Clearwater Dawn (40 page)

The night was as clear as any he’d ever seen as they made their slow way east and north, intermittent light in the windows of distant farmhouses the only witness as they passed.

Both moons were up when he saw the faint spread of light and shadow that marked the city in the distance. As they slowed, his hand found Lauresa’s, riding close beside him.

There were no words.

Chriani slipped out through the stable doors to the shadows of the courtyard track. He’d told Kathlan to stay back, but he saw her in the faint light of the loft window, watching him as he nodded to her, then was swallowed suddenly by shifting shadow, gone from sight.

On his right hand, he wore the ring of plain steel. On his left, he’d slipped on the black band he’d taken from the assassin once Lauresa had awoken and he’d been healed. Both of them had made their careful way up to the fractured terrace, then. He’d searched the body carefully without telling her why, hoping for some token or sign that would connect the assassins to Chanist, but at the level of the bargain they’d struck, he knew he’d come up empty. He’d taken the assassin’s ring though, felt its power as he’d slipped it to his finger and watched his hand shimmer and fade like the dawn-faint shadow it cast.

Though he’d felt their power in the speed they gave the assassin’s relentless attacks, he left the steel-shod boots behind. Their echo along the corridors of the barracks that night was a memory he wanted to forget but knew he never would. The assassin’s eyes had stared sightlessly up the whole time, the emotionless set of the face taken to the grave.

He’d never even learned the killer’s name, Chriani thought now as he slipped south across the staging ground. Never heard him speak. The last one to die in the name of Chanist’s ambition? Or simply one of many who would die if that ambition came to pass?

What kind of madness?
Dargana had asked, and not for the first time since that terrible moment of realization, Chriani hoped he’d never find out.

From the steps of a narrow alley, he watched the guards and the dogs at the Bastion gate for just a moment, slipping silently between them as he sent a scattering of pebbles and horse dung across the courtyard where Barien’s body had been burned. A moment’s distraction of sound and scent, but it was all he needed to send him silent and unseen along the bright marble of the central court. There would be no way in past the guards in the great hall, he knew, so he went the old way, through the barracks to the warden’s door. The familiar corridors to Barien’s quarters, walked ten thousand times.

The dining halls were alive with raucous laughter as Chriani slipped through the garrison quarter, twice flattening against the wall as he was passed by guards he recognized, but it seemed as though their features had changed somehow. Faces from a dream he might have had once. Less than three weeks since he’d passed through these corridors for the last time. Less than three weeks since Barien had fallen to save five nations from war without knowing it.

Or had he known? The thought came from nowhere, circling in Chriani as he slipped past what had been Barien’s door, what would have become the new warden’s quarters, whoever had inherited the title and the responsibility for Peran now. That night, had whatever intelligence Barien stumbled upon laid all Chanist’s dark plans out and unconcealed? Or had it been simple instinct, protecting the princess without ever knowing why? Just trusting that it would make a difference in the end?

At the edge of the farmsteads surrounding Teillai, seat of Allenis, Duke Andreg, Warden of the Clearwater Steppes, Chriani and Lauresa parted, and it seemed to him then that continuing on for the road north and west as she spurred the roan ahead was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

He slipped the steel ring to his finger then, the mate to the one she said she’d put on if ever she needed him again.
Wear yours always
, she’d said, and he knew he would.

He rode slow, saw where she was sighted from the city walls, an escort riding out to meet her. He waited, turned his mind to listening in desperate hope for one last word from her, but there was only the silence of his own dark thoughts.

As they picked her up, he saw one of the riders swing past her, gazing westward like he might have seen Chriani lingering there, the Clearmoon setting in the sky behind. Chriani turned quickly, spurring the mare west to meet the long road ahead.

The lock in the storeroom wall looked like it had been rekeyed, but it didn’t slow Chriani as he opened and closed the warden’s door behind him one last time. In the children’s court, the evenlamps were burning bright but he was less than a shadow as the ring’s dweomer wrapped him, no sound coming from any of the dark doorways he passed. At Peran’s chamber, which had been Lauresa’s chamber, he saw light beneath the door. She was twelve, the same age Lauresa had been that first day on the training grounds. Princess High Peran someday.

Though he tried to hold it back, he felt the dark anger flooding him now. He felt the chill in the shadowed stones, felt an oppressive weight in the nighttime Bastion silence. A place he loved once. A place he dreamed of spending all his life, but there was an emptiness in its pristine stillness that galled him now.

Once, he’d dreamed there was greatness here.

Four days before, Irdaign had been waiting for him on the road just outside Caredry. She was wrapped tight in a cloak of black wool, but Chriani caught the flash of bronze hair even at a distance. As he approached, the same horse she’d ridden before watched him with its unnatural gaze.

Chriani was as surprised to see her as he was relieved, an anger he could sense in her telling him that she already knew of the things he didn’t think he could have brought himself to speak of. Lauresa had gotten word to her somehow, Chriani thinking he might have caught a glimpse of a steel ring at the princess precedent’s finger.

“I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say where he slowed next to her.

“You have nothing to be forgiven for, Chriani. And much to be thanked for in the end.”

“Thank me when the end comes.”

Her look told Chriani that she would have known what he was thinking without him ever speaking it. Would have known just as Lauresa had known it. The thing she’d begged him to not do, an unearthly echo of her mother’s words now.

“Spare him,” Irdaign said.

In that last morning together, Chriani had met the princess’s plea with silence, but Irdaign reigned in close to him, held his gaze in a way that forced his voice.

“Why?”

“Because whether you are successful or not, you will most certainly die. And because there remains good that he can do.”

