He felt the loss of his own father. Understood how it had crippled him instead. Threatened to break him.
All his weakness, all his anger. All the lessons of his life that he had forgotten or would never learn. The empty space inside him that his father had left, that his mother had tried to fill before fate took her from him, too soon. Barien and Kathlan. Everything they had tried to show him, with Chriani thwarting them every step of the way. That legacy of failure he would carry with him to the last moments of his life.
Those last moments were almost on him. Chriani blinked.
He was caught in the timelessness of memory, sensing and seeing the scene move around him. A slowness of body, a quickness of thought and mind. It let him judge the movement of Viranar as she pushed back against him, let him use that movement against her as he thrust straight down with both hands, twisted the bloodblade around.
The loops of chain that bound the coins of the confessor were twisted around their conjoined hands as Chriani punched the dagger up beneath the sorcerer’s ribs and into her heart.
It didn’t kill her. He had no idea how. He felt the scream her life made as her skin pulsed gold and a strength twisted through her, forcing him back. She lashed out with her hands, tried to gouge his eyes out. Tore at his throat with her teeth, the blood of her broken nose making a red-black mask of her face.
Chriani fought back with a strength only partly his own. He felt Dargana’s hand at the bloodblade as he tore it free and struck again, feeling its balance and weight with a lifelong familiarity that countered the hindrance of his bound hands. He punched the blade into Viranar’s chest, turning it to lock within a cradle of splintered ribs. Then with both hands, he used that bloody steel lever to turn the sorcerer, smashing into her face with his head again to drive her back toward the edge of the platform. One step away.
He recognized the sensation of arrows slamming into him, but he couldn’t feel their bite. He was dying, didn’t care anymore. He would finish it, for Kathlan and the others. For Dargana. It was done.
He tore the dagger from Viranar as he punched into her with his foot, driving her back. The blade slipped from his blood-soaked hand to hit the platform somewhere behind him. He let go of the coins as he staggered backward, the sorcerer’s hands tearing at them, trying to reach them as both she and the amulet fell back screaming into shadow.
The swirling darkness erupted to a storm of dead black like it had when Chriani watched Farenna fall, and the sentries the captain had taken with him. He saw Viranar’s body consumed by shadow, flesh and bone drawn away to black tendrils and unspooled like tangled yarn. The coins flared with the molten light of a winter sunset, then shattered with a crack like thunder. Then they were gone.
Chriani was on the ground, couldn’t remember falling. He could barely see as the darkness descended on him, swallowing him whole. But as the coins were consumed, he felt the last tentative touch of the link of mind and memory fall away. The eyes of the Ilvani closest to him flickered gold to green, and grey and brown, black and silver. He heard shouts of alarm, footsteps racing away from him. Then there was just the sound of the black storm.
He tried to stand but couldn’t. He tried to drag himself forward, but there was no purchase to be found on the blood-slick platform. A wave of pain crashed down over him, the taste of metal fading from his mouth. A half-dozen arrows were perforating his legs, jutting out of his back and shoulders.
Fire was bright in the distance, flaring even through the darkness. The hiss of arrows rose, hoofbeats pounding hard, growing louder. He didn’t understand it.
He heard the call of Ilvani voices shouting out in alarm. The Valnirata fought in silence, though. Something had changed.
“Laóith!” they screamed.
His hands were free. Chriani felt the raw flesh at his wrists marked by cleaner cuts where he must have used the bloodblade to slice through the silk ropes. He couldn’t remember it. The blade was in his hand, though, and he was using it like a climbing axe as he drove it into the platform, pulled himself slowly forward like he was scaling some sheer wall.
He couldn’t remember where he was going, couldn’t understand why the pain had stopped. The bloodblade was warm in his hand, Dargana’s strength still clutching it. Holding it fast even as his own strength failed.
“Chriani!”
He thought he heard Kathlan calling to him, but she was a world away. He had done it for her, though. The Ilmari could catch the cultists by surprise now, their power crippled. The Laneldenari were safe from the treason that had infected them without their seeing it.
