Three Coins for Confession

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  The warrior swinging that blade was perched on the turret’s sloping roof like a bird of prey, long hair shrouding her face. The backsword favored by the Ilvani was a single-edged blade, curved and tapered. Sharp enough to slice bone like passing through paper. Chriani made two quick feints against it, forcing it high. Then he grabbed the Ilvani’s hair and pulled hard, pivoting off his hip to drive her over him and down to the tiles. He tossed away a handful of that hair as she scrabbled to hold on, almost slipping to the roof’s edge before she found her feet. Her sword clattered past her and over into darkness, but she had long-knives already drawn from scabbards at her thighs as she paced carefully up the slope of the roof toward him.

  Chriani felt Kathlan come through the window behind him, reached out to touch her as she stepped close. He watched the movement of the Ilvani on the roof around them, measured the shifting of their slow approach. They’d expected an ambush, not sure what they were dealing with anymore.

  “Four of them,” he whispered. “Straight and left, two behind.”

  “I see them.”

  “Stay close.”

  It was a useless command by virtue of the roof offering no real alternative, but Chriani said it anyway. He had to fight the urge to turn all his attention to Kathlan, keep himself between her and the Ilvani as they closed. Remembering the feeling of seeing her struck by the arrow meant for him.

  “Ilvani attack!” Chriani shouted to the night sky. “Call the guard!” But he heard only fast footsteps from the street below. From this high vantage point, the curtain of rain gone, he could see the keep’s southwest gatehouse. The lights of its windows were burning bright against the cold. No movement there, though. No reaction to his warning, his voice muted by the rising wind.

  The eyes of all the Valnirata were burning gold in the shadows. They were watching him as he stepped away from Kathlan, his sword and dagger sweeping the air. The Ilvani’s first strikes were tentative, assessing them both. Chriani and Kathlan kept them moving, shifting along the slick tiles. He felt her close beside him, let all his senses expand to wrap around her, listening for movement beyond.

  He heard two quick strikes of steel, saw from the corner of his eye as she parried and deflected a two-handed knife fighter striking from the upslope. His own attention was focused on two warriors pushing in to his front and right, timing their movement to strike at once, give him no chance to parry. He surprised them by going wide, hooking the long-knife attack so that it sent the sword strike past him by a finger’s breadth.

  He felt the Valnirata focused on him. Trying to get past Kathlan, but they weren’t attacking to kill him. He could read it in their movements, in the timing of their strikes. Like in the woods, when they had waited for the moment to unleash the magic of the black arrow. They had something else in mind for Chriani if they took him down this night.

  The Ilvani kept their silence as they fought, but the leather of their boots was loud against the tile. Swords and knives flashed in the starlight, pressing harder now as Chriani and Kathlan shifted beside each other, using the inn’s three broad chimney stacks as cover and backing. Chriani drew first blood, taking advantage when an Ilvani knife fighter slipped on the slates and went down to her knee. A moment’s distraction, but enough for him to punch his sword through armor and breastbone with a full-body thrust.

  They weren’t attacking to kill Chriani, but as long as Kathlan was at his side, that wasn’t a courtesy he could afford to return.

  He heard her behind him as she tagged a second warrior, the crunch of bone and cartilage that said she’d taken him through the hand. He spun around to refocus on that same target, catching him off guard and off balance. His sword cut deep into the warrior’s neck on the backswing, sending him crashing to the tiles, then over the edge of the roof to the dark street below.

  He heard shouting from that street, but it wouldn’t be enough. Rising from the rooftops adjacent to the inn, he counted eight more figures in the shadows, saw them take measured steps and leap the arms-wide gap across the alleyways that surrounded them. Two pressed quickly toward the window, cutting off that route of escape.

  “Chriani!”

  Kathlan’s voice was his only warning as a figure shot up out of the shadows behind him. A lithe warrior in a shimmering cloak of ilvanweave, helping to mask her movements as she’d crawled prone along the far slope of the roof, coming up from the dark alleyway behind the inn. She hammered at him with a succession of two-handed backsword attacks, Chriani blocking them but gaining no chance for a counterstrike. But it wasn’t the Ilvani’s sword he was focused on — it was the horsebow hanging across her back, the combat quiver at her hip.

