Three Coins for Confession

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  She extricated herself from him, leaning back on one elbow to assess him in the shadows. Not angry. Not upset. Just curious, her green gaze bright to Chriani’s eyes.

  “We could,” she said at last. “In the sense of it being a possibility. But there being no point or purpose to taking the rites makes it an open question of why we should?”

  “For the sake of doing it. Showing everyone else what it means for us.”

  “We’ve got no family for either of us, Chriani. Who’s the everyone you’re so concerned for suddenly?”

  “That’s not what I mean. It’s just that as much as it means already, as much as we mean to each other, it gives us something else. Shows the world what we are.”

  “It’ll show the captains as well. You know the regulations. Separate assignments. You’ll lose me as your adjutant. I’ll never be able to serve under you.”

  Chriani laughed, but it rang hollow in his ears. “I’ll be the one worried about serving under you when it comes to that, Kath. And we don’t need to make it public. Find a justice in some market town where no one’s watching. Take furlough to Elalantar and come back with it done.”

  “So you’re going from everyone knowing what we mean to each other, to no one knowing, to only us knowing in the space of fifty words. Except we already do know. Or I do, at least. So why is this so important to you?”

  Because Chriani had no answer he could give her, he kissed her in reply. He felt her warmth, realized how cold the room had become.

  “Fire’s dying,” he said as he slipped from the bed. He crouched low to the hearth, banking coals and lining the grate with kindling and fresh wood. He was stoking the flames from their slumber when he heard Kathlan pad naked across the floor behind him. From the mantle where she’d set it while she bathed, she took her pendant brooch, slipping it over her head. She dropped down to sit in Chriani’s lap, her back to him as she pulled the blanket around them both. As he wrapped himself around her, she rocked against him gently, breasts and belly hard against his arms.

  “Why is this important?” she whispered to the shadows. “The truth.”

  Beneath the blanket, Chriani caught a glimpse of green and silver at Kathlan’s neck, the brooch and its silk ribbon that was the color of her eyes. And with that came all the memory of the first time he’d seen himself in those eyes. All the understanding of how the question of the rites was important because he had hurt her. Over and over again, the thought hammered against his mind like it might be hoping to break the silence of his tongue. It was important because he had lied to her, had let each new lie settle on the foundations laid down by the truths he still couldn’t tell her.

  It was important because he had stood in front of Umeni, stood in front of Rhuddry, and lost everything he and she had both worked for. A stupid thing to do. Courier duty, and needing to tell Kathlan that if she wanted to finish out her assignment with the rangers, she’d have to do it without him. They would be together in time, but for now, he had no right to keep her with him. Had no way to tell her why.

  “I just want us to always be,” he said. “I don’t want it changing. I want to think about the future and know what’s to come…”

  “I don’t want children,” Kathlan said.

  Something cold twisted inside him. Not where he’d been going with the conversation. Not where he’d wanted to push her, not what he wanted to hear.

  Not that, not now.

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “We’re soldiers, Chriani. That’s our life, while we’re young at least, and I hope for all time. I was daughter to two soldiers, and I watched them both buried in uniform. I can’t put any child through that. I won’t leave any child to page at the Bastion, and wondering each time you and I ride out whether we’re coming back.”

  He let the silence hang for a long while. “I didn’t want this talk,” he said. “It’s not what I meant.”

  “I know. But it’s been on my mind, and I should have said it already. No secrets.”

  Chriani shivered with Kathlan’s warmth, clutched at her hand to stop himself from trembling. She lifted her other hand, shifted the blanket to set her fingers to the war-mark at Chriani’s shoulder.

  “You lost your father for this,” she said quietly. “I know what it means to you. I know what he means to you. And I can’t have your children never knowing you. I just can’t, Chriani.”

  Not that. Not now.

  The late autumn of the year before, he’d heard first word through the Bastion’s protocol office. Had been waiting for it. A week later, it was in the markets, and then for that month that followed with every courier that came in across the Clearwater Way.

