leg where it twisted between his and dropped him, though. Too busy waiting for the other hand, not watching.
As Barien helped him up, the warrior laughed again.
“You had enough, then?” Chriani said where he calmly dusted himself off.
“Yeah, on account of I can’t afford to have to carry you in. I’m late for the watch.”
He slapped Chriani on the shoulder, tossed him the waterskin again and headed out. But at the doors, he stopped, turned back. Stars in an endless black sky behind him cast their faint light on the weathered stone walls opposite, the gatehouse flags twisting in the chill breeze.
“Konaugo’s no friend to anyone I’d want to call that, but he’s captain whether you and I like it or not,” Barien said. “You want to make rank before you’re older than whatever captain takes over for him one day, you stay out of his way.”
“I’ll wait for you to take over for him.”
“You’ll be older still.”
Chriani finished the waterskin, sprayed the last dregs across his dust-streaked face. He found an inside corner of his tunic slightly less dirty than the rest and wiped his eyes.
“I don’t need the advice.”
“When you stop telling me you don’t need it is when I’ll know you don’t,” Barien said. An evenness in his voice, no sign of the impatience that Chriani had often thought should have been there by now. “I know what you should be, well as you know it. Only one of us gets to decide whether it happens or not, though.”
Across at the stables, Kathlan reappeared to hurl the courier’s saddle unceremoniously into the frost-streaked dust of the courtyard track. She slammed the doors behind her as she disappeared inside.
“I’ll work on it,” Chriani said simply. In the doorway, Barien nodded and was gone.
Where Chriani doused the lamps and pulled the doors shut, he felt the fatigue suddenly. A dull ache in his gut settled below the deeper pain there, reminding him he hadn’t eaten yet that day, but he was too tired suddenly to want to.
The gates of the keep opened northward to the crowded city slopes that dropped to the harbor and the seawall beyond. The Bastion gate looked south, the long twist of the courtyard track sweeping east between its walls and the crowded rise of buildings pushing up against it. Chriani cut west, though, crossing the empty training grounds where the garrison practiced. He pushed himself up the narrow steps that rose along the wall that separated the grounds from the clutter of buildings to the south. Along the inside walls of the keep, the exclusive apartments and offices of the ground-level alley maze were locked up tight, lamps burning in the upper windows. In their secure island at the center of the city, the keep’s residents were an elite — gem merchants and goldsmiths, scribes and sages. The offices of the silk guild and of a dozen of Brandishear’s largest private trade concerns were here, as were a half-dozen merchants of spellcraft. The branded sorcerers wise enough to set up shop as close to the watchful eye of the prince’s court wizards as possible.
At the prince’s
stables, he thought he might have caught another glimpse of Kathlan
at the open window of the loft, but then he was around the Bastion
wall that blocked his sight of the opposite yard. As he slipped
through eddies of dust and chill wind for the steeply winding lane
ahead, he didn’t look back.
Tired as he was, Chriani had walked the keep walls until well past second evenbell, the starlight stained with red where the Darkmoon rode alone in the east. On one pass hiking above the orchard, he glanced around to make sure he was alone, swinging down easily along the rough ladder that the stones made to pluck three of the prince’s last snow oranges for his pockets. From a perch above the courtyard, he let the sweetness of their slow-frozen fruit numb his tongue, watching the guard change on the stepped tiers of the staging ground that opened up before the Bastion gate. He’d expected to see Barien there but didn’t, wondered absently if the warrior would be staying on for fourth watch to make up for his arriving late.
Within the sharp lines of stone and steel that rose from the rock, the Bastion’s design reflected its martial origins, and the twisting of its high banners in the wind seemed almost defiant sometimes. It had been the original keep when the city was little more than a spread of sod huts around the rocky rise that overlooked the harbor, and as Rheran grew up around it, the stepped walls of the current keep had been built to wrap around the old like a salt-snail’s new shell.
The rocky foundations of the bluff had been chopped away to form the near-vertical base of the outwall that ringed the Bastion now, its shattered stone giving rise to the walls of the new keep as the slope within those walls was stepped and leveled. Now, it seemed to Chriani that the place had some sense of how it had been long ago demoted to family life and court. A once-muscled sword arm turned to the lute, he thought.
