Three Coins for Confession

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  “What they want with me. Debriefing on Makaysa’s orders. Something in the forest. Not important.” He winced then as he carefully moved his shoulder through full motion. Not because of how much it hurt, but because only as he spoke of it did Chriani truly understand how much he didn’t want to talk about what he had seen. What he’d felt that day.

  As he hoped, his apparent pain refocused Kathlan’s attention. “You need me to restitch that later, let me know,” she said, running her fingers along his tunic sleeve. “You’re like a drunk sailmaker with your left hand.”

  Chriani found most of a clean uniform in his footlocker, dressed quickly as Kathlan put his cot back together. “You’ll be here when I get back?” he asked before he left.

  “Count on it,” she said. She held him tight again for a long while before she let him go.

  There were rules about these sorts of things. The official conduct of fraternization between members of the prince’s guard, as the regulations called it. Soldiers in the field sought each other out for comfort, especially in times of strife. It was known and accepted. Practically a tradition in its own right. Kathlan was a product of that tradition, in fact, telling Chriani when they first came together how her parents had met while on patrol in the south.

  The finer details of the regulations of official conduct didn’t prohibit fraternization, but were dedicated to ensuring that fraternization didn’t interfere with discipline, or take advantage of rank, or come at the cost of recrimination or lovers’ spats in the field. Kathlan called it liberating. Chriani found it daunting, only because the commitment he’d given to Kathlan in the deep winter of the year before was still a relatively new thing to his mind. The idea of having the captains implicitly sign off on it — the idea that what passed between the two of them in the night might end up the subject of report if it affected their conduct by day — put him on edge.

  From the first, even before they’d ridden out from Rheran together in the forty-strong force from the Bastion guard reassigned to ranger duty, Kathlan had set out her own terms for keeping boundaries between them. “Call it paying sop to regulation,” she’d said the night before they left, their last night in her loft above the stables. Their loft, Chriani had come to think of it, spending more time there than in his own assigned bunk in the Bastion barracks. “Call it keeping your head down. It’s all the same to me.”

  “It’s a waste of time and a lot of irritation,” Chriani had said in reply. But he made good on the promise she extracted from him that night, and the two had done their best to keep sight and sign of their bond to themselves. Not that it had always been their doing alone. Sergeant Thelaur knew they were together, because it was no secret, and it hadn’t taken her long to use that to get back at Chriani for what had become a lengthening list of failings. When he and Kathlan weren’t on patrol together, Thelaur seemed always to have them assigned to the rangers’ intermittent perimeter watch at opposite ends of the night, the two of them passing each other in his tent or hers for a few fleeting moments in the deep darkness.

  It was dark now as Chriani made his way past the camp’s central pavilions. These were a stand of five-pillar tents surrounded by a well-patrolled track, and set with a sentry platform atop a great white pine, staked and tied to hold it secure against the wind. He stuck to the shadows, watching for any movement from the captains’ pavilion as he passed beneath it.

  His plan was to avoid Rhuddry for as long as he could, and he knew that making his way first to the mages’ pavilion was as good a way as any to do so. The captain’s distrust of the camp’s war-mages was notorious — even when compared to the general distrust that spellcasters held among many soldiers. For now at least, it was as good a place as any to hide from the debriefing Chriani knew was coming.

  The war-mages’ pavilion stood apart from the tents and meeting places of the officers, set adjacent to the armories by custom, and keeping that important corner of the camp clear of traffic and casual looting. Its standard was the symbol of the mageguard — a gout of flame set within intersecting crescent moons. That mark was a brand taken by those arcanists who served the crowns of the four Ilmar nations — and who were eventually tasked with hunting down any arcanists who attempted to avoid such service.

  Chriani rapped at the outside pole of the mages’ pavilion, the tent already sealed up for the night. When a voice barked out from inside, he entered.

  The leader of the camp’s war-mages was the boisterous and dismissive Magus Milyan, whose black robes were rumored to have reached that shade simply by virtue of never having been washed. His steely eyes behind their spectacle lenses caught Chriani’s gaze as he stepped into the tent, pulling the door flap closed behind him.

