Three Coins for Confession Read online

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 • Rangers Down

  Chapter 2 • The Deep Wood

  Chapter 3 • The Hunter’s Heart

  Chapter 4 • Chriani’s Promise

  Chapter 5 • Bells in the Night

  Chapter 6 • Legends Once True

  Chapter 7 • A Different Fear

  Chapter 8 • Four Days South

  Chapter 9 • All There Is

  Chapter 10 • The Hidden City

  Chapter 11 • The Lóechari

  Chapter 12 • The Ghostwood

  Chapter 13 • Markura

  Chapter 14 • The Road Behind

  Chapter 15 • The Black Well

  Chapter 16 • Only Memory

  Chapter 17 • The Future Unseen

  Fiction by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  Colophon

  Copyright

  A year and a half has passed since the dark road that took Chriani across the Clearwater Way and back, at the side of the princess he once loved. Despite the anger and ambivalence to duty that once held him back, rank and commission have taken him to the frontier of the Greatwood and riding with the rangers, Kathlan at his side to help him focus on the challenges of a soldier’s life.

  But when Chriani finds himself targeted by Ilvani hunters tied to an ancient prophecy that might upset the balance of power in the Ilmar, it forces him back to the unresolved pact that binds him to the Prince High Chanist — and down a new road whose secrets might destroy the life Chriani and Kathlan hope to build.

  From behind him came a low hiss. A sharp exhalation, a sound of fury and frustration that carried even over the thud of hoofbeats and the horses’ rasping breath.

  “Laóith irnash!”

  The hissing turned to words that rang out behind him. One of the Ilvani, his voice twisted by rage as he screamed an oath. We hunt the vile, we hunt the hateful. We hunt the Ilmari. The Valnirata’s hatred of the Ilmari and their homelands ran deep, and gave their epithet laóith a dozen subtle meanings. Chriani didn’t understand the warrior as he shouted again, though.

  “Lóech arnala irch niir! Lóech niir!”

  He risked a look behind him. The Ilvani warriors always fought in silence. No battle cries, no orders ever heard.

  He saw the rider three lengths back, snaking through the thinning screen of trees. His hair was long streaks of grey and gold, tied tight and flowing fast behind him, his eyes flashing molten gold in the half-light. His leather was cut away at the shoulder for ease of shooting, his bow up and a black arrow at the string, set dead on Chriani. On the wrist of the Ilvani’s bow arm, a blood-red light was flaring.

  “Chriani irnash! Lóech arnala irch niir!”

  It happened slowly, as it always did.

  Chriani heard his name hang across the gulf of shadow and the screen of leaves that wrapped them both. His name, shouted by an Ilvani warrior he’d never seen before. He felt his reflexes slow, felt a chill twist through him as the black arrow snapped from the bow…

  A Novel of the Endlands

  by

  Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  Cover, Design, and Typography

  by (studio)Effigy

  Published by Insane Angel Studios

  insaneangel.com

  For Colleen

  Cal lun tau seryan ede to maynd…

  Not the power to remember,

  but its very opposite, the power to forget,

  is a necessary condition of our existence.

  — Sholem Asch

  Downloadable color map available free at

  http://insaneangel.com/insaneangel/Fiction/Extras.html

  “GREEN SCOUT MARKED!”

  Like the crack of a whip, the distant shout of one of the first-squad rangers split the shadowed stillness of the forest, a following of echo-sound hanging for a moment before it was swallowed by the stifling air. The faint hiss of arrows sang out an instant behind, and Chriani marked the shift and shimmer of the sound to count three distinct shots, far off and unseen.

  His hearing was better than the other rangers of second squad, who reacted only to the voice sounding out a measured distance ahead of them. All of them listened now for the faint thud of hoofbeats to mark the movement of the rangers of first squad, and of the trouble pursuing them.

