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  “I am returning to quarters as ordered, lord, then to the gatehouse barracks, again as ordered.”

  “Barien made it farther on hands and knees with a bloodblade wound at his chest than you’ve made it in the time since I gave that order.”

  Chriani felt something twist in his gut, saw Konaugo happily note it. He tried to fight the anger, failed under the weight of the captain’s gaze.

  “I am sorry I have tarried, lord. May I be relieved to carry out this order?”

  Where Konaugo grabbed the front of his tunic, Chriani felt himself lifted to slam back against cold stone, the captain hefting him with one arm. He had to force himself to breathe.

  “Get to your assigned barracks, tyro, for the sake of the memory of Barien that is all that keeps you here right now. If you are seen at liberty again in the Bastion or the keep without my leave, it will be for the very last time.”

  Where Konaugo dropped him, Chriani didn’t bother with the nodded salute, just turned and ran. Down the barracks corridor, then north to the intersection, footsteps loud against the stones. And then he stopped, turned back to slip in silence along to the intersection of the armory hall again, Konaugo’s voice faint to the south. The door to the tower was open, light spilling out, a weapons inventory begun from the sound of it.

  Chriani headed north at speed, boots the faintest whisper of leather this time. Back in Barien’s chamber, he shut the door quickly behind him, fumbled while he lit the lamp. He dropped to the floor, used the sharpness of the Ilvani senses his father had given him to listen for movement in the corridor, to scan for the traces of the steel bootprint where they filled the room.

  He took the chamber apart, then, piece by careful piece. He went through Barien’s pallet, pulled blanket and tick to the floor and sifted through them. He went through the footlocker, the shelves, the wardrobe. He scrutinized the pristine dress uniforms and the worn grey leather that was the only uniform the warrior ever wore.

  In the weapons locker, he found a locked box, lifted it carefully. Low and flat, maybe four hands to a side and one high. It was belted in brass and riveted tight, and Chriani noted the fresh pick marks along the keyhole fitting. Thin lines, untarnished where he turned them to the light.

  He opened it easily, left no marks of his own. Inside was a letter in a script he didn’t recognize, a ring with the prince’s crest on it that any of Barien’s fingers would have burst. There was a wooden dagger, a tyro’s practice blade, cracked with age. Chriani felt something like a smile work its way up from the tightness in his chest.

  At the bottom of the box was Barien’s dress insignia. The armband of grey cloth, signature standard of the garrison, never even worn by the look of it.

  Protecting the princess was his duty, Barien had told Chriani that first day he’d brought him up from the market court streets. For as long as Chriani was interested in learning at his side, the warrior said, that was the only standard he would ever be measured by. Chriani hadn’t believed him at first, no way to connect the rank of a royal warden with the patchwork leggings and the jacket that looked like it had been through at least three previous owners.

  “Too many men get measured by the cut of their cloth over the cut of their spirit,” Barien had said as if he could guess at the boy’s thoughts. He’d watched Chriani clean himself up, the food long gone. “Too many look to the outside, afraid to look inside because they’re afraid of what others would find if they looked in them.”

  He’d lifted Chriani’s hair then, noted the sudden tension in the boy. The long locks were tied back as his mother had showed him, had told him to always wear that way. The style of courtier and ranger alike, a convenient enough disguise. Barien had touched the faint Ilvani point at the tip of Chriani’s ear, let the hair fall again.

  “You wouldn’t be the first half-blood keeping that fact to themselves in the prince’s company,” he said. “You’ve got naught to fear from that.”

  And in response, Chriani had slowly pulled his collar down, exposed the mark there that his mother had warned him to show to no one that he wouldn’t trust with his life. Not sure why he already felt that trust in this burly warrior, sharing the secret on which his world had been anvil-struck. The mark on which his fate turned now with his mother and grandfather gone, a world around him that his mother had said would hate him for what he was if he wasn’t careful.