Long past the point of any living memory, the Bastion had been the house of the Brandishear princes, then had been the regent’s palace under the long years of the Lothelecan, the great Empire that existed now as little more than the insignia of the sun that marked the leaguestones of the roads. Then sixty years before, Chanist’s grandfather had been steward when the Empire and its fifteen centuries of history had suddenly fractured, and the Bastion had had its prince once again.
It had always seemed odd to Chriani that even as Barien had let him maintain a blissful ignorance of the political structures and subtle power struggles of the present-day Ilmar nations as a youth, the warrior had maintained an almost obsessive interest in beating into him the historical highlights of the Empire that had built that power.
“The Empire’s gone, though,” Chriani had said, only a year into his service but already grown impatient with the impromptu history lessons with which Barien liked to fill the empty waiting of a watch. “What’s the point in studying the road behind when you know you’re not turning back?”
“History’s use comes in using what was as a gauge for what’s to come,” Barien had said. “You’ve got to make the trip the first time to sketch the map. Second trip’s easier because of it.”
“What was it like?” Chriani had asked. “Living with the Empire?”
Barien laughed.
“How old do I look, boy?”
Chriani shrugged.
“What was it supposed to be like?”
“Peaceful,” Barien had said after a moment’s contemplation. “Or so they say.”
“There’s peace now.”
“So they say.”
Across from the stables, what had once been ramparts along the northwest tower was the porch of Lauresa’s chambers now. A balcony extended out from a set of Ilvani-carved glass doors, Chriani watching light behind white curtains where he paced slowly past. The wind from the harbor to the south was like ice against his grime-streaked skin, but he lingered above the stables for a long while, an unused sentry post there in the shadow of the tall gates. He watched the light of the stars play out across the black expanse of sky above the Clearwater, a ripple of grey below where wind and wave caught their reflection.
Where he finally felt the fatigue hit him hard enough that he decided it was safe to head inside, he nodded a salute to the guards with their dogs at the Bastion gate. He watched them check the adjutant’s insignia at his shoulder as he passed in through the arched hall of the central court, daylight bright. Within the Bastion, the fires would burn for warmth, but evenlamps lined all the corridors of the central court and the barracks wing beyond that Chriani slipped through soundlessly. Outside the prince’s citadel and the homes of the wealthier lords, the sorcerer’s light was rare. Not for its expense, but for the superstitious unease with which most folk regarded it, burning always with a cold white flame that cast ghost-thin shadows.
He heard voices in the dining halls but drifted past them without looking in. As he slipped through the locked door to Barien’s quarters, Chriani was surprised to see a lamp burning but the warrior absent. From the set of the oil, he’d been there and gone a while already, but Chriani was too tired to do more than simply note it.
Past the faded green cloth that marked the alcove that was his, he noisily kicked off his boots. His quarters were little more than a narrow gap running two paces deep at the corner of Barien’s main chamber, and he’d never been sure whether the space had actually been intended as an antechamber or whether some mason had simply run out of stone as the walls came together.
He was fortunate at least that Barien was as he was, and though Chriani made do with the narrow space for sleeping, the warrior had long since allowed him to claim a healthy part of the chamber beyond it as his own. Chriani had known a number of tyros over the years who’d had to make do with much less.
There was a pronounced difference between Barien and much of the rest of the garrison, Chriani had realized early on, watching the anger by which too many of the others sought to train their own tyros, young apprentices graduating by virtue of a litany of scorn and scars. He’d seen it that very first day, barely a boy when he’d attempted to lift the warrior’s purse, no clue as to the significance of the horse-and-axe insignia on the pouch where it hung at his belt. Not smart enough to have noticed the same standard flying from the ramparts of the keep itself, its stone walls rising across the market court behind him.
The initial curiosity in Barien’s eyes as he lifted him by one frantically jerking arm was something Chriani had never forgotten.
“To the keep,” the warrior had called as he tossed the boy effortlessly to a pair of guards who’d appeared as if from nowhere. But once dragged in through the enormous stone gatehouse and up the courtyard track beneath the watching eyes of what seemed an enormous number of people, Chriani had found himself not clapped in irons as expected. Instead, he’d been deposited in Barien’s quarters, the same he staggered through now.
