Three Coins for Confession

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Chriani was up and after her. He heard Farenna hiss behind him in a way that told him he was blocking the Ilvani’s shot, the assassin choosing her course carefully. She was fast but still injured, her gait stiff where her wounded leg slowed her. Chriani caught her in three steps but she spun around again, struck him in the temple with her bound hands.

  The double-fist strike sent a wave of shadow through his mind, sent him stumbling. Chriani saw the fear in the assassin’s eyes as she twisted away again, sprinting once more for the trees.

  She stumbled as Farenna’s thrown long-knife took her between the shoulders. A moment of stillness seemed to catch her, her body teetering as she tried reflexively to grasp the knife, but her bound hands couldn’t reach it. Chriani managed to catch up to her as she pitched sideways to the ground.

  He pulled the knife, cast it away. Blood was at the assassin’s mouth and at the new wound. A slow flow, but the pale blue eyes stared sightlessly past him. He heard her choke out a last breath as Farenna stepped up beside him.

  “You trust too easily, friend Chriani.” The Ilvani warrior snatched up his knife, his voice cold again.

  Chriani said nothing as his fingers pressed to the assassin’s neck. Trying to feel for her blood, but it was already still. She must have been more badly injured than he’d thought. Pushed herself too far into blood-shock with the acrobatic display that had nearly taken his head off.

  Farenna reached down, grasped the body by the hair and hefted it. “We waste our time here,” he whispered. His face was a mask as he set his long-knife to the assassin’s throat.

  “Leave her!”

  Chriani heard the words as if it might have been someone else shouting them. He wasn’t aware that he’d moved until he was driving into Farenna’s throat with his elbow, sending the Ilvani stumbling back. All the captain’s rage was redirected toward him as he righted himself, but Chriani’s own heart was filled with an anger that burned equally hot.

  “You dare…!” the Ilvani shouted.

  “I’ll dare as far as you, Farenna, but I’m done with this. Ilvani and Ilmari alike, screaming vengeance. Carving oaths into the dead. Enough of it.”

  Farenna’s grey-black eyes were cold, his knuckles white on the knife. Chriani hadn’t drawn a weapon, knew that if he did he was dead. From the corner of his eye, he saw Dargana with hands at her axe and dagger, though. Waiting. He hadn’t expected the rage that had risen so quickly in him, though he recognized it all the same.

  The assassin had been worth something to him alive. Another bargaining chip he might have used to buy his way back into Brandishear. An Uissa agent with intelligence of the Valnirata. He could have delivered her to Chanist’s war-mages, or even to Vishod’s, after the Laneldenari were done with her.

  She’d been afraid. He’d seen it in her eyes. It made a difference to him. He couldn’t say why.

  Farenna said nothing, even as the anger in him ebbed again. He sheathed his knife. “Our mission is done, Ilmari,” the captain said.

  Chriani shook his head in response, but it was Dargana he spoke to. “What do you know about a temple? Markura, she called it?”

  “A lot of names come out of the Ghostwood. A lot of places lost within it. I don’t know this one.”

  “We’re going to find it,” Chriani said.

  “We return to Sylonna.” Farenna’s tone had lost its edge, but Chriani was reminded all the same that the captain wasn’t used to being challenged.

  “You can ride for Sylonna. Tell Laedda and the rest that you let Dargana and I finish this alone.”

  “When I accepted you among my riders, Ilmari, it came with obligation and trust in equal measure.”

  “Just like you took obligation from Laedda and the rest of them when you swore to see this mission through.”

  “The lóechari track us…”

  “They were tracking Taelendar, meaning they know she’s dead. They’re as likely to think she took us down first as anything else. By the time they figure out…”

  “The troop is broken, Ilmari. I will not discuss…”

  “Your troop is standing in front of you, waiting for the order to push on, lord.” The title didn’t make any sense among the Ilvani, but Chriani said it by instinct. Packed it with all the usual sense of challenge that the word had carried when addressed to any of the officers whose orders he’d defied.

  “Our mission was to seek intelligence of the lóechari, and what we have learned is dire enough,” Farenna said.

