Clearwater Dawn Read online

  CLEARWATER DAWN

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Chapter 1 • The Warden’s Door

  Chapter 2 • Worthy of Fear

  Chapter 3 • Chriani’s Secret

  Chapter 4 • The Narneth Móir

  Chapter 5 • Five Hog’s House

  Chapter 6 • The Ode of Seilonna

  Chapter 7 • Lauresa’s Song

  Chapter 8 • Things Left Unsaid

  Chapter 9 • The Clearwater Way

  Chapter 10 • The Crithnala

  Chapter 11 • A Good Way to Die

  Chapter 12 • The Road Home

  Colophon

  Copyright

  Special Preview

  A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales

  Part One — The Name of the Night

  CLEARWATER DAWN

  An apprentice guard in the royal household of Brandishear, Chriani is a capable young warrior held back from attaining his full potential by a lifetime of dark anger. Lauresa is a princess about to be set aside as heir and married off for the sake of treaty — and the only woman Chriani has ever loved. When his mentor is murdered preventing an assassination attempt within the palace, Chriani is forced to become Lauresa’s protector — the two reconciling a forbidden passion even as they find themselves caught up in a maelstrom of political intrigue, ancient racial hatred, a society living in mortal fear of sorcery, and a decades-old plot to plunge five nations into genocidal war.

  The princess faltered. Chriani saw the flick of her eyes, the gleam of blue catching the light as he twisted to follow her gaze. He’d left the dark door open behind him. In the faint light of the corridor, his eyes caught the ripple of shadow that meant movement in the distance. Footsteps, almost silent.

  “You fool,” she whispered.

  Chriani wasn’t listening, sheathing his sword with effort as he turned for the door, made to call out to whoever was racing toward them. No idea what he was supposed to say, but he was fairly certain that begging for mercy would be a large part of it.

  Then the princess was moving behind him, one hand across his mouth even as the other brought the dagger up, close to his throat as she dragged him back. Chriani was startled, as much at being grabbed at all as he was at the strength in her arm. As he stumbled back, though, he felt instinct override any uncertainty. Her blade was a hand’s-width from him, more than enough space to go for her wrist. No room to get a decent strike in with the other hand, but her flank was vulnerable and in easy reach, or the soft muscle of her thigh, one sharp blow that would drop her.

  But even through the instinct, through all the memory of all the hand-to-hand training he’d done at Barien’s side, he knew he couldn’t do it.

  No idea what any of this was about, but he couldn’t hurt her. Not anymore.

  He went for the dagger, though. No point in having his throat slit, by accident or otherwise. But even as his hand clamped around her wrist, Lauresa sang…

  CLEARWATER DAWN

  A Novel of the Endlands

  Book One

  of

  The Exile’s Blade

  by

  Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  Published by Insane Angel Studios

  (insaneangel.com)

  Copyright © 2010 Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  Smashwords Edition

  For Colleen

  Braern ar nay min leinn…

  One owes respect to the living.

  To the dead,

  one owes only the truth.

  — Voltaire

  Click either map to download a PDF version from

  http://www.scribd.com/doc/59270511/Clearwater-Dawn-Maps

  — Chapter 1 —

  THE WARDEN’S DOOR

  LOOK TO THE PRINCESS…

  Even in the half-waking dreams of his own exhaustion, Chriani thought he could hear the command ringing in his head where he lay in his alcove in Barien’s chambers. Waiting for the sleep that he knew would come if he could only quiet the ache at his chest and in his gut.

  Where he shifted on the thin tick, the pallet beneath it barely long enough for him, he felt the chill airflow through the narrow gap that passed for a window in the closest corner of the room. Originally an arrow slit when the Bastion was new-built a hundred generations past, it had been knocked out and roughly widened as the open fields and huts it once overlooked and defended had turned to the alleyways and flagstoned court of the outlying keep long years ago. The wind still blew in from over the southern walls, though, twisting across him now. Just past High Winter, the Brandishear coast had yet to see snow, but the unseasonable warmth of the past two weeks’ sun had disappeared as quickly as the day’s light.

