Three Coins for Confession (13 page)

The world beyond the Bastion was nearly as new to him as it was
to her, but he didn’t see it as she did. He had traveled some of these roads
before and more than once, but only as a child. Riding with Barien while the
sergeant served as warden to Lauresa, he had seen the southeast steppes of
Brandishear and the seaside forests, had traveled west and north to Elalantar.
On his own, he had gone east to see the farmland of Aerach spread beyond the
end of the Clearwater Way.

Still, the land carried a sense of sameness to his eyes that he
couldn’t shake. He couldn’t embrace it in the way of Kathlan, who would seek
out the stories of every town and village in which they stopped. She marked the
days that way, Chriani instead noting the landscape’s slow progression of
grasslands to farmsteads. Great flocks of sheep dotting the hillsides gave way
eventually to terraced fields following the river valleys on their meandering
way north to the sea.

They stayed most nights in billeted lodgings, their insignias of
the prince’s guard enough to earn them a pallet by the fireside or the soft
dryness of a hayloft. Even a spare room and a clean bed twice, stopping at
farmsteads north of Alaniver and south of Cadith, where the last harvests were
in and the seasonal laborers had already headed north to the forests for the
winter.

The respect for the uniform was a thing Chriani wore with less
comfort than Kathlan, even though he had worn the uniform far longer than she
had. Most often, their offers to pay for their meals were refused with grace
and admiration, the folk of the frontier knowing the job the rangers did and
showing their respect for it as they could. In even those cases, Kathlan would
leave a clutch of silver siolans on hearth or windowsill before they departed
in the morning.

Another difference between them — Kathlan could sleep
easy in those strange beds, or sharing rooms with strangers. But for Chriani,
each night on the road took him into the deep night wide awake, whether in
Kathlan’s arms or sleeping separate in shared bunkrooms. When he did sleep, the
strangeness of traveling brought him back even before the first glimmer of
dawn. Listening to the sounds and the silence.

He was thus growing more tired as the journey wore on, using the
excuse of rain to add a day to that journey, and to spend much of that day in
taverns among the close-set farm villages that spread south from Rheran. They
had taken an inn in Glaeddyn, Chriani talking up the prospect of a bath to
Kathlan, but truly more interested in a solid night’s rest for himself behind a
locked door. It had worked to a point, the city’s noise and traffic putting him
in mind of the more familiar clamor of Rheran. But as it had each day along the
road, with any thought of that city where he’d spent most of his life, Chriani
found himself dwelling on the thought of why he was returning to Rheran, and of
what he hoped to accomplish there.

He had no idea what he was doing, what he was searching for. Only
the dark and unspoken knowledge that he could think of just one person in all
the Ilmar who would want him destroyed. A person who knew the risks of having
him killed, and so who might have conspired instead to have him taken by the
Ilvani and never seen again.

When he had returned to Rheran in the deep winter of a year and a
half before, taking the last steps along the path that had changed him, Chriani
had said words alone to the Prince High Chanist. A newly appointed squire with
a promise of commission still to come, no note of distinction in his record.

“You would serve me after all this? To what end, master
Chriani?”

Eight years a tyro, held back by a sullen anger that became a
point of pride in him. As if he might have had nothing else to be proud of. He
had stood alone in the Bastion throne room, a place where not even ambassadors
and nobles walked unescorted, to issue a challenge.

“To watch you, my lord prince. To remind you of the price of
your ambition.”

That Chanist was behind the Ilvani attack that targeted him was
an easy guess, though Chriani still had nothing like a full sense of what had
forced the prince high’s hand. He had challenged Chanist. Had used Irdaign as a
threat to warn the prince that the truth would come out if anything happened to
Lauresa or him. But that knowledge would be undone if Chriani could be undone,
Chanist manipulating events to his own ends. The Ilvani claiming Chriani,
controlling him. Making it appear as though he had turned traitor, perhaps.
Making sure that if the truth ever did come out, that truth would never be
believed.

