Free Clearwater Dawn by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

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