Three Coins for Confession (8 page)

Grus apparently knew it too, hammering three times across the
wound with a fist that struck like iron. As bad as the pain had been on the
ride from the forest, it exploded like a hot brand now, shooting down Chriani’s
arm and back as a spasm that allowed Grus to drive him to the ground. He was on
his back in the mud, couldn’t move. The leering veteran loomed over him, ready
to kick.

“Master Grus!” Makaysa’s voice sounded out from the shadow
scouring Chriani’s sight. Through Grus’s legs, he saw her standing at the
entrance to the side track, her rangers and a handful of others close behind,
watching with amusement. “You fight on your time, you follow orders on mine.
Now.”

With a growl, Grus once again showed his devotion to following
orders by stepping quickly away. Chriani staggered to his feet, holding his arm
as the pain ebbed. By the time he made it stumbling to the main track, the
blood at his leather was seeping through his fingers.

Makaysa sighed as she saw the extent of the wound. “You didn’t
think to mention that?”

“I’m fine,” Chriani said through clenched teeth.

Grus snorted, but Makaysa silenced him with a look. “Grus, lead
to the war-mages. I’ll get Chriani to the healers first, then meet up with you.
Go.”

The veteran nodded, but his smirking gaze held Chriani’s for a
long moment as he and the others turned away.

“Can you walk?” Makaysa asked. Her tone had softened, but Chriani
shrugged off her assistance as he made his way around the intersection and took
the main west track. “The healers are to the east, Chriani. Is it your arm or
your head that needs attending to?”

“My arm’s fine,” he said evenly. “I’m returning to barracks to
check on Kathlan. Then I’ll see the healers. Then I’ll see the war-mages, then
the captain. With your permission and indulgence, lord.”

“Just make sure you do it in that order.” Makaysa fell in beside
him. “If you bleed out on Rhuddry’s carpets while you’re still technically
under my command, I’ll be the one cleaning them.”

Chriani glanced over, tried to assess the shift in Makaysa’s
mood. She wasn’t looking at him, though. Just walking. “That was good riding
today,” she said at last. “Though a bit more excitement than I like on patrol.
I’ll look forward to not seeing you in my squad again anytime soon.”

“You should take the whole troop with Thelaur gone,” Chriani
said. He was almost surprised to realize he meant it.

Makaysa laughed. “You’ll put in a good word for me, then?”

He shrugged, felt pain lancing down his back and wished he
hadn’t. “You know how to lead is all. Not all of them do. Umeni should learn
from you.”

“Umeni is a soldier with more ambition than ability, and it’ll
kill him one day.” Makaysa said it evenly, no sense of judgement. Chriani got
the sense it was something she’d thought about. “The opposite of your problem,
in fact. All ability and no ambition. Though I don’t doubt you and he will both
come to the same end.”

Chriani stopped. Makaysa came around to face him. She was smiling
as she had been earlier that day, though Chriani hadn’t noticed when she’d
started again.

“You find that funny?” he said. “My end?”

“Based on what I saw today, I suspect your end will be
spectacularly amusing. I’m just hoping I’m not there to see it.”

“I guess you can find anything funny if you try hard enough.”

“I’ve found it’s the best way to survive out here. But you in
particular always amused me, Chriani. Recalling that day in the armory still
makes me smile.”

She had remembered. Chriani didn’t understand why that felt like
a good thing.

Makaysa was watching him closely, her expression suggesting she
had something else to tell him. But in the end, she only said, “Good luck,
Chriani,” before she turned back east.

He watched her go for a moment, so that he was still facing her
when she turned back.

“I was sorry to hear about Barien,” she said. “He knew how to
lead.”

Chriani could only nod as he turned away.

He wasn’t sure what kind of punishment might be in store for him,
though he’d had enough practice that he might have tried to guess. Umeni
wouldn’t be the first superior to have him before the captains for disobeying
orders since his arrival among the rangers. However, he would be the first to
do so despite Chriani having probably saved his life. He didn’t know whether
that made him care more or less about the outcome.