For the better part of that long day, he’d sat alone, paralyzed with fear and the expectation of the beating that was coming. But when the warrior finally appeared, he brought with him not a lash but a quarter-loaf of buttered bread, still warm from the ovens and the first thing Chriani had eaten since he’d walked to the city two days before.
He’d picked up more than enough scars of his own over the years after, but mostly from ignorance or a notorious lack of judgment on his own part. In all the years since Barien had claimed him from the street, though, the warrior had never raised a hand against him in anything but carefully measured warning, or in calculated exercises like the fall he’d taken in the armories.
Barien was cut from different cloth than so many of Chanist’s guard. He could handle himself as well as any of them with sword and axe, but Chriani had seen him also hold his own in conversation with any number of lords or diplomats on morality and matters of state. Barien was a warrior, but he could think in a way that most of the warriors around him never bothered to. He knew military strategy and social graces, and he was as good a rider as anyone in the keep and a number of the rangers besides. And in the deepest dead of winter, Chriani had heard the warrior pull music from the strings of a bandore that would summon up spring as surely as the scent of a fresh-mown meadow.
Above all else, though, Barien was bodyguard and warden to the Princess Lauresa. Beyond the ten years he’d trained Chriani at his side, beyond the assigned shift as sergeant of the watch, beyond the roles of courtier and rider and warrior that he switched between with no apparent effort, he was warden to the royal heir. Would be for two more weeks.
The Princess Lauresa is to marry in Aerach…
Beyond knowing that it lay beyond the Greatwood and the Valnirata warclans to the east, Chriani had never bothered looking at a map of Aerach until the day the proclamation was made. A six-day journey by horse, longer by sea where the merchant fleets from Rheran and Sudry were forced to sail up and around the Sandhorn jutting thirty leagues into the blue expanse of the Clearwater.
Most people went by water regardless, though, the shorter overland route along the Clearwater Way cutting through the northern frontier of the Valnirata forests and the whispered threat that rode there. Last part of the old Ilvani empire to fall against the tide of war that the tribal migrations into the Ilmar had made, thirty centuries ago now. The only part of that Ilvani empire to never formally surrender, shut up in the dark heart of the Greatwood now.
Where he stripped off his shirt, Chriani caught his reflection in the small steel mirror that hung between pallet and wall, the narrow table beneath it stuffed into the same space. There was a bone comb and a cracked enamel basin there. He dumped it to the drain hole near the doorway, refilled it from the skin that hung there and made a mental note to refill that in the morning.
Lauresa would go by water, Chriani knew. The Mealay, Prince High Chanist’s best ship, would have its decks spread with flowers like it was said they were when the princess high had been brought down from Elalantar for the prince’s own wedding.
Splashing his face and his chest, he caught his reflection again, forced himself to look at the bandage covering his shoulder and chest, and all at once the ache of the day’s work was eclipsed by a sharper pain. Beneath the white linen, he felt the name he’d scribed there burning next to a mark that only two people in the keep had ever seen.
The Princess Lauresa is to marry in Aerach. He’d been trying to not count the days but had failed.
Barien was bodyguard and warden to the Princess Lauresa, and that very first day, he’d waited until Chriani had eaten his fill, then tossed him a length of silken cord. It was tied with a rider’s triple-cinch, significantly more intricate than the hitch Chriani had slipped at the warrior’s belt.
“Who taught you to work a knot like you did?”
“My mother,” Chriani said. He was trying to sound defiant, but the fear in his own voice was all he could hear.
“Untie that one,” the warrior had said. Chriani studied the knot only for a moment, worked it for not much longer before tossing the unfurled cord back to Barien. The warrior handed him a rusted padlock then, Chriani pulling a sliver of dark steel from its hiding place in his ruined boot. The pick was one his mother had given him to go with the instincts she’d taught him, the lock opening almost effortlessly to his touch.
“How old are you?” the gruff warrior finally asked.
“Eight full seasons this last summer. When my mother died,” Chriani said.
“Father?”
“My grandfa died a month past.” Chriani didn’t actually answer the question, but Barien didn’t seem to notice.