  A flash of hand signals passed between Sergeant Thelaur and second squad, Chriani and his five fellow rangers drawing to a quick halt in response. The sergeant was a dour veteran half a head shorter than any of the soldiers under her command. But in the five months that command had included Chriani, he had come to recognize that her instincts were sharp and her hearing even sharper. Nearly as sharp as his own, in fact, to judge by her quick sign of three fingers to mark the count of the Ilvani archers. They were somewhere ahead in the green shadow of the Greatwood, spreading to all sides as a deep and impenetrable gloom.

  “Green scout marked!” the voice came again, farther off now.

  “East!” Thelaur hissed to Chriani and the rest. “Three and three. Stay low.” At a touch from the sergeant’s boots, her horse slipped forward, Chriani in the first rank of three rangers close behind her.

  When a ranger called a warning, green was code for moving east — named for the green of the Greatwood that rose like a wall along Brandishear’s eastern frontier. Blue meant a scout was moving north, for the vast expanse of the Clearwater Sea that spread beyond the headlands of Rheran, the great capital and Chriani’s former home, five months behind him now. Gold and grey, west and south, for the grasslands that marked much of Brandishear’s border with the Greatwood, and for the bare slopes of the Analatia Mountains that Chriani had never seen.

  In the complex series of call signs he had learned over his five months on the frontier, there were codes for rangers under attack, codes for rangers wounded, codes for tracks found and followed. There were codes for signs of a war camp, or for predators of the four-legged variety prowling the twisting switchback trails that the Ilvani and their sure-footed horses marked out between the great trees.

  There were codes for rangers down, and for rangers captured — special call signs meant to warn allies that you were caught and compromised, meant to sound like calls for help in the event that an Ilvani warrior of the Valnirata held a long-knife to your throat. In five months of scouting and skirmishes along the edge of the Greatwood and pushing within it, the rangers of Chriani’s company hadn’t had to use either of those. Not yet.

  Their horses moved at a jog to hold their strength, silk ties wrapping off bit joints and stirrups, muffling any clink of metal as they moved. Chriani and the other rangers hunched low, cloaked in green and brown. The forest around them was a perpetual haze of emerald twilight that seemed to mask all movement — shadow and mist slashed through by the twisting strokes of great tree trunks rising up to shroud the sun. Their branches were set with unnaturally broad and scaled evergreen leaves, glimmering gold to jade green depending on their age. These were the great limni of the Greatwood, home to the Ilvani who called that forest Muiraìden.

  Chriani flicked his horse to the right to skirt a gnarled trunk, and a fall of blood ivy dropping from a twisted branch the thickness of his leg. The shower of serrated leaves was pale and wan in the faint light, but it wasn’t the plant’s toxic touch that made him wary. As they made their way along the twisting trails behind the sergeant, the rangers of the squad had stopped and doubled back five times already. It was a common happenstance when following the Ilvani, whose trails were crossed and crossed again with dead ends and false starts. The scattered formation in which the rangers rode while within the forest served double duty, lowering the risk of an entire group fa
lling to ambush even as those in the middle and back ranks could seek out clear paths while the lead rider repositioned.

  The silence in the forest hung over all their patrols like an ever-present shroud, dampening the sound of their horses’ hooves even as it seemed to make the breathing of mounts and riders louder. Today, though, that silence was tinged with a feeling that set Chriani’s nerves on edge — and all the more so because he had no idea as to its source.

  Chriani and the rest of the rangers had been scouting in pursuit of an Ilvani raiding band since first light. They all had bows drawn and arrows nocked, scanning the shadows intently. However, Chriani was the only one who knew they were alone for the moment, the gloom shifting and shimmering like ever-fading fog against the sharp sight of his eyes.

  He had his father’s black hair, the same steel-grey eyes. He never spoke of the sight that was the gift of those eyes and his father, who had once called the Greatwood home. The sight had saved his life on more than one occasion, even as hiding the fact of that sight had saved his life more often. He wore his hair tied back and low, always covering his ears, concealing the faint peak at their tip.