Because from the moment he’d ridden out of the forest at speed
for the second time — from the moment before that when the dead
Ilvani’s eyes went gold to green and Chriani had felt the fear —
there was only one thing he cared about. One person he needed to find.

He looked for Kathlan first in her tent, but she wasn’t there.
Back
at sunset,
the sentry had said, and Chriani felt a faint unease. He knew
she wouldn’t have spent any more time at the healers than necessary, but he
knew also that a wound as straightforward as hers had looked shouldn’t have
taken this long to deal with.

He spent a few moments to check her footlocker, her gear. Two
tunics spread across her cot, untouched from when Chriani had seen her that
morning. She hadn’t been back.

He went next to his own tent in the hope she might be waiting
there, but he saw no sign of her. A faint fear traced his spine as he thought
of the black arrow. Wondering what manner of Ilvani magic might be in it. He
needed to go to the healers, check to see if she was still there. Ask what had
happened.

Except Chriani couldn’t go to the healers. Chriani hadn’t gone to
the healers in all the time that he and Kathlan had ridden with the rangers,
and she was the only other person in the camp who knew why.

Over five months on the frontier, he had tended his own wounds,
had sought healing life-magic in his own way when he needed it. In five months,
he’d never made use of the camp’s baths. Instead, he and Kathlan spent off-duty
time alone at a quiet stream a short ride away, its water frigid but its pools
secluded.

He spent a few moments outside his tent to brush the dirt of the
forest, the dust of the grassland tracks, and a newer coat of mud courtesy of
Grus from his leather. As he did, he let the scene before and around him play
out, carefully marking off light in the closest tents, the movement of soldiers
along the nearby paths. Then he slipped inside. The barracks tents were roomy
but low, Chriani dropping to his knees so he didn’t have to stoop. He sealed
the door flap tight, listening carefully. He prepped water and brandy,
bandages, needle, and silk thread from his field kit. He listened as he did so,
all his senses on alert. Waiting to feel the ebb and flow of movement in the
world around him.

He found the quiet he was seeking. Then, teeth set against the
pain, slowly and carefully, he peeled off his scarred leather and the blood-soaked
jacket and tunic beneath. Beneath the drying crust of red-black, a darker mark
stood out on his left-front shoulder, crossing around to his arm. A knotted
mass of twisting red and black lines, delicate as lace, bright as blood, dark
as night. The war-mark of the Valnirata.

The mark had been tattooed upon him when he was a child. An
inheritance from his father, an Ilvani exile of the Greatwood who had fought
against his Valnirata kin in the Incursions. Its lines and crafting were the
hand of his mother — an Ilmari who had fallen in love with her
Valnirata exile against a thousand years of bitter racial hatred, and who was
one of the few Ilmari who had ever learned the war-mark’s art. She had scribed
the tattoo on Chriani in the name of his father who had died in the Incursions.
Just a memory now.

Halobrelia forest-heart.
His father’s house within the
rigid clan structure of the Valnirata Ilvani. But against and around the mark
of Halobrelia, Chriani had since scribed four names of his own, setting them
down in the delicate script of the Ilvani. A year and a half before, on that
path where his life had changed.

Lauresa.
Princess of Brandishear, who he had loved once,
and who had given up the future she had been born to in order that the Ilmar
would have peace.
Barien.
Warden to Lauresa since her childhood and
mentor to Chriani, taking the place of the father Chriani had spent his life
remembering only as shadows.
Irdaign.
Lauresa’s mother, spell-singer of
the Leisanmira, who had tried to show Chriani how to set aside his fear of
things he didn’t understand.

The fourth name was the one that meant the most to him now. The
only one of the four who remained a part of his life, and who would for all
time if he had anything to say about it.
Kathlan,
who knew the mark and
all of Chriani’s secrets, and who had promised to hold those secrets as she
held his heart.

No. Not all.

The thought came to him as a stray shadow, twisting through his
mind as he washed the cut the arrow had made. Telling him he was lying. He tried
to push it away as he always did, but it churned within him like a shard of
cold steel, like an arrowhead snapped off and burrowing slowly beneath his
skin.

