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  His was a fool’s reaction, Chriani thought.

  “You know that the rumors are true,” Lauresa said quietly. Not a question.

  Chriani drank deeply, tried to focus. He was following two tankards of bitter with stout because that’s what had come by on the tray the last time, and his tongue was already speaking the warning that he knew his head would be feeling by next morning, too late.

  “When you found the blade, you knew it for what it was.”

  In the three days since he’d woken to Barien’s voice in the dark, Chriani had become more intimately acquainted with the degree of subtlety in the princess than he’d ever dreamed he would. But though he tried to sense what insight, what interest was in her now, all he heard in her voice was a pain that seemed to match his own in a way he would have thought impossible.

  Beneath the cloak, her hand found his, clutched it tight. He could feel her shaking.

  “I would bring Barien back in a heartbeat if I could. But failing that, I understand that he did what he did in order to keep my father safe. I would pay any price to do the same, Chriani.”

  War… the voices around them said.

  In Barien’s endless history lessons, the Empire had been a time of great advances in craft and sorcery, but the Empire’s presence had given those advances direction and control. When they’d made that first transition from nations to provinces almost fifteen centuries before, the Ilmar principalities were sparsely populated, thinly defended. Today, the warrior had told him, Brandishear alone would be capable of putting an army into the field ten times greater than the combined forces of Brandis and Werran that helped turn the tide of the Migration Wars, with weapons and magic that might match the power of the Imperial Guard themselves.

  In the aftermath of the Empire, Barien had said with a seriousness Chriani heard, any war that started might just never end.

  Chriani squeezed his eyes shut, a numbness in his fingers where hers twined through them. Chriani, she’d said, and with a rush of insight that met the chill of the stout as he drank deep, he realized that she’d never called him that before. Not these last four days, not the four long years they’d trained at each other’s side. Never used his name. Like he was for every other sergeant and guard in the prince’s employ, he’d been ‘tyro’ always, interaction in the Bastion filtered through rank and station and the already-composed sets of expectations that came with it.

  “Konaugo let slip that a Valnirata bloodblade took Barien’s life,” he said. “When I saw the blade that was hidden, I knew it for what it was.”

  There was sudden snarling at the next table, the caravan chief feeding a pair of guard dogs the remains of a rack of lamb picked remarkably clean. His booming laughter drowned the current of conversation for a moment.

  “Yesterday,” she said, “you never answered me. What did Barien say before he died?”

  With effort, Chriani pulled his hand from hers. He glanced carefully around them, not meeting anyone’s gaze but confirming that no one’s gaze was on them.

  “He said to keep you safe. He spoke of someone, I know not who.”

  “The killer?”

  “No,” Chriani said. “Someone else. Someone within the court, I think. The reason he chose to flee to the archives, to hide what he hid. He left the dagger for me to find because he feared that to reveal the blade would have put your father in even greater danger. That’s the only sense I make of it.”

  Trust him not…

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said ‘Uissa’. He spoke of this person owning Uissa, I don’t know what it means.”

  Lauresa’s hair touched his cheek as she shook her head.

  “A weapon, perhaps. Or a person in his service. Is it a Valnirata name?”

  Chriani could have answered her No. Almost did, in fact, catching the word only just in time to prevent his having to explain how he could possibly have known. There was a dull buzzing in his head.

  Then at the bar suddenly, he heard Lauresa’s name shouted out. All the pleasant sluggishness of the drink fled from Chriani in an instant, and his hand at her head pulled her toward him, her face against his shoulder, hidden.

  A toast to the royal wedding! A drunken bellow, a chorus of clanking mugs rippling out from the bar. Chriani let himself relax.

  May the prince send as dowry ten thousand Valnirata heads!

  Against the chorus of cheers, Lauresa whispered in his ear.

  “It’s time to go.”

  Chriani glanced to both sides, no one paying them any particular attention that he could see, but Lauresa was already rising, hood pulled further down as she slipped through the crowd for the door.

  She said nothing as they made their way back toward the market court, Chriani breathing deeply of the chill winter air. He felt his head clear a little, but with that clarity came a sudden awareness that Lauresa’s scent was still with him. On him now, he realized. Beneath the cushion of drink, the dull pain the tattoo made was a fading ache.

  When you found the blade, you knew it, she’d said. He’d almost told her the truth, then. All the truth, like only Barien and Kathlan had ever been told before. He’d felt it on the tip of his tongue, felt it burning in his throat like bile, but as words formed, they’d latched instead onto the fragment of truth that had saved him in front of her father.

  Funny, he thought, how easily one small piece of truth could bury the larger lie.

  They took a different route back, sticking to the lantern-lit side streets that circled the markets but would return them to the keep walls just the same. As they walked, Chriani tried to think of what he was going to say to Garyan at the door in order to get Kathlan back, but it was Kathlan herself there when he quietly knocked, Lauresa in the shadows behind him.

  He saw the green eyes bright where she slid the narrow wedge of the lantern slot back to appraise him. A moment’s waiting as he heard the chain and the bars undone again, then they were inside.

  “Enjoy yourselves?” Kathlan asked sweetly.

