Three Coins for Confession

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  “You should take the whole troop with Thelaur gone,” Chriani said. He was almost surprised to realize he meant it.

  Makaysa laughed. “You’ll put in a good word for me, then?”

  He shrugged, felt pain lancing down his back and wished he hadn’t. “You know how to lead is all. Not all of them do. Umeni should learn from you.”

  “Umeni is a soldier with more ambition than ability, and it’ll kill him one day.” Makaysa said it evenly, no sense of judgement. Chriani got the sense it was something she’d thought about. “The opposite of your problem, in fact. All ability and no ambition. Though I don’t doubt you and he will both come to the same end.”

  Chriani stopped. Makaysa came around to face him. She was smiling as she had been earlier that day, though Chriani hadn’t noticed when she’d started again.

  “You find that funny?” he said. “My end?”

  “Based on what I saw today, I suspect your end will be spectacularly amusing. I’m just hoping I’m not there to see it.”

  “I guess you can find anything funny if you try hard enough.”

  “I’ve found it’s the best way to survive out here. But you in particular always amused me, Chriani. Recalling that day in the armory still makes me smile.”

  She had remembered. Chriani didn’t understand why that felt like a good thing.

  Makaysa was watching him closely, her expression suggesting she had something else to tell him. But in the end, she only said, “Good luck, Chriani,” before she turned back east.

  He watched her go for a moment, so that he was still facing her when she turned back.

  “I was sorry to hear about Barien,” she said. “He knew how to lead.”

  Chriani could only nod as he turned away.

  He wasn’t sure what kind of punishment might be in store for him, though he’d had enough practice that he might have tried to guess. Umeni wouldn’t be the first superior to have him before the captains for disobeying orders since his arrival among the rangers. However, he would be the first to do so despite Chriani having probably saved his life. He didn’t know whether that made him care more or less about the outcome.

  Because from the moment he’d ridden out of the forest at speed for the second time — from the moment before that when the dead Ilvani’s eyes went gold to green and Chriani had felt the fear — there was only one thing he cared about. One person he needed to find.

  He looked for Kathlan first in her tent, but she wasn’t there. Back at sunset, the sentry had said, and Chriani felt a faint unease. He knew she wouldn’t have spent any more time at the healers than necessary, but he knew also that a wound as straightforward as hers had looked shouldn’t have taken this long to deal with.

  He spent a few moments to check her footlocker, her gear. Two tunics spread across her cot, untouched from when Chriani had seen her that morning. She hadn’t been back.

  He went next to his own tent in the hope she might be waiting there, but he saw no sign of her. A faint fear traced his spine as he thought of the black arrow. Wondering what manner of Ilvani magic might be in it. He needed to go to the healers, check to see if she was still there. Ask what had happened.

  Except Chriani couldn’t go to the healers. Chriani hadn’t gone to the healers in all the time that he and Kathlan had ridden with the rangers, and she was the only other person in the camp who knew why.

  Over five months on the frontier, he had tended his own wounds, had sought healing life-magic in his own way when he needed it. In five months, he’d never made use of the camp’s baths. Instead, he and Kathlan spent off-duty time alone at a quiet stream a short ride away, its water frigid but its pools secluded.

  He spent a few moments outside his tent to brush the dirt of the forest, the dust of the grassland tracks, and a newer coat of mud courtesy of Grus from his leather. As he did, he let the scene before and around him play out, carefully marking off light in the closest tents, the movement of soldiers along the nearby paths. Then he slipped inside. The barracks tents were roomy but low, Chriani dropping to his knees so he didn’t have to stoop. He sealed the door flap tight, listening carefully. He prepped water and brandy, bandages, needle, and silk thread from his field kit. He listened as he did so, all his senses on alert. Waiting to feel the ebb and flow of movement in the world around him.

