Three Coins for Confession Read online

  In the few times their paths had crossed in the camp, Makaysa had made no sign that she recognized or remembered him. Probably for the best.

  Chriani let his horse slow as the trail took them back toward the last point of the battle. There, through the gloom, he saw bodies. Two Ilmari soldiers and their horses, scattered at a distance along the forest’s skein of twisted paths. One Ilvani horse lay dead a short way off, but there was no sign of any of the Valnirata warriors that had fallen. Those bodies would have been dragged away from the battle site, Chriani knew, to be given whatever rites were practiced in the Greatwood. The Valnirata didn’t return their dead to their homes or families. Just hid them away in the darkness of the forest close to where they fell, leaving them to nature but out of sight of enemies who might desecrate them. Even if he’d had time to look for those Ilvani dead, Chriani knew he’d never find them.

  He dismounted to check the Ilmari fallen, though, saw their weapons gone and bodies looted. Arrows had dropped them both. Teobryn and Geran, Kathlan had said their names were. Chriani wouldn’t have known it otherwise.

  The horses had their saddlebags emptied, the Valnirata clearly taking their time as they fell back. He found the signs of that retreat easily enough, tracks marking where the light Ilvani steeds had circled before veering off along a trail that opened up to the north, breaking northeast before it vanished into shadow.

  Within the field of hoofprints as they funneled off to a single chaotic line, Chriani saw the familiar track. Three circles cut into the half-moon. He was still staring at it when he heard the sound of horses rising from behind him.

  As before, he knew it wasn’t the Ilvani even before he caught first sight of movement through the trees. He felt a shard of anger spike, having counted on Umeni being too obstinate to follow him. The horse he’d stolen had a standard-issue shortbow clipped to the saddle, light for his taste but serviceable, and good enough that he could have sent warning shots behind him. Chriani left it there as he swung on and spurred ahead, though. No point in giving Umeni any more reason to shoot him in response.

  Even as he slipped the horse at speed into the dark screen of the trees, though, it was Makaysa’s voice he heard calling to him.

  “Blue scout shown green. Blue to green.” North to east. Announcing that she had seen him, was following his course. Then a louder call. “Clearmoon’s full light. Chriani!”

  Chriani reined to a stop. He lingered for a moment, heard the others approaching at a trot. Not giving chase.

  Clearmoon’s full light was the call that all was well. Clear and safe to approach. Its counter, designed specifically to be used by rangers captured or cornered by the Valnirata, was Clearmoon, dark night. Not many of the Valnirata Ilvani spoke the Ilmari language in one of its regional dialects, so that the rhyme of the two calls made it difficult for the Ilvani ear to tell which was which. This allowed the hope that a captured ranger could attempt to sound a warning if tortured into calling allies into ambush.

  Chriani swung the horse around, stiffly cantered forward from deep shadow to the paler light of the open paths.

  Makaysa was leading five of her rangers, nodding to Chriani as she drew abreast of him. He wondered for a moment where the last rider of first squad was, then realized stupidly that he was astride that rider’s horse. He didn’t know the others by name, but if the dark looks they gave him were any indication, they knew who he was.

  “You shouldn’t ride off ahead like that,” Makaysa said. The familiar smile played across her lips, her eyes bright in the shadows. “Someone might think I hadn’t ordered you to join me on this sortie.”

  Chriani felt a look of profound surprise twist across his face, fought to quell it as he nodded. Makaysa was covering for him, but what her reasons might be, he had no idea. Perhaps annoying Umeni was reward enough in the complex game of ambition and power the ranger guards all played.

  “Sorry,” was all he could think to say.

  “Sorry what, soldier?” Makaysa had angled herself so that only Chriani could see her smile widen.

  “Sorry, lord.”

  “Much better. Now enlighten me as to why I’ve called this patrol.”