  Barien had stared. Carefully reached out to touch the war-mark of the Valnirata where Chriani’s mother had laid the tattoo across his left-front shoulder in its tight knot of red and black lines, as dark now as the day they’d been scribed.

  The tattoos of the Valnirata clans were impressed beneath the skin with a technique only they knew. Never any fading, no sign of aging in their precise strokes. Chriani’s mother had been taught by his father, he knew — no doubt one of the few Ilmari who had ever learned that ancient art. The mark was the one the father he’d never known had carried, and that his mother had told him to wear with pride in his father’s name.

  For a long while, the young Chriani had watched Barien deep in thought, a chill fear drifting across the warm awareness of food in his belly and the pallet in the corner that he’d hoped would be his.

  “Too many judge on the outside,” the warrior had said at last. “We’ll show them, you and I.”

  Where he crumpled to the floor now, Chriani stared at the room pulled apart around him. No idea who had been there, no idea what they had been looking for. No idea whether they’d already found it or not, slipping past him in plain sight in an open corridor because he was too wrapped up in himself to see.

  In his hand, he clutched the insignia tight, the falcon of Brandis stitched there in the gold thread of the prince’s guard. The rank and file wore silver stitching, the Bastion guards and the Prince’s Company and the soldiers of the keep. Those who answered directly to Chanist wore the gold that he did. A thing that most would spend their lives trying to attain but never get. Barien had it, then kept it locked in a box because he believed there were more important things.

  We look to hold some of that memory for them, his grandfather had said, and Chriani wanted desperately to believe it now.

  He clutched the insignia tight in his hand, bid farewell to it and the wooden dagger and the memory of Barien’s hand on his wrist that first day, because those were the only things left.

  — Chapter 4 —

  THE NARNETH MÓIR

  THEY WOULD HOLD THE FUNERAL at second mornbell as was the custom, the winter sun just barely risen, the silence of the keep punctuated by clear voices as the warrior’s rites were sung. The body of Barien would be accorded honor in the name of the spirit it had held once, but that spirit had already slipped back within the earth.

  Even before he’d finally made his way to the gatehouse barracks, Chriani knew that he wasn’t going to sleep that night. He’d left Barien’s chamber finally, didn’t know how long he’d stayed there before he stuffed the lockbox he’d found into his own locker with the faintly dark hope that Konaugo would come looking for it.

  He’d dumped all his gear unceremoniously on the first empty bunk he’d found, a dozen garrison guards in the common room sitting down to the end of a grueling night. He heard one of them mutter an oath to Barien, others drinking to the warrior’s name. Chriani felt more than one of them glance to him, but he was already gone, setting off without a word to the lieutenant or the sergeants there. It wouldn’t go reported, he knew. Not today.

  Until well past dawn, he’d walked the walls aimlessly above the night-quiet streets of the keep, letting himself drift, doing his best not to think. However, even as hard as he tried not to, Chriani couldn’t evade the sharp echo of words in his head — Captain Konaugo, Prince High Chanist both fighting to rise where he’d been pressing their voices down beneath the mud of his thoughts.

  A bloodblade wound at his chest. Konaugo had seen Chriani’s reaction. He might have even thought he’d known what that reaction meant.

 
The narneth móir, Chriani thought, the name pulled up from the distant memory of childhood stories. The bloodblade — the honor weapon of the Valnirata Ilvani who had sued for peace beneath Chanist’s banner and never forgiven him.

  It will take more than one of them to ever finish me…

  Since he’d heard those words in the throne room, Chriani had felt an ache threading through him sharper than the knife-edge pain of Barien’s loss. Sharper than the sting along the Valnirata war-mark where it touched his chest, the name of the princess still burning there.

  When his mother had made that mark, she hadn’t known what it would come to mean, hadn’t understood the way that fortune and the future were destined to turn. Before then, before his father left to fight and die against the inevitability of his being captured and killed as an enemy of the crown, the Valnirata were a distant memory in Brandishear and across the Ilmar. The warclans were legends from another time, an air of the exotic to them.