Things would be better now, he hoped. It was done.
“Chriani! Fate and faith, no!”
The glow of mage-light was bright around him. He tasted a bitterness at his lips, then felt himself lifted off the ground by a storm of pain that took his sight away.
He was gagging, more liquid forced to his lips, but he couldn’t drink it fast enough. He felt hands on him, heard other voices calling from far off.
“…dead three times over…”
There was a darkness, then a light.
“…fate and fucking moonsign, what’s keeping him…”
Someone was calling his name, telling him to hold on. He thought it was Dargana at first, her voice in his mind again. Find your path, half-blood. But then he recognized Kathlan, speaking softly.
“It’s all right… It’s all right…”
Someone was holding him, and he wished suddenly and with all his life and heart that it could have been her. Not just a dream. One last moment in Kathlan’s arms would have made it better, he thought, before the darkness took him away.
HE WAS BACK IN RHERAN, but it was a memory, not a dream. A subtle difference within the cascade of images, of scent and sound that washed through him in the dark. Chriani didn’t understand how he knew. He just accepted it. Welcomed it in what he knew must be the last moments of his life. The past running before him at the end, like the old warriors all said.
He and Kathlan had come together at the harvest fest, High Autumn of three years before. He remembered it with a strange clarity, all his present darkness seeming to sharpen the sight of the past. A night of wine and song around the market court fires, Kathlan taking up a duet with Barien — an ethereal lyric of fathers and daughters, love and time that had driven into Chriani’s heart like a blunted stake as he watched her.
Late that night came a moment he had long known was coming. From the time Barien had taken him in at eight years, he had told Chriani — had warned him repeatedly — of the danger of showing the war-mark at his shoulder to anyone in the Bastion, anyone in the prince’s guard. Though she worked within the walls of the keep and alongside tyros and squires alike, Kathlan wasn’t of the Bastion or the guard. But this did little to temper the fear that churned in him as he felt that moment drawing closer. Both of them overwhelmed by the celebration of a summer gone, and by spiced wine and firelight, and by an intensity of feeling that left Chriani light-headed as Kathlan led him to her loft above the stables beneath a moonless sky, stars blazing bright and warm.
Chriani had fumbled his way through the overtures. Had attempted to keep his shirt on at first, but Kathlan was having none of that. He had known the day would come at some point, but he hadn’t expected it quite so soon. Had no idea how to stop it, how to stop her. No idea what would happen as she pulled his tunic off his shoulder and saw the mark there.
She hesitated, to be sure. But in the end, all she said was, “Tell me.” So Chriani did. He told her all of it, the words rushing from him in a flood that spoke to how long he’d been holding them inside. The things he’d only ever told Barien before. The reasons why he’d kept them secret for so long.
When he was done, Kathlan told him her story. Where she’d come from, how she’d gotten to Rheran, her parents dead. “I’ll keep your secret,” she said in the end. “Don’t worry about what’s done.”
The rest of that night was a blur to him now, with
the months that had followed it almost as much so. He had turned away from Kathlan for a time. He had gone to Aerach and returned, and had forgotten in the year and a half since then how many things had changed with that return.
He had forgotten what it felt like to accept the solitude. To expect that he would always be alone. Had forgotten how long it took him to break past that. He should have known it sooner, he thought within the dream. Waiting for the darkness to close around him for good.
He should have told Kathlan what she was to him when he had the chance. He should have told her what she’d done.
Chriani awoke to daylight and the feel of healing magic coursing through him, clearing his thoughts, washing away the pain. A half-dozen points of a bright aching were fading in him now, where arrows had pierced him. At least two of those carried the sharp sense of having hit bone, but even that pain was only memory now.
His arms and legs felt like glass chimes, so fragile that they might shatter if he moved too quickly. His skin was clammy, warm against the chill in the air. It was the brief weakness that came with the magic of healing, but Chriani had never felt it so intensely before. He thought on what that might mean about how close to death he had been. Then he pushed that thought away, down into the shadow where it would hide for a time.