  “Even more reason, then, that you need Aerach and Brandishear. Even more reason to try to learn how the cult puts its power into play. Find a way to undo that power.”

  Farenna stood in silence a long while. Chriani saw his gaze flit back to the dark amulet at his wrist.

  “I will complete the rites for the fallen,” he said at last. “Prepare to ride.”

  While Farenna occupied himself at the bodies of Taelendar and the other dead Ilvani, Chriani searched the assassin’s body, already growing cold. He expected to find magic. Some kind of talisman, or a ring like his own to explain her ability to follow them unseen. However, he found nothing on her except her scabbard and a belt pouch filled with Ilvani bread and mead. Stolen from the same provisioned glades they had rested in along the trail from Sylonna, he guessed. He checked every seam of her tunic and leggings, searched the pouch and her belt for secret pockets. He emptied the mead flasks and broke the bread open, but she carried nothing else.

  When he returned to his horse, he remembered that his backsword had been cast aside while he rode. Contáedar’s sword. He took Taelendar’s blade to replace it, wiped the blood from it on her cloak before he slipped it to his scabbard.

  Chriani and Dargana were both ready by the time Farenna swung up onto his horse. He whispered an incantation to set the dead talisman at his wrist pulsing with blue-white light once more, studying it carefully. Then he spurred forward to shoot along a shadowed trail hung with moss, Chriani and Dargana following close behind.

  THE LÓECHARI RAN in near silence, the grey of their leather all but swallowed by the shadows beneath the trees. They matched their pace to the hiss of the wind as if by instinct, shifting with the movement of the forest canopy overhead as it shed sunlight to spread in ripples and waves across the ground. All five were on foot with bows drawn, moving a half-dozen paces apart and facing away from each other. Scouting the full circle of the forest around them, no way for anything to move unseen within their field of view.

  Then one of them died, almost as silently as he moved. Chriani appeared behind him out of empty air in the same instant his arm came around the Ilvani’s neck. His other hand plunged a long-knife straight in through leather and bone to the archer’s heart.

  The power of the black ring at his finger had let Chriani follow the cult patrol unseen, but he felt that magic disrupted as he struck. The forest around him shimmered back into place, like the shadow the ring’s power set across his eyes was burning away.

  A hiss sounded from the closest Ilvani as Chriani was spotted, as he’d known he would be. He shifted back to let the body crumple before him, threw himself behind a screen of young limni as a hail of arrows slid past to one side. Then he shifted back again, dodging more arrows as he made sure the Ilvani could see him.

  The four of them came together in a line as they closed, driving Chriani back into an open clearing. No cover for him as another hail of arrows arced toward him. Then those arrows passed through the space where he’d been standing as he vanished again.

  At the same moment, Farenna and Dargana shot from the screen of the trees where they’d been waiting, dropping the two scouts at the outside where Chriani had led them into perfect position. He appeared again at the far side of the squad an instant later, taking what he assumed was the captain in the lower back, punching a long-knife in beneath a chain shirt whose lacquered links gleamed black. With a second knife, he came in across the Ilvani’s throat, ending it as quickly as he could.

  Four down in less ti
me than it would take to describe it. The last Ilvani panicked, dropping her bow and bolting into the trees. Farenna’s bow sang out faster. It was over.

  Chriani stood for a while over the body at his feet. It had been Farenna’s plans and orders to do it this way. Let Chriani get close, then use him as a lure to draw the others into ambush. Kill them quickly. No other options.

  It wasn’t something Chriani was used to. Killing up close, no chance for quarter. Not for the first time, he thought of how fighting with a bow, fighting from horseback across the shadowed spaces of forest paths, felt so much cleaner than this. Less chance to think about the dead as they fell beside and behind you, unseen. No reason to ever look into the eyes of the ones you’d killed.

  The gold light that was in all the cultist’s eyes still burned brightly in the leader’s gaze, staring sightlessly upward. His mouth was twisted in a grimace of anger, defiant even in death. Then that grimace was changed to a silent scream of pain as all five bodies began to convulse.