As he’d taken up his commission to the guard and the
responsibilities that came with it, Chriani found himself set into a position
from which he could make good on his promise to watch the prince. Circling
Chanist from a distance, like an outrider on long patrol. Never a word between
them, as was proper. Rarely in the same room at the same time, Chriani’s new
duties taking him across the Bastion and on patrol around it.

As a ranked squire and then a commissioned guard, he was part of
a more complex power structure. The business and appointments of the prince
high, the security and operations of the Bastion, became things he was made
aware of, was asked for comment on. No longer information overheard at the mess
table or traded as secrets, incomplete and half-heard. But even as he used his
new position to make good on his promise, Chriani felt himself falling back
under the weight that position imposed.

As a tyro, his skill with the bow had seen him named a braggart.
A liability, always trying too hard to make his betters look bad, and so his
betters had responded in kind. A guard with Chriani’s skill at arms was seen as
an asset, though. A disciplined warrior, a potential leader in the field.
Except each time Chriani demonstrated his lack of discipline and leadership, it
only underlined to those around him how their first impressions had been
correct all along.

In all important ways, Kathlan was Chriani’s opposite in uniform.
As Chriani’s tyro, she had fallen into life in the guard with an ease that
required him to hide his jealousy. She took to the rigors of rank, took to her
duties with the same forthrightness and honest effort that had been the
foundation of everything else in her life. And so he found his attention split.
Upholding the dark duty of his private promise to the prince high, made in deep
night and the shadow of an empty throne room. Upholding the brighter obligation
of the pledge he had made to Kathlan the very next day, waking in her loft to
find her watching him.

Over his first year as a guard, Chriani had made good on his
promise to watch the prince high. To remind him. But in the end, it had been
Kathlan whose presence in his life reminded Chriani of more significant
obligations.

He had slipped from the bed that first morning after his return
from Aerach. Had crossed over to where she sat on the floor, wrapped in a
blanket. He sat with her, let her wrap it around him too. It had been cold that
morning.

“Do you remember what you asked me before?” he said. “The night I
left?” It was a question from the previous night, before Chriani’s challenge to
the prince high closed off the path that had taken him to the exile lands, to
Aerach and back. But the question looked back further to the beginning of that
path, when he’d stolen a horse with Kathlan’s aid and set himself back into the
life of the princess he had loved once. The princess he had watched ride away in
the end.

“I asked you what you could possibly know if you didn’t know what
you wanted for yourself. I asked you your ambition.”

“I want you to be mine,” Chriani said. “I want to speak oaths
with you. Take the marriage rites if you’ll have me…”

“Slow that talk down,” Kathlan said to interrupt him. No look of
surprise in her, though.

He had expected surprise. He felt an unfamiliar warmth flood
through him when he saw acceptance instead. Then he felt that warmth redoubled
as she pulled herself onto him, sat astride him and pulled the blanket tighter
around them both.

Eighteen months since he pledged himself to her, and Chriani had
felt his threat and his promise to the prince shift over that time. The
implicit pledge of mutual destruction he and Chanist made, tempered by his
commitment to Kathlan. Not softened. Just made smaller, Chriani feeling his
world expand around him in a way he had never expected.

On special dispensation from Guard Captain Ashlund, Kathlan had
been assigned half time to remain in the Bastion stables where she’d spent her
whole life, caring for the horses of the prince high’s own regiment. She had
two other stable hands working under her, spent every other day at Chriani’s
side for weapon and hand-to-hand training.

It wasn’t enough, though. Chriani had known it from the start.

“I’m going to ride with the rangers,” Kathlan had told him, more
than once. When the orders came, the ranger captains having watched her for a
year, Chriani was ready to set aside the secret truths he knew. Give himself
over to the greater truth of what Kathlan meant to him, for a time at least.