  The mockery in her tone shouldn’t have bothered him, but Chriani felt the faint burn of anger rising in his chest as he turned away. He gestured to the dark side trail ahead. “The Ilvani looted the bodies, interred their own, then rode north and east. Not time for a full rest, though. Riding as hard as they were, they’re moving slowly to cool their horses. With fresh mounts, we’ve got a chance to catch them. Lord.”

  He added the honorific in reaction to Makaysa’s look. He saw wariness in that look, but also the knowledge that her decision to follow Chriani through to whatever he was seeking had been made even before she rode into the forest behind him.

  “If they’re retreating, they’re moving for the deep wood.” Makaysa glanced up from the bottom of the well of green shadow. “We’re losing the light as it is.” For the benefit of the other rangers, she added, “Loose formation, ready to fall back. We follow Chriani.”

  They rode fast to make the most of the fading sun, Chriani already knowing that even he would need light by the time they made their way back. The twilight of day in the Greatwood faded to an absolute darkness by night, the great trees converging overhead to swallow the pale light of moons and stars alike.

  He’d seen that darkness only once so far, on the night patrol that had responded to the burning of the shepherd’s root cellar. That was the first time he’d seen the half-moon hoofprint, clear beneath the torchlight as they’d followed the trail into the wood, just far enough to ensure the Ilvani were gone. Away from that torchlight, the night-time forest had vanished even before Chriani’s eyes. A vast emptiness outside the bright spread of firelight, the wind shifting branches to wrap each rider in shadow.

  With Chriani on point now, they followed the trail easily, the Ilvani not bothering to hide their passage. Still, he spent as much time focused on the side trails and open spaces as he did on the twisting main track, watching for any sign of horses splitting off. He’d seen nothing so far, though, the Ilvani seemingly unconcerned with being followed.

  They rode in silence for the most part, the occasional slap of hand to palm sounding out a warning that turned out to be mostly shadows. They saw wolves twice, but only at a distance. These weren’t the great fell wolves but their smaller cousins, cautious enough that even as a pack, they would think twice about taking on horses and warriors in concert.

  They were passing the second of those packs, Chriani watching their bright eyes as the squad slipped by in silence, when the light changed. He slowed his horse, held up a hand in warning.

  It was an unfelt moment. A subtle shift like the start of a change in the wind. They had ridden a little over a league, he judged. Behind them was green shadow, the twilight of the Greatwood’s dusk still hanging. Before them was a deeper gloom that only Chriani’s eyes could pierce. He saw no threats, the trail continuing clear and unbroken ahead. Just the darkness.

  Tales from the wars the Ilmari called the Ilvani Incursions talked of the network of trails the Valnirata carved through the deep wood as shifting day by day, twisting like something alive. A troop’s worth of tracks would end suddenly in a wall of trees, no way to get beyond it. Open trails would lead to ambush, or twist around to split a squad up and separate its riders, leaving them lost and alone.

  The rangers of Brandishear patrolled the frontier. They rode the forest’s edge, watching the Ilvani shadow them with patrols of their own. On rare occasions, they would slip within the edges of the forest for a day, or a week. But not since the days of the Incursions a generation before had Brandishear rangers driven in numbers into the deep wood — the heart of the forest beyond the relatively open trees of the frontier.

  A year and a half before, that had almost changed. An attempt on the prince high’s life, talk of a Valnirata plot. It had all just been tales in the end. Chriani had been there.
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  “We go in there, how do we come out?” It was the rider behind Makaysa, whispering for her ear alone, but the silence of the forest seemed to lift and raise his voice to a sharp hiss. Makaysa silenced him with a wave of her hand, but her eyes held the same question for Chriani.

  He made the signal for light, two of the others drawing torches from side compartments on their saddlebags. These were special issue for the rangers — alchemically treated by the Bastion’s mages to burn safe and almost smokeless, and to light themselves when a sharp blow cracked them. Chriani heard the snap, saw the pulse of firelight spread and shimmer within the trees.

  The other three rangers had bows drawn, the two holding the torches drawing their swords. All looked wary. Chriani had a bow in hand, but he shook his head at Makaysa as she pulled a torch of her own. He nudged his horse closer to her.

