Clearwater Dawn (17 page)

In an alcove, he saw a young street gamine carefully present a dagger to a pair of lean farmhands. The blade was new enough that it had clearly been stolen, the boys inspecting it with a care that suggested they’d never touched one before. They had salt pork and copper to trade. The girl laughed them away.

“Even with what has happened, there are precious few things I can think of that would inspire my father to secrecy that severe.”

War,
someone said.

Chriani glanced around him, couldn’t see who had spoken, loud enough that the voice carried across the crowd. He felt the reaction to it, though. He heard it echo back from all around him, heard the speculation.

…
be at both ends of the Locanwater by tonight,
someone said.

At the edge of the night market, he saw the wains and stalls of the weapons dealers doing brisker than normal business. He saw battered short swords change hands for twice the silver they were worth.

…
a message they’ll understand
.

At the edge of the market, two Ilvani wains were pulled to one side, the city guard inspecting them with a diligence that belied both the lateness of their watch and the innocence of the crystalware the wagons carried. Like he had on the wall before Barien was burned, like he had within the keep not so long before, Chriani felt the tension hanging, the sense of expectation sharp in the voices that filled his ears and the sudden memory of Barien.

There’s peace now.

So they say…

Behind him, he heard glass breaking, voices raised. He didn’t look back.

“We have arrived, highness.”

Where Five Hog’s House squatted at the corner junction of the trade road and the market court, its weathered white stones took on the blackness of the winter sky, stars impossibly bright overhead. Like anyone else who had spent a life in Rheran, Chriani had lost count of the number of times he’d passed through its doors.

By day, the tavern was packed with the merchants and laborers and guards of the market district, standing shoulder to shoulder at the bar for first call, or lined up four deep if the weather was bad and the crowds couldn’t spread to the nearby lanes. By dark, the caravan traders and the dockworkers and the keep garrison would descend on the torchlit cobblestones and the constant echo of talk and laughter there.

Where Chriani shouldered his way through the crowd at the door, he scanned the close shadows of the tavern’s interior as he made a mental note of the half-dozen guards he recognized, grateful for the shroud where the smoke of the open kitchen vented to the chimney high overhead.

The owner of the place was a dark-eyed teller of tales that Chriani had heard called Ceiya. He did service behind the bar, filling flagons with an unnatural speed as Chriani snatched one up along with a pair of tankards. One of the siolans he’d brought with him was tossed to the tavern master, who caught it without looking.

At his neck, visible only when he wanted it seen, Ceiya bore the wizard-brand that marked its bearer as a sorcerer with fealty to the crown. Stories circulated as freely as the steady flow of mugs to and from the taps that he’d gone by the name of Narthia when he was one of Chanist’s warmages, long years before his quiet retirement. While no one Chriani knew had ever seen the barkeep summon so much as a hint of spellcraft, the reputation of that brand kept Five Hog’s House one of the more sociable establishments in the city.

As he slipped back to Lauresa’s side, Chriani spotted two well-dressed traders rising on shaky legs from a corner table. But where he motioned the princess toward it, she nodded instead to a single vacant space at the open benches along the nearest wall.

Stepping past Chriani, she slapped the shoulders of the two men sitting to either side of the empty space, dockworkers by the look of them, arms tattooed and tar-streaked where they grudgingly moved down. And where she pushed Chriani to the bench, she slid in next to him as he sat, wrapping her cloak around them both as her body pressed close.

Chriani felt her leg alongside his as she shifted her weight along rough planking. From his first tankard, he drank more deeply than he’d planned.

Along the walls, braziers were burning against the cold, but even over the aroma of charcoal and charred meat at the kitchen fire and the close reek of a hundred laborers, Lauresa’s scent filled him. Soap and lilacs, he thought, suddenly conscious of the crust of sweat and dust that the long day had left still clinging to him as a serving tray careened past them, a boy no more than twelve hefting it like it weighed nothing. Lauresa grabbed another flagon as it passed, tossed a clutch of copper to the tray and filled the mug still in Chriani’s hands. She spoke only to him, close enough that she didn’t need to lean in.

“Listen,” she said again.

Within earshot, Chriani reckoned he must have heard a hundred different voices. Merchants, workers, mercenaries. A clutch of half-bloods whose tattered robes marked them as monastics from the frontier lands of the south. A cross-section of laboring Rheran, a hundred different lives intersecting in a crowded tavern on a clear winter night, and there was one thread alone that worked its way through every conversation.

Attempt on the prince’s life…

All around them, word of the failed assassination was all that anyone talked of, and in that talk, one word was whispered repeatedly with the edge of a dark curse.

Valnirata.

Where a bench had been pulled close to the warmth of a brazier, a broad-shouldered Elalantar caravan chief held forth to his rapt crew on the Ilvani plot to assassinate the Ilmar’s four princes, one by one. Chanist was first, he said, and even now his riders had split south and north to send warning to Holc, Aerach, and Elalantar alike. Beyond them, loud oaths against the warclans spiked a dozen conversations, Chriani recognizing a scattering of Holc caravan guards by their habit of spitting when they spoke the Valnirata name. Closer by, he heard snippets of a heated argument between two regulars of the city watch, and though he couldn’t make out where it had started, it finished with a clanking of mugs and a whispered oath.

Chanist will see all the fucking Valnirata burn…

Konaugo’s slip hadn’t mattered in the end, Chriani thought. The prince had been right. Word that the guard rode out against the Valnirata was on all lips, confirmation likely coming in from every courier and wagon that had passed Chanist’s troupe on its way. A kind of eagerness to the discussion, as if this truth had been expected somehow.