Kathlan didn’t know all his secrets. Not yet.

He tensed as he flushed the wound with brandy, felt the pain
rising to a burning, blood-red crescendo in his mind before it began to fade.
Then he stitched it quickly, knowing he would need to seek healing magic but
needing to seal off the wound, ease the pain first.

The four names that had become extensions of the mark were the
only people who knew Chriani wore that mark. But Barien was gone now. Lauresa
and Irdaign had left his life. Kathlan alone was the keeper of his secret.

No.

Twisting through him again. Another lie, told because the truth
was something he didn’t want to think on, didn’t want to have to see.

One other person presently knew that Chriani wore the mark of the
Ilmar’s deadliest enemies, knew that his father had been Ilvani. The Prince
High Chanist, who had been sworn to secrecy in his own way by the threat of
what Chriani knew of the madness the prince bore. What he knew of the actions
that madness had driven.

Chanist had tried to sacrifice his own daughter in the name of
restarting the war he had ended with the Ilvani a generation before. He had
killed Barien to protect his secret. Had sent Chriani into the center of his
plots in the hope of killing him for what he knew. When that failed, he had
spoken of killing Chriani in the Bastion throne room — the great
meeting hall where the last words between him and the prince high had been
exchanged.

Chriani remembered those words. He knew how easily Chanist could
have seen them made real.

“A man might die many ways, squire.”

Chriani had reflected on that threat uncounted times in the first
few months of his new life. His rank and commission, and all that came with it.
A clear understanding that it was Chriani alone the threat was meant for.
Knowing that whatever happened, Lauresa was beyond her father’s reach now. That
was something, at least.

A prince sworn to his secrecy was a power that Chriani never
imagined, could never have dreamed of. But still, he knew that if any person
who served that prince stepped into his tent right now, his remaining life
might well be measured in moments.

Five months away from the healers, away from the baths of the
camp. And for eleven years in the Bastion before that, Chriani had bathed
alone, had slept in bedclothes always outside Kathlan’s loft, had never
stripped his tunic off even in the hottest summer.

He remembered the Ilvani warrior he’d dropped when he cracked his
bow across her face. Remembered the tattoo that turned her skin to a seething
field of twisted lines, razor sharp. For the five months since he’d been sent
to ride the frontier, Chriani had wondered in all his darker moments what would
happen the day he was injured and knocked unconscious, left for dying. Kathlan
not there to keep one of the other rangers from tending to him. Others seeing
the secret set in black ink at his shoulder. A thing they would kill him for.

The Valnirata arrow had torn the flesh of his arm but missed the
bone, thankfully. The wickedly serrated hunting heads the Ilvani favored for
their shafts were notorious for leaving scars even for those who took magical
healing, and more than a few rangers wore those scars with pride. The edge of
Chriani’s wound had severed one of the long, twisting tails of the war-mark,
but he knew from a boyhood’s worth of nicks, scrapes, and cuts that the
tattooing of the Valnirata would somehow seal itself when the flesh was joined.
The war-mark of the Valnirata never faded, never aged. Some manner of alchemy
in that ancient art, of which the names Chriani had tattooed himself were only
an imperfect reflection.

When he was done, he dressed quickly, then found rags to wash up
the spill of blood and brandy across the tent’s platform floor. He drank what
was left of the brandy as he worked, felt its bright burning in his gut to
remind him he hadn’t eaten anything since the morning.

“Chriani…”

Kathlan’s voice came from outside the tent as he was finishing.
The rush of the brandy was joined by a calm that wrapped around him, held him
tight. He fumbled with the door flap, had only two of its pegs untied when she
slipped in on hands and knees, rising to embrace him.

She kissed him hard, pressed tight against him as if the two
might be wearing each other. It was a feeling Chriani had long grown used to,
but which still carried with it an intensity, a passion like it might be the
first time they’d touched. Eighteen months since Chriani had pledged himself to
Kathlan, and more than a year before that of her bed when it suited him. And
all the time since, he had thanked fate through every waking moment that she
had waited for him.