The warrior ordered him to fetch fuel for the brazier, gave him directions to the firepit in the courtyard where the wood cellar stood. Chriani went quickly. By the time he’d returned, staggering under an armload of kindling, the pallet in the alcove had been set up for him.
When he’d heard the wedding proclamation, Chriani had taken that steel sliver from the hidden inside pocket of his sleeve where it always rested now. He’d added another dozen picks alongside it since that first day, shaped and sharpened carefully over the years for a dozen different styles of lock. His mother’s was the first he tried, though, always. His mother’s pick worn smooth by the movements of his fingers across its once-honed edges. His mother’s pick whose point he’d used a month before to punch carbon black into the skin of his chest, carefully scribing the lines of Lauresa’s name as blood-marked glyphs along the edge of another mark that his mother had made there long ago. Another part of his life no one would ever see.
Where Chriani finished washing, he felt the same anger, the same knot in his stomach that had kept him from sleep for four weeks now. But this night, for some reason, his eyes closed almost as soon as he hit the pallet. He remembered thinking drowsily that he should have turned the lamp down, saved the oil in case Barien had gotten caught up again in some frenzied debate on reciprocal sea cargo taxes on behalf of the prince high in the dining hall. Chriani couldn’t make his legs move, though. He made a mental shrug, wrote the oil off on another one of Barien’s late nights that he had as little interest in as the warrior seemed to have in discussing it.
He felt the slow stretch of that last space before sleep like he hadn’t felt it in a month now. A frozen moment of time.
Look to the princess. Ringing in his head, he heard the echo of Barien’s voice from earlier that day, and from all the long years before.
Two weeks, he told himself as he adjusted the bandage, tight where it wrapped across the knotted muscle of his shoulder and chest.
Time enough for this
scar to finally heal
Look to the
princess…
Where it filled his head, the voice was a force that shook Chriani awake like a blow, forcing him bolt upright in the shadows. The lamp across the room was lower but still burning, his vision blurred where he forced his eyes open, staggered to his feet.
Look to the princess… Seek her in her chambers and stay with her… Keep her there…
It was Barien’s voice, pounding in his head as if the hulking sergeant had been shouting face to face. In his fatigue, Chriani actually stumbled across the room, half-expecting the warrior to appear crouched behind some cupboard, issuing orders from out of sight.
Summon none else till I get there…
“Sorcery…” Chriani whispered despite himself. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that wherever Barien was, however this was happening, the warrior knew that he was listening. He was more awake than he’d ever been before, unseen fingers twisting ice-cold along his spine.
Beneath an edge-cracked flagstone at the foot of Barien’s bed, Chriani pulled a brass key wrapped in white linen. Aside from Barien and Chanist himself, Chriani was the only one who knew the key was there, was the only one who knew what door it opened.
Look to the princess…
Though Chriani had no idea where the voice had come from, he obeyed it as he always did. He obeyed it without thinking, Barien the only one besides the prince himself whose orders could do that to him. He fumbled his sword belt from the hook by the door, not stopping to make the moonsign he wanted to make with every pulse of the fear that rose in him.
He made the sign while he ran, though. His fingers touched heart to navel as they scribed the shape of the crescent, paying homage to the power of night and darkness in order to appease it. Chriani pounded into the corridor with his scabbard slapping at his leg in a way that told him he hadn’t fastened it correctly, but he didn’t slow. He hadn’t actually been given the call to arms, knew that he could be sanctioned or worse if the urgency he heard in Barien’s voice didn’t warrant it, but he trusted that urgency.
He couldn’t remember ever seeing the warrior afraid. Couldn’t remember ever hearing the unmistakable edge in Barien’s voice that he’d heard tonight.
Opposite the long hall of the Bastion armory storerooms, Barien’s chambers were about as far as one could get from the heart of the barracks wing and still be in it. At the end of the silent corridor sat a nondescript storeroom, Chriani pushing through it, the light of a shrouded evenlamp bright as day to his eyes.
He locked the door behind him, though. Spent precious moments checking to make sure he was alone before he found the sliver of stone wall that slid back to reveal the keyhole beneath.