  “If they’re waiting,” he whispered, “the light will draw them in. So we work that to our advantage. Send the others wide, the archers behind, just out of the light. You and I on point. Stay behind me.”

  “And how are you and I supposed to see?”

  “I’ve got good eyes for the dark,” Chriani said carefully. It was less than the truth but more than he liked to say. He looked away to avoid Makaysa’s gaze. “You just need to stay close.”

  Makaysa made the finger signals that gave the orders. No hesitation, no argument, but still no trust for him that Chriani could feel. Just an instinct for sticking with a course once committed to it. Not willing to show her uncertainty to the others under her command.

  They rode forward as three groups, Chriani leading. The distant last light of day was a dark grey stain across the trail ahead, but it was enough for him. The other rangers split off along side trails, pressed through screens of brush to stay on Chriani’s course when the trails veered.

  The trees around them were growing almost trunk-to-trunk in places, their great boles arcing down to twisted roots that his horse stepped over carefully. He glanced behind him to Makaysa each time it happened, warning her with a wave but not sure whether she could see him. Her horse kept the trail, though, her expression alert. She had a longsword in one hand and her unlit torch in the other, ready for whatever might lie ahead as she crept forward with Chriani through the shadows.

  He remembered that same sense of readiness in Makaysa from her time at the Bastion. A kind of expectation in her that whatever was to be faced, she would face it and persevere. An attitude from the start that leadership was just another challenge to be faced, and a thing she would claim when it was time.

  He saw that in Kathlan sometimes, though never from the innate sense of superiority that Makaysa had too often shown as a tyro. And in the time since he and Kathlan came to the frontier, Chriani had wondered more than once what it was going to feel like serving under her some day. Kathlan knowing what she was capable of, rising to that capability through the same determination that let her face off against every other part of her life. Chriani falling behind her, under the weight of insubordination and the anger he would never shake.

  He had no idea, he realized, what the penalty even was for stealing a horse. The thought struck him with a sense of absurdity that almost made him smile. At some point previously, he should have looked into that.

  Through the screen of trees ahead, a shimmer of movement blurred at the edge of his vision. He leaned forward as he nocked his bow, saw a half-dozen Ilvani on foot breaking to both sides. As he hoped, they’d seen the light and honed in on it, not seeing him and Makaysa as they pushed up the middle.

  He let his fingers slip the bowstring as he shouted, the shaft arcing high through a screen of trees. “Throw torches, thirty paces dead ahead! Shoot!” No time or place for coded signals anymore.

  The figure Chriani had targeted was caught off guard. The arrow took the Ilvani high in the shoulder, sending it off its mount with arms flailing as two pools of firelight arced through the trees. That light landed across the paths of the other Ilvani where they were slinking into ambush position. Then it burst to a brilliant sheen, each of the torches flaring to daylight brightness in a space twenty paces across. It was more of the Bastion’s alchemy, the torches designed to flare when thrown and almost impossible to quench when they did. It wasn’t magic — or not the real magic of dweomercraft, at any rate — but Chriani had to fight the urge to make the moonsign anyway.

  Catching the Ilvani off guard had been their only real hope of facing them successfully. But even Chriani was surprised by the speed of the fight. He and the other rangers were in darkness but targeting freely, the Ilvani fully lit up against the shadowed forest beyond. For their part, the Ilvani were all but blinded by the light, the keenness of their own vision not helping them where Chriani and the others spurred their horses and circled around through the trees. The long grey shafts of the Ilvani horse bows arced past them harmlessly as their own return fire struck true.

  Chriani took two more Ilvani cleanly himself, striking one horse when he misjudged the arc of a long shot through a screen of hanging vines. He shot twice more to take the wounded horse out, heard it scream as it fell. The Valnirata fought and died in their deathly silence.

  The rangers pushed into the light, swords drawn and steel striking. The Ilvani bowshot faded, and the forest was quiet once more.

