Read Online Clearwater Dawn by Scott Fitzgerald Gray - Free Book Online Page B

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,