Three Coins for Confession (49 page)

“All hold! The infidel is mine!”

She was next to him suddenly. Chriani didn’t see her move, but
whether because he’d blacked out or the sorcerer had used magic to cross the
space between them, he didn’t know. She grabbed at the coins clutched tight in
his still-bound hands, used them to lift Chriani as if he weighed nothing. She
had Dargana’s bloodblade in her other hand, knuckles white where she gripped
it.

It wasn’t the blade she thought it was, Chriani reading the
sorcerer’s knowledge of his deceit in her frenzied eyes. He could see himself
through those eyes suddenly, flashes of the pain that lined his face, his
twisted body. The link that connected Viranar to all the other Ilvani was in
him now as the power of the shadow well coursed through him. He felt her rage,
felt the hunger for his death that drove her. Whatever power Chriani’s lies had
seemingly promised her was already forgotten.

As she raised the blade, readying a killing stroke, another
convulsion took him. But Chriani was ready for it this time. He let it drive
him forward, angled himself with the last of his strength to smash his head
into Viranar’s. He heard her nose break beneath the force of the magic coursing
through him.

The sorcerer screamed as she staggered back, dragging Chriani
with her. Her knife hand spasmed, swinging wide as she tried to keep her
balance. Her grip on the amulet was still iron-tight, even as Chriani’s hands
began to slip. A haze of her blood clouded his eyes, but he saw her gain
control of her other hand, striking with the bloodblade for his throat. He was
screaming as he forced one hand open, managed to lock it around hers to send
the dagger wide.

A bright pain across his cheek and ear told Chriani he’d been
struck, but he managed to hold on. One hand was at the amulet, the other at the
bloodblade as Viranar’s fingers cracked beneath the convulsive strength of his
grip. But with his wrists still bound, his body bent, he couldn’t find any
leverage to force the blade back toward her.

His hand slipped, just a little. A bright flash of pain seared
him as the dagger scored his palm, set a new line of blood there.

Then a bright blue light was in his mind, turning the haze of
molten gold across his eyes to the gentle color of a winter sky.

Something had changed.

Chriani felt the link to Viranar and the other Ilvani fade away
like quickly shuttered windows. One by one, they closed to darkness where a
golden light had shone a moment before. In its place, he felt the white light
resolve to the sharp lines of a war-mark he recognized. The sigil of Halobrelia
that marked his shoulder, that had marked Dargana’s shoulder. The lines
acid-etched across her dagger, his blood spreading out along those lines now to
mark the name of his father’s kin as a red-black stain.

You have fate behind you, whether you like it or not.

Dargana’s voice was around him, as if the exile might have been
standing at his side. He felt her strength fill his mind, felt his tight-locked
muscles surge with an energy he didn’t understand. He twisted his hands around
to tighten his grip on the dagger, locking himself to the amulet where Viranar
was desperately trying to tear it from him. The coins still burned brightly,
but their heat was gone.

You’ll know what it means.

His wrists were bleeding beneath the ropes but he ignored the
pain. He heard a scream that he realized was his own voice as he held Viranar
fast.

He felt Dargana in his mind. He felt her strength and resolve,
her bitter anger driving the pounding of his heart. He felt her memories as the
flickering light of a shadow play, flashing across his sight. Voice and image,
impression and sensation, all of it moving faster than his thought and sense
could process. Chriani understood it all the same.

The power of the coins was in his mind like a living thing. He
felt that mind opened up and laid bare, his memories set down like charcoal
lines on blank parchment. Single images frozen fast, words and voices plucked
out of mind and time. A connection between magic and memory. His eyes burned
with a white light that he could see through Viranar’s frenzied gaze.

Chriani felt the blood and passion of the fallen Dargana erupt
from the blade the exile had carried her whole life. He felt the lives of all
the exile tribes reflected in her — and through her blade, all those
lives burned now in him.

