Three Coins for Confession (23 page)

A broad grove of trees was lit up brightly by colored lamps,
Chriani catching sight of a dozen or more horses sheltered there. Six traveling
wagons were pulled in tight to the edge of the wood, where a hollow marked out
a grove alive with the light of a huge bonfire. He could make out at least
three dozen figures sitting there, safe from the rain beneath trees or
arrangements of colorful sheets of canvas staked out and extended from the
wagon roofs. He saw children dancing, mugs passed around the fire. The smell of
roast meat and the sound of singing hung on the air.

Kathlan and Dargana slowed up, Chriani taking the lead as they
approached the fire. It wasn’t the shelter he was looking for, but if the
search for inns failed, it would make a better fallback than sleeping rough or
seeking out other forest shelter in the dark.

From the shadows at the back of one wagon, a figure dressed in
brown and green stepped into the light. An older male, greying hair tied back
beneath a broad-brimmed hat, and a peaceful expression on his face as he
approached. Chriani slowed to a stop a few strides away, nodded in greeting.

“Chriani of the Prince’s Guard of Brandishear,” he called.
“Traveling with a squad of seven and seeking shelter.”

“Maron,” the figure replied. He reached out his hand to touch
Chriani’s, grasping it in an unfamiliar gesture. Different customs in Aerach,
he guessed, but he matched Maron’s firm grip.

“I have guards checking the local villages for inns, but if we
come up empty, we would be grateful to join you here. Shelter our horses in the
wood, share your fire. We can pay for…”

Maron shook his head emphatically. “You and yours are welcome,
friend, if you wish. But please, you’re drenched. Come and warm yourselves
before you turn back to seek your companions.”

His accent was odd to Chriani’s ear, but he couldn’t place it.
Not an Aerachi dialect, but still familiar. A faint hint of the soft lilt of
Ilvani to it somehow. “You are gracious, friend, but we should…”

Chriani’s voice was cut to silence, his throat closed off by a
sudden tightness. He was looking past Maron, idly scanning a trio of children
that had pressed close to the edge of the firelight to watch him.

A figure stepped out from behind the children. Chriani recognized
her even in first silhouette. The spill of bronze hair caught the gleam of
lanterns behind her, the grey that touched that hair turned to an even deeper
red by the light of the fire. She stepped toward them, smiling a greeting.

“Chriani?” It was Kathlan’s voice at his shoulder, wary. Alert.
He heard the rattle of steel that was her hand on the hilt of her rapier,
Chriani’s own hand shooting up to stop her.

“It’s all right,” he said, but he made the moonsign in spite of
himself.

Maron laughed to see it. “You won’t need that here, friend. Come.
The night’s too cold for waiting.”

Chriani had wanted to kill the prince high. The memory in his
mind now, coming unbidden. Breaking through the shadow, forcing itself up like
bile, like water from the lungs of the near drowned. He was bound to kill the
prince high. Had ridden back west across the Clearwater Way with no other
thought in his mind, knowing it was his fate and the end to everything he was.
Knowing he had no reason to turn away from that fate.

In the end, he had found his reasons. Two of them, turning him
from that path. Lauresa’s grief, which he’d felt in three days of her opening
herself to him after what seemed a lifetime of yearning. A heart so perfect, so
pure in her that she couldn’t hate her father. Not even after knowing what he
was. She was Chriani’s first reason.

The figure who stood within the circle of lamplight, who had
pleaded with Chriani for the life of the prince she had loved once, was the
second reason. She was watching him now. Irdaign. Mother to Lauresa. Princess
precedent of Brandishear. Wife to the Prince High Chanist before she was set
aside a dozen years before.

She beckoned to him now. Then she turned and walked back into
shadow.

“Kathlan. Stay with Dargana and the horses,” Chriani heard
himself say.

“Chriani, what…?”

“It’s all right. I won’t be long.” His gaze flicked to Dargana,
saw her watching him intently. Questions there, but none of Kathlan’s
uncertainty.

He swung down off his horse, heard Kathlan and Dargana do the
same. With a nod, Maron led the two of them and the horses toward the wood even
as Chriani paced away. Following Irdaign where she had disappeared from sight.