Kathlan was holding him. He couldn’t see her, but he knew her presence all the same, feeling her arms around him where he lay slumped on his side.
He was conscious of the sounds of distant shouting, horses on the run. Scattered bowshot over the faint hiss of wind through the trees. Something dark was falling all around him, carrying the scent of charred paper. His vision flickered as he tried to focus, thought for a moment that he might still be dreaming.
He felt Kathlan’s breath at his neck. Knew it was real.
“Kath…”
“You need to not move for now,” she said quietly. “You’ve taken enough magic to bring a full squad back from just this side of dead. The healer’s not sure how you held on so long.”
“I did it for you…”
It was all he could say, the thought etched in his mind as if he was finishing a conversation he’d started with himself a long time ago. He felt the words burning bright, shining like steel scraping at the darkness. He could see torches along the platform, the floating motes of mage-light gone. The black well’s haze of shadow was before him, but it had changed somehow. Swirling more slowly, drifting down instead of venting upward. Above him was the faint glimmer of a sunset sky.
The well was silent, he realized. The falling darkness was the slow storm of leaves shedding from the great black tree, swirling down around them like a gentle rain.
Slowly, Chriani raised himself up to sitting, Kathlan’s arms disengaging from him. He didn’t turn back, couldn’t look at her yet. More slowly, he stood. He felt a wave of dizziness wash through him, quickly pass.
He turned to survey the terraces around him, seeing them littered with arrows but only three Ilvani dead. A half-dozen guards in the livery of Aerach were spread around him and Kathlan, walking a slow patrol along the edges of the platform. They were alert, cautious as if they expected a horde of Valnirata to suddenly swing down from the adjacent trees. Beyond and below them, where the well of shadow had been, Chriani could look down to see nothing but ash now. The roots of the great tree were cracked and splintered where they thrust up above that grey-black field. Between two of those roots, the twisted pillar of stone had collapsed to a lighter grey stain.
He moved carefully, took three cautious steps toward the bodies. All warriors in the grey armor of the cult, felled by Aerachi arrows. Some part of his mind that cared about such things noted that the pale captain Raecla wasn’t among them. Chriani set the thought aside. It didn’t matter anymore. It was over.
Tician wasn’t there. That thought stayed with him a little longer, though Chriani expected that the assassin must have bolted the moment the Aerachi arrived in full force. But as his gaze swept the platform, he saw the blood trail he’d left from the edge nearest the black tree, where he had tried to step over and into oblivion. Tried and failed. He marked the smoothly arcing lines that said he’d been dragged a half-dozen steps from that edge, then marked the rougher movement where he had clawed his way forward with the bloodblade in hand.
The ropes that had bound him were cast aside at the point where he’d started moving on his own. He didn’t remember cutting them. Could only recall the wounds at his wrists that a knife hacking through the ropes had made.
He saw the rough edges of those ropes where they’d been severed. Not by the razor-smooth edge of the bloodblade, which he had dropped as Viranar died, then claimed again somehow. It was a smaller knife that had sliced through them. A jagged blade, someone freeing him before the Aerachi arrived. Tician had dragged him from the edge, had cut his bonds. She found Dargana’s dagger, set it back in his hand.
The assassin had saved him. Again. Chriani set the thought aside, let it slip into the shadow. It was over.
“Sergeant Kathlan. It’s all but done in the woods.” The voice carried a strength that echoed heavy footfalls along the platform, a tall figure wearing the insignia of an Aerachi captain approaching at a brisk walk.
“And here, lord,” Kathlan called in response. She shifted in toward Chriani, who understood that by doing so, she was blocking the incoming officer’s view of him for just a moment. He felt her push something into his hand. The black ring, which she must have taken off him.
