Clearwater Dawn (35 page)

They waited only a short while in silence before they saw movement along the edge of the wood ahead. A party of four on horseback, moving at speed despite the darkness. As the leader leapt from the saddle of the black stallion, Chriani saw the scarred cheeks as lines of shadow, the dark eyes scanning the bluff.

“You know who they are?” Dargana whispered.

“No,” Chriani said.

“Monastics of the Hunthad Wood. The order of Uissa. They attacked a camp off the Wayroad last night.”

In his mind, Chriani felt the faint sensation of contact, like fingertips across his skin. Lauresa was listening, he realized. The Ilvani that Dargana spoke was somehow translated across the bond that the rings made. He tried to look surprised as he glanced across to meet the exile’s gaze, hoping to read what he saw there.

“You saw them?”

“Afterward. What was left of them any rate. They were dressed as Valnirata, and the Valnirata don’t take kindly to their livery being worn by the laóith.” The Valnirata epithet for the Ilmari had no translation. Dargana spat it with a venom Chriani could feel.

“Why would they take on the uniform of the Valnirata?” Chriani asked carefully. Like with every exchange he’d ever had within the rigid formality of Bastion military protocol, he felt the importance of how he spoke, felt Dargana seeking for the meaning beneath the words themselves.

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

On the bluff, he saw the assassin on hands and knees, following their tracks down to the bank where they’d descended. But when he came up against the screen Dargana had laid across their trail, he slowly pushed past it, continuing on into the trees.

“We owe you our thanks,” Chriani said evenly.

“More than you know. We shadowed them for two days where they rode north from across the Hunthad. They’d set themselves up on both sides of the Wayroad the night of the ambush.”

In his chest, Chriani felt something twist. A single facet of understanding, of knowing, suddenly shunted into place where it had been set wrong, all the pieces adjoining it cascading into new alignment.

“It’s a long way from Uissa to the Brandishear borderlands,” Dargana said, “especially at such urgent speed.”

He hadn’t led the attack to Konaugo’s camp. The assassin’s forces had lain in wait for them there, in wait for Lauresa, Chriani thought. Knowing somehow that she would be taking the road, some sorcery at work to get word to Uissa’s forces from the camp. The unknown traitor who he thought was Konaugo, still there.

Dargana was watching him. Chriani shook his head, tried to show an ignorance that was only partly feigned.

“Who was it they attacked?”

“A company of the Brandishear guard. Or so it appeared from what was left of them.”

Chriani felt the pain at his shoulder flare, felt something sharper in his heart. He did his best to shape it as a questioning look.

“Off the road? Why?”

“War, half-blood.”

Chriani heard the implicit coldness in the epithet, felt something twist in his gut. He wasn’t sure how Dargana would even have been able to tell who he was, what he was, but where he felt her gaze appraise him, he glanced away.

“War in the Ilmar would be news to me.”

“News travels a great deal faster within the Muiraìden than beyond it. The Prince Chanist has already ridden out against positions beyond the Locanwater. They’ll be fighting as we speak.”

Chriani laughed.

“Brandishear break the treaty…?”

Dargana laughed louder. Chriani played his uncertainty to the hilt, glancing from her to the other exiles watching him darkly. His expression one of hoping to get in on the joke they shared.

“Chanist’s mission in forging the Ilmar alliance was in the hope that the Valnirata would fight the two-front war he challenged,” Dargana said. “Domination over the Muiraìden as a first step to controlling all the Ilmar. Caught between Aerach and Brandishear, their destruction at his hands would be assured. It’s said that when the Valnirata sued for peace was Chanist’s darkest day.”

“News to me if Brandishear’s moving against the Valnirata,” Chriani murmured. A hint of indifferent pride, not too strong.

“No doubt.” Dargana smirked, still watching him darkly. “But what interests me more strongly is why…”

Then from above, a steel shriek suddenly cut the night. Against the moon-backed clouds, a flight of six griffon riders passed into view, soaring fast along the forest’s edge.