The Leisanmira. The accent he couldn’t place. The wandering folk
of the Ilmar, crossing all four principalities but never at home in any of
them. The spell-singers, whose magic Lauresa had channeled in secret. Magic her
mother taught her. Chriani had heard the accent only once before, in a song
Lauresa sang. Irdaign bore no trace of it that he had ever heard, though these
were her people. Her past carefully reshaped by Chanist’s advisers when she had
married the prince high and left that life behind a generation before.

She was sitting on dry ground at the side of a small fire, set
back from the larger central blaze. The other members of the wagon camp nodded
to Chriani as he passed, smiling greetings but not speaking. He heard their
voices ringing out in melodic whispers beyond him, though. Building songs in
the shadows.

“It is good to see you, Chriani.” Irdaign beckoned him to sit, Chriani
nodding to her as he did. She offered him wine in a steaming mug, heady with
the scent of fruit and spices. He shook his head, though. Already enough
uncertainty to his thoughts.

“Why are you…” He took a breath, tried to focus. He fought the
urge to make the moonsign again, knowing the insult it would seem to her. The
fear of things he didn’t understand. “How did you know I would come here? Or
did you make this happen?”

“No one does my bidding against their will or knowledge, Chriani.
Or at least not except by craft more subtle than what you would call magic. But
I do have gifts, which speak to me at times. Small gifts that tell me of things
that might come to pass.”

Irdaign’s tone was even as she spoke, the musical quality of her
voice joining somehow with the songs rising around her. But to Chriani’s ear,
it carried an edge of something else as well. A thing he couldn’t quite place.

“Do you know why I’m here?” he asked.

“I know some of it. I have no need to know all of it, if you
worry that I have brought you here for questioning.”

“I don’t know what need for questioning you’d have so long as you
can see what I do. See what I am with your sight.”

Irdaign shook her head with a sad smile. “My sight does not see
into you or any other, Chriani. And even if it did, overhearing word of secret
envoys from Brandishear from couriers in the halls of Castle Osthegn is more
dependable than the sight by far.”

Chriani nodded, but he felt the shift in his mind that came with
new knowledge. Something changed. “We were to be met by troops of Prince
Vishod’s from Aleran. What does Osthegn know of our mission?”

“Vishod has made his own alterations to Chanist’s requests, I
gather. He finds a measure of power in being able to accept a plan, then to
alter it with impunity so as to not seem like Chanist’s servant. The games
princes play.”

It sounded strange to Chriani’s ear to hear her speak Chanist’s
name. A darkness to it as it churned his thoughts of what bound her and the
prince high together. He couldn’t look at her, stared to the fire instead.

“I have been told you travel south?” she asked.

Chriani nodded, not sure what he could tell her. Not sure what he
should tell her.

“I warn you that the duke was not entirely happy with Vishod
handing off Brandishear’s request. But the rangers he has assigned to you know
the southlands well, and they are blindly obedient to the duke. As he likes
them.”

“So why are you worried?” Chriani looked up again to meet her
gaze. Saw acknowledgement there in the blue eyes. That worry was the edge he
had heard in her voice before.

“The trinket you wear,” she said. “At your belt. I sense its
dweomer. New magic, and powerful. It seems out of character for you.”

He thought for a moment of how to explain it. Decided in the end
for the truth. “The Valnirata are hunting me,” he said. “Because of… things to
do with what happened before.” He saw a flicker of pain in the blue eyes that
told him Irdaign knew what he spoke of. “The badge keeps them from finding me.”

“How long will you wear it?” Irdaign asked, and the question
caught Chriani by surprise simply because it hadn’t yet crossed his mind.

“I don’t know.” The fire was warm. Chriani’s cloak had been
soaking wet when he sat down, his clothes damp beneath his jacket and armor.
They were almost dry now. “Why are you here, Irdaign?”

When she laughed, Chriani heard the sound spread around her.
Unseen children picked it up as if it were some kind of game, their own
laughter echoing back and around him as Irdaign spoke.

“I am here because I saw you here, Chriani. You are the reason,
if reasons are something you feel compelled to pursue. I saw you seek me here,
whether you knew it or not, and sensed that you had need of me. So speak that
need, and I will help you if I can.”

