Clearwater Dawn (32 page)

Chriani felt a chill he didn’t understand, but there was no time to think. He sensed the shape and movement of the battle around him as he set a straight-line course for the copse, hoping that the roan was still tethered there more then he’d hoped for anything in his life. He could separate out at least six horses in the storm of hoofbeats that followed them, tried not to judge the distance that remained to the trees against how fast the sound was moving.

And then at the forest’s edge, he saw a faint shimmer of shadow. Movement played out across the endless wall of green-black, and there was a rustling that rose above the hiss of the wind.

He pulled Lauresa to the ground again without knowing why. Even later, even thinking about it in the exacting detail with which his mind remembered that moment like it remembered all moments, he could never put a name to the instinct he’d answered where it spoke to him at a level beyond words. Like some voice calling to him from the edge of the Greatwood that was the place his father had been born.

From the tree line to the south, a wall of shadow erupted like the one that he’d seen in the war room that night, and from within the shadow, a hail of arrows shredded the moonlit night. He heard the screams of the riders behind them as they were cut down, heard their Ilmari voices shout out in strangled cries, but he couldn’t look back as another Valnirata warband emerged at full gallop from the trees.

The livery and the arms and the cloak that the dead rider wore were all the same as those the new troupe of Valnirata that bore down on them, but they seemed to have as little trouble picking out the original band that the imposter had been a part of as Chriani did now. No comparison in their tactics or their movement where the two forces smashed against each other. He saw the tight lines of the war-mark on the half-dozen of them who rode bare-chested, including one who bore down on them with a longspear and a fury in her eyes that cut Chriani to the core.

At his ear, he heard Lauresa sing. In her hand where she tore it from his grasp, he saw the twisting bird-shape flare, a bolt of eldritch fire fanning out. The panicked horse cut hard left even as Chriani cut right, swinging up to hit hard with Konaugo’s handaxe, feeling it break through leather and bone and stick there fast as he rolled away.

From the chaos around them, Chriani heard a clear voice utter words in a tongue he’d never heard before. It was Lauresa who pulled him to the ground this time, rolling with him as the night around them was split by a flash of spell-lightning that blinded him. He heard more screams from behind as he stumbled up, didn’t know whether it was the last of Konaugo’s troop or the false Valnirata who were dying now. He pushed Lauresa ahead of him, running hard again as they slipped into the trees.

Barien had spoken of having seen even hardened combat horses panic at the signs of spellcraft, but the roan was waiting where Chriani had left him, clearly on edge but mercifully making no sound. He hefted Lauresa to the saddle like she weighed nothing, her arms seeming just as strong where she grabbed him by the jacket and hauled him up, not giving him the time to decide whether to send her off on her own.

“I cannot ride and work my spellcraft at once.” Where she whispered in his ear, Chriani realized the princess was fighting for breath, and for the first time, he noticed the burn along her exposed arm where the lightning she’d saved him from must have caught her. He shifted forward, felt Lauresa wrap herself tight around him as he pulled hard to turn the roan for the clearing ahead.

In his hand, wet against the reins, he felt something. He glanced down, saw Konaugo’s blood-soaked insignia held tight there. Pulled free from his cloak when the horse had overrun him, Chriani guessed. He must have carried it the whole time and never known.

In the haze of moonlight, the real Valnirata were sweeping the hillside with a precision that made the lightning-fast attack of the first group of riders seem clumsy by comparison. Lauresa’s tent was burning now, Chriani frantically scanning for an escape route along the shadows of the tree line even as Lauresa whispered in his ear.

“Straight on…”

Ahead of them, he saw Valnirata archers ranking themselves to both sides, Lauresa presumably not seeing them where the moonlight shone as brightly to him as it did to them. He pulled to the left as the horse ran, thought he spied what looked like a trailhead, but she reached forward to pull the reins back.

“Straight,” she said again. “All speed. Hold on.”