  He found the quiet he was seeking. Then, teeth set against the pain, slowly and carefully, he peeled off his scarred leather and the blood-soaked jacket and tunic beneath. Beneath the drying crust of red-black, a darker mark stood out on his left-front shoulder, crossing around to his arm. A knotted mass of twisting red and black lines, delicate as lace, bright as blood, dark as night. The war-mark of the Valnirata.

  The mark had been tattooed upon him when he was a child. An inheritance from his father, an Ilvani exile of the Greatwood who had fought against his Valnirata kin in the Incursions. Its lines and crafting were the hand of his mother — an Ilmari who had fallen in love with her Valnirata exile against a thousand years of bitter racial hatred, and who was one of the few Ilmari who had ever learned the war-mark’s art. She had scribed the tattoo on Chriani in the name of his father who had died in the Incursions. Just a memory now.

  Halobrelia forest-heart. His father’s house within the rigid clan structure of the Valnirata Ilvani. But against and around the mark of Halobrelia, Chriani had since scribed four names of his own, setting them down in the delicate script of the Ilvani. A year and a half before, on that path where his life had changed.

  Lauresa. Princess of Brandishear, who he had loved once, and who had given up the future she had been born to in order that the Ilmar would have peace. Barien. Warden to Lauresa since her childhood and mentor to Chriani, taking the place of the father Chriani had spent his life remembering only as shadows. Irdaign. Lauresa’s mother, spell-singer of the Leisanmira, who had tried to show Chriani how to set aside his fear of things he didn’t understand.

  The fourth name was the one that meant the most to him now. The only one of the four who remained a part of his life, and who would for all time if he had anything to say about it. Kathlan, who knew the mark and all of Chriani’s secrets, and who had promised to hold those secrets as she held his heart.

  No. Not all.

  The thought came to him as a stray shadow, twisting through his mind as he washed the cut the arrow had made. Telling him he was lying. He tried to push it away as he always did, but it churned within him like a shard of cold steel, like an arrowhead snapped off and burrowing slowly beneath his skin.

  Kathlan didn’t know all his secrets. Not yet.

  He tensed as he flushed the wound with brandy, felt the pain rising to a burning, blood-red crescendo in his mind before it began to fade. Then he stitched it quickly, knowing he would need to seek healing magic but needing to seal off the wound, ease the pain first.

  The four names that had become extensions of the mark were the only people who knew Chriani wore that mark. But Barien was gone now. Lauresa and Irdaign had left his life. Kathlan alone was the keeper of his secret.

  No.

  Twisting through him again. Another lie, told because the truth was something he didn’t want to think on, didn’t want to have to see.

  One other person presently knew that Chriani wore the mark of the Ilmar’s deadliest enemies, knew that his father had been Ilvani. The Prince High Chanist, who had been sworn to secrecy in his own way by the threat of what Chriani knew of the madness the prince bore. What he knew of the actions that madness had driven.

  Chanist had tried to sacrifice his own daughter in the name of restarting the war he had ended with the Ilvani a generation before. He had killed Barien to protect his secret. Had sent Chriani into the center of his plots in the hope of killing him for what he knew. When that failed, he had spoken of killing Chriani in the Bastion throne room — the great meeting hall where the last words between him and the prince high had been exchanged.

  Chriani remembered those words. He knew how easil
y Chanist could have seen them made real.

  “A man might die many ways, squire.”

  Chriani had reflected on that threat uncounted times in the first few months of his new life. His rank and commission, and all that came with it. A clear understanding that it was Chriani alone the threat was meant for. Knowing that whatever happened, Lauresa was beyond her father’s reach now. That was something, at least.

  A prince sworn to his secrecy was a power that Chriani never imagined, could never have dreamed of. But still, he knew that if any person who served that prince stepped into his tent right now, his remaining life might well be measured in moments.

  Five months away from the healers, away from the baths of the camp. And for eleven years in the Bastion before that, Chriani had bathed alone, had slept in bedclothes always outside Kathlan’s loft, had never stripped his tunic off even in the hottest summer.