For nineteen years now, Barien had been warden to the heir of Brandishear, and proximity to the warden’s door was the reason behind the relative isolation of his chambers, far from where the other officers barracked south of the dining halls. Chriani turned hard, bolts thudding faintly back as the wall sunk in and twisted away from him, then he was through, pushing the false front of stone and tile back on its well-oiled track. He heard it click into place, looking like it had never been moved at all.
Where a wide corridor ran north and west ahead of him, it made a sudden transition from the plain stone walls of the garrison quarter to white drapes and wooden paneling. Grey-shrouded evenlamps slumbered at regular intervals into the distance, wide doors of dark wood lining the hall to both sides. No one there, but he knew there shouldn’t have been that time of night.
Around the Bastion, the garrison’s presence was constant, guards on the gates and walking the edge of the outwall that overlooked the grounds of the keep. The staging ground lay to the east and west, the main gate to the north, the apartments of the inner city all around. The door that only he and Barien used bypassed the great hall and the guards outside the main entrance to the throne room, though. Chriani was running now toward the prince’s court — the wide hall that angled its way irregularly around the interior of the prince’s quarter.
He was in the connecting hall still called the children’s court, though the royal heir he raced for now was hardly a child any more. To left and right, wide doors marked off sewing and art rooms, music rooms and solaria, the chambers of the younger heirs all shut up tight as he slipped through the intersection, the hall splitting off to the north and west.
He went north, footsteps silent on pale grey marble as he heard second nightbell echo dimly from the tower above, marking off the slow passage toward morning. There’d been no alarm, he realized, but he didn’t slow. In emergency, and in the intermittent garrison drills designed to prepare for emergency, the bell rang constantly. Struck three times, then held for an equal length of silence, then struck again.
A hundred paces along the corridor, he slowed before a recessed alcove and a set of white-painted double doors, rose vines and lilac stenciled carefully around its edges. This corner of the Bastion tower marked off the last of four chambers along the corridor, the other three holding the younger heirs.
Phelan and Miani shared the connected rooms he’d just passed — the bright twins, nine years old the previous autumn. There had been celebrations then, but Chriani had been stuck on outpost duty, Barien away while Lauresa spent the High Autumn at her mother’s house at Aldac, near Myrwater in the south. Between the twins and Lauresa, the Princess Peran, just turned twelve. Seven years Lauresa’s junior and soon to be confirmed as Chanist’s heir. Waiting for the Princess Lauresa to take her leave of Brandishear and the title she’d been born with.
To both sides, evenlamps burned. The only sound was Chriani’s own breathing, slowing as he did, but against the calm he tried to force himself to feel, a sense of anxiety was quickly rising. The urgency in Barien’s voice was still with him, but even in the short run, he was suddenly less sure whether that urgency was truly what he’d heard or simply what he’d felt in the unexplained unfolding of that voice in his head.
Around him, there was no sign of trouble. No alarm, no movement in the courtyard where Chriani peered out through the narrow windows beyond Lauresa’s doors. In the air, in the silence of the night around him, he could feel the sense of subdued order that clung to the walls like paint to plaster. A sense of security that Chanist worked hard for, Barien and the others of the garrison hand-picked for detail within the Bastion’s walls.
At twenty-five, Chanist had been only seven years older than Chriani was now when he’d been made prince. All the history that Chriani had been forced to learn at Barien’s side long ago. Chanist’s father had been killed in the disastrous assault at Welbirk, his older brother and sister falling to Ilvani assassins’ blades that same day. A coordinated assault by the Valnirata against the crown that would never be forgotten, not least by the younger princeling who should have died at his father’s side.
But a shoulder injured in a skirmish across the Locanwater the week before kept Chanist from the saddle that day, saw him on the throne less than two weeks later. It was said that there were factions within the war-court then who had favored deposing the new prince even before his coronation, so great was the fear of his young and untested hand failing in the face of the increasingly uncontrollable Ilvani threat.
One year later, Chanist had slain the Valnirata warlord Caradar and pushed his armies back across the Locanwater. He had forged the treaty with the other Ilmar nations that saw the Ilvani sue for peace. Few people had doubted him since.
Look to the princess, the voice had said, and Chriani tried not to think about how much of the fear he felt now might have come just from the thought of that. Having to look at Lauresa one last time.