  Chriani nodded awkwardly.

  “It was important,” he added, not sure why.

  “An unranked adjutant escorting a princess past lockdown?” Kathlan said quietly. “Must have been.” Chriani saw Lauresa glance back, caught a look between both women that he didn’t understand.

  “Chriani’s escort was important,” the princess said. “Thank you for making it possible.”

  “Highness.” Kathlan nodded, a little too quickly.

  At the stable doors, Chriani waved Lauresa back, slipping outside by himself to carefully check the courtyard track, no one passing. Along the walls, evenlamps burned brighter than normal, he thought. The garrison still on high alert, a bad night to be walking.

  Lauresa was at the door when he slipped back in, Kathlan darkly silent behind her. She waited until they were outside before she called.

  “Ashlund’s looking for you both. Best make the story good.” Chriani glanced back to see the doors slam shut.

  As far as he could tell, they made it unobserved along the narrow alley that climbed to the Bastion servants’ entrance. Watching the walls as they walked, he timed their movement between the movements of the guard. Lauresa had directed him there, told him she could find her way to her rooms on her own. She wouldn’t take the chance of him being caught inside, she said, a sentiment Chriani shared.

  Before she went, she gave him the cover story that Kathlan had suggested they’d need, walking him through it with an ease that suggested she’d had it prepared. She’d asked him to escort her to the orchard that evening, Chriani waiting while she’d written letters in the old gardener’s shed. He’d seen several of the garrison approach but the princess had made it clear that she didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “Personal correspondence to attend to before I leave,” she said. At the words, Chriani felt a sudden chill beyond that of the air. Something in the blur of the drink caught at him suddenly, and he was glad for the darkness. He felt her voice
in the shadows like something he could have touched.

  “When the cold became too much, you returned me to the courtyard. I informed you that I would make my own way from there.”

  She returned Chriani’s nod, opened the locked door with a key she slipped back within her tunic when she was done. But as she stepped inside, she turned back, Chriani still waiting.

  “My father needs to know what Barien said, but wherever he might be is too far for me to send word by any court sorcery I have access to. Whether Barien knew the source of his fear, I would not trust any in the Bastion to take word to my father now. Keep your silence while I think on this, Chriani.”

  He only nodded, heard the bolt click as the door closed behind her.

  Chriani checked the wall again before he headed back toward the gatehouse with the faint hope that he’d manage to put off Ashlund’s interrogation until the morning. But along the shadows of the courtyard track, he slowed. At the stables, he saw light still burning in the loft. At his chest, the ache of the tattoo flared against the dull resolve of the evening’s drink where it welled up in him.

  He stood there for a long while before he turned to cross the courtyard track, made for the stable doors.

  It had been more than a year since the first time he and Kathlan had found themselves together, but only a month since the news of Lauresa’s impending marriage and the series of excuses that Chriani would have once thought himself incapable of making. A month in which he’d lost count of the number of times he’d come up with reasons to not make his way to the stables after curfew, up to her pallet in the loft above.

  She’d come to him that first time with a fervor that had surprised him almost as much as it pleased him. Calling herself a soldier’s brat, she explained that she was the product of that casual and inexorable desire that happened between men and women out in the field. A night of unplanned passion between her parents, she’d said, with her the end result nine months on. Then she showed him that she was no stranger to unplanned passion herself.

  Her father had ridden with the garrison at Uliwen, Chriani knew, and except for his death when she was barely a girl, she likely would taken up training at his side. She’d never said how he died, but whatever accident had claimed him took the strength in her leg as well.

  Her mother had been the horse master who’d ridden with her father’s troupe, herself dead four years before of some consumption the healers couldn’t cure. Kathlan hadn’t spoken of her since the one time Chriani had asked, so he didn’t ask anymore. She’d ended up in Rheran some time after, made assistant to Eugen the stable master at fourteen. She was in line for his position if he ever retired, it was said, but it was said as well that Eugen was likely to work the stables till he dropped dead and a couple of days more besides.

  He’d heard Kathlan set the bolt at the main doors when he and Lauresa slipped out, so he went to the side instead. It was locked as well, but he had shadow there to hide him while he picked it.

  Even before she and Chriani had come together that night after the harvest fest, Barien had liked her, and that in the end was all the encouragement that Chriani had needed. She’d sung with Barien sometimes, one of the few people that the warrior would raise his careful baritone alongside of.

  Where the stables’ ancient stove burned bright beneath the stone chimney that twisted through the main beams above, he found her washing at a clay basin, steam still rising from the kettle close by. She had her hair tied back to a tight tail, naked to the waist, the sharp muscles of her arms and shoulders edged by the light. She glanced up when she saw him, made no move to cover herself.

  “You taking all the royal heirs drinking tonight? I’ll just leave the gates open for you, shall I?”

  Chriani felt the anger in her but had no words to counter it. His tongue felt thick.

  “Where’s Eugen?”

  “Bringing three of Chanist’s stud stallions back from Cadaurwen. He’s been gone a month. Same as you.”

  “Kathlan…”

  “It’s all right,” she said. She wrung the cloth out with more force than it probably needed. “I should have been smart enough to see. It’s fine, I forgive you, shut the door on your way out, all right?”

