Clearwater Dawn (31 page)

“I would never betray you,” Chriani said.

“You wear the armband of the Prince’s Guard.” Chriani hadn’t seen her note the insignia in that quick glance, but she would have heard the news from her father’s own lips, he realized. “You serve my father and his court. Betraying me is your duty now.”

Choice is you deciding what’s important,
Barien had said.

Where he pulled the armband from his sleeve, Chriani was fairly certain she heard it tear. He tossed it to the floor in front of her, saw her glance down.

“I know my duty, princess…”

She was silent a long while, Chriani still watching her back, the slight tremor that threaded the rise and fall of her shoulders.

“Please go,” she said at last. It was the voice from the war room again.

“Look at me first…”

He had no idea why he said it. No idea why it was suddenly as important as it seemed, the need to see the blue of her eyes one last time. The need to seek what he thought he’d seen there a moment before.

“No rank that you will ever have gives you the right to order me, tyro. Get out.”

“Squire,” Chriani corrected her, knowing how little difference it made. “Look at me.”

Lauresa laughed then.

“Do you not understand? Two day’s ride with nothing else to think about, and not even now is this clear to you? I saw this moment coming, Chriani, since the day our training ended. This laughable obsession. Love me? You are a fool.”

There was a measured anger in her now, and where she paced away from him, Chriani followed, trying to circle around her but she was quicker, her face always shifting away.

“Every knight who serves a princess falls to this same pathetic sickness of the heart,” she said. “Barien himself said as much to me before the princess high ordered my training ceased, but I had no idea until now how right he was.”

Chriani felt something twist inside him, Barien’s name like a knife in his gut.

“Look at me.”

“In the midst of what looks like it may be war between the Ilmar and the Valnirata, I am married in a month. Do you imagine that I have the time for your puerile fantasies?”

“Look at me, then, and it will be the last time.”

“Get out, Chriani.” He heard the coldness in her, feared for a moment that someone outside the tent would hear them.

“I’ve loved you since we were children,” he said. He felt the rush of words within him open up like some long-drawn sluice gate had been suddenly and finally freed. “I would have done anything for you. Anything to win you. Anything to make you happy.”

For most of the past month, he’d tried to remember the last time he’d seen that look, tried to remember when the feeling that had wrapped itself up in that shared childhood had finally broken, but he couldn’t. He could remember the times it had been there, could remember a time when it was incontrovertibly gone, but the transition had slipped past him somehow. Unseen.

“Please go,” she whispered. The anger still there, but something else twisted in with it now. Something familiar.

Outside, Chriani heard footsteps approach but he didn’t care, the ragged cadence of his pulse seeming to twist in with the regular rhythm of those footfalls as they passed away again.

“Look at me.”

“Leave…”

“From the moment I stood behind you and guided your hand on the range that day, I loved you, Lauresa. Every moment I spent with you. Look at me.”

“We were children…”

“Children younger than we were then have known war. Children can know madness, children can know deceit, can know fear. Tell me they can’t know love.”

Beneath each word, Chriani thought he saw her flinch. Some trick of the light, Lauresa suddenly frail where she twisted from him, held her hand to the tent’s central pole as if she was steadying herself.

“And children can know friendship,” she whispered hoarsely. “Children can know devotion that crosses lines of rank and class, but these things aren’t love.”

“I was there, Lauresa. I know what it was. Look at me…”

She turned then.

Chriani saw the tears where they tracked her cheeks, saw the eyes in the glow of evenlamps burning the blue of a High Summer sky.

He saw the look he remembered, felt it flood through him like warm rain.

“I loved you, too, Chriani…”

And then she was against him, her hands in his, her mouth at his, and there was no sound, no movement, no time.

He understood then. He understood it in the taste of her, and in her hands at his head now, holding him tightly, and in her tears where the blue eyes squeezed them to trace her cheeks. All the distance in her, he thought. All the arrogance, all the false pride designed to push him away because she’d spoken the truth.

