Clearwater Dawn (27 page)

You won’t be able to come to me,
she said.
I will meet you there.

He wasn’t wearing the ring, but he heard her in his mind just the same. Wondering darkly whether she’d ever even needed the rings in the first place, wondering if she could hear him now as he could hear her. A darkness in his thoughts that he wasn’t bothering to hide this time.

Ahead, he saw two guards watching him from the time he appeared across the officers’ pavilion, spears locked across the entrance to the prince’s tents. He didn’t slow down, didn’t meet their gaze as he approached, the spears lifted as he passed through them, up the steps and through the curtained alcove without a word.

Inside, he found Lauresa waiting in the study where she’d waited just a short while before. She had changed from the riding clothes she’d been walking in, dressed now in a long white shift in which she seemed to float just above the floor. Her hair was tied back, her skin pale in the unnatural brightness of the evenlamps. Even more regal than normal, he thought, not sure if that should have been possible.

From her expression where she turned to see him, he realized that Chanist’s draught had done nothing to affect how bad he must look. He touched his face as he nodded to her, felt still-drying blood caked there.

“Sit,” she said, motioning to the low bench along the far wall. He did so without emotion, Lauresa filling a basin from the jug of water there, wetting a handkerchief she pulled from within her sleeve. She knelt as she washed Chriani’s face, the water cool where she gingerly touched him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Well enough for you to leave me,” he said evenly.

“I ran for aid,” she said. “I did not know how badly hurt you were. Had I tried to move you, you might have died before any healing could save you.”

“Very good of you to have it delivered thus.”

She slipped the cloth into his hand, rose abruptly. Chriani ignored her, continued to scrape the crust of blood from his face and neck even as he tried to hold onto the anger that was fading suddenly.

She’d saved his life. He tried to grasp that thought, wanted to hang onto it against all others. He felt the anger rise white-hot like it always did, wanted to push it away for once. He wanted to thank her.

“You lied to me,” he said instead.

“I lie to everyone, Chriani. All my life is lies. You are just unlucky enough to have seen through them.”

“It was you all along,” he said, not a question. “In the war room. The shadow, the sorcery that saved us in the fall. Outside the throne room, and your voice in my head. None of it was rings or pendants or any other thing. Just you.”

“The rings are real,” she said quietly. “Without them, I can send you my thoughts but cannot hear yours in return. The pendant has protective power of its own, but not the power I pretended it to have. It was me.”

Chriani stood. In a mirror that hung close to the door, he caught a glimpse of himself, wiped the last of the blood from his face and hair. The faint marks of the split lips and the gash that had opened up across his cheek were still visible.

“You have no right,” he said coldly.

“I have no right to what, tyro? To my life?” She matched his tone where she paced away from him, stood at her father’s chair. “No right to my mother’s blood? I did not choose what I am, Chriani, it chose me. The arts of my people have been handed down from mother to daughter, father to son since before the Ilmar tribes crossed the mountains.”

“What you are is your affair, princess. Choosing to hide it within the Rheran court makes it mine.”

“One should have standing in court before one presumes to speak for that court…”

“You ordered me to lie to the prince high to protect your own actions against that court. Whose eyes do you watch your father with, princess? Andreg’s? Your mother’s? Was it on her orders that you stole into the tower that night?”

“I was in the war room as I have been many times in order to practice my art, you obtuse fool. I did not hear the alarm that night because I was in the midst of working a silence charm. In my own chambers, my father’s court wizards would sense me wielding the power within me. I practice in the war room because its sorcerous wards prevent detection of the spells I study, the same wards that prevent others seeing within. No space in the Bastion is more secure.”

“And your father approves?” Chriani said coldly.

In Lauresa’s face, Chriani saw the sudden fragility again that he’d seen in the throne room that night. He almost believed it.

“If my skills were known, my life would be over,” she said. She pushed the chair in abruptly, turned from him where she paced. “I’d have been made to become one of my father’s court wizards in the tower, or sent to one of the warmage outposts for military training.”

“Many have endured more for the land and its people,” he quoted back to her.

Lauresa turned on him, cold.

“I love this land, but I am not of it. Not enough for my father’s advisors, at any rate.” A lifetime’s practice had almost hidden the edge in her voice. Almost. The princess faltered for a moment. “The Leisanmira blood does not still easily. The prince high knows this.”

Her Leisanmira lackey,
Konaugo had said.

Chriani had circled back to the basin, watched its water swirl red where he squeezed the blood-slaked cloth out. In the captain’s words, he felt another thing pressing on him suddenly, mind numb beneath the weight of one more secret to add to all the other things he should have known, should have suspected but was too blind to see.

He understood finally. Barien’s voice in his head that night.

“Barien was of the Leisanmira,” Lauresa said as if in echo, and where Chriani spun, he sent the basin toppling to the floor. He saw the prince’s carpets stained pink at his feet where the water soaked in.

“Stay out of my head,” he whispered.

“I am not in your mind, Chriani. The fear in your face can be read easily enough. Barien was my mother’s warden from the moment she and Chanist were wed. They were cousins, had been friends since childhood. Sorcery and music in their blood, commingling.”

Outside, sudden footsteps approached, Lauresa slipping to the gap at the corner to peer out. Slowly, the noise faded away. Chriani was conscious of the stillness around them, distant shouts echoing from the perimeter, the guards silent around the prince’s tents.

“The Leisanmira summon sorcery that way, with song. The court wizards and the necromancers write their spellcraft. They need their books to study and their spellwords to utter. Ours is passed from person to person, voice to voice.”

