Three Coins for Confession Read online

  “Ride hard!” he shouted, though the steady thunder of hoofbeats behind him made the order unnecessary. He hadn’t looked back to see if he’d lost any of the three who’d followed him, but he could see Umeni on his far right flank now, three riders still with him.

  Kathlan was one of those riders. Chriani felt something bright surge within him as she outpaced the others, even with Thelaur’s body draped across her legs. As they all ran, she pulled closer to Chriani where the trails began to split and widen to open ground.

  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.

  “Chriani!”

  His name again, but from the right side this time. The endless moment surrounded him, giving him time to see Kathlan from the corner of his eye. She twisted her horse in to drive his a half step to the side as they both broke through the sentinel trees at the forest’s edge. Then she muffled a cry as the arrow that would have taken Chriani in the back punched into her shoulder instead with the crunch of breaking bone.

  A surge of pain and nausea twisted through Chriani, spreading from his gut and threatening to knock him from the saddle. One hand clutched at his stomach, then swung around to his back to see if he’d been hit, but there was nothing there. The other hand grabbed at Kathlan, but she shrugged him off where she lashed her reins tight around one hand.

  A wave of brightness washed over Chriani, and a pulse of clean air. They were out and free, racing across open ground and through a field of autumn-gold oat grass, blown to gentle waves by a rising wind. He twisted to look back, saw Umeni and the others following close. He waited for the volley of arrows across the clear and open space behind them, but it never came. There was just the dark wall of the forest rising, the sloped canopy of leaves rippled by the wind and glowing green-gold in the day’s last light.

  Of the Ilvani, there was no sign.

  AT A HUNDRED PACES from the trees, Umeni’s voice rang out over the breathing of exhausted horses, the drumming of hooves. “Rangers hold!”

  They were all looking behind them, waiting for the Ilvani that Chriani knew instinctively were long gone back to the green shadow. His heart was racing, pain twisting through him as he let his horse slow, easing it into a walk. His mind was working even faster, a spill of furious thought cascading through him too fast to focus on.

  The Ilvani had called his name.

  “Blood, mother, and fuck me…”

  The edge of pain in Kathlan’s voice brought Chriani back to something like a focused state of mind. She was on her knees on the grass, her horse wandering off to where Umeni and two others approached it. Sergeant Thelaur’s body was still draped across its back.

  Kathlan had a wad of cloth held to the arrow where its head was buried in her shoulder, its black shaft gleaming in the light of the setting sun. Her face was pale, but the slow ooze of red-black across her armor told Chriani the arrow had missed the fast blood.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said as he slipped from his horse. He stumbled as he stepped toward her, righted himself.

  “Spoken like someone who doesn’t have an arrow in the arm.”

  “Just hold it for now. Take healing when it’s drawn. Staunch the bleeding, flush the blood-fever.”

  But as Chriani knelt close to her, reaching in to help her keep pressure on the wound, he lurched as the nausea hit him in a second wave. Something hot and sharp was burrowing inside him, like a broken dagger nesting in his gut. Kathlan had to reach out to steady him, her hand as he brushed it awkwardly away showing the blood welling on his own arm.

  Her tone softened just a little. “You’re hurt.”

  “No,” Chriani said, and it should have been true. The arrow had cut him, but he couldn’t feel it through the rising wave of pain that occluded all else. Poison, maybe? But there was no burning in the wound itself. He’d felt the chill of blood-shock before, knew this was something else. Only the hammering at his heart was familiar to him.

  He was afraid, he realized.

  He’d seen Kathlan shot in front of him, an arm’s length away. And it had terrified him. He recognized that fear. Felt it surge out from the space he’d been carrying it since the day they rode out from Rheran for duty on the frontier, even as he tried to hide it. He knew how she’d react if she saw it in him.

  “Don’t do this,” she said quietly. Too late, then.

  “I’m not doing anything…”

  “You’re paying mind to me where it isn’t needed, and I’m not the only one noticing.”

  “You need healing. Thelaur should have had a draught with her…”

  “Thelaur’s dead, and Teobryn and Geran,” Kathlan hissed, low enough that only Chriani would hear. “And there’s at least three others who need healing more than I do right now. I’m shot and both squads are in shambles, but I’m not where I need you nursemaiding me just yet. And I need the rest of troop seeing you treat me like I can’t handle myself even less.”

  Chriani stood shakily in response, felt a wave of dizziness pass through him.

  “See to your horse,” Kathlan said. “Then see to yourself. Or thinking on it, see to my horse, then to yourself. It’s worth two of you any day.”

  Chriani walked back to where his horse and Kathlan’s were pacing, trembling. Kathlan’s chestnut mare had been brought from the Bastion stables, a horse she’d reared and trained herself. He knew she was right about its worth. As he pulled both horses to a slow walk, he caught the glances from the other rangers, the quick flick of eyes from him to Kathlan and back again. It told him she was right as well about them noticing.