  “Seven stories promised me tonight, but only six rangers came to sing them. I don’t like waiting.” Milyan’s voice carried the reedy tone of a schoolteacher, but the thickly muscled set of his arms and the longsword at his belt showed that he took his military service seriously. He wore his collar cut low, so as to reveal the full extent of the mageguard brand he wore at his neck. Its twisting lines were set in red against the shadowed skin that marked him as hailing from Elalantar’s northern isles. “Chriani, they call you?”

  “Yes, lord.” Chriani nodded to Milyan, then to Derrach behind him. She was one of the war-mages’ many adepts — tyros in service to the mageguard but not yet branded. Chriani had dealt with her more than once, but she ignored his nod now with narrowed eyes, speaking to the nature of those previous dealings. She sorted through papers spread across a broad oak table, candles set across it and burning with an unnaturally bright light.

  The tent was more books than walls, set with freestanding shelves linked together by stanchions on which hung dried herbs, glass flasks, and the skeletons of creatures Chriani didn’t recognize. He was more than certain they were the bones of different animals simply reassembled into alarming forms to frighten those who visited the tent — a squirrel with a bird’s long beak, a sinuous fish with hands and a snakelike tail, something like an oversized frog with bat’s wings erupting from its shoulders. However, he had never seen fit to ask after the truth.

  “Sit,” Milyan muttered. Chriani did, taking a stool across from the room’s single chair, whose height seemed specifically designed to allow Milyan to look down upon anyone he was speaking to. “Makaysa and the others have come and gone with their reports. Spare me the tedious details they have shared and expand my knowledge for a change.”

  From his pocket, Chriani drew the bloodstone talisman. He tossed it to Milyan without a word. He was certain he saw the mage’s eyes actually light up as he snatched it in a long-fingered hand.

  “And what is this?” Milyan asked before he whispered a word of incantation. Chriani fought the urge to make the moonsign as the talisman shimmered with its faint pulse of blood-red light — not because he feared this particular magic, but because he understood it. Milyan’s casting was a spell of detection, reading the dweomer in the talisman. What Chriani feared was what might happen if that power passed over him to read the dweomer of his two rings.

  The black iron band was hidden in his belt again, in its secret space lined with velvet over gold foil. That was a trick he had paid to learn from one of the war-mage acolytes he trained with at the Bastion after taking commission. Though the lowest ranked among the spellcasters who served the prince high, even the acolytes knew how lead and gold would block the dweomer of detection. Chriani had thus spent a considerable amount of his newly commissioned salary sewing gold foil into certain of the secret pockets of his belt, his jackets, his armor.

  He had designed those pockets himself, and he was confident of their security against anything but the strictest search. One held a set of lockpicks that he hadn’t had any opportunity to use in the five months since he came to the frontier. One of those picks had been his mother’s, who had taught him to master it as a child. Likewise, he kept the black ring at his belt at all times except when he wore it. A sense of war
iness about its power, and a subtle fear of that power somehow activating when he didn’t intend it.

  He had a second ring tucked in beside the black band now. One he normally wore, but which he had hidden away while he walked to the pavilion. It was cast of plain steel — a token Lauresa had given him before the end. He tried to not think of either of the rings now, or of what would happen if Milyan’s power sensed them.

  “Divination and revelation,” Milyan said thoughtfully as he raised the talisman to his eye. “Ilvani magic. Tracking by blood. Where did you find it?”

  “On a dead Ilvani whose eyes turned from gold to green. Three coins on him. One in the mouth, one in each hand.”

  “A tale already heard. The others…”

  “Didn’t see this Ilvani. I followed him into the deep wood. Found him at some kind of shrine.”

  Milyan twisted the talisman between his fingers, his expression looking unnervingly to Chriani like he might be tasting it. “Tell me,” the magus said.