To all sides, Chriani heard the evenlamps hissing soft against the silence, had never noticed before that they made sound. He remembered Lauresa’s voice in his ear at the library, remembered stealing her song away with a kiss as they’d fallen. He remembered her voice twisting in with her mother’s against the storm.

“I’ve spent my whole life training in secret. Trips taken yearly to my mother’s in Aldac, the two of us riding out alone.” Chriani heard an air of confession in her now, but all it made him feel was how little the confession meant. “We would spend weeks in the wilderness, exploring. There are ruins throughout the hills and the western mountains, steeped in dweomer. Some predate the Empire and the Ilvani alike.”

He felt a dull fear circling like distant shadow, visible but unformed. He tried to imagine hearing the words Lauresa spoke now, but from Barien. The warrior telling him the truth of who he was, of what he was.

“My mother knew from the moment she was set aside that I must be married off one day. For the good of the crown, for the good of the treaty. If it was known what I could do, if it was known even that I had dabbled in the Leisanmira spellsong as a child, I would carry a cloud of suspicion with me all my days. Andreg and Vishod alike co-opting the power in me even as they would wonder to my death whether that power still served my father from afar.”

The witch-princess.
In Chriani’s mind, Konaugo’s spite was as sharp as the memory of the hands at his throat, sharp as the memory of Chanist and Barien laughing together in the soft glow of firelight. All the trust that Chriani had seen run from the prince high to the warrior, and he wasn’t sure now how much of it was real.

He tried to tell himself that if Barien had told him the truth, he wouldn’t have been afraid.

“You are your father’s daughter,” he said numbly. He dug hard, tried to find the words he knew were hidden somewhere in the dark silence. “You had no right to take this power in secrecy. Your mother had no right to seed it in you…”

“Blood and moonsign, Chriani, think on it. I was the daughter of a princeling third in the line to a throne held by a man most thought would live forever. There should have been no responsibilities placed on me, no expectations. She thought I would be free to choose my own path, and so my mother began the training with me. I began to learn the music of my people before I spoke my first words. Then everything changed.”

“She had no right…”

“Once the song of the Leisanmira comes to life within you, it cannot be silenced. Not by a father’s will, not by a husband’s fear.” The princess turned away, then. “Only by me,” she said quietly. “For the sake of what I must become.”

Chriani wiped again with the pink-stained cloth, watched it come away this time no dirtier than it already was. He dropped it where the basin still lay overturned on the floor.

“How do you expect to keep this secret?”

“The warmages will assume that the assassin used the magic that burned the glade tonight…”

“Not tonight. I mean the secret of what you are, what you’ve been all this time?”

Lauresa laughed quietly, then, almost to herself. A kind of weary acceptance in her suddenly.

“While my mother was a youngest prince’s wife, many knew that she carried the Leisanmira song within her,” she said. “When she became princess high, those truths were quickly made to seem like rumor by the carefully placed falsehoods of my father’s Rheran councilors, and those who clung to them were branded superstitious fools. Make the truth seem laughable and you give life to the lie.”

He felt the urge to turn from her, run from the tent and the dull ache that was her face in the half-light where she sat now at her father’s work table. He saw her hands shaking.

“None of it matters any more,” she said, and Chriani heard the strength fade from her voice. And suddenly, he saw a resemblance to her father he’d never seen before. More than just the golden hair, more than just the darkness that lurked beneath the fair features.

He remembered Chanist where he’d stood in this tent before, letting Lauresa hold him against the weight of a fear that seemed ready to drag him down. He saw that same fear in her, now. A kind of age in her eyes that no one as young as her should have ever shown, the expression of courtly demeanor shrouding it like fine silk might drape the bones of a starving man.

“Marriage in Aerach means the end of this life,” she said. “For Brandishear’s sake.” Chriani felt himself pulled from the storm of thought twisting through him. From the moonlit copse, he felt the sharp tug of memory, tried to fight it. “You have much distrust in common, you and Andreg,” she said. “A shame you’ll never meet.”

I used to watch you at the harvest fest…

“I trust what I can see,” Chriani said, but there was an emptiness in his voice. He could feel the shape of all the things he longed to say pushing up beneath the careful mask of the words he actually spoke.

“You trusted the power that saved your life in the war room when you thought it was trinket spellcraft…”

“Because sorcery in a ring, I control. Sorcery within a living heart, hiding from the authority of crown or law, who controls it?”

“The one who attacked you tonight, the one who killed Barien, who tried to kill my father, was no sorcerer. The power that might well have killed you came from what he wore. A ring, an amulet. Do you feel better, now?”

“Yes.”

“And why?”

“Because I can cut the rings from his fingers and twist the chains from around his neck before I cripple him cleanly, man to man. But what’s inside him, I cannot touch.”

“You could kill me for what lies inside me,” she said quietly. “And I would not be the first Leisanmira to die for the sake of a peasant’s fear.”

“Funny to hear one talking of fear who’s spent her whole life in hiding.”

“And what do you hide, Chriani?” she said bitterly, voice raised now. “Beneath that bandage under your tunic which somehow never needs to be changed? Some wound that never seems to heal…”

And Chriani stared blankly. At his chest, he felt the pain twist through him suddenly, felt her empty eyes bore a hole through him. He slipped the steel ring from its inside pocket, tried to force the shaking from his hand where he tossed it to her feet. He felt the ache again, twisting through the words he wanted to make, but in the end, it was the anger that spoke as it so often did.

“All this talk about how badly you want not to be controlled, and yet you seem to enjoy control a fair bit. Don’t you princess?”

“Goodbye, Chriani,” was all she said, and he turned for the curtain and was gone.