Clearwater Dawn (20 page)

“Eating, highness.”

“You’re out of food already?”

“I was forced to pack hurriedly, highness.”

Silently, Lauresa broke half her bread, stood to toss it and a chunk of dried meat to where Chriani’s saddle blanket lay, the horses tethered and grazing winter rye a short distance off.

He brought back the shirt full of berries he’d collected, set them down on the cheesecloth that served as her platter. He left her the fullest fruit, ate the rest himself where he sat. The bread took away some of the bitterness.

They made a good distance along the trail before darkness closed them in, Lauresa stopping in a small copse of alder. Green-black shadows stretched around them, cloud promising a warmer night where it pushed in, but Chriani made a fire anyway. Even so close to the farmsteads, wolves and sometimes worse ran the course of the sheltered winter waterways before the snows came.

Though she hadn’t spoken since the last stop, Lauresa’s mood seemed lighter somehow. Still pensive but not actively hating him, Chriani thought. Small improvements.

It was dark when she began to sing. Chriani was banking the fire up, fighting the fatigue that was reminding him how little sleeping he’d actually done the night before. Lauresa had already set her bedroll up across the clearing from him, and her voice rose from the shadows there like clear light. As with the brief fragments she’d sung the night Barien died, Chriani didn’t recognize the language, but in the sustained passages she sang now, he began to make out words, sharp-edged.

Ysh nell to sull gweana caer in toryn

Tar seacla mi kaay to cirwyr saym

Al to ceimond dovya brall

Dovya nay to craym

He spoke a bit of the Ilvalantar, the language of the Ilmar Ilvani. His mother had taught him a child’s lexicon with which he’d made the leatherworkers of the Terever Woods laugh when they visited, trading worked belts for the delicate woodwork his mother had carved. This was different but had the same feel, somehow. A language meant to be sung, not spoken. The shape of the words seemingly tangible where they slipped through him

Nar min briev ysh craonn tau ceinn

Braern ar nay min leinn

Cal lun tau seryan ede to maynd

Lun tau seryan neld to caynd…

Chriani felt the silence of the night hanging like tapestry, surrounding them as Lauresa’s voice trailed off.

“That was very beautiful.” All he could think to say.

Lauresa didn’t look to him where she stared into the fire.

“It is the Ode of Seilonna. A lament of departure and leave-taking.”

“I don’t know the language,” he said.

“Leisana. Not many do.” Where she set another length of deadfall on the fire, Chriani caught her face in the flare of light. She’d been crying, he saw. “The Leisanmira speak it. The wandering folk of south Elalantar and the western hill country.”

“Your mother’s folk.”

She looked up at him.

“My folk,” she said.

Though Chriani’s lack of study of the histories of the Ilmar had always left him precious short on details of how Lauresa’s mother had been set aside in favor of Chanist’s second marriage to Gwannyn, the odes of the bards that Barien himself sometimes sang made up for it. As a daughter of the wandering folk, Irdaign had been an acceptable match for the young Princeling Chanist who’d fallen in love and gotten her with child in the early days of the campaign that would quickly become the Ilvani Incursions.

The court of Chanist’s father at Rheran had created a suitable pedigree for Irdaign, creating connections to a lost Leisanmira royal family that had never existed. But once Chanist had taken the throne upon the death of his father six years later, that questionable pedigree had no longer been enough.

“It sounds Ilvani,” Chriani said.

“It was. Long ago.”

Ilmari and Ilvani were one folk,
his mother said.

“I’m sorry,” Chriani said. “For my words this morning.” Though he wasn’t sure if it would do any good at that point, he knew it would do less good by the morning.

“It’s a difficult thing having been told your whole life that you are too important to be allowed to make your own decisions,” Lauresa said. “You were right. Your presence on this journey is prudent. And welcome.”

A silence fell then that Chriani assumed would end the night, but Lauresa spoke once more. Her voice roused him as he stared into the embers of the fire.

“The Ode of Seilonna is about the road that leads endlessly away from home. The Leisanmira have the freedom to make their home in any lands, but not the freedom to ever call those lands home. Always seeking a thing they will never find.”