  “It’s not that way. There’s been no one else. It’s been busy is all.”

  She laughed where she wiped dust and grime from her arms.

  “You’re a good liar, Chriani, but what you can hide, she can’t.”

  Chriani stared, didn’t understand. Then he remembered the chill he’d felt from her earlier, Kathlan not asking Lauresa’s dismissal in a way that would have gotten her the back of Ashlund’s hand if he’d seen.

  “The princess? Care for me?” Chriani laughed, a little too loudly.

  Kathlan appraised him.

  “Men’s ignorance comes by twos, my mother used to say. Can’t tell you what they mean, can’t hear meaning in what you tell them.”

  “Kathlan, she’s married in ten days.”

  There was a drain a step away from Chriani, but where Kathlan emptied the basin, she somehow managed to land the water closer to him than it. She appraised him coldly.

  “She’s bound for Aerach in ten days. She’s not married for a month after that. Funny you getting that mixed up.”

  Chriani said nothing, felt a sudden heat rising in his face. Kathlan pulled a clean tunic from the back of a chair, slipped it on over her head.

  “Folk have been wondering who’s the one she’ll be leaving behind,” she said, almost to herself. “She could have done better by my eye.”

  “That’s madness, Kathlan.”

  “You can leave anytime.”

  “I don’t want to go,” he said. And not until he heard the desperate echo of the words in his own mind did Chriani realize how true they were. In all the memory of the past month, he somehow couldn’t make himself recall what had kept him away. Kathlan glanced back. The look in her eye told Chriani she’d heard it, too.

  Where her hair was tied, she wore a ribbon of tattered green silk. Her mother’s, she’d said once, and Chriani had never seen her wear another. He untied it now where he came up carefully behind her, let dark locks fall to frame her face where she half-turned away. The green eyes were cold, but there was an edge in her voice that echoed the feeling stirring in Chriani’s gut.

  “I need to be up early,” she said warily. “Orders from your princess.”

  “You’re my princess,” he said, cringing inwardly even as the words rose from the numb detachment of the drink. She laughed, though. The same sound he remembered from that first night the autumn before.

  “If I don’t have a courier’s horse ready by daybreak, it’s on your head,” Kathlan said. She leaned back against him, found his mouth with hers before pulling away. “Her perfume’s on you,” she said. “Wash before Ashlund gets a whiff and lines his saddlebags with your spleen.”

  Kathlan moved to retrieve the basin, Chriani slipping the bloodblade out from beneath his tunic and into his boot before she’d turned back. As she peeled his tunic off, his hands found her again but his thoughts were racing suddenly. Against the thickening of his pulse, he tried to focus.

  “So what sackless sot has the princess got riding out at daybreak, then?”

  “Didn’t care enough to ask.” Kathlan filled the basin again from the kettle, added cold water from an urn. “She told me while you were outside scouting the courtyard.”

  Where she squeezed warm water against his chest from the cloth, she noted the bandage. “What’s with that?”

  “Got cut in practice.” He carefully guided her hands from his shoulder, flinched pleasantly as she traced her fingers across his chest.

  I would not trust any in the Bastion to take word to my father now…

  “I can make it better,” Kathlan said quietly.

  She sent him first up the ladder to the loft, followed him with the basin and another steaming kettle. But as she led him to her pallet and laid him down there, he saw the narr
ow windows open to the night and the courtyard. Cold air raised goosebumps on his skin where she moved against him, the light in Lauresa’s window burning brightly in the darkness beyond.

  — Chapter 6 —

  THE ODE OF SEILONNA

  IT WAS WELL BEFORE DAWN when Chriani pulled himself from the half-slumber in which he’d spent the short remainder of his night in Kathlan’s embrace, slipping naked across the dark loft to retrieve his clothes where she’d thrown them. He pulled the bloodblade from under her pallet where he’d managed to tuck it away unseen, careful as she shifted in her slumber. The ache beneath the bandage was fading but the pounding in his head was as sharp as he’d expected it would be, and he forced himself to focus on both the long ride that he expected lay ahead and the favor he’d have to ask Kathlan before he could make it. He wasn’t sure which he was looking forward to less.

  He’d hoped to be dressed before she awoke but knew it wasn’t likely. Kathlan slept lightly enough to wake if one of the horses below her so much as coughed in the night. He had to light the lantern to check the bandage, was retying it when he saw her half-open eyes watching him.

  “You thinking to stop trusting me with your secrets?” she said sleepily.

  “I was cut,” he said, kneeling to kiss her. “I told you.”

  “So I shouldn’t worry?”

  “You know all my secrets,” he said.

  She rose up, stretching as she glanced to the still-open window.

  “It’s not even light. Come back to bed.” She slid across, pulled the nest of blankets back invitingly, the curve of her hip in shadow where he traced it with his hand.

  “I need a horse,” he said.

  “I know that feeling.” She ran her fingers up his thigh, laughed when he didn’t.

  “I need a horse,” he said again. “I need to ride out this morning.”

  Her expression changed as she rose up on one arm, wide awake suddenly.