Clearwater Dawn (21 page)

Then it was gone. No flame, no ash remaining. Just Irdaign pacing slowly across the clearing toward where Lauresa had watched it all impassively, carefully setting her saddle in the shelter of the wall.

Where Chriani’s hand had shot to his chest to make the moonsign, Irdaign hadn’t seen. Lauresa did, though, watching him now where he stumbled back. Chriani saw Irdaign follow her daughter’s gaze before he was able to turn away.

The rain hit early that night, the lightning not far behind it. Where the three of them ate in silence beneath the fir, the smoke of the fire twisted up through the canopy of branches. Chriani sat a discreet distance away, ostensibly to give mother and daughter the privacy they seemed to want. What he was watching had been a large part of Lauresa’s wanting to make this journey alone, he’d realized belatedly, but the fear still twisting in his gut made him grateful for the distance.

The bardic odes also had much to say about the spellcraft of the Leisanmira, but Chriani had never paid them much mind. Watching Irdaign now, though, he felt the chill that had traced his spine when the horse had vanished, had to fight to keep himself from shivering. There was something in her manner as she whispered in Lauresa’s ear, some sense of unseen power where she gazed around her, taking in the hill and the countryside below.

It was said that the old Ilvani blood flowed in Leisanmira veins. Rumors from a time before the Ilmar settlements, before the long wars that drove the Valnirata warclans deep into the forest. One blood from long ago. Where they wandered Elalantar and the steppes of the western frontier, the Leisanmira had a reputation as hedge wizards and midwives, dabbling in charms. Darker rumors spoke of even greater power among them, somehow kept secret from the always-watchful eyes of the rangers and the local garrisons in the towns they passed through.

Until now, he’d never believed it.

When dinner was done, he banked the fire up and bid both women a formal goodnight that only Irdaign answered. He heard snatches of song as he checked and stowed his gear for the morning, Irdaign’s voice beautiful beyond any description where she sang quietly to Lauresa curled at her feet.

On the other side of the wall, Chriani found a space for himself that was only partly soaking, and he tried for some time to find a sitting position that would keep the tear in the cloak away from the rain. He closed his eyes once or twice, but the lightning was a constant eruption within the clouds now. The hillside pulsed daylight-bright, thunder reverberating with a fury that kept him from hearing Irdaign where she slipped up behind him, her hand on his shoulder as she kneeled.

Chriani started, fought to still his hand where it wanted to trace the crescent above his pounding heart. In the intermittent light, he might have taken Irdaign’s face for her daughter’s, but she smiled in a way that he couldn’t remember seeing Lauresa smile for so long now.

“One who grew up under Barien’s charge should be too smart to be as afraid as you seem,” she said quietly.

“Forgive me, princess precedent.”

“My name is Irdaign, Chriani.”

He could only nod. She was thoughtful, slowly placed her hand on his as if she knew its plan.

“When one must make five days’ ride in two, one needs a horse beyond what any stable in Myrwater or Rheran can hold.”

“I understand, Irdaign.”

“But you fear nonetheless. Barien was fond of saying that fear and understanding will make war in any mind so long as both live. You need to choose which rules you.”

We end up afraid of only the things we see…

Irdaign’s hand on his was warm, and in that warmth Chriani felt a shame that he hoped she couldn’t see. This matron, this woman of royalty, scaring him.

In the entire garrison, Barien had been the only one to Chriani’s knowledge who paid Chanist’s court sorcery neither the reverence nor the superstition it seemed to demand. It had been High Winter two years previous, and the news had just come in from Quilimma in the southern marches of the rangers putting down a rogue mage. In a lost fortress high on the steep slopes of the Analatias, he’d settled himself and laid claim to the lands around him, and a half-dozen had died in the attack that finally brought him down. When the story was told in the barracks halls, all men made the moonsign but Barien.

“Folk should rightly respect what they don’t know, but most folk forget that they don’t know much,” he’d said later that night when Chriani had asked him why. “Sorcery and life-magic are like any other craft. There’s danger in the wizard’s craft, to be sure. But if a man knew how much danger he was in riding a badly-shod horse at full gallop, he’d find as much respect for the blacksmith’s craft in a grand hurry.”