  Chriani told him. The flight through the woods, the dead grove and its black trees. The crumbling courtyard and the stone altar before which the Ilvani had died. When he was done, Milyan sat in silence for a long while. From the corner of his eye, Chriani saw that Derrach had stopped her sorting, was listening intently.

  He told most of the story. Not all.

  Chriani irnash! Lóech arnala irch niir!

  The Ilvani had called his name.

  Something caught at Chriani suddenly. He felt it, sensed it tripping across his skin like a spider’s touch. A twisting in his gut, his pulse rising. He was alert, glancing around the tent and behind him, but seeing nothing there. His hand strayed to his dagger, his fingers trembling.

  “If I can take my leave, lord,” he said, “I am ordered to the healers.”

  Milyan glanced up as if he had only just become aware of Chriani’s presence. “I don’t suppose you had any more sense than your halfwit companions to claim the coins you found?” Chriani shook his head. “But you touched them? Saw them?” the arcanist pressed. “Describe them.”

  “Ilvani. Old by their look, but clean like they were new. Lord…”

  “More! When I stop listening, you stop speaking.”

  Chriani felt the anger surge, but it was muted. Caught and dragged down by the sudden unease. “Warm to the touch,” he said, trying to focus. “Bright, not like the blood-gold. The same color as the Ilvani’s eyes before they turned.” He pulled that image from his memory, even as he felt its edges frayed by the fear that still carried over from that darkness.

  No, he realized as he spoke. Not that fear from the deep wood. This was something else.

  When he’d sat with Kathlan, seen her wounded, something had torn through his gut like hot iron. That sensation of pain and nausea was coming back now, no warning to it. No sense of where it had come from. “I need to take my leave, lord. The healers…”

  “Can wait. This shrine. You can find it again.” Not a question.

  “Lord, I fear that I am not well. If we could continue this conversation…”

  “This is not a conversation, soldier.”

  “No, lord. I mean, I don’t know if I could find it. Perhaps in time.”

  Milyan was on his feet, digging through one of the stacks of papers Derrach had just finished sorting. “The captains and I have things to discuss. An expedition to the deep wood. Derrach, see our visitor out.”

  With that, the mage swept past him, Chriani feeling a pulse of chill air through the door flap that set a shiver through him. He stood up from the stool, stumbled forward to the table.

  “What in fate’s name?” Derrach stared at Chriani’s erratic movements in horror. “You come here drunk…?”

  Chriani held a finger to his lips for silence. He looked around him, watched the door. Tried to listen, but a roaring was rising in his ears. “Healing draught,” he managed to whisper. “Quickly.”

  Since Chriani had come to the camp, Derrach had become his contact for life-magic, with her access to the stores of draughts and unguents shipped out from the healers in Alaniver. They were troop-issue only, meant to be held by sergeants and squad commanders and doled out in response to dire need. Chriani had the coin to pay for them, though — and the need. The shoulder that no healer could ever see.

  “Stuff your draught,” Derrach hissed as she glanced to the door in turn. “It’s not a week past the last time…”

  “I need it,” Chriani whispered. “Something’s wrong. Something happened today. Ilvani magic, or poison, I don’t know…” From the purse at his belt, Chriani fished out a handful of coins, Ilvani blood gold and silver siolans marked with the crest of Brandishear. “I can pay…”

  “It’s not about the pay, you mindless ass. It’s about me getting caught. Two draughts gone missing so quickly, Milyan will know something’s going on.”

  In all their brief and clandestine dealings, Chriani had never seen the acolyte show anything but fear at the mention of the magus’s name. She was skilled enough, to judge by her having been recruited for fieldwork under Milyan’s direction. But Derrach never made any secret of how passionately she hated that fieldwork, and all the myriad ways a person could die on the frontier.

  “Ten in gold.”

  “Get out,” Derrach hissed.

  “Fifteen,” Chriani said. Then something hit him like a body blow, and he went down to the floor.