Chriani heard the conviction in her voice. He spurred the roan.

Ahead, the column lined up, Lauresa singing again even as she pulled both of them low against the horse’s neck. Chriani heard the order to fire barked over the sweetness of her voice in his ear, saw the hissing wall of ash-grey shafts erupt in front of them.

Where Lauresa’s song peaked, Chriani had to force himself to keep his eyes open, had to fight the urge to leap from the horse in the expectation of it being cut down. And where a score of arrows arced in against them, a faint haze of eldritch light flared as they shattered like glass, deflected harmlessly off the horse’s flanks. The roan didn’t so much as flinch.
I trained him myself
, Kathlan had said.

They’d fired as one against the charge Lauresa had ordered him to make, shooting head-on in rank. Now, they’d have to waste the precious time in which they might have managed side-on shots, Lauresa understanding the Valnirata tactics far better than he ever would have. The sound of intermittent bowshot rose behind them, but the roan was already hurtling around the far edge of the hill, running at a speed that belied how little it could actually see of the ground ahead.

But as Chriani cut hard against the sight of two outriders closing from the right, he felt something heavy slam into him. He clutched the horse’s neck against a wave of sudden darkness, a razor-tipped Valnirata shaft protruding from his right shoulder. He reached behind with one hand, screamed ahead of the pain as he snapped the end of the arrow off, pushing into the forest and under cover. But before he could wrench the head free, he felt Lauresa’s grip across his chest suddenly weaken, his free hand clutching at her.

She was still singing, fighting to force the eldritch melody from her. And as Chriani felt her collapse against him, a shroud of sudden darkness boiled out from the air around them even as an unnatural silence fell. Chriani couldn’t hear the shouts of the Valnirata behind them, couldn’t hear his breathing or the pounding of the horse’s hoofs or his voice as he called Lauresa’s name.

With his good hand, he clutched both the princess’s hands where they started to slip from his chest, pulled her tight against him. With his other and his knees, he banked the roan hard left, fighting the searing pain of the arrow where it lanced like fire down his arm. More arrows whipped past behind them, fired blindly at the point where they’d been a moment ago. Ahead, he could make out the narrow cleft through the hills that marked the path back to the road, and he bore straight for it along a well-used rocky track, wanted to make it an easy guess where they’d gone.

Just short of the road, he saw the scout trail open up where he knew it would, the stone marker there that he recognized now but that anyone not looking for it would miss in the darkness. Though the Ilvani of the exile tribes harried the Clearwater Way whenever possible, Chriani already knew that these were no exiles behind them. No idea why one of the carontir, the elite Valnirata ranger patrols, would push so far into the unclaimed northern forest, but the hope that they wouldn’t know to look for the track straightaway was the only hope he had of escape now. Chriani turned the horse hard, Lauresa’s sorcery still in effect where they plunged into the shadow of the trees without a sound. He risked a glance back to see pursuit pass by behind them, the Valnirata riders heading for the road where they thought he’d gone.

Along the side of the trail, a fast-moving stream still flowed between shoals of ice hanging along its banks. Chriani took the roan in, raced him silently through the water for a short while, wanting to obscure their trail even if the Valnirata doubled back.

Lauresa was still slumped against him, both arms aching now where he held tight to the reins and her. Then ahead, he saw another ranger-trail marker, nudged the horse up across icy gravel and into the trees again, and they were gone.

—
Chapter 10 —

THEY RODE HARD for the rest of the night and long into morning, Chriani watching the roan for signs of exhaustion even as he watched behind them for the pursuit he knew would end the chase the moment it came. The horse ran without effort, though, and the forest behind them stayed silent even as a stain of blood-red light spread in the east.

Lauresa had regained consciousness almost as soon as they left the stream, but even after the dweomer of silence around them had faded to the steady pounding of the horse’s hooves, she’d stayed mostly silent where she clung to Chriani. More than once, he’d wanted to break north for the road but she’d directed him to stay on the trail where it pushed northeast along the forest’s edge. There was marsh there, a wide spread of bog that the stream they’d followed earlier must have emptied into, and the air was thick with fog that Chriani hoped would obscure any pursuit as effectively as it obscured the trail before him.