  As another sword thrust came for him, he let it slip by him, heard it hiss past even as he twisted in toward the assailant. He took an elbow to the side for his trouble, but he’d expected that. With his bare foot, he kicked down to smash her knee, felt her crumple at his feet. He fell with her, rolling twice along the slates before he released her, letting her carry on over the edge of the roof and down to the street below.

  When he came up, his longsword was gone but he’d yanked her bow free, had a single arrow in hand.

  He forced the bow’s lower limb between his feet as he flexed and strung it. He had time to set the arrow and pull, feeling the weapon’s draw and tension, sensing and assessing its curve and balance in the single instant of aiming.

  He twisted to sight the gatehouse. The windows were still bright, but a smaller point of light was the lantern hanging above the locked gate on its black iron bracket, hooded against the night. Chriani judged the distance at three hundred paces, a long shot for an Ilvani bow even if he’d had full light.

  He let his fingers flick from the string, saw the arrow arc up and over the nearest rooftops, disappearing into shadow. He saw the gatehouse lantern shatter where it was hit dead center, heard a shout go up as the door was thrown wide.

  “Attack from the Greatwood!” Chriani screamed it to the black night, hearing his voice echo even against the wind. “The prince’s guard in combat! Sound alarms!”

  Tile shifted at his back. He spun to bring the bow down hard, cracking it across the face of the Ilvani slipping across the roof toward him, sending him off balance and onto his back. Chriani dropped to the warrior’s chest with both knees, tearing the long-knife from his grasp as he heard ribs break.

  Off at the gatehouse, the rise of a tolling bell told him the guards had heard him. Three strikes, then a silence. Then three strikes again, echoing. The alarm call of the prince’s guard.

  Chriani rolled off the body beneath him and was running for Kathlan. She was caught between knives and sword, two Ilvani pressing even as a third loomed up out of the darkness.

  He shouted. “Lóech arnala irch niir!” It was a moment’s instinct, nothing more, when a moment was all the time Chriani had. As his voice rang out across the rooftops, golden eyes flashed toward him, two of the Ilvani at Kathlan momentarily distracted.

  The third Ilvani was bare-armed in black leather, dark hair hanging wet to shroud her face. She had a dagger in one hand, a handaxe in the other. Taking advantage of the distraction in her two companions, she lashed out with both blades, taking each of the other Ilvani across the throat.

  Chriani faltered. Stared.

  Kathlan was scrambling back as the two warriors that had pressed her tumbled to the tiles, clutching vainly at their necks as their life left them. She had her rapier and dagger up, watching the figure in black, but the new arrival looked past her to meet Chriani’s gaze. Dark eyes flashed in the starlight, the figure twisting as two more Ilvani rose from the slope of the roof.

  In the brightness that his eyes revealed, Chriani saw the tangle of black and red that was the war-mark at the dark figure’s shoulder.

  As the warrior slipped toward Kathlan, she twisted to go back to back, fighting with her. In the four steps it took Chriani to get to the two of them, rapier and dagger, dagger and axe flashed out. The Ilvani pushing i
n were forced back as Chriani jumped into the fray, let himself slide along the slates as he spun. With the long-knife he’d claimed, he cut through the warrior closest to Kathlan. The other tried to step back, stumbling as her boot caught the edge of a tile.

  The black-armored figure tumbled forward and up, both arms crossing over as she rose. The Ilvani who had stumbled keeled over backward, his leather parted across his chest in a bloody X.

  A long moment of silence hung. Mist twisted along the rooftop, caught by the rising wind. Chriani sensed no movement, no life in the scattered bodies, though he knew his senses were distracted by his focus on the figure before him. He recognized her face, though he had never expected to see it again.

  He recognized the dagger as the warrior slung it to a scabbard at her back. It bore a thin haft of steel and bone, its cap and spiked guard gleaming dully with the look of mottled silver. A scalloped blood-edge marked the base of the blade, which was acid-etched with markings Chriani recognized as a match to the war-mark at the dark figure’s shoulder. A match to the mark at his own shoulder, and to memories he wanted desperately to forget.