When Chriani glanced up, Irdaign was watching him closely. He hesitated.

“You knew Barien,” he said.

He saw the smile leave her eyes for just a moment. “I did. And I am truly grieved.”

Then she touched his cloak, her voice a gentle whisper of song as faint light flared beneath her fingers. Where Chriani looked to see her run them along the cloth, the cloak was whole again, the jagged tear repaired with no stitch or seam.

“It is dry on the other side of the wall,” she said. “Sleep there, please. Lauresa and I must walk.”

He nodded again as she rose, waited until she’d turned away to make the moonsign with a shaking fist. In the staccato shimmer of the clouds, he saw Lauresa a dozen paces off, cloak wrapped tight around her. She stepped in behind her mother, the two of them pacing off through the storm.

Chriani made sure they saw him pull his sodden bedding around to the fire, waiting until they were out of sight beyond a twisted stand of low-growing spruce before he followed. Across the mud-slaked hillside, he moved within the storm’s dark spaces, stuck to the shadows as the lightning flared.

“Sorcery won’t kill you any better or faster than the countless other ways to die,” Barien had told him that night two years before. “Be wary of them all.”

He saw Lauresa and her mother stop some dozen strides above a rocky basin, a tumbled cairn below them. For the long while that they stood there, he watched them, rain-soaked. They sang together, voices clear like crystal above the guttural rumble of the slowly fading storm. And all the while, Chriani’s hand was tight to his chest, scribing the moonsign until his arm ached as he watched Irdaign dance in the lightning-shadow. Watched her summon her own storm of fire that slammed down upon the cairn like a living wave.

In the shape of the unearthly flames that rose and twisted around the princess precedent, he thought he saw some great bird spread its wings, shrieking with a sound that drove through him like nails. Rain-shadow shrouded the power she hurled with her hands, Lauresa standing to watch a short distance away, expressionless as she matched her mother’s voice.

At one point, in the darkness and the blinding rain that blurred his sight, Chriani would have taken Irdaign for her daughter. The bronze hair was lit to wet gold by the staccato pulse of lightning, all the lines of age blurred by distance and stormlight and the power that coursed through her body and struck the stone as fire again and again.

When they finally headed back, Chriani sprinted along the hillside ahead of them, pretended to be asleep as they returned to sit by the fire. He was still awake when dawn came, uncomfortably dry inside his shredded cloak made whole again.

At some point in the time that Chriani had saddled up his own horse, Irdaign’s black stallion had reappeared. He said nothing, tried not to meet the gaze of the unnatural beast. But as though it could sense his fear, he thought he saw its sidelong glance seek him out as they descended the track.

Across the hillside, the cairn stood in the hollow where he’d missed it the night before, stone and grass and crusted moss charred black where it had burned. Chriani looked away.

Irdaign rode with them only a half-league or so, stopping to turn east where the road could be seen across a short stretch of open pasture and milling sheep. Along the field’s edge, Chriani held back again, saw Lauresa cry once more as her mother held her. Irdaign turned back to him, though, rode up close beside him where he waited. She clasped his hand again.

“What do you mean to do?”

There were any thousand things that she could have meant, but Chriani knew which one she spoke of. The same answer either way, though.

“I don’t know.”

“Barien wanted you to seek your commission.”

“He had more faith in my ability to get it than I.”

“Barien understood that you have the strength to walk that path. Yet you have the fear that prevents you from seeking it. Fear and understanding, Chriani.” Her words had a softness to them that he remembered from his mother’s voice. This woman he’d met only a day before but who seemed to know him somehow.

He nodded, Irdaign slipping her hand from his. A whispered word to the horse, then they were off. Lauresa watched for a long while, Chriani silent behind her. When the princess finally turned, her eyes were dry.