  As he walked along the walls of the keep not so long before, Chriani had watched the lights of the sentry towers echo the light of the city beyond, threescore thousand strong. Like he always did, he felt the specific stillness that was the keep at night. From the southlands, from the farmsteads that spread and surrounded Aloidien and Quilimma and Cadaurwen and the fertile steppes at the mountain’s feet, the trade roads ran non-stop by day with the past season’s grain and cheese and salt beef bound for the docks. Destinations east and west, ports in Elalantar and Aerach and Holc. Beyond the walls of the keep that was its heart, Rheran was alive with a light and a noise and a movement that ran all night and only began to fade as the noise and movement of the next day started up all over again.

  But where Chriani lay now within the Prince’s Bastion, that life had never seemed more distant. As the walls of the keep marked off the heart of the city, the Bastion marked off the heart of the keep, and within that twice-isolated space, the closing of the gates marked off the end of the day with a sense of ritual formality. Whatever business carried on into the night around him now was the quieter commerce of court. Consuls and emissaries would be plying their trade in the apartments of the master-merchants and barristers and petty nobles who had long ago secured the keep’s scant supply of apartments. In the prince’s tower that rose just above and to the north of Barien’s chambers in the garrison wing, a steady stream of servants would even now be making their way along the stairs to the guest chambers where Chanist housed whatever foreign dignitaries the tide or the road had brought in that day.

  The Bastion was the place of princes that Chriani had been a part of for ten years now, and it would be a part of him for two weeks more.

  Two weeks until it was over, he counted from the space where sleep beckoned. Time enough.

  He’d heard the words that day, found himself hoping that it might be for the last time. Ringing out across the courtyard of the keep from the stable gates, the Princess Lauresa had swept in along the city road with a half-dozen riders around her.

  “Look to the princess!”

  It had been Barien’s voice, the deep tone of command ringing out like it always did. To the side and the customary distance behind the Princess Lauresa, Chriani saw the tall warrior rein in, dark cloak and lighter dust swirling around him as a pair of grooms took his horse, then he in turn leapt down to take Lauresa’s reins in his own hands.

  Chriani had been resting, slouched in the doorway of the outside armories as the twisting breeze of a bright daymark funneled through the main gates, the scent of dust and dung and roasting meat carried in from the market court beyond. The armories and the stables framed the gates like bookends, but where Chriani lingered within the doors, he was hidden where sunlight glared off the stones of the courtyard track.

  Lauresa was in white, as she usually was, draped in a shawl of ilvanweave that the Mearinn of the Tannwood made, the dust of road and trail never clinging to it. Her horse was a white palfrey mare that had be
en given to her by her father to mark her nineteenth year the autumn just passed. Curls of sunflower yellow twisted where she gently returned Barien’s nod of salute, blue eyes catching the light even from where Chriani stared darkly.

  He was tired suddenly, watching her. He hadn’t slept well the night before. Hadn’t slept at all the night before that.

  The Princess Lauresa is to marry in Aerach, the sudden proclamation had read a month before, and all Brandishear will join in tribute for her happiness.

  Barien was warden to the princess and had been since before she was born, they said. Chriani was Barien’s adjutant from the day he’d been taken into the keep, ten years past now. Barien had asked him to ride out with the princess’s party that morning, hanging back behind the warrior for the day’s ride. Chriani had begged off sick, though, just as he’d managed to work his way out of three other invitations to accompany Barien on some outing or another with Lauresa the past month.

  Over breakfast in the garrison mess, Barien had appraised him coldly where Chriani did his best to look pale, but the warrior hadn’t bothered speaking the disbelief that was obvious in his dark eyes.