  The unexpected ally was smiling coldly. “No greetings for old friends, half-blood?”

  In the brief time in which Chriani and Lauresa had been captives of the Ilvani exile leader Dargana, he had seen her smile only once. She had called for his execution as she did so, the expression carrying no mirth. Only a sense of malevolent power.

  “Not the time or the place,” he said at last. As if in answer, the guardhouse alarm was echoed, a deeper tolling sounding out from inside the keep, then again from farther out toward the city walls. More bells sounded out in the night, the guard across Rheran on sudden alert.

  “More true than you know.”

  Chriani stepped close, long-knife raised, his bare feet sensing faint warmth on the tiles. He glanced down to see that he was standing in blood, washing away from two Ilvani where they had fallen.

  He saw the gold of their eyes flash in the starlight as the bodies lurched with unexpected movement.

  A trace of fear ran up Chriani’s spine as the Ilvani began to convulse, one by one. Their limbs contorted, chests heaving as if something might be driving into them from the roof below. Their dead mouths moved as though trying to speak, spitting red-black froth but making no sound.

  “Blood and moonsign…” Kathlan made the moonsign as she said it, stumbling back. Chriani shifted across the tile to stand beside her. The crescent was scribed across her heart in red, her tunic marked by the blood on her hands.

  He watched Dargana’s expression as the movement of the bodies slowed, then stilled. No surprise there. Just a cold recognition.

  Even in the faint light of the cloud-streaked sky, Chriani saw the flash of gold at each of the bodies’ swollen tongues, the clasp of their fingers. Three coins for each of the dead, not there a moment before.

  The Ilvani fallen closest to him had twisted her head over, the coin slipping from her mouth to spill to the black tile. An instinctive revulsion twisted through Chriani as Dargana crouched to carefully collect it, then just as carefully pulled the other coins from mouths and fingers, one by one.

  “Chriani?”

  He heard a dozen different questions in Kathlan’s voice. She was shivering, but whether more from the chill of the rising wind or the aftermath of the fight, he didn’t know. This wasn’t the first time she’d killed. That had been on their third patrol into the Greatwood, when a perfectly placed bowshot had taken out a rogue Ilvani who had leaped from the trees overhead onto the back of their squad’s lead rider. Chriani had seen the same look in Kathlan’s eyes then that he saw now, but he could only shake his head to her in an awkward call to silence. No way to answer her. Not yet.

  “Does she speak Ilvalantar?” Dargana scooped rainwater from the roof to her hand, sifting the fistful of bloody coins within it as she called to Chriani in that language of the Ilmar Ilvani.

  Chriani responded in the Ilmari tongue. “Anything you say to me, say to her.” He had no idea whether Dargana spoke anything other than the Ilvani tongues he had heard her use in the past, but the exile leader shrugged to tell him she understood.

  “You’re being hunted,” she said in Ilmari, only the slightest trace of an accent catching at the words.

  Chriani caught Kathlan’s look from the corner of his eye. “And?” he said.

  “And you’d be in their hands now if not for me.”

  Kathlan spoke up, an edge of defiance and distrust in her voice. “We didn’t need your help to deal with this lot…”

  “You needed me to deal with the six I left in the street south of here. The ones set to come through the inn and take you while you were distracted by the attack from the roof.”

  Kathlan’s response was cut short by Chriani’s hand in hers, squeezing it gently. Dargana shook the coins dry before she slipped them to a pouch at her waist. From another pouch, she pulled something, tossing it to Chriani. He grabbed it without seeing it, half-closed his fingers to hold it. Saw a pulse of red light welling up within a chunk of bloodstone set within a golden claw.

  It was the same talisman he’d taken from the dead Ilvani in the forest, but the leather cord that strung this one was sliced through and dark red. As he had before, he felt the power of the hunter’s heart calling to him. The stone was oily even to his wet fingers, its magic seeming to seep into his skin.

