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  He felt something hard strike his head, the pain already there redoubled. He felt his arms pinned, boots striking him in the stomach and back. Then he was moving across cold stone and his legs didn’t work anymore.

  A frozen moment of time, the ceiling sliding endlessly past above him. Then darkness took him away.

  — Chapter 3 —

  CHRIANI’S SECRET

  THE SECRET CHRIANI HAD KEPT since the day he walked into Rheran through the dust of the trade way meant that he could see better than anyone else in the keep that he knew of, but that same sharpness of sight blinded him now when he finally awoke. He blinked, found himself staring up into the singular brilliance of a dozen evenlamps, a massive hanging fixture directly above him that he looked away from at once, overwhelmed by the shadow that had burned into his sight while he lay there unconscious.

  As he slowly forced his eyes open, he saw an intricate pattern on the floor beneath him, blue and white tile cold against his face. An interleaving pattern of knots twisted around a blurred mosaic as he slowly looked up and across. The falcon of Brandis, ancient standard of the first princes. Its wings unfurled across the floor as it climbed, empty eyes fierce in their coldness where they seemed to watch him through a blur of movement all around.

  The throne room, he thought.

  He tried to focus, felt all the disparate pain from the number of times he’d been struck in the head that night twist into one solid knot. He felt rough cords at his wrists and feet, thought about trying to sit up but decided against it. The blood at his tunic was still wet, hardly any time passed. He was in the throne room but he was bound, which meant that they wanted something from him but were expecting to be able to get it without beating him in the dark holding cells behind the outwall. That was a good thing.

  Barien was dead.

  Where the terrible truth had circled half-remembered in his daze, it flooded him now like a plunge into ice-cold water. Against a sudden spike of anger, Chriani forced himself upright as a knife-edge of pain cut through him. Across from him, he saw three guards suddenly alert, more around them, spread across the room where his vision blurred.

  You will do as I command, the princess had said.

  Only she hadn’t commanded him on what to do in the event that his mentor was murdered and he found himself taken down and bound by the Bastion garrison. He should have run that scenario past her, Chriani thought bitterly. But then the anger wilted beneath a sudden fear, and he wondered what might happen if they used truth magic on him.

  He wondered what might happen if they simply took off his shirt and the bandage beneath it.

  For the mark his mother had made at his shoulder long years before, they’d kill him outright, he guessed. If the princess’s name freshly tattooed along its edge was seen by anyone who could read the delicate Ilvani script, Chanist or Konaugo or the ranger captains, they’d likely torture him first.

  The pain in his head flared suddenly. Chriani squeezed his eyes shut.

  It had been his eleventh summer when it had started. The Princess Lauresa a year older than him but showing no signs of growing out of the breeches she still wore then and into the robes her stepmother and younger sister favored. He’d been at the keep and under Barien’s hand almost three years, but even as tyro to the princess’s warden, he had yet to see her at anything less than a distance. Chriani had shoveled the stables while she rode out with Barien and her father. He had watched from the wall as she walked through the gates to explore the market court with her stepmother and younger siblings.

  It had been a bright spring day whose light had long-burned into permanent relief in his memory. The orchard trees were blossom-white above the walls, the training grounds wet with brief rain the night before. Images that he wished on his mother’s blood he could forget.

  On that day, Barien had told him to meet at the archery yard when his duties in the armory were done. Chriani was eleven then and was already outshooting Barien six times in ten, not sure why the warrior thought he needed more practice. But when he arrived on the training grounds, she’d been waiting for him. The Princess Lauresa, smiling shyly where he approached.

  She’d already been shooting, a brace of arrows lying in the mud a half-dozen paces past the target and conspicuously few of them sticking in it. Like the rangemaster who watched her, like any member of the garrison who carried arms within the Bastion, Barien was standing five paces away from the princess by Chanist’s own orders. It was a rule that all who served under the prince knew as well as they knew their names, Chanist’s will in this regard dating back to the days of Lauresa’s mother Irdaign, the first princess high.