The darkness was full enough that even Chriani’s eyes couldn’t pierce it, but he thought he heard her crying again.

When Lauresa finally slept, he stayed awake for a long while. He paced around the copse a half-dozen times but saw no sign of movement, animal or otherwise, where the Clearmoon broke from behind the clouds. He trusted the horses to wake if they scented wolves or anything else, but he slept lightly all the same. A half-dozen times, he awoke in a dull dream-state, expecting to find the princess packed up and vanished in the night.

She was still there in the morning, though. She had the fire going, the smell of roasting pork waking him, Chriani annoyed at himself for having slept nearly until first light. The long day’s ride and the even longer night before had caught up to him, he thought.

But even as he packed up, Chriani froze. Stared.

There beside his saddlebags, he saw a scrap of parchment, folded tight and bound with a ribbon of tattered green silk. Across the top edge,
Chriani
was written in an angular hand.

“I found it in my saddlebags,” Lauresa said simply. Chriani nodded, didn’t look at her. He gently pulled the ribbon free, sure he was only imagining that he could sense Kathlan’s scent still clinging to it.

Where he unfolded it, the parchment was blank.

“A message from the girl at the stables?”

“Take care of the horse or she’ll line her saddlebags with my spleen,” Chriani said. “She’ll do it, too.” He laughed, the sound wrong somehow.

They ate in silence, headed out under a red dawn that turned to a dark day, cloud still pushing in from the north where the winds across the distant Sea of Ehadne scoured the Clearwater basin and the steppes beyond. As the forest around the line of the trail they followed thinned to scrubland for a brief space just past daymark, Chriani saw what he guessed was the Glaeddynfield road to the south, a faint scar marking off green farmland beyond.

“A storm coming,” Chriani said. “Evening at the latest.” Where she glanced to the sky, Lauresa nodded agreement. “We should take to the road. Make a village by dusk, find somewhere to shelter.”

“No,” she said. She cantered on, wind tugging at her cloak. Chriani glanced again to the darkening sky, wondered if she knew something he didn’t.

He was about to speak again when he spotted the rider. Alone, faint against the darkening sky to the west. Chriani slowed to watch, calculated distance and trajectory along the edge of the fields where the figure bore fast toward them, perhaps a quarter-league away.

“It’s all right,” Lauresa said. He wheeled to see her following his gaze, spurring her horse forward. “Come.”

Where Chriani followed her, he slipped the battered short sword from its scabbard, scanned the horizon to all sides but saw no sign of other movement. Ahead, the black sky had swallowed the last light of day, and he strained to pull detail from the shadow.

He’d never seen the figure before, but in the end, he knew there was only one person it could be. She rode easy where she raced toward them, features slowly coming into clear focus in the half-light. The tightly curled hair was deep bronze, the first streaks of grey only showing where it flew behind her, but Chriani recognized the blue eyes all the same. Even sharing the color of her father, Lauresa had her mother’s eyes, it was said.

Where Lauresa spurred towards the Princess Precedent Irdaign, Chriani slowed the roan, held back to a canter as the two came close. Irdaign was riding bareback and without reins, he saw, her black stallion slowing with just a word as Lauresa came alongside her.

Where he saw the princess embrace her mother in the dying light, Chriani saw her tears. But where she clung to her daughter, the princess precedent’s gaze lifted to seek him out, and he looked quickly away. Turning the roan, he paced around them in some vain attempt at setting up a one-horse perimeter. Trying not to watch.

When she was younger, when she trained at his side, he’d felt a strength in Lauresa. Eldest daughter of a youngest son, born in wartime and raised by a father who seemed convinced that every new dawn might bring the final wave of Ilvani invasion from the Greatwood’s endless shadow. And though it had taken him until this moment to recognize it, Chriani realized that he’d seen that same strength in her again that fateful night in the library. Honed and shaped to a different tension, but still drawn from the same source. The strength of will and personality that marked one accustomed to having to prove herself. A strength of hand and word, like that of Barien in brawl and debate alike. The strength of the leader she’d never get a chance to be.