He knew they should have been safe enough, no traffic or settlement to speak of within the narrow strip of forest and scrubland they traversed. The Ilvani of both the Valnirata and the exile lands stayed back to avoid the well-armed Clearwater Patrols, even as the patrols stayed back to avoid the Ilvani. But in Chriani’s mind, in the aftermath of the attack, too many questions still turned.

The subterfuge of an assassin’s troupe posing as a Valnirata warband. The real Valnirata hunting far closer to the exile lands and the Clearwater Way than they should have been. The idea of Lauresa being followed in the first place. He didn’t understand any of it, not yet. Pieces of a puzzle whose edges he couldn’t make out, couldn’t set into place.

But even as he allowed himself a moment’s acceptance that they seemed to have evaded pursuit for a time, Chriani had to force himself to focus on the fact that it would be a long road back to Caredry. The unseen final outcome of the battle the night before was still very much in his mind, and in particular, the fact that he hadn’t seen the black stallion’s rider on the field in the end. No idea whether the assassin had escaped or been brought down with the rest of his troop. No idea what might be waiting for them as they made the journey back, alone.

At some point, he became conscious that he didn’t feel the cold he should have felt with his cloak wrapping Lauresa behind him. More of her spellcraft, he guessed. It was nearing dawn when they finally stopped in the shelter of a fir grove, a dark island in a brighter sea of snow-streaked rock and sand. The roan was spent, Chriani likewise, but it wasn’t until he dismounted that he felt the pain at his right shoulder, the arrow wound he’d somehow forgotten spiking in sudden agony that drove him to his knees.

Where Lauresa dropped to Chriani’s side, she pulled his cloak from her own shoulders, draped it across him as she knelt to examine the splintered shaft.

“On your side,” she said, and Chriani lay down without arguing. She looked shaken, he thought, mouth set as she carefully flooded the wound with frigid water from the skins in the roan’s saddlebags. The Valnirata dagger still concealed at his stomach was the only blade Chriani carried, and he saw her hand shaking as she pulled it from its sheath.

He nearly blacked out when she used it to carefully cut the flannel of his tunic out from where it had been punched in through his skin. Then he did black out when she pulled the shaft free, the pain a flash of white light in his head that suddenly shifted through to shadow where his eyes flickered open. The sweat that had beaded his face was frozen. Where he lay, he’d been covered by the bedroll from his pack. The pain at his shoulder had spread down his side and his spine, but it had faded slightly. Slowly, Chriani raised himself up on his good arm.

Across from him, the roan was sleeping. The wind in the trees was a faint rustling, and he had to groggily look around him to see Lauresa on the far side of the grove, knees folded where she sat against the bole of a single towering tree. On her face, in the set of her body, he saw a distance he’d never known in her before. Her eyes were closed but she hadn’t bothered to wipe the frozen tracks of her tears away.

As he tried to stand, Chriani felt the blanket rub the bare skin of his chest where she’d stripped his shirt off. She’d taken the grimy bandage from his left shoulder and used it to bind the wound on his right. Exposed to the sun as it never was, below the princess’s own name where it had been gently etched, the tight lines of the Valnirata war-mark swallowed the light.

“It appears that we both had our secrets,” Lauresa said quietly.

When Chriani looked up again, she was watching him, but the words he wanted to say were lost somewhere in the tightness that had seized his chest and throat. An oblique realization struck him, twisted through the fear and the nausea that flared with the pain.

He remembered her words in her father’s tent. He’d wondered then if she’d known what the bandage hid, whether she’d seen it with sorcery, or read the secret in his or Kathlan’s thoughts. She hadn’t. All of it bluster, all of it part of the delicate game of deception the princess played.