  The three-beat signal to regroup sounded out, but Chriani circled far outside the light before he fell in. His eyes pulled the stillness of the forest from the shadows as he went, making sure they were alone.

  When he did return, more torchlight had been spread around the point where the rangers took shelter within a twisting stand of five broad trees. The brightness of the light set up a surreal tone within the wood, the great trunks of the limni shimmering like verdigris and bronze, green moss scrawled like veins across bark-brown skin. The brightness made the darkness beyond seem even more absolute, the rangers and their prisoners held within a bubble of green walled in black shadow.

  Makaysa and the others were circling around four Ilvani on their knees, hands to their heads and blades at their backs. Three bodies had been dragged to where the horse had fallen, but the other Ilvani steeds were gone. The Valnirata trained them that way, sent them to flee if their masters fell.

  As Chriani slipped off his horse, Makaysa nodded in what almost looked like thanks. “Nicely done.”

  “You plan well, lord,” he said.

  The squad leader smiled. “When you and Umeni had your… debriefing, you talked of this being a coordinated attack. The Ilvani using first squad to draw second squad into ambush?”

  “As I saw it, yes. When you called green, moving east, they were already closing in around us. Waiting for us to follow you.”

  “But why target second squad with first squad already in view?”

  Makaysa’s tone carried a thoughtfulness that Chriani heard far too rarely in would-be leaders. Not in Thelaur, for all her skill in the field. Certainly not in Umeni. But the question was one he had no answer for. Not yet.

  Chriani irnash! Lóech arnala irch niir!

  The Ilvani had called his name.

  The sound of cracking ribs pushed Chriani’s thoughts from his mind. He looked up to see an Ilvani prisoner slump forward, mouth set in a grim line where one of Makaysa’s rangers had sent a boot into his side. Grus was a hulking veteran guard whose name Chriani had learned only because it showed up so often in the troop’s disciplinary reports. All muscle and no wit, like too many members of the guard who seemed content to stay at first rank all their lives. A picture of himself in years to come, Chriani thought.

  Trembling, the Ilvani slowly straightened. He made no sound.

  “Tell us what we want to know and it will go easier on you.” Makaysa spoke the words in awkward and badly accented Ilvalantar, the language of the Ilmar Ilvani. An offshoot of the older tongues of the Valnirata war-clans, but close enough in nature that the prisoners would understand her. “Your actions were unprovoked attack, in violation of treaty. You target
ed a sergeant of Brandishear who now lies dead. Answer for your aggression.”

  The stoic silence in which the Ilvani fought had seemingly carried with them. None of them looked up. None of them spoke. Grus waited for a nod from Makaysa before a second kick sent the first prisoner to the ground. When he made no sign of rising this time, the veteran lined up a third kick, his heavy boot swinging back and a thin smile on his lips.

  Chriani grabbed the boot as he stepped up behind Grus in two quick strides. As he pulled and twisted, he drove his own foot into the ranger’s back, sending him hopelessly off balance and crashing face-first to the ground.

  A flash of blades. The other rangers were close, swords still on the Ilvani but dirks in their hands now, all leveled at Chriani. The tip of his own longsword was set to the back of Grus’s bare neck.

  “No,” Chriani said simply.

  At his feet, the veteran made no effort to hide the rage in his trembling breath, but his hands stayed at his side. No one moved.

  “Pardon me, soldier?”

  He saw Makaysa from the corner of his eye. She stepped closer, but her rapier was still in its sheath. “Forgive my lack of protocol,” he said. “No, lord.”

  “Step back, Chriani.” It was an order, and in a tone that said there would be no follow-up.

  “On your word that the prisoners are to be left unharmed. Interrogation only. Take them back to the camp if they won’t talk. The war-mages’ truth magic can deal with their confession.” He repeated his words in the Ilvalantar, a mix of threat and diplomacy. Not sure which was appropriate, what his role was. The Ilvani made no response either way.

  “The war-mages can steal the thoughts of one as easily as four,” Makaysa said.