He understood a lifetime spent seeking a path between the
extremes that defined the exiles, as clear as if he had lived that life himself
from the day he was born. Trying to cleave between the two bright points of
hatred that defined the Crithnala. Hatred of the Ilvani who had driven them
north into exile, out of the Greatwood that had been home to their people for
all time. Hatred of the Ilmari who haunted Crithnalerean along its borders and
across the Clearwater Way, and who hunted the exiles even in the only lands
they could call their own.

A hundred generations of hatred became a seething passion in his
pounding heart. He felt an ageless indifference, saw with his own eyes the act
of turning away from the Greatwood. Felt the need to push even farther north to
avoid the Ghostwood and its dark pasts, the Clearwater Way and the battles that
would always be found there.

He knew Dargana’s father in the blink of an eye. Felt her child’s
reverence at the tall figure who had carried her before him on horseback, dark
hair flowing behind him in the wind. He knew her mother an instant after that,
seeing her laid to rest on a brush bier, draped in white cloth that hid the
marks of the Ilmari arrows that had slain her. He knew her brothers. One who
rode the Sandhorn in scorpion mail. One who had left Crithnalerean for the
forests of Elalantar long years before, disappearing into what passed for life
among those Ilvani who called the Ilmari nations home. Chriani knew the Ilvani
who had followed Dargana as leader, who had ridden skirmishes against Ilmari
patrols for long years. He knew their names, watched them live. He felt her
love some of them for a time, felt them drift away or die, one by one.

He remembered his own father. The images of his childhood were
refocused and reframed by the magic that scoured his thought and mind, all his
memories twisting through Dargana’s like the magic that filled Chriani might be
trying to weave a single life between them. But where the slow-frozen panes of
loss and ache intersected, a dissonant clash of color and form erupted, driving
into Chriani’s heart like a fist. He felt the loss of Dargana’s father,
understood how it had driven her. Forced her to find her own strength, forced
her to fight.

He felt the loss of his own father. Understood how it had
crippled him instead. Threatened to break him.

All his weakness, all his anger. All the lessons of his life that
he had forgotten or would never learn. The empty space inside him that his
father had left, that his mother had tried to fill before fate took her from
him, too soon. Barien and Kathlan. Everything they had tried to show him, with
Chriani thwarting them every step of the way. That legacy of failure he would
carry with him to the last moments of his life.

Those last moments were almost on him. Chriani blinked.

He was caught in the timelessness of memory, sensing and seeing
the scene move around him. A slowness of body, a quickness of thought and mind.
It let him judge the movement of Viranar as she pushed back against him, let
him use that movement against her as he thrust straight down with both hands,
twisted the bloodblade around.

The loops of chain that bound the coins of the confessor were
twisted around their conjoined hands as Chriani punched the dagger up beneath
the sorcerer’s ribs and into her heart.

It didn’t kill her. He had no idea how. He felt the scream her
life made as her skin pulsed gold and a strength twisted through her, forcing
him back. She lashed out with her hands, tried to gouge his eyes out. Tore at
his throat with her teeth, the blood of her broken nose making a red-black mask
of her face.

Chriani fought back with a strength only partly his own. He felt
Dargana’s hand at the bloodblade as he tore it free and struck again, feeling
its balance and weight with a lifelong familiarity that countered the hindrance
of his bound hands. He punched the blade into Viranar’s chest, turning it to
lock within a cradle of splintered ribs. Then with both hands, he used that
bloody steel lever to turn the sorcerer, smashing into her face with his head
again to drive her back toward the edge of the platform. One step away.

He recognized the sensation of arrows slamming into him, but he
couldn’t feel their bite. He was dying, didn’t care anymore. He would finish
it, for Kathlan and the others. For Dargana. It was done.

He tore the dagger from Viranar as he punched into her with his
foot, driving her back. The blade slipped from his blood-soaked hand to hit the
platform somewhere behind him. He let go of the coins as he staggered backward,
the sorcerer’s hands tearing at them, trying to reach them as both she and the
amulet fell back screaming into shadow.