Chriani laughed, cold.

“You can forgive him?”

But he felt the laugh cut off, the bitterness in him buried beneath a sadness in her eyes that took his breath away. Lauresa had her mother’s eyes, it was said.

“I will never forgive him,” the princess precedent said softly, “and he will know that from me. But there are forebodings in my heart which I have learned to trust, and those tell me that without him, the land will suffer. Young Peran has the seed of statecraft in her but not the years that will let that seed bloom. For her sake, for the sake of the land that Lauresa has given her love and freedom to strengthen, let him live, Chriani.”

Along the shadowed north hall of the prince’s court, he moved with no sound, like Barien had made him practice, day in and out. Sending him to the kitchens some mornings before dawn to fetch a loaf of the prince’s own bread, hot from the ovens. Or to the servants’ quarters more than once. Delivering invitations to Marjir, the princess high’s tailor, long after the Bastion had been locked down for the night.

Barien had always done his best to confine those requests to the warmer nights of spring and summer, and it was on those evenings spent alone outside his rooms that Chriani had first settled himself in the old sentry post. Watching Lauresa’s windows from the shadows of the wall, hearing her voice as song spilled out from her balcony to the darkness.

At the smaller entrance hall to the throne room, the doors were open like they shouldn’t have been.

Chriani slowed, pressed flat to the wall. He felt the power of the ring thread through him, saw no shadow behind him that the evenlamps should have cast, but he knew his concealment likely wouldn’t last for long. The throne room was alive with sorcerous wards, it was said.

He’d left the sword behind at the stables, the idea of what he was going to do to get past the guards a thing he told himself he’d work out when he got there. The throne room or the prince high’s quarters alike, there should have been guards. Now, though, their absence seemed even more of a threat. As he approached, Chriani slipped the assassin’s ring off, his shadow suddenly flaring to either side of the corridor.

At the end of the short hall, another set of double doors stood closed. Chriani felt a quick twinge of apprehension at the thought of an ambush waiting beyond, or coming up on him unseen from the prince’s court behind him, or of what power his attempts to pick the lock might unleash.

In the end, he simply pushed at the plain brass ring that marked the center of the left-hand portal. At his touch, the door swung wide with the faintest creak.

Within the throne room, the fire was burning high, just as Chriani remembered it from any of the long nights of celebration he’d seen there. The countless times he’d sat by the hearth to watch Barien and Chanist together at the head table, laughing like brothers.

Chanist was beyond that table now as Chriani slipped silently inside. The prince high was in a plain tunic of grey flannel, a jacket of the guard draped across a chair close by. He was standing with arms folded behind him where he watched the fire, not looking back at the sound of the door in a way that told Chriani he was expected. He felt a knife-edge of fear push through him, buried it quickly beneath the anger that he welcomed this time as he never had before.

What kind of madness?

Save for the two of them, the chamber was empty, and somehow even larger than it usually seemed. Chriani’s voice echoed sharply from distant walls as he spoke.

“I’m afraid I could not stay for your daughter’s wedding after my escort duties had been fulfilled, my lord prince. But I bring two messages from the bride.”

Where he turned back slowly, Chanist gave him a withering look, Chriani feeling the weight of all the power in that gaze. All the history, all the strength that had been purchased with deed and bravery and a will that had made Brandishear great. A lifetime spent dedicated to keeping a nation safe. He had to feel for the anger where it flagged, had to force his mind to the thoughts he would have given anything to forget.

“If I might be so forthright, my lord prince, your security measures need improvement.”

“My security followed your progress from the moment you entered the city and passed within the keep by way of the stables, master Chriani. You are here are at my indulgence. You are alive at my whim. Do not forget that.”

“My life will be spent as I wish it, my lord prince.”

The prince high laughed, then.

“Do you come to kill me, boy?” In the booming voice, Chriani heard the same warmth that he had lost himself in as a child. It sent a chill up his spine now.

“No, my lord prince.”

Chanist shook his head, a trace of weariness in him suddenly.

“So what keeps me from killing you, then?”

“The same thing that stopped you from having me killed anywhere along the road from Aerach. The number of those who know the truth your daughter and I know, and their instructions to make that truth known to all should either the Lady Lauresa or I come to harm.”

Chanist paced around the table slowly. He had wine there, Chriani saw. He filled two goblets of black glass, beckoned closer. Chriani approached, balled his fist before seizing his drink so as to quell the trembling in his hand.

The prince high drank, thoughtful.

“A man might die many ways, squire.”

“Then for the sake of your rule and your name, you should hope that none of those ways find either the Lady Lauresa or myself for some time.”

Close as he was, Chriani saw a flash of blue at the prince’s neck, a lapis pendant there to match the one Lauresa wore. The court sorcery that had saved Chanist and him both in the end.

“You escaped that way,” Chriani said slowly. There it was, a thought given voice, summoned up from the long contemplation of the road. “Barien fell but not before taking you down. It was your blood and his in the hall of records that night. You used the pendant to escape to the throne room.” All the way back, nine days ridden in silence, he’d tried to put the last pieces of the puzzle together. Questions still hanging around the events of that night when everything had changed.

“You are to be complimented on your intuition, master Chriani. Perhaps Barien did teach you something after all.”

“Speak the name of Barien in my presence again for any reason, my lord prince, and despite my vows to the contrary, you will die.”

In his voice, there was a deadly earnestness that Chanist heard. Chriani locked his gaze to the prince’s, didn’t look away. He had to set his jaw against the trembling that traced its way up from his shaking fists, squeezed tight again. The prince’s blue eyes were colder than he’d ever seen them.