He was thinking about the truths he knew when the walls of Rheran
came into sight late on their ninth day out from the camp. Those last days of
the journey had taken them into High Autumn, passing the nights at the
celebrations of harvest fest in small towns along the long, straight road from
Glaeddyn. He was thinking about all the questions Kathlan hadn’t asked him over
those nine days, content with small talk on the road, and sharing songs with
the farmers and merchants whose paths ran alongside theirs for a time.

Kathlan’s voice was good in its own right, but it was the way she
sang a story that truly caught the ear. Her love of tales, her appetite for
lore, had been well sated since she and Chriani rode south. She would share
stories in the mess each night, reading the old histories and seeking out the
knowledge of the veteran sergeants in her off-duty time.

For his own part, Chriani had no real interest in tales, though
he had been forced to learn his share of them from Barien. The lore of the
Incursions. Stories of soldiering from the rangers and the Rheran guard. The
history surrounding the Empire’s fall more than sixty years before, and the
rebuilding of the Ilmar in the aftermath of that fall. But the story he was a
part of was the only one he knew well. And he had been fighting for a year and
a half against the need to tell it. All the things he needed to say to Kathlan
before it was too late.

It was a strange feeling, Chriani had come to realize, to care
for someone enough that their pain cut you more than your own. Understanding
how important it was for them to never hurt, to never fear because of you. He
had never experienced that before, not even with Barien. And from the first day
of his pledge to Kathlan, of coming back to her and understanding the truth of
what he was meant to be, Chriani had set himself up to hurt her on the
steel-sharp secrets kept close in his heart and mind.

On that bright blue-white winter morning when he’d pledged
himself to Kathlan, he told himself he would free those secrets in the end. He
would dull their edges, would leave them to the light and air and let them rust
away like cheap iron. Instead, he had sheathed them in silence and honed them
with more silence still. Had added to them, in fact. Rhuddry’s last words to
him, effectively exiling him from her camp, were something he’d spent much of
the nine-day journey thinking on. Wondering how he’d explain it to Kathlan. He
could apologize for all he was worth, but that was only half the battle, he
knew. The main thrust would be convincing her to let him release her as his
adjutant, so that she could go back alone. Knowing she’d have no problem doing
so as long as Chriani was no longer her unwanted baggage.

She would be all right without him. He could convince her of
that. Maybe even set her on that path before he stepped onto the path of
whatever his return to the Bastion would bring. Easier that way.

For nine days on the road, Chriani had felt the prince high’s
words in the throne room that night wedge into his thoughts like an
always-shifting sliver. A part of him had expected to die that night in the
throne room, surprised that it hadn’t happened then.

“A man might die many ways, squire.”

Nine days on the road, and Chriani had felt the memory of the
black arrow’s magic burning in him over nine mornings of waking in the faint
light of promised dawn. Wondering over each of those mornings what had made the
Prince High Chanist decide he’d waited long enough.

Darkening cloud the morning they sighted Rheran had turned to
rain by the time they reached the south city-gate, well before sundown but the
day already gone to gloom and shadow. Traveling the main road, they had passed
Bastion guards and couriers at regular intervals throughout the day, Kathlan
returning their nods of salute more quickly than Chriani did.

He felt the faint chill at his neck, down his back, that told him
he was expecting trouble. He found himself turning to watch the retreating
backs of the guard patrols they passed, more than once. He chastised himself
for his paranoia each time, even as the memory of the black arrow burned in his
mind once more.

The harvest fest celebrations in the Brandishear capital tended
to expand around the seven days of High Autumn without restraint, starting in
the last days of Patalis and running well into Tarcia. As such, the trade
streets were crowded despite the weather. Where Chriani and Kathlan rode
steadily toward them, the walls of the keep were slabs of shadow pocked with
torchlight, marking off the extents of the walled fortress that was the heart
of the city. Within the keep, the central stronghold of the Bastion rose on its
low bluff of dark stone, but Chriani could barely make out the lights of its
towers through the haze of rain.