  “If you can keep from coughing up blood long enough, see what Konaugo’s got for you,” Barien had said, which sounded simple enough. But meetings with the prince’s notorious captain and Chriani had a way of complicating themselves, and so it was that he’d found himself in the armories since just after dawn, a battalion of the prince’s rangers returning from a two-month tour of Aloidien province the previous day. A full troupe’s worth of weapons had been left for inspection and honing, most of their blades so notched that Chriani suspected the south-west townships had been granted a reprieve from the wolves that prowled the foot of the mountains in favor of attack from an army of rocks that the troupe had valiantly bashed into submission.

  From the stables, the Princess Lauresa in white made her way with two escorts along the steady rise of the courtyard track for the main gates of the Bastion to the south, circling the upthrust stones on which the citadel rose. Chriani thought he saw her glance his way. He backed farther up, slipped easily into deeper shadow. Waited until she’d passed before he moved back to slam the armory doors.

  Marriage of convenience, it was said in the city and among the garrison who speculated on the suddenness of the announcement. A marriage of treaty. Politics. Chriani pushed the word and the thoughts from his mind then. He was far too tired to think.

  It had been three years since the last time the Princess Lauresa had spoken to him. One month since the proclamation and Barien seeming to take some great interest in having Chriani at his side while he rode out the last days of his obligation as Lauresa’s warden. Two weeks more of Chriani finding excuses to keep the distance of the last three years before it was over.

  He’d gone back to the stone wheel and the pile of shortspears and blades still there, another lamp lit to vanquish the shadows when he heard the doors open behind him.

  “So what was it this time got you on solitary detail?”

  Where Chriani looked up, Barien’s hulking figure was dark against the light outside. He pulled a waterskin from within his cloak, the dust of the road falling from him where he slapped it away.

  “If you’ve already heard, you likely already know,” Chriani said coldly. He arced three spears end-first across the room, watched them slam one by one into their rack without touching the steel to either side.

  “I didn’t hear it, I smelled it,” the wind-tanned warrior said with a grin. “Konaugo burning, all the way from the south city-gate. General insubordination? Specific insubordination?”

  “I reportedly called his parentage into question,” Chriani said evenly.

  Barien laughed.

  “And how did our fine captain find that out?”

  “I may have inadvertently said it to his face.”

  Barien laughed louder. He helped Chriani finish up, though, both of them working the wheel in silence, and what would have been a grueling day and a night became just a grueling day in the end. The short day’s sun had already set as Chriani racked the last sword, bundling up a dozen that he’d spotted too-serious flaws in, readying them for the forges. But where he dumped the damaged blades at the doors, he saw a figure moving at the stable gates across the way, and in his mind, a hundred different impressions shifted and locked into place.

  Through the armory, twenty different types of weapons spread across four times that many racks and shelves, but Chriani knew them all. Beneath the shock of black hair that he brushed aside, he had his father’s grey eyes that would spot the faintest blemish or deviation in a single blade, or sort and catalog every shadowed rack in the room at once. He had his mother’s attention to detail that would take those things in, etch them permanently and effortlessly into memory like it had long ago etched the slender figure across from him.

  Where Kathlan stormed out from the stables, Chriani caught a glimpse of dark hair cut ragged above whipcord-tight shoulders. Her bare arms were tanned where a too-large tunic was belted with black leather, a silver-edged buckle on it that had been her father’s. The trace of a limp was visible where she grabbed the reins of an exhausted horse, and the Elalantar lilt of her deceptively soft voice rang out across the courtyard where she cursed the Aerach courier who had overridden it, trying in vain to make the Bastion before last light.

  “Blood, mother, and fucking moonsign!” Kathlan rattled off a string of epithets that Chriani had only heard half of before, her slight frame making her gift for profanity that much more of a shock to its generally unsuspecting victims. “By your prince’s balls if you can sotting find them,” she shouted, “you ever bring a horse through my gate in a lather again, you’d better have the fucking whole of the Valnirata riding up your overstuffed ass!”

  Chriani watched the courier backpedaling for the courtyard track as if he expected Kathlan’s tongue to suddenly lash out across the distance between them. Deep down, Chriani wanted to smile, but he knew that even if he’d searched for it, any mirth in him was long gone.