  Chanist and she had been married just five years before the death of his father, brother, and sister marked the sixth year of the Ilvani Incursions, the war of invasion from the Valnirata Greatwood. And while most in the garrison thought the prince’s caution excessive against the backdrop of peace that Chanist himself had wrought from the raw destruction of that war, it was a caution they adhered to nonetheless. The prince high had seen too many of the family he’d grown up with murdered, Barien had said. He would take no chances with the family he’d made since then.

  “Don’t get no ideas,” the warrior had whispered with a wink as he waved Chriani in, but the boy hadn’t understood what he meant. Then Barien formally announced that the Prince High Chanist had seen fit to allow Chriani leave to serve as the Princess Lauresa’s personal mentor in archery, close blade combat, and riding. The warrior had somehow convinced the prince that he could allow a tyro this slight contact with his daughter but still keep the precepts of his orders intact. Chriani could only nod, wide-eyed.

  With the warrior’s prodding, Chriani approached Lauresa awkwardly, steadying her aim over the length of that first day. Close at her side, his hand wrapped around hers where he adjusted the set of her arm, told her how to breathe, how to open her eyes but focus with her whole body on the distant target.

  Chanist himself had appeared across the range just past second daybell, Chriani only realizing it when he saw Barien and the others salute. He was at the age then when he didn’t understand how clearly this new duty of his marked out the trust that ran from Chanist to Barien. He didn’t understand enough of the machinations of power and politics in the Bastion to realize until much later the resentment both he and the warrior would carry because of it.

  Chriani looked up now to the sound of footsteps approaching across the throne room floor, and the faint thought flitted through him that his long-ago ignorance was something he would have done well to hang onto.

  Above him, a face loomed, dark-eyed. Seamed with years of hard service, a jagged scar running jaw to ear, white like the hair and the narrow beard. Konaugo, captain of the guard, was shorter than Chriani but easily twice as broad. He was in riding leathers, out of uniform, Chriani only dimly registering it where the captain motioned two guards to pull him roughly to his feet.

  “Move,” he said.

  As they half-carried, half-dragged him toward a wide table of dark wood, Chriani’s vision cleared. Ashlund was there, a look passing between him and Konaugo that he didn’t like. In the press of guards around the main doors, he saw two that he remembered at Barien’s body. He remembered running at them, felt the rage that had filled him then twisting away to shame now as it always did.

  Though the garrison still called it the throne room, it had been untold years since it had been used as such, no throne there since the time of Chanist’s father at least. This was the prince’s workroom — a council chamber, a planning area, an impromptu dining hall for those occasions when guests of the court outnumbered the regular hall’s ability to hold them. Before this night, those were the only times Chriani had ever been past the doors. Occasional revels Barien had dragged him to when he was younger, sitting quietly off to the side of the prince high’s table where the warrior most often sat, dreamily lost in the laughter and the warm light of the central fire that burned on banquet nights.

>   Tonight, that fire was burning but hadn’t yet cut the cold. Behind the council table, the prince high sat in quiet consultation with a woman in black robes, and Chriani found himself staring. Chanist’s chest was bare where he wore an unbuttoned shirt of white linen, a pendant at his neck and a jagged scar running from shoulder to elbow in the same flesh-torn pattern he’d seen on Barien’s body. It took Konaugo slapping the back of his head for Chriani to remember to nod low.

  The dark-clad woman was speaking softly, a monotonous incantation delivered in a tongue Chriani didn’t recognize. She held Chanist’s head in her hands, touched his shoulder, his hair. He saw the prince breathe deeply, a kind of vigor coming to him. And as faint as it had been when he first saw it, the jagged scar faded still more, almost gone as Chanist nodded dismissal, the healer slipping away as the prince buttoned his shirt.