  Of the rangers ranked around Chriani now — his squad mates, sworn to service with him — he judged three that he suspected would never speak to him again if they were to see his ears. One for certain who would try to kill him on the spot if the secret of Chriani’s sight or the parentage that had bestowed it on him were ever known.

  The five who rode beside and behind him under Thelaur’s command were new-made rangers as he was, all of them freshly commissioned in the prince’s guard and on their first field assignments. They were younger than him, as were most members of the troop as a rule. Two years or more for most of them, and with at least a quarter of the troop’s guards barely broken out to breast or beard. Those years were the length of time it had taken Chriani to make rank. The cost of a lack of ambition, and an anger he carried with him still.

  The circumstances under which he’d make rank had become a tale told quietly and with no small amount of animosity throughout the prince’s guard, preceding even his arrival to ranger duty. He had made rank as squire, then been granted his commission to guard in the space of two weeks — a promotion whose quickness made it unusual enough. But then came the rumors that gave his sudden advancement a sense of dark secrecy and bright notoriety all at once. Notoriety for the story of how Chriani had helped deliver the Princess Lauresa to Aerach as the only survivor of a ranger squad ambushed by the Valnirata. Secret for the real truth behind those rumors, which none of the folk of Brandishear or the soldiers of the Bastion knew.

  Chriani’s first night in the ranger camp, bunking with his assigned squad, they had replaced his bedroll with silk sheets. Fate only knows where they’d come from. For the Prince’s Whore, the note tacked to them read. If Chriani had held out any hope that the anger always holding him back was a thing he’d left behind when he left Rheran, the feeling as he crumpled the note erased it.

  When he left Rheran, when he had taken the assignment with the rangers that he’d been wanting for far longer than he could ever admit, Chriani hoped that things would change. Hoped that things had changed. But like the secret of his sight, like the reason for his promotion, his relationship with the Prince High Chanist of Brandishear was a thing Chriani kept secret. And as long as that was the case, he suspected that nothing would ever change enough.

  As the troop rode its patrol, its three squads were scattered by design, with first squad riding ahead of Sergeant Thelaur and her rangers, third squad behind. Standard formation and assembly for forest patrols, where the noise of a full troop would call down an Ilvani ambush in short order.

  The ambitions of the rangers’ forays into the Greatwood were modest. They stayed clear of the deep wood, rarely ranging more than half a league within the perimeter of the forest. That frontier of the Valnirata was an empty expanse of trees that mirrored the Ilmari’s own frontier — the empty belt of wild grassland kept cleared of settlement for fear of Ilvani raiding, and of incursions by the beasts that dwelled in the Greatwood and were found nowhere else in the principalities of the Ilmar. Fell wolves and drakes, trolls and wyverns. The Ilvani drove them from the forest and against the farmsteads that dotted the frontier, it was said. They trained them to the taste of Ilmari flesh by feeding them on captured scouts and errant woodcutters, and on children plucked from their beds in the dead of night.

  They were good tales, as tales went.

  The Ilvani patrols that shadowed the movements of the Ilmari along the frontier were the carontir — the elite ranger scouts of the Greatwood. Only rarely, however, would those scouts slip out to harass the Ilmari farmsteads nearest to the Greatwood’s twisting wall of trees. More common by far were rogue Valnirata riders slipping past their own patrols to do the same. It was likely those rogue Ilvani that the troop was pursuing now — raiders that had crossed the boundary of the forest for two weeks past, harassing the close-standing farmsteads by dark of night. No casualties had been reported, but barns had been burned, flocks sniped and scattered by bowshot.

  Three days before, the troop of Guard Sergeant Thelaur had been ordered to end it.

  Chriani’s sight, his hearing, even his sense of scent were things he had learned to trust long ago. Even so, no threat came to eye or ear now, the air close and thick with the forest’s familiar musk of rot and loam. He was already slowing, though, wary, when another hand signal from Thelaur ahead of him made all the rangers rein up sharply. She stood at a fork in the path, both branches twisting out into shadow that made it impossible to read their direction for more than a dozen paces.