They were Barien’s orders, though. Chriani composed himself. He would check her safe in her quarters, apologize for waking her. He would wait outside for Barien’s eventual arrival, or for someone else sent on the warrior’s further orders with an explanation of what was going on.
He felt the sword bump his leg again, tried to adjust the belt as he listened carefully, still no sound or movement from either side. The three younger heirs had been away most of the summer, gone north with their mother. Returned just a week ago, they were preparing now to see Lauresa off, though it had already been decided that they wouldn’t sail with her for Aerach. None of the family in attendance at the wedding, Barien had said. Political discretion. Lauresa was bound to some duke, marrying down because that was the importance of it all. Peran would probably lay claim to this chamber at the tower corner before Lauresa had even left the harbor, Chriani thought.
“By your leave, princess.” He heard the bitter edge in his voice swallowed by the silence, carefully tapping the door with the heel of his hand. He was practically within sight of the throne room, the doors that marked the private entrance hall from the prince high’s own quarters standing some thirty strides away down the northern corridor. He waited for what seemed like a long while, called again, knocked a little louder. Still no sound or movement from within.
He could call someone, he thought. It was late and she was sleeping, clearly, and to make enough noise to wake her would be enough to bring every guard within the prince’s quarter down on top of him.
Summon none else till I get there.
He felt the shiver thread through him, but it was just an echo this time.
He looked around quickly, from instinct. Made sure he was alone.
As he dropped to his knees, Chriani had the picks between his fingers even before he’d pressed himself to the keyhole, feeling his way across the pins with practiced ease. Chanist’s locksmiths were the best in Rheran, but they were too consistent in their construction, and Chriani had long years of practicing on the identical lock at Barien’s door that gave him an easy familiarity with this one. He’d opened more than a few of the Bastion’s locks in his day, sometimes at Barien’s request and sometimes of his own volition, but always with the very certain understanding of what would happen to him if he were ever caught.
He’d never broken into a princess’s chamber before, though. He glanced both ways down the corridor again, felt the solid click of the bolt as he twisted and pressed.
He was through the door without a sound, pushing it closed behind him. You had a better chance of being surprised outside than you did being expected inside, his mother had taught him. Figure out what you’re doing before you go in if you can. Don’t know what you’re doing, figure it out as you go.
Inside, a small alcove opened up, Chriani’s eyes alive in the faint trace of light through gauze curtains. Evenlamps burned beyond. Listening, no sound. Inside the doorway, a pair of shoes sat, soft blue leather stitched with gold. Nothing else there.
Slowly, he pushed the haze of white linen aside, found himself in a chamber twice the size of Barien’s. Larger than the others along the corridor by the look of it, the bulk of the space wrapping around from the alcove, centered on the balcony whose door was directly across from him now. Through that door, light flared in the distant darkness, the steep slope that fell off to the north raising this side of the Bastion well above the walls of the keep and the fires of the distant harbor.
From the sentry post above the stables, he’d watched the princess on that balcony sometimes, standing quietly as she scanned the skies after dark, hidden in shadow from any observation from the keep below. Never suspecting that Chriani’s eyes could pick her out in those shadows so that it might as well have been full day. He’d watched her movements behind the curtains, could hear her singing if the wind was right.
In the room, Chriani forced his mind clear.
The princess wasn’t there.
Like the Bastion itself, Lauresa’s chamber had a kind of conspicuous straightforwardness about it, the same sense of military order here that pervaded the rest of the residence. The princess too like her father, Barien had often noted, though Chriani had never seen her that way. Chanist was earth, he thought. Solid. His oldest daughter was air, unreadable. Invisible.
Here, two tables of dark wood, one spread with what looked like letters, two she was reading, one partly written to her stepmother, the Princess High Gwannyn. A tall shelf of wrought metal and thin marble sheets held four cases of neatly tied scrolls, a dozen bound books he didn’t look closely at. A wardrobe, open. Clothes within, riding boots in buffed calfskin. Past it, three windows were shuttered against the darkness, all bolted tight like the balcony door was bolted as he slipped past.