The track was mud but they made good time that day and the next, the sky bright and warm. As they rode, the tree line meandered to the south above open pasture, handfuls of farmhouses scattered like the white-faced sheep that clustered in the fields around them. As they broke from the forest track early on the second day, Chriani set them following a line of border stones along a tall trail of spectral elms. Down a steep slope beyond them, a straight-line path made toward a distant poplar bluff.

Beyond the bluff, Chriani could see the haze of the encampment that they were headed for, the faint white of tents a brighter mark against a sheen of fog. And beyond it, a further day’s ride in the distance, he could see the forest wall rise up to blot the land beyond. These would likely be the last farmsteads they saw, he knew. A day’s ride wasn’t enough distance to keep a rogue Valnirata warband at bay.

They rode in silence through that morning, Lauresa’s mood dark in a way that seemed to go far beyond this last meeting with the mother she was leaving behind. Chriani’s mood was no lighter, and the silence hanging between them was welcomed for a while. In the light of day, the memory of the night before seemed distant, Chriani holding Irdaign’s words close like he hoped they might shroud the memory of what he’d seen her do.

Lauresa and her mother. Exiles heading in different directions, Chriani thought. Rheran the place where both had begun, closed off to them now.

Lauresa was a problematic peerage, they’d said. Whispered voices had spread the words within the Bastion the week her marriage was announced, the same thoughts repeated more loudly in the keep and the city beyond. With her mother set aside and her younger sister’s blood linked to the Elalantar line, Lauresa was half a princess in the eyes of too many. Safer, then, to have her relinquish any possible claim to the crown in favor of accepting title in another land. And so she would be the Princess Lauresa of Brandishear for another seven days. Another nail in the framework of arranged marriages that bound the Ilmar principalities in treaty and blood.

“What do you know about this husband of yours?”

Chriani hadn’t wanted to say it, but the words spilled too easily into the long silence of the ride. He heard Irdaign’s words from the night before,
fear and understanding.
He wished he could have thought to tell her then that there was some understanding which fear was meant to prevent.

Lauresa didn’t look back.

“A duke,” she said coldly. The question one that she’d been asked enough times in the past weeks that she perhaps didn’t hear the bitterness beneath his version of it. Or didn’t care. “Allenis Andreg, his holdings in Teillai, cousin to Prince High Vishod. He was a captain of some renown, granted title after the Incursions. Warden of the Clearwater Steppes.”

It had been thirteen years since the Ilvani Incursions had ended. Chriani did the math, guessed at this former captain’s age and got a number he didn’t like.

“It isn’t fair.” He might have only meant it as a thought, but it came as words. Lauresa turned back this time.

“Many have endured a great deal more than a marriage for the land and its people to prosper,” she snapped. “Your father was killed in the Incursions, Barien said. You forget him and all who made that same sacrifice so easily?”

Where he stared, Chriani felt his blood quicken, a trace of unfamiliar emotion twisting in him suddenly. It was no secret, certainly, this story he’d adopted on the day Barien took him in, but in all the years since he’d first spoken it, he’d gotten used to hearing it in only his own voice. He wasn’t sure why it bothered him now.

He felt the pain, then. Deep in his chest, spreading to the skin at the spot where her name would stay, he felt the sudden spike of frenzy that had driven him to trace those seven letters in blood in the first place. And with a rush of insight that swelled like the sudden ache that had risen behind his eyes, Chriani recognized for the first time this pain that had threaded through him for as much of his life as he could remember, but which he’d never before named.

The pain of living a lie, he thought.

He had no memory of his father in him but what his mother had told him. But even that had been buried long ago beneath the lie that had let him survive in the Ilmar village of his birth, and along the desolate road that had taken him from his mother and grandfather’s graves to Rheran, and that had brought him into the Bastion at Barien’s side. Now a princess’s name etched on his skin over one night of anger would become a new lie that twisted in with the old like the lines of that name twisted in with the mark his mother had made. And for the very first time, Chriani recognized the ache that had twisted in his gut that long night. He recognized the pain that had echoed the searing of his skin where the needle-sharp tip of the pick punched down again and again.