  He drank thirstily from the waterskin Barien tossed, not realizing that he was staring past him until he saw the warrior turn to follow his gaze.

  “Second shift at the stables tonight?” Barien said with a broad wink as Kathlan gently led the horse inside. “You’d let me know, I’d have worked faster for you.”

  “No,” Chriani said as he turned away quickly. “I’m for bed.” Off Barien’s look, he added, “My own bed.”

  “You telling me the bloom’s off that rose already? Night and daylight, boy, I’d have thought you might find someone yet you don’t push to want to kill you inside six months.”

  “You thinking anything would be a great first,” Chriani said as he handed the waterskin back. A calculated taunt, intentional. He felt the same numb pain circling in his gut now that he’d felt when Lauresa had ridden in, wanted nothing but for it to go away. Not wanting to hear the words in Barien that would reflect the words unspoken in himself.

  “Seems to me the longer that mouth of yours stays open, boy, the less chance of anything worth hearing coming out of it.”

  “Shut yours, then, old man, and show me how it’s done.”

  The backhand blow that Barien threw was fast enough that it would have caught most people, but long experience meant that Chriani knew to watch for it. He twisted back, felt the air behind the warrior’s hand where it slammed past. He missed Barien’s leg where it twisted between his and dropped him, though. Too busy waiting for the other hand, not watching.

  As Barien helped him up, the warrior laughed again.

  “You had enough, then?” Chriani said where he calmly dusted himself off.

  “Yeah, on account of I can’t afford to have to carry you in. I’m late for the watch.”

  He slapped Chriani on the shoulder, tossed him the waterskin again and headed out. But at the doors, he stopped, turned back. Stars in an endless black sky behind him cast their faint light on the weath
ered stone walls opposite, the gatehouse flags twisting in the chill breeze.

  “Konaugo’s no friend to anyone I’d want to call that, but he’s captain whether you and I like it or not,” Barien said. “You want to make rank before you’re older than whatever captain takes over for him one day, you stay out of his way.”

  “I’ll wait for you to take over for him.”

  “You’ll be older still.”

  Chriani finished the waterskin, sprayed the last dregs across his dust-streaked face. He found an inside corner of his tunic slightly less dirty than the rest and wiped his eyes.

  “I don’t need the advice.”

  “When you stop telling me you don’t need it is when I’ll know you don’t,” Barien said. An evenness in his voice, no sign of the impatience that Chriani had often thought should have been there by now. “I know what you should be, well as you know it. Only one of us gets to decide whether it happens or not, though.”

  Across at the stables, Kathlan reappeared to hurl the courier’s saddle unceremoniously into the frost-streaked dust of the courtyard track. She slammed the doors behind her as she disappeared inside.

  “I’ll work on it,” Chriani said simply. In the doorway, Barien nodded and was gone.

  Where Chriani doused the lamps and pulled the doors shut, he felt the fatigue suddenly. A dull ache in his gut settled below the deeper pain there, reminding him he hadn’t eaten yet that day, but he was too tired suddenly to want to.

  The gates of the keep opened northward to the crowded city slopes that dropped to the harbor and the seawall beyond. The Bastion gate looked south, the long twist of the courtyard track sweeping east between its walls and the crowded rise of buildings pushing up against it. Chriani cut west, though, crossing the empty training grounds where the garrison practiced. He pushed himself up the narrow steps that rose along the wall that separated the grounds from the clutter of buildings to the south. Along the inside walls of the keep, the exclusive apartments and offices of the ground-level alley maze were locked up tight, lamps burning in the upper windows. In their secure island at the center of the city, the keep’s residents were an elite — gem merchants and goldsmiths, scribes and sages. The offices of the silk guild and of a dozen of Brandishear’s largest private trade concerns were here, as were a half-dozen merchants of spellcraft. The branded sorcerers wise enough to set up shop as close to the watchful eye of the prince’s court wizards as possible.