As Irdaign’s words slipped through him, Chriani felt the moment
seize around him. Against the firelight, the voices seemed to congeal like
mist, hanging as echoes whose colors reflected the lamps shimmering in the
wood. A child’s voice rose above all the others, singing words he remembered.

Cal lun tau seryan ede to maynd

Lun tau seryan neld to caynd…

It was part of the only words of Leisana he would recognize. The
language of the Leisanmira, and a song Lauresa had sung while he traveled with
her. The “Ode of Seilonna” was a lament of leave-taking, the princess had said.
It spoke of the road that leads endlessly away from home, never leading to what
the traveler truly seeks.

Until Irdaign spoke, Chriani wouldn’t have understood what his
need was. He knew now.

“When I last saw the princess,” he said carefully. “I gave her a
gift.” Irdaign made no response. Waiting. “No one knows where it is. Not even
those few others who know of its existence. But some might try to find it. Tell
Lauresa…”

The princess’s name sounded wrong on his tongue. He felt a weight
to it as he spoke, realizing how that weight came from the length of time since
the princess had truly left his heart, left his thoughts. And even as she had
left his thoughts, Chriani realized how those thoughts were clinging to a
version of her that no longer existed.

Lauresa was a duchess’s name now. Not a princess anymore.

“Make sure she understands that it’s safer where it is now, safer
with her, than it could be anywhere else.”

“And those who seek it…?”

“Are my problem,” Chriani said.

The degree of resolve in his own voice surprised him. The fear of
having been hunted, the fear that came with magic he didn’t understand, had
been riding alongside him like an unseen companion since that day of stumbling
upon the shrine in the deep wood. But Dargana’s sudden interest in her Ilvani
children’s tales had muted that fear somehow. Reminding him that it was easy to
be afraid of what you didn’t know, but that simple fear would never stop him
from fighting.

Irdaign nodded. “I understand. And what else?”

Chriani stared to the fire. He felt a different fear twist
through him, of the weight of assessment and expectation in Irdaign’s voice. He
knew his fear of that voice and the power of the mind behind it, even as he
hated himself for it.

She wouldn’t need the sight, he told himself, to know his mind
right now.

“Is she happy?” he said at last.

“As she can be, yes. Her daughter is a blessing in all ways,
though a son would have suited the duke better. All things in time, though.”

Chriani noted the subtle shift in Irdaign’s voice. A sudden
brightness to her words. A moment of a mother speaking of a daughter and
granddaughter, setting aside other concerns.

There was no sign in that voice that she knew the truth, but
Chriani couldn’t look at her. Didn’t know if he could accept seeing the
recognition of that truth in her eyes.

The rain had lessened, he realized. The songs had shifted around
him, punctuated by laughter. He felt an unexpected lightness threading his
mind, and a warmth that was more than the fire.

He was happy for the fact that Lauresa could be happy. Knowing
how that was all he’d ever have.

“I need to go,” he said.

Irdaign stood as he did. “I’m sorry to have kept you, Chriani.
But I am glad we spoke.”

He nodded as he turned for the wood and the horses, but Irdaign
stopped him with a hand to his shoulder.

“Do you trust me, Chriani? Enough to set aside your fear for a
time?”

I’m not afraid of you.
The urge to lie came quick and
instinctive, but the words went unsaid. Only three meetings he’d had with Irdaign,
and she had seen through to the truth of his heart from the first.

“I do.”

“I would leave you with a charm of song. If you will allow me.”

Chriani forced himself to nod. Knew he couldn’t give himself time
to think about it. Then Irdaign sang.

A warmth spread from her hand where it still touched him. Chriani
felt that warmth trace its way across his shoulder, down his chest. It rested
there for what seemed a very long time to the reckoning of his fear, though his
distant consciousness counted out the song Irdaign sang in a measure of
moments.

When she took her hand away, he looked down to see a mark at his
armor. A sigil of light whose lines were Ilvani but not Ilvani traced
themselves around the outline of a flower, five white petals ranged around a brilliant
point of pure light. The mark vanished, but as it did, Chriani sensed its
brightness follow the warmth, pushing down through armor and tunic to his skin.
He felt it spread inside him, surround and press against the other magic he
held. The steel ring worn openly at his finger, the golden disk hidden but
exposed. The black ring tucked within its secret pocket at his belt, the dead
talisman next to that.