“That’s Captain Shara,” she said as Chriani slipped the ring to his belt. “He commands this troop, made me an acting sergeant. You’re going to come with us. Do you understand?”
Chriani nodded, turning toward the captain, but Kathlan stopped him with a hand. He saw the cinched rope restraints she held.
“I need to arrest you,” she said quietly.
From the corner of his eye, Chriani sensed a pattern to the movement of the guards around him that he hadn’t noted before. He understood that he was at the center of the patrol they walked. It was him they were watching, their eyes straying to the Ilvani leather he wore, the war-mark that armor revealed at his shoulder.
“I understand,” he said. Pieces falling into place. Whatever chance had brought Kathlan to his side in time to save him, this was an enemy extraction, not a rescue mission. The charges against him as a result of the war-mark at his shoulder being revealed, the fear of whatever plots of the Ilvani he was part of, were both strong enough that a full troop had been sent into the Ghostwood to find him. Repayment for his betrayal.
“I understand,” he said again, but for the benefit of the Aerachi captain this time as he stopped close. Shara was an older veteran, wind-burned and close-shaved, thickly muscled in the manner of one who’d been a warrior all his life. Chriani was surprised, though, to see an even temper in his gaze. None of the bluster in Venry, or the raw hatred he remembered from Jeradien’s eyes, and which he saw echoed in three of the guards around him now.
Dargana’s bloodblade was on the platform two strides from where he had woken. Kathlan stooped to pick it up, wiping it clean with a cloth from her belt pouch before she handed it to Shara. He showed no fear as he took it, held it up to examine it. Chriani saw only admiration in the captain’s gaze for the quality and construction of the blade.
As Kathlan stepped close, she pushed Chriani’s wrists together, preparing to bind him. They would leave his hands in front of him at least, for riding. Chriani raised his hand to stop her, felt the quick tension in her.
“Captain Shara. Before I’m arrested, I have a favor to ask.”
The captain’s eyes flicked over to Chriani from the bloodblade, angled so that the light danced across its glyph-etched steel. “You’re in a poor position for favors, son.”
“How many did you lose in the assault, lord?”
Shara’s eyes narrowed. Chriani had no reason to hope for a conversation with the captain, but something in the Aerachi’s manner made him speak. Reminding
him of Barien.
“Eight wounded, none dead,” Shara said, “by the grace of fate and steel. Lucky for you and your cause, I’d say.”
“It wasn’t luck, lord. When you approached the temple, you would have seen the patrol trails, but I’m guessing you met no sentries.” Shara made no response, but Chriani saw acknowledgement flicker in the captain’s eyes. “You have war-mages with you. I saw fire in the trees, then heard arrows to follow. You saw the Ilvani scatter, then. They were fleeing even as you attacked.”
“The Ilvani excel at skirmish tactics, son, but they know better than to stand against Aerachi rangers on a mission. They broke when they read the odds…”
“They broke because I slew the mage who led them and shut down the magic of this place. I’d wager that your mages are on the ground right now, reading the dweomer around the black tree. Feeling it fade. Ask them. And know that if I hadn’t done what I did, this assault would have ended differently.”
Shara was silent a moment. His eyes drifted from Chriani to Kathlan and back again. Carefully, the captain set the bloodblade into his belt. As he did, Chriani realized that he had never wondered before at whether the narneth móir held any of the magic said to be second nature to the Valnirata Ilvani. The crafting and history of the blades had always made their legend powerful enough in his own mind, even before he’d seen one for the first time. But he was thinking now of the real power Dargana’s blade had fed to him in that desperate moment at the platform’s edge. The memories of the exile leader, and the strength of her that had saved his life.
“Lieutenant Venry has accused you of treason, son.” Captain Shara said it evenly. Almost apologetically. “He has the duke’s ear in this. Fighting against the Ilvani doesn’t absolve you of working for them in the first place.”
“I have one favor to ask of you, lord,” Chriani said again. “When that’s done, Venry and your duke can accuse me of whatever they like.”
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