  The offer was three times what the draught was worth, but he suspected it was his collapse that swayed Derrach’s mood more than the money. The acolyte dropped to her knees beside him, frantic. Fumbling through uncounted pockets on her grey robes, she pulled out a black glass jar, quickly tore through the heavily waxed paper that sealed it. She scooped a finger’s worth of a thick salve from it, forced that finger into Chriani’s mouth and onto his tongue. It tasted of summer herbs and burned sugar, sweet and dark.

  As the warmth of the salve’s magic washed through him, Chriani felt the pain at his shoulder ebb. Against the waves of nausea coursing through him, he had stopped noticing that ache.

  Breathing deep, he waited for the nausea to end, waited for the shadow to lift from across his sight.

  It didn’t.

  He saw the black arrow then.

  It was hanging on a rough wooden rack alongside a dozen other Ilvani relics — arrows, long-knives, what looked like a horse’s harness and reins. He recognized it without knowing how, other arrows of grey alongside it looking nearly as dark beneath the haze that covered his eyes.

  Standing, he lurched toward it. Had to fight to do so, feeling the magic of the arrow repelling him, forcing him backward beneath the weight of a spasm that made his limbs ache.

  “The arrow,” he whispered. He had to look around to find Derrach, standing still and pale behind him. “Do you feel it?”

  But it wasn’t the power of the arrow that had frozen the acolyte, Chriani realized numbly. It was the way the talisman’s blood-red light was pulsing crimson, suddenly too bright to look at where the frantic Magus Milyan had left it on the table.

  “It wasn’t doing that before,” Derrach whispered. “It wasn’t doing that…” She stumbled back to the table and dug frantically through the papers there, scattering them to the floor in her haste and coming up with two scrolls in hand.

  Chriani heard her words as a dark hiss as she cast her spell, an empty echo in his head. The talisman was tugging at him, the arrow’s power feeding into him like the burn of a scorpion’s sting.

  He was standing in front of the arrow in its rack, couldn’t remember the three strides that must have taken him there. He could hear Derrach shouting at him, but her words were lost in a shrieking wind.

  Seeing it close up for the first time, Chriani could mark the black arrow as an Ilvani shaft only by its fletching. He thought at first that its head must have been snapped off when it was drawn from Kathlan, but the arrow bore no head. Only a steel cap at its gently pointed tip. It was designed to pierce leather, to strike a
nd stick, but not to kill. He might have mistaken it for a practice shaft, if not for the red-black stain of Kathlan’s blood that still clung to it, speaking to a strength in its magical construction that would have shattered wood.

  With all his strength, Chriani seized the arrow in both hands. He felt it burning him, felt it impossibly heavy as he drove it down into the platform of the floor. It stuck there hard, the dark steel of its tip disappearing into the wood.

  He tightened his hands around it and pushed. He felt the shaft bend, heard it splinter.

  There was only darkness after that.

  He awoke to the sound of Milyan looking at him.

  The magus wasn’t screaming. Wasn’t speaking. Just staring through the storm of wind-sound that was slowly fading from Chriani’s mind. He was on the floor, the red-faced mage looming above him. One half of the black arrow was embedded in the floor where he’d sunk it. The other half lay beside his numb left hand, the shaft black to the core where it had shattered cleanly, cracking more like stone than wood.

  The pain was gone. The nausea had passed like it was never there. Like it had passed when Chriani walked away from Kathlan and the arrow earlier that day. Easy to see that now, even if he still didn’t understand.

  He sat up slowly, so weak that it took all his effort to move. Milyan took a step back as if to give him space to rise, but the staring didn’t stop.

  “Attuned to him… An offering of blood…” It was Derrach’s voice, but Chriani thought she might have said something more. It was hard to focus.

  There was a long silence before Milyan spoke. “Remarkable.”

  Chriani sat there for a long while, unable to do anything but watch. He thought he saw Derrach grinding something in a stone bowl, saw Milyan drink wine from that bowl when the acolyte was done. He heard the whispers of incantation, saw both mages vanish to reappear across the room. Fear twisted through him before he realized dimly that this wasn’t magic he was seeing, but his own senses slipping momentarily to darkness. The scene before him blinking in and out.