  He remembered the Ilvani warrior he’d dropped when he cracked his bow across her face. Remembered the tattoo that turned her skin to a seething field of twisted lines, razor sharp. For the five months since he’d been sent to ride the frontier, Chriani had wondered in all his darker moments what would happen the day he was injured and knocked unconscious, left for dying. Kathlan not there to keep one of the other rangers from tending to him. Others seeing the secret set in black ink at his shoulder. A thing they would kill him for.

  The Valnirata arrow had torn the flesh of his arm but missed the bone, thankfully. The wickedly serrated hunting heads the Ilvani favored for their shafts were notorious for leaving scars even for those who took magical healing, and more than a few rangers wore those scars with pride. The edge of Chriani’s wound had severed one of the long, twisting tails of the war-mark, but he knew from a boyhood’s worth of nicks, scrapes, and cuts that the tattooing of the Valnirata would somehow seal itself when the flesh was joined. The war-mark of the Valnirata never faded, never aged. Some manner of alchemy in that ancient art, of which the names Chriani had tattooed himself were only an imperfect reflection.

  When he was done, he dressed quickly, then found rags to wash up the spill of blood and brandy across the tent’s platform floor. He drank what was left of the brandy as he worked, felt its bright burning in his gut to remind him he hadn’t eaten anything since the morning.

  “Chriani…”

  Kathlan’s voice came from outside the tent as he was finishing. The rush of the brandy was joined by a calm that wrapped around him, held him tight. He fumbled with the door flap, had only two of its pegs untied when she slipped in on hands and knees, rising to embrace him.

  She kissed him hard, pressed tight against him as if the two might be wearing each other. It was a feeling Chriani had long grown used to, but which still carried with it an intensity, a passion like it might be the first time they’d touched. Eighteen months since Chriani had pledged himself to Kathlan, and more than a year before that of her bed when it suited him. And all the time since, he had thanked fate through every waking moment that she had waited for him.

  When the embrace was done, Kathlan hit him, and significantly harder than she’d kissed him. Chriani shifted to evade the backhand blow, but he was only rarely fast enough when Kathlan had hurting him on her mind.

  “Have you had healing yet?” she asked when he turned back to her, his cheek stinging.

  “No. So maybe don’t…”

  She struck him again, this time across his freshly stitched arm. He had to stifle a cry as the pain shot through him, renewed.

  “What in fate’s name were you thinking?” she hissed.

  “I was thinking you wouldn’t be hitting me quite so much, or I’d have left you outside.”

  She sent her other hand toward his cheek but Chriani was ready, catching her wrist in his fingers. That freed her up to slam him in the arm again, which he realized had been her plan all along as another molten wave of pain sent a haze of shadow across his eyes.

  Though already on his knees, he collapsed back toward his cot, worried that if he didn’t, he would simply keel over. But he twisted Kathlan’s wrist at the same time, brought her around backward and wrapped his arms around her. They hit the cot together and sent it crashing to the platform, Chriani landing hard under her, but managing to hold her in a tight embrace.

  A ribald call of approval rose from outside as footsteps passed the tent. Then laughter, fading.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” he whispered.

  “Tremendously. Now answer the question.”

  “You already know the answer, Kath. I wasn’t thinking. I leave that to you.”

  She said nothing to that. Just lay in his arms for a while.

  “Were you worried?” Chriani asked at last.

  “A little less when Makaysa set out after you.”

  “You try to ride with her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Umeni have to hold you back?”

  “Maybe.”

  He kissed the back of her neck. She swung around, setting her weight against him. She avoided the wounded arm this time.

  “I was looking for you,” Chriani said.

  “I was at the healers, then with the horses.”

  The stables were a place Chriani should have known to go back to. Not thinking again.