  There were birth celebrations in Aerach.

  No secrets, they had said, and so Chriani let the shadow settle in his mind that hid the thoughts of a child in Teillai, daughter to a duke, and to his wife Lauresa. A duchess who had been a princess once. The child’s name set down in royal proclamation in Aerach and Brandishear, but the space of that name was a darkness in Chriani’s mind.

  “Come back to bed,” Kathlan said at last. The fire was blazing again, Chriani with no idea how much time had passed while they sat there.

  He followed her numbly, felt her drape herself across him as he fought back the shivering. Felt it fade at long last, Kathlan’s warmth drawing it out and away like pulling poison from the wound that was his heart.

  She slept before he did, Chriani watching the play of firelight across the ceiling for a long while, seeing faces in that light as he slowly drifted off to darkness. His father. His mother. Barien and Kathlan both. And as much as he wanted not to, as much as he tried to push it down, slip it safe beneath the armor of dark thought, he was thinking on the face of the daughter of a duke as sleep finally took him. Imagining the features of a child he would never see.

  THE MEMORY OF THE black arrow brought Chriani back to waking, barely into the deep night and the fire not yet cold. It was quieter, though. The rain had stopped finally, but a wind had risen from the north, its steady hiss augmented by a staccato pattern of dripping along the eaves above the room and the guttered roof below.

  He lay and listened to Kathlan’s slow breathing in the dark beside him, feeling her foot moving against his. Even lost in a dead slumber, she would do that, some awareness of their contact stirring always in her sleeping mind. It was her right leg, once injured and now restored. Some subconscious sense of the pain she had once carried there, perhaps. Making up for all the small pleasures of movement she had lost for so long.

  After all the days of waking early along the road, Chriani had hoped that being back in Rheran would give him the sleep he needed. But instead, he felt the last strains of his stomach churning, a kind of visceral memory of the nausea that had taken him outside the forest that day, in the war-mages’ pavilion by dark. Not just the memory of the black arrow’s magic, of the fear that had accompanied it, but something stronger. An echo, like the pain that flares from time to time in healed joints. The strange play of nerves that endured in the scars of the deepest cuts. The itch at his finger.

  For most of his life, Chriani had slept in fits and starts, rarely making it through a night without some matter of annoyance, some private rage driving into his sleeping mind like an awl punching new leather. But he had lost that, most unexpectedly, when he returned from Aerach. Sleeping that long first morning in Kathlan’s bed, before they spoke. Spending that day at her side, then each night thereafter, feeling himself slip into a sense of calm he’d never known before. Waking at dawn into the same dream of being at her side that had carried him through the night.

  When I came back from Aerach. He had said it to Kathlan earlier in the fire-bright dark. It was the only way he ever spoke of those days now with her. A kind of convenient code for things he had promised her were told and done, gone to memory. All the things he still couldn’t say.

  Barien had never slept a full night through that Chriani could remember. Official duties as warden t
o a princess. Plans and protocol to execute as a sergeant of the Bastion, unofficial duties as Chanist’s right hand and adviser. Sitting through tactical councils and trade talks, drinking with counselors and dukes, had seen Barien out of his chambers at night as often as he was ever in them. Late meetings would take him to the mess or the armories, advising captains and tyros alike. His even later meetings with Marjir, the princess high’s tailor, were of a more personal nature and in his own chambers, requiring Chriani to find his own place to sleep on those nights. Even returning at dawn, though, he would often find Barien already awake, a low murmur of voices and laughter answering his knock at the door.

  As Chriani got older, when his own duties and outside interests began to push him to later nights and earlier mornings, he realized he had no idea how Barien managed. At less than half his mentor’s age, Chriani understood that he was as good as any soldier at going two days without sleep, or making do with three or four nights of short and interrupted slumber when he needed to. But he remembered long nights of Bastion intrigue and war council meetings with Chanist that would keep Barien on his feet for a week or more. The warrior would catch moments of short slumber before dawn and in the heat of the day, even as Chriani and the other tyros serving those meetings inevitably dropped to a dead sleep at the mess table.