The swirling darkness erupted to a storm of dead black like it
had when Chriani watched Farenna fall, and the sentries the captain had taken
with him. He saw Viranar’s body consumed by shadow, flesh and bone drawn away
to black tendrils and unspooled like tangled yarn. The coins flared with the
molten light of a winter sunset, then shattered with a crack like thunder. Then
they were gone.

Chriani was on the ground, couldn’t remember falling. He could
barely see as the darkness descended on him, swallowing him whole. But as the
coins were consumed, he felt the last tentative touch of the link of mind and
memory fall away. The eyes of the Ilvani closest to him flickered gold to
green, and grey and brown, black and silver. He heard shouts of alarm,
footsteps racing away from him. Then there was just the sound of the black
storm.

He tried to stand but couldn’t. He tried to drag himself forward,
but there was no purchase to be found on the blood-slick platform. A wave of
pain crashed down over him, the taste of metal fading from his mouth. A
half-dozen arrows were perforating his legs, jutting out of his back and
shoulders.

Fire was bright in the distance, flaring even through the
darkness. The hiss of arrows rose, hoofbeats pounding hard, growing louder. He
didn’t understand it.

He heard the call of Ilvani voices shouting out in alarm. The
Valnirata fought in silence, though. Something had changed.

“Laóith!” they screamed.

His hands were free. Chriani felt the raw flesh at his wrists
marked by cleaner cuts where he must have used the bloodblade to slice through
the silk ropes. He couldn’t remember it. The blade was in his hand, though, and
he was using it like a climbing axe as he drove it into the platform, pulled
himself slowly forward like he was scaling some sheer wall.

He couldn’t remember where he was going, couldn’t understand why
the pain had stopped. The bloodblade was warm in his hand, Dargana’s strength
still clutching it. Holding it fast even as his own strength failed.

“Chriani!”

He thought he heard Kathlan calling to him, but she was a world
away. He had done it for her, though. The Ilmari could catch the cultists by
surprise now, their power crippled. The Laneldenari were safe from the treason
that had infected them without their seeing it.

Things would be better now, he hoped. It was done.

“Chriani! Fate and faith, no!”

The glow of mage-light was bright around him. He tasted a
bitterness at his lips, then felt himself lifted off the ground by a storm of
pain that took his sight away.

He was gagging, more liquid forced to his lips, but he couldn’t
drink it fast enough. He felt hands on him, heard other voices calling from far
off.

“…dead three times over…”

There was a darkness, then a light.

“…fate and fucking moonsign, what’s keeping him…”

Someone was calling his name, telling him to hold on. He thought
it was Dargana at first, her voice in his mind again.
Find your path,
half-blood.
But then he recognized Kathlan, speaking softly.

“It’s all right… It’s all right…”

Someone was holding him, and he wished suddenly and with all his
life and heart that it could have been her. Not just a dream. One last moment
in Kathlan’s arms would have made it better, he thought, before the darkness
took him away.

HE WAS BACK IN RHERAN, but it was a memory, not a dream.
A subtle difference within the cascade of images, of scent and sound that
washed through him in the dark. Chriani didn’t understand how he knew. He just
accepted it. Welcomed it in what he knew must be the last moments of his life.
The past running before him at the end, like the old warriors all said.

He and Kathlan had come together at the harvest fest, High Autumn
of three years before. He remembered it with a strange clarity, all his present
darkness seeming to sharpen the sight of the past. A night of wine and song
around the market court fires, Kathlan taking up a duet with Barien —
an ethereal lyric of fathers and daughters, love and time that had driven into
Chriani’s heart like a blunted stake as he watched her.

