Clearwater Dawn by Scott Fitzgerald Gray Page B

the warrior was.
    Three times as he made his way along the outwall, Chriani passed squads of the Bastion guard racing, sidelong glances made to his scabbard as he passed. He was carrying it under his arm now, tried to make it look like he was delivering it somewhere. Not sure how believable that was in the end, but not wanting to risk Barien’s wrath by abandoning it. At each tower, the garrison was out in full force now, but there was still no sign of the warrior. No officers either. Only sergeants, all of them with the same look of uniform unease.
    He raced along past the spot where he and Lauresa had dropped, made it back to the top of the gatehouse when he passed another tyro racing by with a sealed message. Vanad, two years younger than Chriani and under the mentorship of Hestria, one of the Bastion’s sergeants-at-arms. Chriani caught sight of what looked like the prince’s seal as he called to ask if Vanad had seen Barien. A shake of the head in response, not slowing.
    “What’s the alarm?” Chriani called, and Vanad stopped, doubled back, got close so he wouldn’t have to shout. Even then, he looked twice over his shoulder before he spoke.
    “Attempt on the prince’s life,” he whispered. Chriani stared for a long while at the younger tyro’s fleeing back.
    He slipped back in at the east tower, then, running for the closest stairs, assuming that Vanad’s account was the truth without really knowing why. He remembered the urgency in Barien’s voice, needed to find him because Barien was the only one who would know what was going on. Barien was warden to the princess, had ordered him to watch her. Barien would have the answers Lauresa hadn’t given.
    But as he pounded down a narrow flight of stairs, a thought struck Chriani with a starkness that angered him for not having seen it before. He emerged in the archives quarter, bypassed the shadowed corridors to the side for the well-lit hall of records ahead, the central court beyond it. No sign of anyone else around him, but if the guard were searching for a would-be assassin, it was no time to be caught slipping through the shadows.
    Barien hadn’t known that the princess was missing when he called to Chriani. Seek her in her chambers , he’d said.
    So then what was it, Chriani wondered, that Barien had ordered him to protect Lauresa from? What was it that had driven the princess to leap from a fourth-story window in order to prevent being seen by her own guard?
    Attempt on the prince’s life…
    As he’d always been able to do, Chriani played the events of those few frantic moments back in his mind as he ran. Her expression shifting as he burst in, the angry exchange, word for word.
    She hadn’t heard the alarm, he realized.
    When he’d said it, he was doing little more than grasp for words that might staunch her anger and keep her from flinging a dagger across the table or having him demoted to the kitchens out of sheer spite. The words had caught her by surprise, though. She hadn’t heard the alarm, the bell ringing through the empty night from the top of the prince’s tower, almost directly above her.
    When the time was right, she’d said.
    He was thinking furiously where he sprinted from the side passage. Only half watching the shadows around him, so that he almost missed the blood.
    Where he skidded to a halt, Chriani whipped the shortsword out, the scabbard dropped behind him as he wheeled. He was in the intersection of a narrow corridor between the galleries of the archives quarter and the central court. Beyond that, the garrison wing where he’d started his long circuit was eerily silent.
    It was bright in the intersection, an evenlamp blazing there. To both sides, fading in the shadows, staggered droplets of red-black ran along the wide expanse of the adjacent corridor toward the shadowed gallery halls. The archives wing was the center of Chanist’s public collection of art and artifacts, a steady stream of scholars passing through it