  Then the Incursions had come. Prince Goffree had been butchered alive, or so they said, his eldest heirs struck down by assassins placed within the ranks of their own attendants to leave Chanist with a nation to rule, alone. Now, the Valnirata who wore the mark Chriani did hated Chanist with a passion as strong as his reputation, the foundation on which the warclans had been crushed and the Ilmar peace constructed.

  Attempt on the prince’s life.

  The unseasonable warmth of the sun as it cleared the eastern walls of the keep carried a stifling closeness with it, the breeze off the harbor checked this morning. Chriani felt a sense of stillness, uncomfortable somehow. A sense of overbearing order in the gentle sweep of the streets, the play of light and shadow across the stones. The same order seen this morning in the movements of the keep’s residents, soldiers and courtiers and merchant lords and guildmasters already slowly filing for the courtyard ahead. At the main gate, the figures of the garrison were lined up six deep to either side of the single file of figures slipping in from the city. He could see Konaugo there, the keep in lockdown like it almost never was. No one coming in or out without running the gauntlet of the Prince’s Guard.

  Chriani himself stayed on the wall, slipping past the gatehouse as he made his way slowly along the western flank of the keep. On the staging grounds, they would burn Barien as was the custom, like any of the half-dozen state funerals he’d watched in the ten years he’d been there. Members of the Prince’s Guard brought down on patrol, mostly, their bodies brought back for the burning that was their right by rank. Aldis Hammeran had been the last, who had been Captain of the Guard before Konaugo and who had finally been felled a year before by the stopping of the blood, after surviving forty years of campaigns and sorties at the prince’s side.

  It was said that the same life-magic that healed through the hands of the animyst casters could raise the dead. Chriani had heard the stories as often as anyone, not believing them until Barien told him once that he’d seen Hammeran himself brought back that way.

  “Sotting fairytale,” Chriani had laughed.

  “He took a Valnirata spear to the chest that was meant for Chanist in an ambush against him and the first princess high,” Barien said quietly. “Last year of the Incursions. Broke his spine like kindling and pinned him to the ground. I was closest to him. I checked his blood myself, stone still.”

  Chriani’s laughter had faded. He’d recognized the thoughtfulness in the warrior’s eyes, and the long silence that followed before he spoke again. It was the province of high-ranking captains, Barien said. Merchant nobles and landed lords who returned miraculously from the dead. Deep magic, it was, and those casting it gave up some of their own life for those whose lives they restored.

  “Who would do that?” Chriani asked.

  “Heroes,” Barien had said. “Martyrs. You want my advice, don’t aspire to be neither.”

  On the west wall, Chriani slipped through shadow, gazed down to the tops of the fruit trees below, Barien’s ashes bound there. To be scattered in the prince’s orchards, as good an end as any who served the crown could expect. Far better than whatever end was likely waiting for him, Chriani thought.

  In the courtyard ahead, the crowd waited. A funeral with honors, the prince high himself presiding. A thing that so many dreamed of. In his sleeve, Chriani felt Barien’s insignia tucked up tight. Another thing that so many dreamed of, but Barien hadn’t cared.

  Below, he dimly registered Kathlan in the distant throng along the courtyard track. One face in five hundred, but she drew his eye in like a target point. He knew she would have been looking for him from the moment she got the news, knew that he should have gone to her. Too late now for any difference that would have made, he thought.

  Too late now for too many things.

  Outside the walls, the early morning city was quiet in a way it never was. As if it was waiting, he thought. In the market court that spread around the northwest side of the keep, there were already as many of the garrison patrolling as there were merchants setting up. In the weapons markets, he could see the banners of the Ilvani wains, could see the city guard patrolling conspicuously tight around them.