By that door, a single chair meant that she wouldn’t accept visitors here, or at least wouldn’t accept visitors she didn’t know well enough to sit with them on the bed. There behind white curtains, another alcove, out of sight. Across from it, a hanging filled most of one wall, painted in what he recognized was the princess high’s own hand. The work of Lauresa’s stepmother adorned the prince’s court and the dining hall, her brushwork done in the delicate filigree style of Caella, capital of Elalantar where she was born.
He recognized the scene that the silk-cast image rendered — the view from the city, just above the harbor. Atop the slope that rose from the Rheran docks, he was looking directly into the rising dawn. The falcon that was the sign of Brandis, house of princes, soared in that first light, the Clearwater burning orange-white where the shadow of the harbor islands rose along the distant horizon. True as a Clearwater dawn was an expression of oath across the Ilmar, that purity caught in this wash of light and color that Chriani thought he might have fallen into if he’d had more time to linger.
A haze of evenlamp white shone through sheer lace drapes that closed off the sleeping platform. A tension threaded through Chriani even as he called, already knowing what he’d find there.
“Lauresa…”
He hadn’t known he was going to say it like that. Shouldn’t have said it like that. He could have found himself sweeping the stable yard for the rest of his life for addressing anyone in Chanist’s family by their given names.
His voice had an edge to it that he didn’t like. He was on duty, he reminded himself sharply. Barien’s voice in his head. Look to the princess…
He’d called her Lauresa, as he used to.
Where he pulled the curtain aside, he saw the bed empty, turned down but untouched. He scanned the bright shadows, felt something twist inside him, his pulse quickening now. Mechanically inspecting the bed-platform, he noted the nightclothes hanging there, an ivory brush laid aside on a stool, boots standing neatly by the nightstand. The shoes had been by the door, he thought. He took all of it in, felt the impressions click into place as he slipped back to the room.
No sign of a struggle meant there likely hadn’t been one. Shutters and balcony were bolted, Chriani checking them again one by one. The door was locked but it was the only way out. She’d left her shoes.
She might simply have been summoned, he forced himself to think. He slowed his racing thoughts, tried to refocus. That was the easy explanation. The princess up late, attending to correspondence, not yet to bed when the knock came at the door. Some emergency that had seen her escorted to her father or the chamberlain. Gone for a short while, back imminently. Or perhaps she was simply spending the night talking with her father. In two weeks, she’d be gone, he thought. What father wouldn’t want a daughter’s company by the fire in those last days?
And then, even as he slipped through the curtain for the antechamber and the door, he heard the alarm ring out. Three strikes from the tower that might have been third nightbell if they hadn’t come so soon after the second. Then a silence that seemed much longer than it was before the next three strikes rang out.
Through the door, he found the corridor still thankfully empty, slowing only long enough to turn the lock back, instinctively hiding his entrance. He cursed silently as the alarm rang out again, telling himself that it should have been he who raised it the moment he found the princess gone. He’d have to move fast, head back along the prince’s court and through to the armories, then around to the great hall with the rest of the garrison where they would have already been racing from the barracks. It would have been faster to have simply followed the prince’s court where it turned, its five-sided perimeter marking the area of the throne room and the boundary of the prince and princess high’s quarters to the south. However, the extra distance seemed more than a fair trade for not having to explain his unauthorized presence beyond the warden’s door this night.
But even as he slipped the picks into their pocket within his sleeve, he stopped. Stared.
In the shadow that spread from where the evenlamp shone behind him, his eyes caught a subtle change of contrast on the corridor stones. Barely visible, even to him, so that he hadn’t noticed it with the light facing him before.
Running from the door where he stood, heading southward along the route he’d been about to take, he saw a regular alternating pattern. Bare footprints, spaced at a walking pace. Smaller than his foot by a half-hand where he crouched to inspect them, low to the corridor floor. Breathing gently on the stone, he saw one outline take sharper shape, the moisture of his breath chilling just slightly on matte-finished marble, highlighting the trace marks that bare skin left behind.
The leather of the shoes she’d gone without would have been nearly silent, he thought, but leather could slip if one found the need to run on the well-soaped Bastion floors. Barefoot on stone gave the best balance of silence and speed.
As he slowly followed, he saw that she was walking, not running. Careful steps, high on the ball of the foot, trying for silence like those who didn’t know how to walk silently did. No one with her, no other footprints alongside or following except his own.