  While he slept this night, Chriani had dreamed of Barien. He remembered it suddenly, the half-remembered sense returning of he and the warrior riding side by side along the seacoast rode that ran from Rheran to Sudry. Dawn was breaking above the Clearwater Sea spreading before them, its perfect brilliance setting bright fire across the waves. Kathlan was riding with them, and her presence told Chriani that this was the wishful vision of dreams rather than a real memory. Though Barien had been a friend to her, she had never ridden with him while he lived, her leg holding her back.

  Chriani had dreamed of Barien more often since going to the frontier, not fully understanding why. When he came back to the Bastion after Aerach, he had expected to feel the press of all those memories as he picked up the pieces of his life. But that life had left his dreams blissfully filled with thoughts of Kathlan, as were his days. In the camp, though, he would often wake with a sense of Barien’s voice in his mind, the warrior’s words forgotten but the feeling of his presence still sharp.

  In this night’s dream, Barien had been somber. Talking in dark tones of betrayal, of treachery coming from the highest places. Chriani knew what he was speaking of and was trying his best to talk over him, trying with the power of his own voice to keep Kathlan from hearing. Barien talked of loyalty and of choices as Chriani shouted back at him. Arguing of how the idea of loyalty should make things easier, but knowing how his own loyalties had been shattered on the Clearwater Way. Not sure if they would ever come together again.

  When Barien finally stopped speaking, Chriani saw blood fleck the warrior’s lips, and he knew in the dream that his friend and mentor was dead. He felt that thought burning in his memory, forcing him as it always did to think on whose hand it was that had struck Barien down.

  He was breathing hard, he realized, a familiar anger twisting through him as he slipped carefully from the bed to piss in the commode closeted in the corner past the hearth. Then he set tinder and wood to the barely smoldering coals, fanned them till they caught and crackled. Pacing to the window, he drew back his cloak to see a haze of stars through shredded cloud. The slates of the roof were gleaming, dark edges limned with moss and starlight.

  Where the curtain of rain had pulled back, he could see the Bastion. Just the barest view over the keep wall, the inn and its uppermost window marking out a high point on the upward-sloping streets to the south. Dark against an even darker night sky, the castle’s towers and turrets rose within the walls of the keep that were a symbol of strength and the center of the city — just as the Prince’s Bastion was the even stronger center of the keep. A heart of political power and military strength, beating within a body of ancient stone.

  For most of his life, Chriani had lived within the pulse of that power. A brightness to his memories of those times. Magical evenlamps and hearth fires burning in the barracks mess hall, shining steel and bright sun on the training grounds. The mottled rage gleaming on the faces of the many, many guards, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains he had insulted, inconvenienced, and thwarted over long years.

  All of it was shadow now. The Bastion and the keep that surrounded it were a cold stain that drained the light, that had drained the brightness from his memories. Like the darkening image that stayed with you when you sighted too long toward the sun.

  It was a place Chriani had dreamed of once. A place he had yearned to find his own way into, to find a way to belong to. The bright past seeming to promise a brighter future for a time, but his past and future now seemed to be cut and unraveling from the same skein of shadow.

  As Chriani was pacing back toward the fire, footsteps sounded out on the slate of the roof above his head and around him.

  He felt it as much as heard it over the hiss of wind, the faint sound of rainwater dripping from tile to tile. Drops building to rivulets that twisted and washed their way through encrustations of moss and guano, pigeons swarming the black tiles of the city’s rooftops for the heat they held on a winter’s day. He had been listening to the sound while he slept, had felt it as the gut-echo of the black arrow woke him.

  A kind of song rang out within the steady repetition, the endless cascade of rills spilling down past the window. So that he heard it, understood it in a moment, when that song was interrupted.