But in the princess precedent’s arms, that strength was gone now. And Lauresa was a girl who’d spent her life estranged from the mother she loved, and who had seen her father nearly struck down in her own house, and who was nine days now from the fanfare and the boat that would take her forever from the home she’d been sheltered in since the day she was born.

A sleet wind was rising, the scent of far-off thunder sharp as Chriani rubbed his eyes. He heard the low thud of hooves, turned to see Irdaign and Lauresa pacing toward him side by side, hand in hand. He sheathed the sword with what he hoped was suitable ceremony, nodded low in the saddle.

“Enough of that,” the princess precedent intoned. Her face was set but he heard the smile in her voice. She wore a cloak of midnight blue that he’d taken for black at first, bracelets of lapis at her wrists to match her earrings. “It’s been a great number of years since anyone was compelled to defer to me, master Chriani. I don’t intend to have to get used to it again.”

He nodded again anyway.

“Highness.”

“I know a place close by,” she said. “Come.”

They headed back down and across the track they’d followed at the stream’s edge, Chriani guardedly watching the shadows that rose around them now, the storm whispering its approach in the hissing of the wind-whipped trees. To the southeast, he saw a low rise of wooded hill that Irdaign seemed to be leading them toward, the darker stain of stone barely visible against grey-green shadow where he squinted. Ruins of some sort, almost overgrown.

“There,” Irdaign said, almost as if she could sense him staring to the darkness, and where her horse turned up the hill, he saw a narrow track emerge in a twisting sea of tall grass. Single file, they advanced to the top, Chriani fighting the urge to spur ahead and check for ambush. But even as they climbed, he found himself wondering at the princess precedent’s sudden arrival, Lauresa clearly expecting her.

The princess could have gotten word to her by spellcraft, he guessed. He still had the ring Lauresa had given him tucked up inside his sleeve. But even as exhausted as her horse looked, it was six days hard road riding to the Glaeddyn farmsteads from Irdaign’s home near Myrwater. Even assuming that Lauresa had sent word of her leaving the night she’d given Kathlan the order to prepare a horse, the numbers didn’t add up. Changing horses twice a day, it still would have been a ride to challenge the best of Chanist’s rangers. Chriani felt a lingering uncertainty, didn’t know where it came from, but once or twice, he almost thought he saw Irdaign’s black steed casually turn its head back to watch him.

At the crest of the hill, two stone walls still stood, an ancient fir growing up around the ruined cornerstone between them, enough shelter under its boughs to hopefully deflect the weather that was coming. Across the hillside, other clumps of stone punched up from the grass like breakers on a frozen sea. More than one building here originally. A watchtower village, perhaps, dating from the first wars to judge by the extent of the ruin. Too long ago to remember even dates now. The forests of the Valnirata had pushed this far once, the Ilvani dominion extending beyond them and across all the Ilmar. The Ilvani tree-cities were long gone, but the stones that the Ilmari had raised to shelter themselves through the long wars endured.

Where Chriani dismounted, he lashed the roan to a low branch, started a slow circle of the clearing to look for firewood. Behind him, Lauresa tied her horse, unhitched saddle and tack as it began to crop the tall oat grass, still full. Irdaign slipped from her own horse with the grace of someone much younger than Chriani knew she was, motioned it to follow her where she walked it to the clearing’s edge.

She had no way to tie it, Chriani realized. Not even a halter hanging from it. He wondered if the beast could possibly be well tamed enough to simply be told to stand by for the night.

But then he watched Lauresa’s mother lean in close, whisper a word in the horse’s ear. It seemed to nod as she stepped back. Then all at once, a light that brought Chriani’s hand up to cover his eyes flared all around the animal’s form, bright as any evenlamp in the falling dark. And like it had suddenly been shredded on a grate of the hottest coals, the horse collapsed in on itself as Irdaign stepped back, its skin shot through with an all-consuming white flame that raced across it like wildfire in summer grass.