  Chriani had to look away, waiting for the dark magic to pass. Not wanting to see the coins appear again.

  “Their uniforms,” Farenna whispered when it was done. “Before the blood sets. Unless you and your ring wish to go alone, Ilmari.”

  The attack had been Farenna’s plan, built around the magic held in the black ring. Chriani had all but forgotten that the captain knew about that magic, from the time he’d tested it on their ride to Sylonna. The need to move unseen was paramount. The lóechari patrols had the advantage of numbers and position. An intimate knowledge of the territory. The mind magic of the coins meant that Chriani and the others had to move quietly. If they were spotted, they would have to strike just as fast.

  They had left the horses a half-league behind them, at the point where the trails narrowed to barely visible footpaths. Shortening the reins across their necks to keep them from catching on anything. It hadn’t seemed right to Chriani to simply let them run free, but Farenna was insistent. “They will wait for us,” the captain said.

  They stripped the Ilvani cultists of their leather and weapons quickly, trading off pieces between themselves to find the best fit. Farenna’s mood was dark again, a weight pressing down on the captain as he claimed the chain shirt of the leader, directing Dargana and Chriani to take specific badges and gear from the other fallen scouts. The details of rank and insignia among the Ilvani had a subtlety to them that Chriani had no hope of understanding, leaving him to trust Farenna’s directions.

  The plan to steal uniforms for the final approach to whatever lay at the end of their trail had been the captain’s as well, but he had rejected Chriani’s suggestion that they take the armor of the scouts they had skirmished with earlier. Chriani understood his reasons now, seeing subtle differences in the leather of the riders and the armor of the foot scouts on closer patrol.

  Farenna spent a good amount of time adjusting Chriani’s armor, even ordering him to remove it once so he could don a tunic beneath it. The captain cut away part of this to reveal the Halobrelia sigil at the heart of Chriani’s war-mark, then set his armor and some sort of sash of rank to carefully conceal the rest of it. The four names scribed in his own hand, which would give away the irregular nature of the mark the first time it was seen.

  “You will need to stay behind us,” Farenna said to Chriani when they were done. The hunter’s heart he wore was still dark, but the light of the captain’s spell-magic was pulsing brighter as he held the talisman high, felt for whatever message it had been giving him as he read its unseen connection to the place where its power originated.

  The captain and Dargana wore the cult armor and regalia as effectively as the lóechari themselves, but the faintness of the Ilvani features Chriani had inherited from his father would give him away far too quickly. Up to the point where his own stupidity had revealed the war-mark to the Aerachi and his life had broken apart, Chriani had lived that life by trusting in the minimum amount of subterfuge it took to hide who he was from the Ilmari around him. The Ilvani wouldn’t be so easy to fool, though.

  “Chriani’s ears won’t be as big a problem as all our eyes,” Dargana said evenly. “Any of the cult get close enough, they’ll see we’re not them.”

  Chriani shrugged. “They might take us for their blind agents. Or we just keep our distance.”

  “Easy to say when we have no sense of who we might meet or what it is we search for,” Farenna said coldly.

  It took Chriani a moment to realize that the captain was looking to him for response, but he had none. He had no plan. Not really. Just a picture of how he wanted this to end, and an instinct for action that would carry him toward that end if he let it. An instinct he had learned to trust. The problem was, his instinct carried him and him alone. He had no way to explain it, no way to ask anyone else to trust it.

  It had happened that way with Kathlan, he realized. Not seeing it in that full light until this moment, the truth hidden away within its place of shadow where all of Chriani’s fears would hide. This was the same instinct that had sent him out of the stables in Rheran before dawn to follow Lauresa, because Barien with his last breath had ordered Chriani to protect the princess. This was the instinct that carried him along the Clearwater Way, that had brought him home to Kathlan.

  This was the instinct that had forced his tongue to silence over the truth of what had happened along that road. The instinct that had driven the slow wedge between Kathlan and him. The instinct he had turned away from when he told her the truth.

