Three Coins for Confession (15 page)

Chriani shivered with Kathlan’s warmth, clutched at her hand to
stop himself from trembling. She lifted her other hand, shifted the blanket to
set her fingers to the war-mark at Chriani’s shoulder.

“You lost your father for this,” she said quietly. “I know what
it means to you. I know what he means to you. And I can’t have your children
never knowing you. I just can’t, Chriani.”

Not that. Not now.

The late autumn of the year before, he’d heard first word through
the Bastion’s protocol office. Had been waiting for it. A week later, it was in
the markets, and then for that month that followed with every courier that came
in across the Clearwater Way.

There were birth celebrations in Aerach.

No secrets,
they had said, and so Chriani let the shadow
settle in his mind that hid the thoughts of a child in Teillai, daughter to a
duke, and to his wife Lauresa. A duchess who had been a princess once. The
child’s name set down in royal proclamation in Aerach and Brandishear, but the
space of that name was a darkness in Chriani’s mind.

“Come back to bed,” Kathlan said at last. The fire was blazing
again, Chriani with no idea how much time had passed while they sat there.

He followed her numbly, felt her drape herself across him as he
fought back the shivering. Felt it fade at long last, Kathlan’s warmth drawing
it out and away like pulling poison from the wound that was his heart.

She slept before he did, Chriani watching the play of firelight
across the ceiling for a long while, seeing faces in that light as he slowly
drifted off to darkness. His father. His mother. Barien and Kathlan both. And
as much as he wanted not to, as much as he tried to push it down, slip it safe
beneath the armor of dark thought, he was thinking on the face of the daughter
of a duke as sleep finally took him. Imagining the features of a child he would
never see.

THE MEMORY OF THE black arrow brought Chriani back to
waking, barely into the deep night and the fire not yet cold. It was quieter,
though. The rain had stopped finally, but a wind had risen from the north, its
steady hiss augmented by a staccato pattern of dripping along the eaves above
the room and the guttered roof below.

He lay and listened to Kathlan’s slow breathing in the dark
beside him, feeling her foot moving against his. Even lost in a dead slumber,
she would do that, some awareness of their contact stirring always in her
sleeping mind. It was her right leg, once injured and now restored. Some subconscious
sense of the pain she had once carried there, perhaps. Making up for all the
small pleasures of movement she had lost for so long.

After all the days of waking early along the road, Chriani had
hoped that being back in Rheran would give him the sleep he needed. But
instead, he felt the last strains of his stomach churning, a kind of visceral
memory of the nausea that had taken him outside the forest that day, in the
war-mages’ pavilion by dark. Not just the memory of the black arrow’s magic, of
the fear that had accompanied it, but something stronger. An echo, like the
pain that flares from time to time in healed joints. The strange play of nerves
that endured in the scars of the deepest cuts. The itch at his finger.

For most of his life, Chriani had slept in fits and starts,
rarely making it through a night without some matter of annoyance, some private
rage driving into his sleeping mind like an awl punching new leather. But he
had lost that, most unexpectedly, when he returned from Aerach. Sleeping that
long first morning in Kathlan’s bed, before they spoke. Spending that day at
her side, then each night thereafter, feeling himself slip into a sense of calm
he’d never known before. Waking at dawn into the same dream of being at her
side that had carried him through the night.

When I came back from Aerach.
He had said it to Kathlan
earlier in the fire-bright dark. It was the only way he ever spoke of those
days now with her. A kind of convenient code for things he had promised her
were told and done, gone to memory. All the things he still couldn’t say.

Barien had never slept a full night through that Chriani could
remember. Official duties as warden to a princess. Plans and protocol to
execute as a sergeant of the Bastion, unofficial duties as Chanist’s right hand
and adviser. Sitting through tactical councils and trade talks, drinking with
counselors and dukes, had seen Barien out of his chambers at night as often as
he was ever in them. Late meetings would take him to the mess or the armories,
advising captains and tyros alike. His even later meetings with Marjir, the
princess high’s tailor, were of a more personal nature and in his own chambers,
requiring Chriani to find his own place to sleep on those nights. Even
returning at dawn, though, he would often find Barien already awake, a low
murmur of voices and laughter answering his knock at the door.