  His hand convulsed in response, the talisman falling to the slates. Dargana nodded as she stepped to scoop it up, slipped it to her pocket. “Something you’ve seen before,” she said. Not a question. “They’ll find you, half-blood. You need to get to somewhere safe. But in exchange, I need your aid. I need your prince…”

  The exile’s words were cut to silence as the rooftop around them flared to the brightness of full day. Mage light pulsed from one of the chimney stacks, shedding deep shadow behind it and bathing the rest of the rooftop in light. The prince’s guard had moved even faster than Chriani expected, but the presence of war-mages was an unexpected and dangerous turn.

  “Hold attack! Chriani of the prince’s guard with one tyro!” He looked to grab Kathlan but she was already moving, seizing him by the hand and pulling him toward the nearest chimney stack. She drew him down flat behind it as he called out again. “Regiment of Rheran and the Bastion, on assignment from Konaugo Post. The Ilvani are down, hold fire!”

  “Half-blood!” Dargana hissed from the shadows, unseen where she’d dropped down into the narrow well of darkness the mage-light hadn’t touched. “To me!”

  “This is the guard,” Chriani called back, as quietly as he could. “We won’t make it…”

  “Show yourself and your insignia!” The voice from below had moved, shifting closer. Bootsteps rose over the wet wind as Chriani saw figures clambering up to the rooftops adjacent to the inn. He twisted to see the path to the window lit up bright and wholly impassable. Beyond that window, everything that marked him and Kathlan as members of the guard was out of reach.

  Footsteps struck the edge of the roof as three figures in the insignia of the Bastion garrison leaped across, following the same path the Ilvani had taken to land before Dargana. Cursing, the exile pushed backward, trying to stay low in the light. Chriani saw her twist, saw the war-mark at her bare arm pulse as stark shadow against her skin.

  They gave no warning. No call for surrender. From the edge of the roof, three crossbows sang out. One bolt shattered off the chimney a hand’s breadth from Chriani’s head, forcing him to duck down under a hail of splintering brick, the long-knife slipping from his grasp as he held on.

  The other two took Dargana in the back.

  She tried to rise. Stumbled. Her boots slipped on the wet slates and she went down, sliding to the edge of the roof, then over it. Chriani heard her hit the stones of the street below.

  She’d fallen to the narrow alley behind the inn, away from the roof’s edge from which the balisters had shot. Chriani was moving by instinct, seizing the
too-brief moment it would take them to reload. He pulled Kathlan with him as he pushed off down the tiles, sliding back and away from the guards, lying flat against any follow-up attack.

  He grabbed at the edge of the roof as he slipped over it, felt his blunted nails torn as they scraped the slate. He hung on with one hand, the other around Kathlan, but she was latched to the roof even tighter than he was, clinging to the gutter and scanning the darkness below.

  Chriani saw the questions in her eyes still, understood that she was following him without asking them. He squeezed her hand to make the only thanks he could, then swung out over the edge of the roof and down. The inn wall along the alley side was all rough stone and plenty of handholds. Kathlan was a faster climber than he was, dropping down in three smoothly swinging motions. Chriani pushed off to catch her, close enough to the ground that he could roll.

  The alley was dark, but beneath the veil of starlight, he could see Dargana on her side, fighting to breathe. She had fallen beside the Valnirata that Chriani and Kathlan had killed together, blood pooling on the rain-slicked tiles from the jagged gash at his neck. His lifeless eyes were dark, the bright gold that had filled them gleaming now in the coins set in his slack hands, his open mouth.

  The bolts that dropped Dargana were bloody stumps in her back, shattering where she’d rolled as she hit the ground. No sign of their heads at the front of her armor likely meant they had hit ribs, dug into the lungs beyond. A bad wound.

  Kathlan had lost her rapier, but she drew the second dagger she’d tucked into her belt. Chriani was weaponless, felt the urge to seize the dagger sheathed at Dargana’s back. His hand stayed where it was, though. Afraid to touch the grip of the bloodblade. The narneth móir of the Valnirata, a weapon as ancient as it was deadly.

  “Who is she?” Kathlan whispered. “Chriani, what in fate’s name is going on?”

  “She’s Ilvani of the exile lands,” he said simply. “She helped the princess and I get free and to Aerach.” Most of the truth there. Too much else to explain in the moment. “She’s on our side. Dargana.”