  “We find the temple,” Chriani said at last. “We uncover what it is. We need to see the magic. This isn’t our fight to win, but the Ilvani sorcerers, the Ilmar’s war-mages, need to know what’s here. That’s the only way we’ll beat them. Break the magic, then break the cult.”

  “And if we can’t?” Dargana said.

  “Then we find out where the cult is vulnerable. Take that back and regroup. Try again.”

  “And what of the lóechari’s interest in you?” Farenna asked quietly.

  “The cult wants Caradar’s dagger,” Chriani said. “It’s got nothing to do with me.” He almost believed it.

  During the ride from Sylonna, Chriani had already been trying to think through the Captain’s question, to sift the pieces of the puzzle in his mind. The cult seeking him, and why. All of Veassen’s talk, and Chriani’s absolute certainty that whoever or whatever the blind seer’s legends sought, it wasn’t him.

  The lóechari attack had left him reeling, though, his thoughts scattered. Taelendar’s death had shaken him. The transformation she had undergone. No warning. No chance to save her.

  He didn’t think on what Dargana had asked him. Wouldn’t meet her gaze now.

  The quiet anger Chriani had seen in the Ilvani warrior was one he recognized. Her challenge to him on the ride from the Hunthad to Sylonna. Acting without thinking. Chriani understood it because he had lived with it his whole life. Likewise, he understood how Farenna had been able to tame that rage. The command and control he had demonstrated, shaping and honing the anger in Taelendar like the edge of a blade.

  Barien had tried to shape the anger in Chriani the same way. He had almost succeeded. Chriani had been the one to stop him.

  The day his grandfather died, his mother already dead a year before, Chriani had expected to follow them both in short order. And though Barien’s intervention had staved off that fate, Chriani had been pushing toward his own end every long day since. The thought came to him now with a clarity that angered him. A thing he should have understood a long time before but hadn’t. The piece of the puzzle he couldn’t see.

  The pack wolf’s instincts sent it to the edge of the herd, set it to pick off the weakest prey. Part of the delicate dance of survival, balancing risk and safety. It was the ultimate reason why those creatures thrived. By comparison, the instincts of the fell wolf were what kept those great monsters in check. Their need to not just hunt to survive, but to destroy for the sake of destruction. To fight simply
for the sake of fighting.

  Lauresa had said it to him. You judge by the instinct of emotions that have their own will, and you never understand that will until too late. You never learn to think except by your rage.

  Kathlan had said it. Barien. It hadn’t mattered in the end.

  They were running now, flat out along the trails that cut through the Ghostwood’s twisted stands of limni, draping moss and black mold to the ground. Chriani could be quiet when he needed to. He had always trusted to the senses his father’s blood had given him, to his ability to see the shadows, hear the faintest movement. He had always made good use of the instincts for speed and silence that his mother had instilled in him. But as the three of them drew closer to the unseen temple, he realized that he was a pretender to the senses and the stillness, the speed and grace of the Ilvani. Nothing more.

  He stayed behind Farenna and Dargana, and was grateful that neither of them looked back to see him struggling to keep their pace. He could move at speed easily enough, and he could move in near-silence when he wanted to. But Chriani had only rarely pushed himself to do both at once, and he felt his footsteps thudding out around him now as if he might be driving cows before him as he ran.

  Because they were armed and armored as a lóechari patrol, they did their best to maintain the pace of the squad they had ambushed. The fear in Chriani was of what would happen if they came across another patrol, no way to guess what routes they ran or what call signs they might be using. He had kept the black ring on, a plan in place that if they were stopped, he was to fall back unseen, then come around from the other side. Farenna and Dargana would buy him time enough to strike, or so they hoped. In the end, though, they detected no signs of the cult except tracks along the paths, no signs of any other Ilvani ahead or behind.

  They saw the shadow then.

  The day was still bright above the forest canopy, but the wood had been steadily thickening as they advanced, the gloom darkening to the point where even Chriani’s eyes were having trouble picking out detail in the far distance. So it was that a deeper darkness caught at his sight even before Farenna and Dargana had seen it, Chriani hissing as he halted.