  Kathlan was the daughter of soldiers both dead, and had been assistant to the Bastion’s stable master when she was named a tyro of the guard at the High Spring before last, a year and a half gone. Chriani had requested that she serve under him, adjutant to a guard superior. She was old for the post, seventeen summers behind her and most tyros taking the writ by thirteen years. Chriani had made rank himself only three weeks before that, was given his guard’s commission that allowed him to take an adjutant at the same ceremony.

  Most members of the guard made squire and served at that station two years or more before receiving commission, making Chriani and Kathlan’s unlikely advancement the subject of much whispering. Chriani was above it, mostly because he didn’t care. But partly also because the suddenness of his commission came with tales swirling around it of what had happened on the Clearwater Way. Kathlan, though, became the butt of quietly whispered jokes heard among every rank of service and duty from the pages on up. A tyro at seventeen. A stable hand in uniform.

  The laughter had faded quickly the first time they saw her ride.

  Kathlan had always been one of the best riders in the keep, but only a select few had ever known it. Chriani. Eugen, the stable master. Barien, maybe. Chriani had never had a chance to ask him. Kathlan had lived among horses her whole life, but a bad break in her leg and a hip that had worn down over years because of it made it painful for her to ride. She would exercise horses shaking off bruises or colic, guiding them across the training grounds of the keep with as much skill as any ranger or cavalry rider of the prince’s guard. A kind of joy was in her when she rode, but never for more than a short spell. When she was done, the limp that plagued her would be more pronounced for days afterward.

  The Prince High Chanist’s own healers had restored her leg. Powerful magic, reserved normally for the crown and its captains. Chriani had seen it done, made it another thing the prince high had promised on his behalf. He had needed to talk Kathlan into it, though. Had needed to be there with her while it was done, the healers protesting all the way. She had squeezed his hand to cracking throughout the spellcasting, made the moonsign more times than Chriani could count.

  Word of that had gotten out. More jokes whispered behind her back, by tyros who had never seen life-magic, by guards angry at a new-made squire getting attention from the healers that none of them would ever warrant.

  The jokes ended the first time they saw her ride.

  In those first months, Kathlan had put veteran rangers to shame on patrols around Rheran. A month into mounted combat training, she was assigned to assist Hestria, the cavalry sergeant-at-arms. Three months after that came an offer to become his adjutant that she turned down. She showed a focus, a discipline, that C
hriani marveled at, even as he knew how bad it made him look by comparison.

  In those months, he realized he had never loved anyone more.

  Only one in a hundred tyros were ever recommended for active duty, and even fewer of those for duty with the rangers. Chriani had never come close. Kathlan had been riding as his adjutant for just over a year when the orders came. The pride she showed that day, the perfect light in her green eyes was a thing he still remembered.

  Because she was his adjutant, those orders came through Chriani, but he understood with absolute clarity that as far as the ranger captains were concerned, he would be accompanying Kathlan to the frontier, not the other way around.

  In his tent now, the two of them lay there for a time, not speaking. A kind of peace hanging between them that Kathlan liked to call the between times. The moment of rest and silence between duties, the moment of waking between sleep and daylight. Nothing else to think on, nothing else to be done except hold each other.

  Chriani remembered the first time she’d said it, one night not long after the night that had first brought them together. He’d felt as if he was humoring her then as he nodded his agreement, sensed her body tight against his in the dark. He felt differently now.

  “I need to go,” he said at last to break the perfect silence.

  “Fine. I’ll get you a horse.” Kathlan lifted herself off him slowly, as if it involved some great effort. “You’ll need a distraction to pass the sentries. Then stick to the river. Harder for Umeni to pick up your trail.”

  She laughed as Chriani swatted at her. But as he stooped to a standing position beneath the tent’s low ceiling, he found himself smiling. It was a thing that happened a lot around Kathlan. A thing he was still getting used to, even after all the time that had passed.

  “I need to see Rhuddry. And the war-mages.”

  The second piece of information caught Kathlan’s attention. “What do you want with the mages?”