Even the Rheran Ilvani where they mingled amongst the room’s Ilmari patrons said it, a little too loudly, Chriani thought. Artisans and armorers, most of them, trading with the caravans from their craft-houses that rose in tiers above the garden quarter. He remembered the scene from the wall the morning before, the bare-edged anger of the Ilvani and the sentry who’d challenged him. The loyalty of crown over race suddenly seemed a thing that a great many were anxious to prove.

They sat for long enough that Chriani felt the beginning of a stiffness in his legs. The two of them listened, all the while talking of nothing against any gaze or ear that might have passed by them in the ever-shifting crowd. Chriani found himself explaining in greater detail than he ever would have wanted to what life in the gatehouse guard entailed, trying not to let his bitterness show. In the end, though, he answered more than he asked, no questions that he could think to put to Lauresa that didn’t involve the wedding in ten day’s time now.

Chriani downed three tankards in that time, hoping vainly that it would dull the sensation of Lauresa’s body warm against his. She’d made more room for herself when a pair of caravan guards who’d been flashing a conspicuous amount of silver staggered for the door, but in shifting down, she’d had to slide her arm behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder beneath the cloak now. It was the appearance that the place demanded, he knew, the two of them effectively invisible where they drank and spoke low in each other’s ears and took in the drifting conversation all around. All the while, though, he felt the dull burning of the princess’s name at his breast, her own fingers close enough to trace it out if she’d known it was there.

Along the adjacent wall, they heard someone speak of having seen the Prince’s Guard riding southeast, shadowing the Glaeddynfield road that ran from Rheran to Addrimyr along the northwest flank of the Greatwood. Lauresa was telling him of a time the summer before when Peran had hidden out in the throne room in order to eavesdrop on a half-day’s excise negotiations, and who had been discovered when she’d burst out from behind a curtain to indignantly order the ambassador to reject the Holc delegation’s offered terms.

Then, from across the room, a murmur drifted through the haze of conversation. Chriani’s senses were duller than he wanted them to be, but these words were sharp, hanging as if they were meant for him somehow.

Piss-sot Bastion guard can’t take out one Valnirata with a knife, don’t know what Brandishear’s come to…

Chriani was already heading for his feet, not even feeling the familiar surge of the rage within him until he felt Lauresa’s hand on his shoulder, pushing him back. He fought to slow his breathing, glanced to the figure who had made the comment. A laborer, nearly as broad across the middle as he was tall. He had a half-dozen empty tankards before him and a wide-set emptiness to his eyes. A fool mouthing words he wouldn’t remember in the morning.

His was a fool’s reaction, Chriani thought.

“You know that the rumors are true,” Lauresa said quietly. Not a question.

Chriani drank deeply, tried to focus. He was following two tankards of bitter with stout because that’s what had come by on the tray the last time, and his tongue was already speaking the warning that he knew his head would be feeling by next morning, too late.

“When you found the blade, you knew it for what it was.”

In the three days since he’d woken to Barien’s voice in the dark, Chriani had become more intimately acquainted with the degree of subtlety in the princess than he’d ever dreamed he would. But though he tried to sense what insight, what interest was in her now, all he heard in her voice was a pain that seemed to match his own in a way he would have thought impossible.

Beneath the cloak, her hand found his, clutched it tight. He could feel her shaking.

“I would bring Barien back in a heartbeat if I could. But failing that, I understand that he did what he did in order to keep my father safe. I would pay any price to do the same, Chriani.”

War…
the voices around them said.

In Barien’s endless history lessons, the Empire had been a time of great advances in craft and sorcery, but the Empire’s presence had given those advances direction and control. When they’d made that first transition from nations to provinces almost fifteen centuries before, the Ilmar principalities were sparsely populated, thinly defended. Today, the warrior had told him, Brandishear alone would be capable of putting an army into the field ten times greater than the combined forces of Brandis and Werran that helped turn the tide of the Migration Wars, with weapons and magic that might match the power of the Imperial Guard themselves.

In the aftermath of the Empire, Barien had said with a seriousness Chriani heard, any war that started might just never end.

Chriani squeezed his eyes shut, a numbness in his fingers where hers twined through them.
Chriani
, she’d said, and with a rush of insight that met the chill of the stout as he drank deep, he realized that she’d never called him that before. Not these last four days, not the four long years they’d trained at each other’s side. Never used his name. Like he was for every other sergeant and guard in the prince’s employ, he’d been ‘tyro’ always, interaction in the Bastion filtered through rank and station and the already-composed sets of expectations that came with it.

“Konaugo let slip that a Valnirata bloodblade took Barien’s life,” he said. “When I saw the blade that was hidden, I knew it for what it was.”

There was sudden snarling at the next table, the caravan chief feeding a pair of guard dogs the remains of a rack of lamb picked remarkably clean. His booming laughter drowned the current of conversation for a moment.

“Yesterday,” she said, “you never answered me. What did Barien say before he died?”

With effort, Chriani pulled his hand from hers. He glanced carefully around them, not meeting anyone’s gaze but confirming that no one’s gaze was on them.

“He said to keep you safe. He spoke of someone, I know not who.”

“The killer?”

“No,” Chriani said. “Someone else. Someone within the court, I think. The reason he chose to flee to the archives, to hide what he hid. He left the dagger for me to find because he feared that to reveal the blade would have put your father in even greater danger. That’s the only sense I make of it.”

Trust him not…

“What else did he say?”

“He said ‘Uissa’. He spoke of this person owning Uissa, I don’t know what it means.”

Lauresa’s hair touched his cheek as she shook her head.

“A weapon, perhaps. Or a person in his service. Is it a Valnirata name?”

Chriani could have answered her
No.
Almost did, in fact, catching the word only just in time to prevent his having to explain how he could possibly have known. There was a dull buzzing in his head.