Clearwater Dawn (3 page)

“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.