As Chriani got older, when his own duties and outside interests
began to push him to later nights and earlier mornings, he realized he had no
idea how Barien managed. At less than half his mentor’s age, Chriani understood
that he was as good as any soldier at going two days without sleep, or making
do with three or four nights of short and interrupted slumber when he needed
to. But he remembered long nights of Bastion intrigue and war council meetings
with Chanist that would keep Barien on his feet for a week or more. The warrior
would catch moments of short slumber before dawn and in the heat of the day,
even as Chriani and the other tyros serving those meetings inevitably dropped
to a dead sleep at the mess table.

While he slept this night, Chriani had dreamed of Barien. He
remembered it suddenly, the half-remembered sense returning of he and the
warrior riding side by side along the seacoast rode that ran from Rheran to
Sudry. Dawn was breaking above the Clearwater Sea spreading before them, its
perfect brilliance setting bright fire across the waves. Kathlan was riding
with them, and her presence told Chriani that this was the wishful vision of
dreams rather than a real memory. Though Barien had been a friend to her, she
had never ridden with him while he lived, her leg holding her back.

Chriani had dreamed of Barien more often since going to the
frontier, not fully understanding why. When he came back to the Bastion after
Aerach, he had expected to feel the press of all those memories as he picked up
the pieces of his life. But that life had left his dreams blissfully filled
with thoughts of Kathlan, as were his days. In the camp, though, he would often
wake with a sense of Barien’s voice in his mind, the warrior’s words forgotten
but the feeling of his presence still sharp.

In this night’s dream, Barien had been somber. Talking in dark
tones of betrayal, of treachery coming from the highest places. Chriani knew
what he was speaking of and was trying his best to talk over him, trying with
the power of his own voice to keep Kathlan from hearing. Barien talked of
loyalty and of choices as Chriani shouted back at him. Arguing of how the idea
of loyalty should make things easier, but knowing how his own loyalties had
been shattered on the Clearwater Way. Not sure if they would ever come together
again.

When Barien finally stopped speaking, Chriani saw blood fleck the
warrior’s lips, and he knew in the dream that his friend and mentor was dead.
He felt that thought burning in his memory, forcing him as it always did to
think on whose hand it was that had struck Barien down.

He was breathing hard, he realized, a familiar anger twisting
through him as he slipped carefully from the bed to piss in the commode
closeted in the corner past the hearth. Then he set tinder and wood to the
barely smoldering coals, fanned them till they caught and crackled. Pacing to
the window, he drew back his cloak to see a haze of stars through shredded
cloud. The slates of the roof were gleaming, dark edges limned with moss and
starlight.

Where the curtain of rain had pulled back, he could see the
Bastion. Just the barest view over the keep wall, the inn and its uppermost
window marking out a high point on the upward-sloping streets to the south.
Dark against an even darker night sky, the castle’s towers and turrets rose
within the walls of the keep that were a symbol of strength and the center of
the city — just as the Prince’s Bastion was the even stronger center
of the keep. A heart of political power and military strength, beating within a
body of ancient stone.

For most of his life, Chriani had lived within the pulse of that
power. A brightness to his memories of those times. Magical evenlamps and
hearth fires burning in the barracks mess hall, shining steel and bright sun on
the training grounds. The mottled rage gleaming on the faces of the many, many
guards, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains he had insulted, inconvenienced,
and thwarted over long years.

All of it was shadow now. The Bastion and the keep that
surrounded it were a cold stain that drained the light, that had drained the
brightness from his memories. Like the darkening image that stayed with you
when you sighted too long toward the sun.

It was a place Chriani had dreamed of once. A place he had
yearned to find his own way into, to find a way to belong to. The bright past
seeming to promise a brighter future for a time, but his past and future now
seemed to be cut and unraveling from the same skein of shadow.

As Chriani was pacing back toward the fire, footsteps sounded out
on the slate of the roof above his head and around him.

He felt it as much as heard it over the hiss of wind, the faint
sound of rainwater dripping from tile to tile. Drops building to rivulets that
twisted and washed their way through encrustations of moss and guano, pigeons
swarming the black tiles of the city’s rooftops for the heat they held on a
winter’s day. He had been listening to the sound while he slept, had felt it as
the gut-echo of the black arrow woke him.