She had known this day was coming. Her obligation to marry in the name of the state, and the pain of them losing each other like she knew they would some day. Easier to turn away before it ever had a chance to happen.

Lauresa hid her secrets well.

That night in the war room, he’d looked for recognition but there’d been none, but in the blue eyes where they opened now, he saw a familiarity that seemed to burn with its own clear light. He thought he saw himself reflected in those eyes, knew that was impossible.

I remember you
…

Outside, the bird-sound shifted with the wind, a trace of woodsmoke drifting where the chill breeze must have turned. The thin shift bunched in his hands as Lauresa’s own hands found his neck and pulled him close, and her breath in his ear was a music as sweet as any song she’d ever made.

Where she held his face in her hands, she gently closed his eyes with her lips, kissed him again to the salt taste of her own tears. She was in his lap and his cheek was wet where they both wept now, Chriani not remembering how they’d slipped to the floor. And over and over, she whispered words that he had to focus to finally understand.

“I’m sorry…”

He found the strength to place his hand to her mouth. He felt her breath trace chill fingers where she kissed them, not sure how long they held each other until he became suddenly aware of laughter at the distant fire, punctuating the silence of the night and the sound of his own heart in his chest.

Chriani froze.

Where his hand came up, it seized Lauresa’s where she stroked his cheek. Outside, he could hear the ripple of wind where it plucked at the canvas, but the plaintive song of the dusk-thrushes had faded in a way it shouldn’t have. He hadn’t heard it go.

Then there was a distant hiss that Chriani recognized with an awareness rooted deeper than memory, and he pulled Lauresa under him as he rolled, the sheepskin up and over them both as a volley of ash-grey arrows shredded the tent.

From the camp, the shouts of alarm and the screams of the dying came with no measured space between them. Chriani didn’t remember pulling Lauresa out through the gap he’d cut in the tent wall, didn’t feel the freezing night against the wetness of his eyes where he frantically wiped them. He had his hand locked to hers, taking in the scene in a single glance. A frozen moment of time.

From the downwind side of the camp, a rain of dark bowshot cut through the frantically running troupe and the screaming horses. He saw archers returning fire, but they were pushing back toward the remains of Lauresa’s tent, trying to protect her rather than take the cover that the hollow of the hill would have given them.

He saw the Valnirata, then. Some twenty strong, they raced in on horseback behind the hail of their own missiles, rolling across the perimeter guards where they fell. Chriani recognized the lean horses they rode, woven reins clutched tightly where they hurtled up the low rise of the hill. In the light of the Clearmoon just risen above the trees, he recognized the knotted lines of the war-marks on their cloaks.

In the center of it all, one rider swept through on a coal-black charger. Chriani saw sharpened steel at the stallion’s hooves, heard it screaming in rage as it reared and slashed at the troops that tried desperately to circle around Lauresa’s tent. He saw the two warmages already down, bodies riddled with arrows where they were crushed beneath a flurry of hooves. As he pulled the princess with him, Chriani instinctively wrapped his own cloak around her to cover the white shift, slipping through the shadows as he sought a point of safety in the chaos.

He saw Konaugo then.

On the opposite side of the encampment, the captain was a blur of motion where he whirled with an axe in each hand, dropping two Valnirata on foot even as he spun to take the legs out from under a horse as it tore past him, its rider screaming as he fell. Chriani didn’t know how he managed it, but Konaugo saw him somehow. From across the encampment, through the haze of flying hooves and the frantic shouting of his troops, he turned. The rage in his eyes was one Chriani recognized.

He pulled Lauresa behind him as Konaugo charged, but the time it took him to fumble the bow from his back was all the captain needed to cross half the horse-churned ground between them, moving at a speed that belied his thickly muscled bulk. Even as he notched an arrow, Chriani knew it was too late, Konaugo screaming as both axes left his hands in a single fluid motion. Then Chriani saw the scything steel arc past him to the left, and he instinctively shot his arm around Lauresa, dragging her down as the two Valnirata stealing up on foot behind them were cut down.