  Chriani fought the urge to make the moonsign, though he’d seen the healing life-magic before. Two springs after Lauresa’s training at his side had started, he and Barien had been among the company escorting the Princess High Gwannyn and the four heirs on the road to Elalantar, the princess high’s mother buried there after long illness. On the road, they’d met wolves, Barien and two others left with savage wounds that Chriani had watched disappear beneath the hands of the princess high’s healer.

  He’d wondered then how it was that the spells of the healers could dispense with the wounds of sword and fang but not of the age that had taken the princess high’s mother. He wondered now what difference it might have made to Barien had Chriani gone for help like he wanted to, brought a healer back before the warrior’s blood and life had ebbed away across cold stone.

  He wondered not for the first time since that long trip north what difference it might have made to his mother, her body broken when her horse had been spooked by a scrubsnake breaking from a stand of witchwillow, throwing her on the road to the trade fair at Quilimma. Chriani and his grandfather could do little more than watch, helpless around her as she died over the length of an agonizingly long blue-skied summer day.

  Where Chanist rose, he took whispered orders from a harried sergeant, one nod enough to send her running with two others in tow. All around, there was an undercurrent of tension, of movement. On the table, Chriani saw maps spread, Konaugo noting his gaze and carefully stepping across to block his view.

  Where his escorts stopped, Chriani staggered to a halt. Chanist glanced up, blue eyes cold beneath the blonde hair still not entirely gone to white, appraising him.

  “Untie him now,” the prince said.

  “Lord, I would urge extreme caution…” Konaugo began.

  “You think him the assassin, Konaugo? Are you mad, or do you simply wish to pretend so quickly that this is over?”

  From a mostly safe distance, Chriani had heard the prince giving orders for most of his life, but there was still a power in that voice that could seemingly take even those used to it by surprise. Konaugo only nodded, a gesture to the two guards alongside Chriani setting them to quickly cut his bonds. He rubbed his wrists, flexed his ankles where he stepped back. Not knowing whether to nod to the prince in thanks or not, he glanced to Konaugo instead, caught the dark look there.

  “My lord prince, he was detained in the act of attacking members of your own watch,” the captain said evenly, speaking to Chanist, eyes never leaving Chriani’s. “He carried a weapon without charge. Barien’s blood was on his hands…”

  “You know as well as I that no sword laid Barien down as you found him.”

  Konaugo said nothing. Looked away as the prince stepped to Chriani, who nodded in earnest now. Not sure which of the conflicting emotions in him would be the first to be revealed where he felt the prince’s gaze reading him like a map.

  But where he tried to keep from meeting Chanist’s gaze, Chriani saw the tunic. Spread to a bench behind the table, the pale blue-grey worn by the prince and all his guard was stained black with blood, torn through by a single jagged slash. On the prince’s cloak where it lay crumpled to one side, the same cut was visible.

  “Tell me what you know.” Chanist’s tone was even, expectant.

  All people had things to hide, Barien had often said. When Chriani had first entered the keep and the warrior’s service, though, the secrets his father had given him were a great deal heavier than anyone as young as him should have been made to carry. So it was good, Barien had told him more than once, that his mother had given him the talent for keeping those secrets safely out of sight. The gifts that parents give.

  The first time he’d met the prince was when he had been formally petitioned as Barien’s adjutant. Chriani remembered carefully fingering the insignia that Chanist himself had presented, not understanding then the degree of honor implied in that. The trust that Chanist placed in Barien was repaid with a respect whose value would never be measured in rank or coin. The investiture of an apprentice was normally something a junior lieutenant would take care of only if he couldn’t pass it off on someone else. But there in front of the prince high, Chriani had obliviously bowed and spoken like Barien told him to, and he remembered being drawn into the warmth of the prince high’s booming laughter that had seemed as wide and as bright as the sun-high sky.