  At the Bastion, he saw the Princess High Gwannyn and Lauresa’s younger half-siblings pass through the open gates. Lauresa was behind them, walking with her father. Once Lauresa was bound for Aerach, mother and children were to have headed north, Barien to have accompanied them to the princess high’s residence at Tarenic Castle on the Clearwater, close to the borders of Elalantar and her kin there. As the ceremony started, she stayed at the prince’s side, their hands touching in an emotionless public display.

  Where Chriani listened, the rites were a blur. More than once, he had to catch himself, pull himself back from a darkness that was taking root in him, seemingly growing as it fed on the empty echo of the ceremony as Chanist spoke it.

  It will take more than one of them.

  When Chanist had spoken it, Chriani had heard the familiar note of power in the voice, and a sense of reassurance that he knew was meant for Lauresa. But there was something else behind the words last night. An anger, concealed with a degree of skill that Chriani was one of the few who would have seen. One of them… The phrase spoken by the prince high with a contempt Chriani could feel in the remembering.

  Outside the keep, along the perimeter road that flanked the wall, he saw a group of children pass. They were singing, a kind of energy to their voices and their running that seemed to have been drained from the adults around them. As they came closer, he heard the words.

  Prince Goffree fought, that good old man

  Ilvani from him flying

  Till traitor’s heart and bloody blade

  Left Brandis’ greatson dying

  I saw his pyre before the gate

  All Brandishear were mourning

  I’ll watch his shade lead armies east

  The Valnirata burning

  In every way that was important, the Ilmari and the Ilvani were one folk once, his mother had told him, so long ago now that he couldn’t remember the first or last time she’d said it. One blood from long ago, separated out over time but now brought back together again. The number of mixed race half-bloods said so, as sure as an Elalantar warmblood destrier bred to an Aloidien mountain horse made a mount as strong and fast as either.

  The river flows strongest that comes from two sources, she’d often said, but even along the frontier of Cresthan province where he’d been born and raised, the half-bloods that he’d known and who had warmed to him as one of them kept to themselves. They were wanderers, mostly, or they lived among the Ilvani and left that human half of their history behind.

  In the market court, he could see an Ilvani merchant with the stars of the Aodarba enclave on his banner. He was arguing with an order from an irate sentry, angry movements and an energy of confrontation rising where Chriani watched, anxious for the distraction suddenly. There was an edge of hostility in the city guard, an antagonism toward the Ilvani that he hadn’t seen before. N
ot openly, at any rate. He saw more figures assembling on either side of the fray, two sentries managing to disengage the sergeant whose order had started the confrontation. Harsh voices echoed across the market, spilling across the walls into the silence of the funeral procession.

  Without warning, one of the Ilvani turned to see Chriani watching him, a kind of coldly questioning look in him that Chriani turned quickly away from. On the staging ground before him, he saw that Lauresa was gone, hadn’t noticed her leave.

  He hadn’t seen her ascend the wall and step in beside him until he heard her voice raised in the singing of the rites.

  Around her was the customary space, the two guards who’d accompanied her flanking at five paces away, the same space opened up in the crowd where she and her younger siblings had come to the wall to watch the end of the ceremony below. Her voice was crystal-pure in his ear, a faint ripple of sunlight turned to sound. He felt his heart skip, felt the familiar burning at his chest that made him look away.

  And where his glance strayed, a ring lay on the low riser to his right. A plain steel band that hadn’t been there before, he was certain of it.

  He looked to Lauresa from the corner of his eye, saw no sign that she even knew he was there. But where her hand strayed at her side, he could see a steel band on her finger that matched the one before him.

  He let his awareness slip out to the crowd around him, their focus on the royal heirs and on Lauresa’s voice as it soared above the others around it. Chriani waited for the moment, shifted almost imperceptibly to sweep the ring up with the slightest trace of one hand, no one seeing.

  Across from him, Lauresa’s song trailed off with the others, silence from below now where Barien’s sword and uniform were laid alongside him. Then Chanist stepped forward with the burning brand and sang alone, all the power of command in his voice turned to sorrow, it seemed.