Then halfway along the corridor, the tracks stopped. He marked where she’d turned to the left, stood to face the blank expanse of wall there between the doors of the younger princess and the twins. Beyond that point, nothing.
Chriani carefully fished his mother’s pick from his sleeve. Along the smooth plaster of the wall, moldings of dark oak were spaced at regular intervals, the steel spike scraping carefully along the two seams to both sides of where the footprints vanished. No gap there that he could see.
Along the floor, though, he felt the slender steel point slip into a narrow depression. A space within the wall itself, accessed through the hair’s-breadth gap between baseboard and floor.
It took him precious moments to find the catch, three times fishing in that narrow space with three different picks before he felt the wire, pushed it carefully to one side, then the other. There was a faint click that he only heard because his ear was to the wall, no outward sign of what he’d done. But where he pushed with effort, a body-wide section of lath and plaster pivoted, one section of molding on the door where it swung out, the other hiding the seam on the opposite side. Something pushed back on it, a counterweight hidden, shifting silently. In the faint light of the corridor behind him, a narrow stone staircase climbed a circular shaft.
Chriani felt a chill trace through him where he saw the footprints continue up the first half-dozen steps before they twisted off into shadow above. A secret staircase, not uncommon in the Bastion, but this was the first he’d found on his own. A thing to be smugly proud of under other circumstances.
Except that the princess was missing, and Chriani knew where those stairs led. His mood was as far from smug as it had ever been.
Where the alarm had echoed from the stones, sudden silence fell, the last set of three strikes fading against the undercurrent of distant sound, rising now. Konaugo, as captain of the watch, would have arrived at the staging ground outside, would be giving orders. Chriani heard shouts from the distant great hall, listened for Barien, hoped for the familiar bark of the warrior’s voice, but the echo in his mind was the only place it came.
Stay with her…
He shook his head to clear it. Behind him, the door swung shut with a faint click and a hiss of trapped air. Ahead, Chriani moved in silence, not looking back as he climbed.
— Chapter 2 —
WORTHY OF FEAR
WITH THE DOOR CLOSED, there was no detail in the gloom for even Chriani’s eyes to pick out as he went, but he counted on the fact that those eyes saw better than all but a handful of the others in the Bastion. People with a secret, like him. He’d see the light of anyone above him long before they saw or heard him, he knew, but all the same, he felt the chill of fear again.
He was ascending to the prince’s tower. He slowed his breathing, faster than it should have been.
He’d never been to the tower before. Had never known anyone who’d ascended to the three stories above the prince’s private chambers, the secret spaces where not even Barien and the other guards went. The tower was the domain of Chanist’s court wizards and healers, it was said — their laboratories and libraries and sanctums there. This much all the garrison knew, but beyond that bare fact were only rumors, of which even the least disturbing were disturbing enough.
Chriani moved carefully, feeling his way along the rough stone of the wall for a count of fifty-five steps from the bottom. He’d expected doors at any of the floors he must have passed, but there was nothing until he heard the end of the stairwell ahead before he felt it. The faint echo of his breathing came back to him as he approached a blank wall, took a moment to find the catch from this side, the same mechanism as the hallway below.
He listened carefully before he pushed through into the middle of a silent corridor. To both sides, he saw the telltale glimmer of evenlamps, but their light was shaded by the endless ranks of shelves that distracted his eye, cost him a moment to get his bearings. He was on the uppermost level, that much was sure. No windows here from which to spy the city or the stars, but the corridor looked to be a perfect reflection of the prince’s court below, running mostly north to south, hard turns west at either end. But where the corridors of the prince’s court were almost unnaturally pristine in their emptiness, these tower corridors held an uncountable mass of books and scrolls. Shelves lined the walls to both sides, barely enough room for two people to pass between them in spots. Even quieter here than it was below.
No guards patrolled here, he knew. In the rumors that spilled from the tower like rain off the Bastion’s slate roof, it was said that no guards needed to. They’d caught a pair of tyros in the tower once, not quite two years before. The pair of them had been just past beardless, and apparently deciding that breaking into one of the secret libraries of the prince’s mages would be a faster path to glory than completing the pledge of service they’d signed.