Where he rolled up again, Chriani managed two shots, a horse bearing down on Konaugo from behind narrowly twisting past him where its rider took both shafts to the chest. Konaugo had somehow pulled the sword from the dead rider’s saddle scabbard even as the horse careened away, already running again, and Chriani realized that it was the princess his eyes were locked to, hacking through two more faltering horses where they tried in vain to scramble back.

Neither Chriani nor the captain saw the black stallion.

Konaugo was still running, didn’t have time to check himself where the steel-shod horse slammed into him. Chriani watched him fall where the sword was torn from his hand, close enough that he heard the sharp crack of bone. Close enough that he could lurch for him, grabbing without thinking, trying to pull the bulky body out of the horse’s path but catching only his cloak.

Konaugo was there, then he was gone. Chriani felt a stabbing pain lance through both arms where his fingers felt like they’d been torn free of his hands, and the force of even that secondary impact knocked him from his feet as the screaming stallion’s hooves drove Konaugo to the ground.

Chriani saw the stallion bear off, hooves striking sparks from the shale rise at the crest of the hill. As he crawled close, he had time to watch his captain die. Konaugo’s left arm was shattered, the hand of his right clutching frantically at the air as Chriani forced himself up, tried to clear his head.

“Princess…” the captain whispered, and Chriani realized that he was speaking to Lauresa where she scrambled through the mud, helped Chriani rise.

Konaugo said nothing else after that.

Where the black stallion skidded and wheeled, it churned the frozen hillside to mud again. Chriani recognized the rider then — the scars across the pale cheeks visible to his eyes where the hood of the cloak had shifted. No sound from the assassin as he slammed the steel boots hard into the screaming horse’s side, bearing straight for them.

“Move,” Chriani said.

He grabbed Lauresa’s hand in his, slick with blood. Where it lay in the open mud before him, he snatched up one of Konaugo’s handaxes as he headed for the woods, cutting by instinct for the frosted shadows of the rose hedge that edged the steeper slope of the hill. Behind him, he heard the stallion pounding closer, then at the last moment, he pulled to the left, leading Lauresa in a leap from a plunging bluff of shale and sand that the rider would have to circle around in order to descend. He heard the horse skid to a frenzied halt, didn’t look back.

They skidded along a narrow cleft where loose scree skittered underfoot, then hit the grass at a run, a horse and rider suddenly looming up. One of the outrider archers, bow dropped where a handaxe whirled in the moonlight. Chriani broke from Lauresa to dive beneath the startled horse, swinging himself up the other side. He had even less aptitude for the axe than he had for the swordplay Barien had taught him, so he let the rage carry him, let it drive his arm where he slipped beneath the rider’s slashing attack and hit hard. With Konaugo’s weapon, he smashed down relentlessly to the sound of breaking bone and the warm spray of blood and the Valnirata rider’s strangled scream.

As he fell back to the ground, Chriani ran for Lauresa. The horses that Konaugo’s troupe had ridden were dead or scattered, but the Valnirata steeds were an unknown he didn’t want to contend with. Not sure whether the aggressive Ilvani horses would take a rider other than their own. But even as he grabbed the princess’s hand, an image fixed in Chriani’s racing mind. The quickest glimpse of the fallen archer, twisting from one stirrup where the frantic horse tried to shake the dead weight that pulled it to one side. Only it wasn’t an Ilvani whose slack features slipped from the bloody cloak as it tore free.

It was no face Chriani had ever seen before, but the woman who wore it was unmistakably Ilmari. Her dark hair was cut rough and short in a style that no woman in Rheran, warrior or not, would have ever worn. Across her face, he saw the same ritual scars that lined the cheeks of the assassin play out, the skin pale as if it had never seen the sun.