  “Your father died in the Incursions,” Barien had coached him all the night before. “He traveled south from the village before you were old enough to remember. He was a bowyer and a militia sentry, and they say your skill on the range comes straight from his arms and eyes. You can’t just speak it, you need to think it all the way through. Think of nothing else.”

  He remembered feeling the presence of the prince high, younger then but no less imposing. The hair and beard were just then beginning to lighten, but even now it was commonly said that Chanist would never show any sign of age but that.

  Only a fool forgets there are always things worthy of fear. Barien spoke the words with his dying breath, but Chriani had heard them before. The first time was that very first day, sitting alone in the warrior’s chambers.

  “We learn to distrust our fear,” Barien had added then, “so the things worth being frightened of, we look away from. We end up afraid of only the things we see. From all the rest, we hide.”

  Barien’s voice in his head this night had filled him with fear he hadn’t felt since that first day in the city. No way of knowing now what it meant, Chriani thought dully.

  “You hide from something, you can’t fight it, lad,” Barien had said in response to the fear he felt then.

  “Do you hide from anything?” Chriani had asked, but Barien only smiled.

  Chriani felt the rough edge now that Barien’s last words had torn in his memory, no way of ever asking what secret lay shrouded in that fear.

  One more thing he’d never have the chance to say.

  Where the prince was waiting for him, Chriani nodded even as he felt his voice choked off by the old anger, blood pounding in his head suddenly as he tried to find the strength to focus but couldn’t. He heard the Princess Lauresa’s directive in his memory. He felt his bile rise at the thought of it, even as the recollection of the events she’d forbidden him to speak of twisted through him.

  Barien had tried to teach him to follow orders, though never as successfully as he would have wished, Chriani knew. Barien had given and taken orders his whole life.

  “My lord prince, I was ordered by Sergeant Barien to stand guard at the doorway to the Princess Lauresa’s chamber,” Chriani said. “I did not know his reasons.”

  The warrior’s last orders to him. Keep her safe.

  “When the alarm was sounded, the princess came to the door, and in her uncertainty requested that I position myself within the antechamber. I remained there until Lieutenant Ashlund and his party appeared to relieve me.”

  It was Barien’s orders he was following, he told himself. Not hers. Chanist only nodded.

  “I was instructed by Lieutenant Ashlund to quit the princess’s chambers but he had no orders for me. I approached the st
aging ground but saw the gate down and no officers. I proceeded toward the great hall and discovered…”

  And even as something rose in his throat, Chriani felt a faint heat on his skin. A stinging sensation, the hair on the back of his neck standing up like it might in the shifting air of a summer storm.

  Truth magic. At the prince’s neck, Chriani caught sight of the pendant and realized that it was the same as the one Lauresa had worn. He tried to push the thought away, mentally willed the moonsign as he wondered without wanting to whether Chanist had already had the lies sensed in the words he’d spoken.

  “I found Sergeant Barien dying, my lord prince.” Chriani tried to swallow but couldn’t. “He died before I could leave him to seek aid. I followed the track of his bleeding to where I believe he was assaulted, in the hall of records. I returned to his body to find members of the watch there. I challenged them in my anger and fear but meant them no harm, forgive me, my lord prince.”

  He bowed his head, didn’t want Konaugo to see the wetness in his eyes, but the captain’s gloved hand clipped Chriani’s chin, lifting it roughly.

  “Did he speak before he died?” Konaugo said darkly. “Any words, any information?”

  And in the dead grey gaze of Konaugo’s eyes, Chriani felt the coldness of the stone floor where he’d wept at Barien’s side. He heard the warrior’s voice — Trust him not. No idea who he’d meant, but Barien had never made much effort to hide his contempt for the captain’s angry approach to leadership.

  Chriani shook his head.

  “He asked after the safety of the Princess Lauresa and yourself, my lord prince. Then nothing.”

  “And when and from where did Barien summon you?” Konaugo asked. His voice was softer this time, Chriani suddenly on edge. He’d never heard Konaugo speak softly before.