  Chriani had to struggle to walk and cool both horses at once, but they settled in time. The rangers kept their mounts saddled against the risk of unexpected attack, but as they walked them, they pulled their saddlebags loose and were cooling the horses with the last of their water, wiping them down with felt as they moved.

  The sound of hoofbeats to the north along the forest wall caught Chriani’s ear before any of the others could hear it. As they did so a moment later, a surge of panic pushed through the rangers, bows drawn. But he had already recognized the sound as their own horses, their cadence different from that of the lighter Ilvani steeds. It was the riders of first squad that Thelaur’s rangers had been in pursuit of when everything had gone so wrong. They were seven strong and all accounted for, Chriani saw, their horses barely winded.

  Umeni strode out to meet them from where he’d been kneeling at Sergeant Thelaur’s body, wrapped now with his own cloak and hers. She was lying in the tall grass, her weapons beside her. The arrow that killed her was set atop
her body, pulled from her chest but not broken. Standard procedure for any Ilvani weapons and ammunition claimed on patrol, the war-mages wanting to read them for magic. The arrow that had struck Kathlan had that look about it. Another reason not to draw it until she was safely back at the camp.

  Chriani irnash!

  They’d been hunting him. The Ilvani had called his name.

  By the time the horses had fully calmed, the nausea and the churning fear had passed. Chriani’s thoughts were focused, playing back the frantic last moments of their escape in mind and memory. He tried to tell himself he had only imagined it. The voice coming steel-sharp on the air, masked by the pounding of hoofbeats and his own heart.

  Chriani irnash! Lóech arnala irch niir!

  We hunt Chriani. A call for his blood, and the other words that he didn’t understand but whose fury he felt all the same. He had frozen at the sound of that voice. Had felt it reaching for him, like the calling of his name was a sight line on which the arrow had been hung. But how would the Ilvani know him? Commissioned for only a year and a half. Most of that time spent in the Bastion guard, then five months with the rangers along a frontier whose most significant battle had been fought only today.

  Chriani felt a rising anger, recognized it as the frustration of having something looming before him that he somehow couldn’t see. A screen of thought and churning questions were hanging like moss and shadow from the trees, shutting down the path he knew lay somewhere beyond it.

  It was his mother who had first taught him to focus his thoughts, focus his mind. Seeing even at a young age how easily angered her son could be, how quick to leap to distraction — or perhaps seeing something in him of the mind of his father who he’d never really known. Quick to judgement, quick to anger.

  Chriani remembered a night by the fire. A winter he recalled before the summer when his mother had died, thrown by her horse and too far from a healer’s touch.

  She had told him of how the fire warms the hearth, and he remembered sitting with her before its bright blazing light. But fire was safe only when it was slowed, she said. One spark, one crack of flame would dazzle the eye and sear the skin, the touch of that fast fire burning. He remembered holding out his child’s hand toward the flame, just long enough to feel it grow uncomfortable before his mother lowered it toward the hearth, and the softer warmth there. Heat drawn in by air and stone, to be soaked up slowly. Warming without burning.

  The Ilvani had been pursuing second squad, sweeping past them on both sides. An ambush set, the track Chriani had seen that Thelaur hadn’t believed. The Ilvani pursuit had hemmed them in but not pressed the clear advantage. The riders waiting for something.

  First squad had ridden out of the Greatwood without a mark on them, the Valnirata seemingly ignoring them.

  The Ilvani had called his name.

  Instinct and anger were like the fire, Chriani’s mother had often told him. Reminding him, trying to teach him to not react to the quick thought, the quick fear. Let it build slow to show the truer thought, and the real fear beneath it.

  “Chriani.” Umeni’s voice from behind him chased questions and memory alike from his mind.

  “We need to follow them,” Chriani said even as he turned. The thought and the words coming in one stroke, unbidden.

  Umeni stood two steps ahead of Makaysa, ranking guard and leader of first squad. She was of an age with Chriani, and someone he had known at the Bastion. She’d made tyro a year after him, but had stayed at the citadel less than four years before making squire, being sent to the rangers, and never coming back. She wore a look of quiet contemplation now to contrast Umeni’s dour countenance. Still, both showed the same surprise in response to Chriani’s words.

  “We’ll send a rested squad back from camp to retrieve the fallen,” Umeni said coldly. “Not that such a decision needs any suggestion from you.”

  “I’m not talking for the bodies. We need to find the Ilvani…”

  “And while I’m sure that might be relevant to some other discussion, this discussion concerns your breaking rank and formation without order or authorization.”

  It was Chriani’s turn to show surprise. “You’re welcome,” he said.

  “Excuse me, soldier?”

  “My apologies. You’re welcome, lord. We need to follow the Ilvani. Now.”

  As a tangible surge of antagonism rose in Umeni, Chriani saw Makaysa smirk behind him. Among the guards, there were only minimal distinctions of rank but plenty of battles for seniority, he knew. He and all the others who wore the falcon of Brandis stitched in silver at their shoulders earned the right to lord themselves over squires and tyros at their whim. But guards likewise fought subtle battles to ascend the tiers of commissioned rank and responsibility, which determined how the guard sergeants and other officers would lord it over them in turn.