  Footsteps above him, shifting almost silently but blocking the flow of water as they did. Chriani marked them in his mind as if seeing ripples spread out across a still pond, noting the points from which they spread so as to judge the movement of the creature beneath the water. Five figures were above them, moving toward the window that was the room’s only point of outside entry.

  He woke Kathlan with a touch, thrusting her sword belt into her hands from where she’d set it on her pack beneath the bed. His own hands ached for his bow, but that was in the stables, stored with the saddles and tack. His longsword hung from the bedpost, a habit Barien had ingrained in him by example and relentless reminder, the scabbard hissing silk-silent as he drew it. While he lived, Barien had been less successful in training Chriani to actually use a blade, but in the time since the warrior’s death, Chriani had tried to change that. A thing he had done in Barien’s memory, bringing him to the point where he could call himself skilled but still largely untested.

  That was about to change.

  Kathlan wasn’t a warrior. Not by nature. Not like Chriani, trained at the side of the best sergeant in the Bastion from his eighth summer. She was the best rider in their troop because that had been her passion, but the blade and the bow were still new to her, even after training at Chriani’s side for a year and a half. She had the instincts, though. The things that couldn’t be taught. From the second she seized one of her daggers, she was ready. Locked to Chriani’s eyes, following his movement as he pointed to the roof and window. She was out of the bed and shifting silent across the floor, as naked as he was, crouched low to the ground.

  They were both ready as a sharp splintering of wood and glass sounded, the window torn outward to shatter and slip to the roof tiles. Whoever was attacking would keep the floor clear of broken glass, not wanting to risk slipping as they pushed inside. A ripple of shadow unfolded as Chriani’s cloak was torn free. Then even as he took the measure of the first figure to slip inside the room, Kathlan’s dagger left her hand to bury itself to the hilt in the Ilvani’s chest, her rapier already drawn before the intruder staggered and fell.

  Firelight shimmered across the floor, meeting faint starlight from the window and the still-clearing sky. Chriani’s eyes split the shadows, saw the gleam of gold in the eyes of the Valnirata warrior as he dropped. The edge of the war-mark was visible beneath the figure’s vest of grey-green leather, arms wet and bare, a lon
g-knife in each hand clattering loudly to the floor.

  Above them, the footsteps shifted again, reacting to the unexpected sound and movement. A figure dropped down in front of the window, slipped back out of sight as if trying to draw attack. Chriani waved Kathlan to hold. When the figure appeared again to force its way through, they met it from either side, cutting high and low. A second Ilvani in leather and cloak. He staggered as Chriani’s blade took him through the back of the leg, Kathlan’s rapier punching through armor and bone as it took him dead center in the chest.

  In the moment it took Kathlan to work her blade free of the body where it had fallen, Chriani pushed to the window, drove his sword down to anchor it in the floorboards. He grabbed the top of the sill and punched his feet straight out, the Ilvani who had just dropped to come through taking the full force of his strike. The warrior was shunted backward, slipping on the tiles before pitching backward to the wide roof below.

  Voices sounded out faint from the floor below him. A wash of light in the darkness outside showed a lamp lit at someone’s window, the fight heard.

  “I need to draw them,” he hissed to Kathlan. “Keep them on the roof, away from the other rooms. You go downstairs, get to the guard, sound the alarm…”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “I can hold them…”

  “This is not a debate.” Kathlan’s voice was cold.

  Chriani could only nod, no time for anything else. One long moment to grab his leggings, pull them on and tie them quickly. No time for his boots. Another moment to seize his tunic where he’d hung it at the fireside, then pull it on. A wet pain flared at his shoulder, as he realized he must have torn it on splintered wood at the window. The war-mark was covered, though.

  Kathlan was dressing just as quickly behind him as Chriani pushed out through the window, hitting the freezing tiles with bare feet. The wind was rising, a shock of cold taking him as he dug hard with his toes to hold himself, swung up with his blade by instinct to catch the thrust of the Ilvani backsword hacking down from above him.