Three Coins for Confession (3 page)

“…break through!” Umeni was calling, but Chriani missed the rest
of the guard’s frantic cry. Something was wrong. He felt it. Sensed the chill
tracing his spine that told him his eyes had caught something his mind couldn’t
yet see.

Around them, the Ilvani were pressing, holding tight to the
rangers as they raced through the grove. The steady pulse of arrows hadn’t
slowed. But the timing was wrong. Erratic. The thought came stray to Chriani’s
mind, burning in him with an instinct he couldn’t name as he lurched his horse
forward with a quick kick. He pulled himself next to Kathlan, feeling both
their horses shy at the uncomfortable closeness as they ran.

“What are you…?” was all she got to say as he hefted Thelaur’s
body from his horse to hers. Both horses stumbled, but the sergeant was light
even in armor. As Kathlan clutched at the body, Chriani pulled his bow from the
hitch at his saddle.

“Ride hard,” he shouted to Kathlan as he pulled away. Then he
called out “Lomyr! Collyn, Taedry!” With the exception of himself and Thelaur,
those three were the best archers in the troop. A half-dozen paces ahead and
beside him, all of them glanced back. “On me! Now!” Then Chriani dug in hard to
wheel his horse, spurring around, then running hard back the way they’d come.

Far to the front, Umeni shouted after him with a strangled cry.
“Hold formation!”

Chriani ignored him, not looking back.

He had seen an Ilvani fusillade once. Only once. On that path
he’d taken to a changed life, he had watched a cloud of shafts spill out of the
darkness into a running battle with unerring precision, only a moment ahead of
a mounted assault. He hadn’t known the Ilvani tactics then. Had spent his life
blissfully distant from the Greatwood and all the myriad ways one might die
there.

He had learned much of the Valnirata Ilvani’s combat in the first
months of taking his place of rank in the Bastion, and newly commissioned to
the prince’s guard by the Prince High Chanist himself. He had learned more in
the five months of his assignment to the rangers, and of patrolling the
boundaries of the forest. And all of what he knew now, and of what he
remembered of that dark night from a year and a half before, was that the
Ilvani war-clan fighters used their arrows always as a prelude to running their
foes down. But these had stayed out of sight, circling. Waiting for something.
Giving him and the three who had followed him a chance.

A twisting track through bracken and low branches took them out
of the grove and onto the trails again. He had Lomyr and Taedry beside him, the
sound of Collyn’s horse coming up from farther behind. He let his eyes pull all
detail from the shadows, following the trails torn up by the Ilvani horses. The
hiss of arrows came from ahead, but still trained on the main body of both
squads, the trees screening Chriani and the others as they closed. The forest
to both sides was green and black, leaf-shrouded sunlight and shadow flashing
past. The trails were uneven, broken through by the great limni’s twisting
roots. Chriani’s horse stumbled once, his knees locking tight to the saddle.

He was the first to break through the screen of trees to bring
the Valnirata troop into sight. It was a carontir patrol, not the border
bandits they had been pursuing. They wore no livery, but Chriani recognized the
sureness of their riding, the speed with which they shot.

Three paces in front of him, an Ilvani set two grey shafts flying
from her bow, sending both into the wall of the grove where the fleeing Ilmari
could be seen as flashes of grey and green. The Ilvani had time to register the
sound of horses behind her as she wheeled. Chriani’s shot took her under the
arm as she tried and failed to flatten against her horse’s neck in time. The
momentum sent her tumbling from her mare’s bare back, hitting the forest floor
in a tangle of limbs and dead leaves.

In a heartbeat, the air around Chriani and the others was a haze
of arrows. Ilvani and Ilmari alike unleashed a storm of bowshot. Both sides
were shooting for each other rather than their horses, knowing that the mounts
were an easier target, but knowing also that a horse could take multiple arrows
and run on. Especially at this range, one well-placed shot could take a rider
out of the fight with ease. Chriani ducked down more than once as a wide-bladed
shaft twisted past his head. But as he had hoped, the unexpected attack from
the flank was sending the Ilvani scattering, creating a gap to one side.

“Umeni, break left!” he shouted over the thunder of hoofbeats,
not bothering with codes anymore. A call came in answer, the Valnirata breaking
even farther as bowshot from the troop crossed over in front of them. The
Ilvani riders were slowing, shifting to both sides now, the careful order of
their assault broken.

Tearing through the trees a half-dozen paces to the left, a
wild-eyed Ilvani warrior turned her horse hard as she saw Chriani appear beside
her. Their bows came up at the same time, both shots crossing over. The sharp
bite of steel hit high on Chriani’s right arm, a flare of pain rising even as
his return shot struck home.

The Ilvani was naked to the waist, golden hair flowing behind
her, arms and shoulders and breast knotted with the dark tattoos that were the
war-mark of the Valnirata. Tight lines twisted along her skin in black and
green, laying down glyphs and sigils that spoke of clan and family, the battles
she’d fought, the enemies fallen before her. Chriani’s arrow took her along the
edge of that mark but didn’t drop her. Her teeth were set with a feral rage as
she forced her horse alongside his, a long-knife flashing in her hands.

A touch to his quiver told Chriani he was out of arrows. He swung
the bow instead, hearing it and the Ilvani’s cheekbone break at once. The knife
flashed past him as the rider went down.

Ahead, he saw light. A sudden shift from green shadow to blue and
hammered gold, the open sky turning molten along the horizon with the setting
of the sun. They were within sight of the forest wall and the open grasslands
beyond, a hundred paces away.

Under normal circumstances, Chriani would have called them safe
as they hit open ground. The horses and horse bows of the war-clans were both
made for speed and maneuverability in tight quarters, not for straight range.
As well, over five months of playing cat-and-mouse along the forest’s edge, the
Ilvani carontir had shown little reluctance to pass beyond their woods. But
this attack was already unusual in too many other ways.

“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.