  “Your actions,” Umeni said, “put two squads at potential risk. You called archers to you with no order or corroboration…”

  “Thelaur was dead. Who should I have…?”

  “Me, fool. As ranking guard of third squad…”

  Chriani turned his attention to Makaysa, a calculated taunt to Umeni’s rapidly rising sense of indignation.

  “Before Sergeant Thelaur was killed, she had been advised that second squad were being pursued. We saw signs…”

  “Enough!” Umeni said, loud enough that Chriani knew he meant for his voice to carry.

  “First squad called out green scout marked,” Chriani said to Makaysa. “You came under fire, yes? But there was no pursuit, because the Ilvani were using you to draw second squad in.”

  “For what reason, soldier?” Makaysa’s tone suggested that even if she had no interest in Chriani’s story, she would embrace it for the rage it was inciting in Umeni.

  “That’s what we need to find out…”

  “Rangers, mount up!” Umeni shouted over him. “Field formation for the return to camp. Eyes on the forest as we go.”

  Umeni’s squad reacted quickly to his order, the other rangers less so. Chriani looked past the seething guard to see Kathlan on her feet, her arm slung and tied tight to her chest to keep the shoulder and the arrow from moving. She was loading her saddlebags one-handed, getting ready to ride.

  Other eyes were on him, but Kathlan’s expression was the only one he felt the need to read. He saw the warning in that expression. A sense not of disapproval, but of impatience. Of an irritation that flared up with each increasingly erratic thing Chriani did — and with the quiet worry that came with wondering what he might do.

  He knew that look. Had seen it countless times since he and Kathlan had been assigned to the rangers. “Eight years a tyro,” she had told him during one particularly long and rain-filled day along the road from Rheran, “and doing everything in your power to keep that streak going as long as you could. But you’ve made rank and commission and got a future to think of. You’re done with the games now.”

  It hadn’t been a question, so Chriani hadn’t answered it at the time. He’d seen the look in her eyes, though. The same as he saw now.

  Umeni stepped in front of him, blocking his view. More quietly, the ranking guard spoke. “I’ll ask the same questions about your games in the forest when we return to camp, soldier. Only there’ll be captains present this time, and I don’t think they’ll find your insubordination as amusing as you…”

  Chriani’s foot lashed out to hook between Umeni’s legs, sending the guard face-first to the dirt with a quick twist. “Thank you for the horse,” he said to Makaysa, seeing her smile waver. Then he was running.

  He had seen the horses of first squad loosely staked near Thelaur’s body, had marked off the distance in his mind even as he drove Umeni to the ground. Bootsteps came a moment behind him, as he expected. Knowing that Umeni would try to charge Chriani in his rage before calling to anyone in his squad — or worse, Thelaur’s or Makaysa’s squads — to stop him.

  Chriani snatched up the reins of the first horse he
reached and kept running. The animal showed no surprise as it lurched to speed alongside him. Then he swung himself up to the saddle at a run, digging his heels in to feel the horse spring forward from trot to gallop. Umeni was screaming something behind him, but he didn’t bother to hear it. The forest loomed as a wall of shifting green before him. He didn’t look back.

  Chriani felt the anger flag even as the shadow fell once more, the forest looming around him as he drove the horse through along the same trail that had led them out of the Greatwood. Behind him a moment before, there’d been the faint gold of grass and fields shimmering through the trees. Now his eyes were adjusting to the gloom as he left the brightness of the sky behind, saw the fainter brightness spread around him where the canopy of leaves let its drizzle of faint sun through.

  He had no idea what he was doing, no idea what he was searching for. But in that complete lack of planning was an uneasy familiarity, Chriani knowing it should have bothered him more than it did.

  He played the fight back in his mind as he rode, tried to assess and count off how many of the Ilvani had fallen. How many might be left. Eight was the number he kept coming back to, so he held it hopefully in mind. He thought about the risk of ambush, then discarded it. They had let first squad go, that thought circling in his mind still, tugging at him.

  He had no idea where the Ilvani had come from, how long they’d been following Thelaur’s second squad. But Makaysa and her rangers had appeared from the trees less than half a league from where Chriani and the others spilled out from the forest wall. If the Ilvani had wanted ambush, if they wanted blood for revenge or to pay for the escape of their chosen targets, first squad would have presented them a perfect opportunity. Instead, the survivors had vanished.

  All he had to do was find them. Simple.

  Chriani shook his head, heard all the voices of his youth calling him a fool in his mind. Barien, Kathlan. Makaysa once, back when both were tyros. He’d almost forgotten it. A shared watch in the armories one night, and Chriani trying to impress her by showing off his skill with a thrown dagger against one of the main chamber’s battered ceiling posts. Except he’d missed and sent a stack of shields to a noisy tumble. The sergeant-at-arms heard him. It hadn’t ended well.