“Move,” Dargana hissed.

Through shadow, the exiles fell back, slipping to where the horses waited, skittish suddenly at the griffons’ cries, loud on the wind. As the crithnala jumped to their mounts, Chriani saw Dargana take the reins of the roan.

“You won’t keep the trail on your own. Ride with Abrindra. You, with me.” She pointed to Lauresa, swung herself up to the saddle and extended her hand. Lauresa waited for Chriani to gently push her forward, the same carefully crafted dread on her face as Dargana dragged her up. Playing the part of the frightened girl, Chriani thought. But he caught her brief glance as he swung up onto a desert-lean grey stallion, the tall exile riding it holding out a rough hand for him.

The griffon riders had split, three following the assassin and his escort where they disappeared into the forest, the other three circling over the bluff, searching. Dargana’s company was spotted almost as soon as they broke from cover, the griffons’ shrieks loud above them. Chriani had never heard anything like it before, a chill dread filling him as they raced across open sand. All the crithnala riders except Dargana and the one who carried him had bows out, firing freely above them as their horses ran seemingly of their own accord.

But even as the griffon riders closed in, Chriani felt a sudden lurch, and then they were descending into a narrow channel he hadn’t seen before, a hidden cleft cutting hard into the tortured canyons ahead. Walls flashed past so close he could have touched them, and then they were through and into a narrow maze of scree and sculpted rock that cut the faint light of the sky. Above them, Chriani heard the shrieks of the griffons slowly fall away.

They rode for what seemed the whole night through the tortured badlands grottos, the Ilvani horses moving faster than they had any right to along a twisting maze of rough trails that even Chriani could barely see. Three times, he sighted scorpions scuttling across the ledges above them, archers driving off the first two, the third destroyed with spellpower cast by one of the crithnala riding behind him. Against the thundering echo of hoofbeats, wolf-song sounded out more than once, filtered down through the twisted canyons in ghostly echo. At no time did they slow.

The sky was still dark as they hit open sand bearing southeast, and he followed Dargana’s gaze up and back where she rode ahead of him. He saw griffons where the Clearmoon’s diffuse light pulsed behind cloud at the horizon, but they were low in the distance, circling the scrubland at the forest’s edge to the south.

Lauresa was clinging to Dargana where they rode, Chriani trying to make eye contact with her where the horse he was on pulled up steady alongside the crithnala leader. The princess’s eyes were squeezed shut, though. No response from her through the ring as he tried to send his thoughts to her.

They rested twice that day, sighting griffons three times in the sky above them. They rode on throughout the night again, their route a blur of shadow in Chriani’s mind. When they stopped, Lauresa would lay with eyes closed, drinking sparsely when water was offered. Saying nothing through the ring, not meeting Chriani’s gaze. None of the crithnala spoke to them, though he could pick out a handful of words in the whispers that passed between Dargana and the others. He heard Chanist’s name more times than he liked.

The second night’s ride was nearly done when they reached the forest.

Where their horses swung east along the chute of a rubble-strewn canyon, the twisting pillars of the badlands fell away, and in the distance, perhaps a league off, a wall of trees rose dead black against the lightening eastern sky. To the south, he could make out a white scar of sand hills that cut an island of forest off from the Greatwood, towering limni spreading their branches to form dark archways into deeper shadow.

Along an unseen trail, the horses plunged into that shadow without breaking stride, and almost before they’d even passed within its walls, Chriani felt the scent and the sense of the forest threading through him like something alive.

The day was fading, light swallowed by the shadow of the towering trees when Chriani saw the ruins.

Across a massive clearing, a dim light shone. Moss glowed where it clung to the boles of the great limni that rose around them, but whether some natural effect or the result of sorcery, Chriani didn’t know. He saw what looked like enormous flagstones set into the ground as the troupe slowed, the clearing some kind of building long-gone to decay and the encroaching wood. And like an extension of that wood, tiered terraces of mottled green and brown radiated out from the surrounding trees, their massive branches slung with spires and trusses that might have supported dwellings once. All of it rotted now, long loops of mossy rope trailing down like cobwebs in the shadows.