A kind of song rang out within the steady repetition, the endless
cascade of rills spilling down past the window. So that he heard it, understood
it in a moment, when that song was interrupted.

Footsteps above him, shifting almost silently but blocking the
flow of water as they did. Chriani marked them in his mind as if seeing ripples
spread out across a still pond, noting the points from which they spread so as
to judge the movement of the creature beneath the water. Five figures were
above them, moving toward the window that was the room’s only point of outside
entry.

He woke Kathlan with a touch, thrusting her sword belt into her
hands from where she’d set it on her pack beneath the bed. His own hands ached
for his bow, but that was in the stables, stored with the saddles and tack. His
longsword hung from the bedpost, a habit Barien had ingrained in him by example
and relentless reminder, the scabbard hissing silk-silent as he drew it. While
he lived, Barien had been less successful in training Chriani to actually use a
blade, but in the time since the warrior’s death, Chriani had tried to change
that. A thing he had done in Barien’s memory, bringing him to the point where
he could call himself skilled but still largely untested.

That was about to change.

Kathlan wasn’t a warrior. Not by nature. Not like Chriani,
trained at the side of the best sergeant in the Bastion from his eighth summer.
She was the best rider in their troop because that had been her passion, but
the blade and the bow were still new to her, even after training at Chriani’s
side for a year and a half. She had the instincts, though. The things that
couldn’t be taught. From the second she seized one of her daggers, she was
ready. Locked to Chriani’s eyes, following his movement as he pointed to the
roof and window. She was out of the bed and shifting silent across the floor,
as naked as he was, crouched low to the ground.

They were both ready as a sharp splintering of wood and glass
sounded, the window torn outward to shatter and slip to the roof tiles. Whoever
was attacking would keep the floor clear of broken glass, not wanting to risk
slipping as they pushed inside. A ripple of shadow unfolded as Chriani’s cloak
was torn free. Then even as he took the measure of the first figure to slip
inside the room, Kathlan’s dagger left her hand to bury itself to the hilt in
the Ilvani’s chest, her rapier already drawn before the intruder staggered and
fell.

Firelight shimmered across the floor, meeting faint starlight
from the window and the still-clearing sky. Chriani’s eyes split the shadows,
saw the gleam of gold in the eyes of the Valnirata warrior as he dropped. The
edge of the war-mark was visible beneath the figure’s vest of grey-green
leather, arms wet and bare, a long-knife in each hand clattering loudly to the
floor.

Above them, the footsteps shifted again, reacting to the
unexpected sound and movement. A figure dropped down in front of the window,
slipped back out of sight as if trying to draw attack. Chriani waved Kathlan to
hold. When the figure appeared again to force its way through, they met it from
either side, cutting high and low. A second Ilvani in leather and cloak. He
staggered as Chriani’s blade took him through the back of the leg, Kathlan’s
rapier punching through armor and bone as it took him dead center in the chest.

In the moment it took Kathlan to work her blade free of the body
where it had fallen, Chriani pushed to the window, drove his sword down to anchor
it in the floorboards. He grabbed the top of the sill and punched his feet
straight out, the Ilvani who had just dropped to come through taking the full
force of his strike. The warrior was shunted backward, slipping on the tiles
before pitching backward to the wide roof below.

Voices sounded out faint from the floor below him. A wash of
light in the darkness outside showed a lamp lit at someone’s window, the fight
heard.

“I need to draw them,” he hissed to Kathlan. “Keep them on the
roof, away from the other rooms. You go downstairs, get to the guard, sound the
alarm…”

“I won’t leave you.”

“I can hold them…”

“This is not a debate.” Kathlan’s voice was cold.

Chriani could only nod, no time for anything else. One long
moment to grab his leggings, pull them on and tie them quickly. No time for his
boots. Another moment to seize his tunic where he’d hung it at the fireside,
then pull it on. A wet pain flared at his shoulder, as he realized he must have
torn it on splintered wood at the window. The war-mark was covered, though.

Kathlan was dressing just as quickly behind him as Chriani pushed
out through the window, hitting the freezing tiles with bare feet. The wind was
rising, a shock of cold taking him as he dug hard with his toes to hold
himself, swung up with his blade by instinct to catch the thrust of the Ilvani
backsword hacking down from above him.