  As Thelaur considered their course, Chriani tapped two fingers to his thumb. The faint pulse of sound was a signal among the rangers, used whenever calling out by voice might bring a Valnirata arrow from the shadows. He got Thelaur’s attention, but then raised her ire when he spurred forward to get within whispering distance.

  “Something’s wrong,” he hissed.

  “An attempt at specificity would be welcome, master Chriani. Or should I strike a guess?” The sergeant’s whisper carried a sharpness like steel scratching glass. Chriani had heard her offer honest commendations that left people shaking. Other people, at any rate. Even after five months in her squad, Chriani’s performance had given Thelaur precious little to commend so far.

  “Just a feeling. There’s something…” Chriani began, but Thelaur stopped him with a chopping motion of hand over hand. She made no attempt to hide her anger as she signaled him to fall back, motioning Ettroch in the third rank to take his place behind her. Chriani’s horse slipped back and was turning even before he spurred it, as if it recognized the command more clearly than he did.

  He had trouble following orders. That’s what his first report from Sergeant Thelaur had said. Also, his second and third. It was an echo of every inspection, every presentation, every assignment he had ever taken at the Bastion — the castle of the Prince High Chanist in Rheran. The Bastion had been Chriani’s home for more than ten years, since the day Barien had taken him in. Barien who was a sergeant of the prince’s guard, and who had been friend and confidante to Prince Chanist. Barien who was dead now, and whose death had been the point at which Chriani’s life changed.

  For ten years in the Bastion, Chriani had learned and grown at Barien’s side. The initial quickness and determination he had shown was shaped by the veteran warrior to a skill with the bow that few other tyros of the guard could match. However, in all that time of shaping, Chriani had never learned to care about the official strata of rank and title on which life in the Bastion was based. More importantly — and more frustratingly for Barien — he had seemingly taken great delight in actively fighting against the even more important strata of seniority and experience.

  If it were ever possible to aggravate a person in a position of authority over him, Chriani would do so. As an unranked tyro, he had enraged other tyros, ranked squires, and guards alike. Sergea
nts and other officers. Barien had watched it happen. Had laughed about it as often as not. But he’d been steadfast in reminding Chriani that when the anger was done, those squires and sergeants and captains would remain his peers and superiors. And he would find himself stuck where he was unless things changed.

  “Find yourself a new path,” Barien had told him more than once. “Or you end up walking behind the same people your whole life, whether you see them or not.”

  Over five months of riding the frontier, Chriani had tried not to think of the path that brought him there. The path he had finally chosen, setting out on a cold morning from Rheran, seemingly a lifetime ago. He turned his mind away from that short spread of days that had transformed his life, like a season of storms had scoured his world and left it remade. Transformed.

  Only one other person knew the truth of what had happened to Chriani. The truth of the path that had changed him, and that truth would stay safe with her.

  No.

  The thought came sharply to his mind as it always did. Not a thing he’d forgotten, but one he had tried to forget. A reminder that in fact, two other people knew the truth. And in that thought were all his reasons for wanting to forget.

  He set his horse to the left of a rotting nurse stump sprouting a half-dozen new trees, Chriani not liking the snarled look of the underbrush to the other side of it. As he did, a familiar itch rose at the forefinger of his right hand where it gripped the reins. Another memory that wasn’t memory, the sensation came and went. A reminder in touch and feeling that Chriani had lost that finger once. Had watched as it was hacked off cleanly by an Ilvani exile, left to rot on the forest floor.

  The animys of restoration had grown it back for him at the end of his path of change, courtesy of the Prince High Chanist’s own healers. He had refused them at first when they came to him, intent on owning the injury for life as a reminder of what he’d been through. They explained it wasn’t an offer, but an order from the prince high himself. Payment for services to the crown.