Chriani realized he was staring as his horse slowed, and he slipped down from behind its rider to stretch life into his cramped legs. In his heart, in his head, was a sensation he’d never felt before. An ache he couldn’t name. He remembered when he’d looked on the Greatwood from the edge of Chanist’s camp, the awe he’d felt then eclipsed now by the weight and the fear of a window into a past that he could remember without knowing how.

Something was moving deep in the shadow inside him, deeper even than the lost feelings of his mother. Memory or longing, he didn’t know. Where she dismounted from behind Dargana, Lauresa ran to him, slipped shaking into his arms.

Snaking through the maze of trunks that surrounded them, Chriani saw ruined walls of mosaic stone rise up from the tangle of vines. Some kind of courtyard, he guessed. Scattered through the ruins, he saw a dozen encampments, archers posted in the ruined platforms above the trail they’d passed along. He counted at least sixty crithnala, all watching Lauresa and him where the riders of Dargana’s troupe stood close by. He felt Dargana’s gaze on him even before she circled around to face him. For once, he didn’t try to hide the uncertainty he felt.

“What is this place?”

“Nyndenu,” Dargana said. “The Ghostwood.”

Where Lauresa stared around her, Chriani saw a wonder in her eyes that the mock fear couldn’t hide. Even in the dankness of decay, there was a beauty there that cut him, but Dargana’s dark gaze as she paced past him sent it away.

“You see before you the seat of the exile kingdoms,” she said. “Abandoned by the Valnirata even before Muiraìden fell. The gavaleria won’t follow us here.”

“Why?” Chriani asked.

“Because they fear this place. And because they don’t know you’re here.”

As Dargana raised her hand, the two crithnala at Chriani’s side were on him before he could move, Lauresa grabbed up as quickly. One of the Ilvani had to stifle the scream she tried to make, Chriani catching the song hidden within it, not fast enough. He watched them gag her, saw her bound even as his own hands were tied before him. Even still, he managed to slip the ring carefully to his first finger, kept it hidden beneath his thumb. He tried to catch Lauresa’s gaze, but she was playing the fear to the hilt, eyes shut tight to squeeze out tears.

Dargana sat down on a shadowed stone block that Chriani realized was a cistern. From a bucket, she drew water with a wooden dipper, drank deep.

“Who hunts you?”

“I don’t know,” Chriani said, that much true at least of everything going on around him. “The Valnirata patrols…”

“If the carontir wanted you dead, you would be. Even assuming you escaped them, they would have simply flushed you north. In the scorpion wastes between the forest and the road, you’d be nothing but bones by morning.”

There was a degree of amusement in her tone that set Chriani on edge more than any antagonism would have. A game had been set in play that he and Lauresa had little chance of winning, and he had to fight to punch the rage down where it flared in him, seeking for the appearance of helplessness beneath the crithnala leader’s cold gaze.

“What lives here that the Valnirata fear?”

Dargana laughed.

“The past, half-blood. Remembering the greatness they once came from. They fear to remember the cities they built across the Ilmar that themselves were only shadows of Nyndenu at its height, their glory turned to tent cities and war camps in a hundred generations since then. The Valnirata need to cast themselves as vengeful victims so as to starve their hunger to fight.”

In her words, Chriani tried to seek some sense of whether these were things he should know, should agree with, should violently deny. He needed to sketch out some sense of who he should pretend to be in order to get past her scrutiny.

“You have walked the Muiraìden, half-blood?”

Lauresa was still silent in his thoughts, no advice there. He didn’t understand why.

“No,” he said. “My family turned its back on the weakness there before I was born.” Around him, he heard a ripple of sound, whispered voices twisting through the silence of the night.