Late that night came a moment he had long known was coming. From
the time Barien had taken him in at eight years, he had told Chriani —
had warned him repeatedly — of the danger of showing the war-mark at
his shoulder to anyone in the Bastion, anyone in the prince’s guard. Though she
worked within the walls of the keep and alongside tyros and squires alike, Kathlan
wasn’t of the Bastion or the guard. But this did little to temper the fear that
churned in him as he felt that moment drawing closer. Both of them overwhelmed
by the celebration of a summer gone, and by spiced wine and firelight, and by
an intensity of feeling that left Chriani light-headed as Kathlan led him to
her loft above the stables beneath a moonless sky, stars blazing bright and
warm.

Chriani had fumbled his way through the overtures. Had attempted
to keep his shirt on at first, but Kathlan was having none of that. He had
known the day would come at some point, but he hadn’t expected it quite so
soon. Had no idea how to stop it, how to stop her. No idea what would happen as
she pulled his tunic off his shoulder and saw the mark there.

She hesitated, to be sure. But in the end, all she said was,
“Tell me.” So Chriani did. He told her all of it, the words rushing from him in
a flood that spoke to how long he’d been holding them inside. The things he’d
only ever told Barien before. The reasons why he’d kept them secret for so
long.

When he was done, Kathlan told him her story. Where she’d come
from, how she’d gotten to Rheran, her parents dead. “I’ll keep your secret,”
she said in the end. “Don’t worry about what’s done.”

The rest of that night was a blur to him now, with the months
that had followed it almost as much so. He had turned away from Kathlan for a
time. He had gone to Aerach and returned, and had forgotten in the year and a
half since then how many things had changed with that return.

He had forgotten what it felt like to accept the solitude. To
expect that he would always be alone. Had forgotten how long it took him to
break past that. He should have known it sooner, he thought within the dream.
Waiting for the darkness to close around him for good.

He should have told Kathlan what she was to him when he had the
chance. He should have told her what she’d done.

Chriani awoke to daylight and the feel of healing magic coursing
through him, clearing his thoughts, washing away the pain. A half-dozen points
of a bright aching were fading in him now, where arrows had pierced him. At
least two of those carried the sharp sense of having hit bone, but even that
pain was only memory now.

His arms and legs felt like glass chimes, so fragile that they
might shatter if he moved too quickly. His skin was clammy, warm against the
chill in the air. It was the brief weakness that came with the magic of
healing, but Chriani had never felt it so intensely before. He thought on what
that might mean about how close to death he had been. Then he pushed that
thought away, down into the shadow where it would hide for a time.

Kathlan was holding him. He couldn’t see her, but he knew her
presence all the same, feeling her arms around him where he lay slumped on his
side.

He was conscious of the sounds of distant shouting, horses on the
run. Scattered bowshot over the faint hiss of wind through the trees. Something
dark was falling all around him, carrying the scent of charred paper. His
vision flickered as he tried to focus, thought for a moment that he might still
be dreaming.

He felt Kathlan’s breath at his neck. Knew it was real.

“Kath…”

“You need to not move for now,” she said quietly. “You’ve taken
enough magic to bring a full squad back from just this side of dead. The
healer’s not sure how you held on so long.”

“I did it for you…”

It was all he could say, the thought etched in his mind as if he
was finishing a conversation he’d started with himself a long time ago. He felt
the words burning bright, shining like steel scraping at the darkness. He could
see torches along the platform, the floating motes of mage-light gone. The
black well’s haze of shadow was before him, but it had changed somehow.
Swirling more slowly, drifting down instead of venting upward. Above him was
the faint glimmer of a sunset sky.

The well was silent, he realized. The falling darkness was the
slow storm of leaves shedding from the great black tree, swirling down around
them like a gentle rain.

Slowly, Chriani raised himself up to sitting, Kathlan’s arms
disengaging from him. He didn’t turn back, couldn’t look at her yet. More
slowly, he stood. He felt a wave of dizziness wash through him, quickly pass.

He turned to survey the terraces around him, seeing them littered
with arrows but only three Ilvani dead. A half-dozen guards in the livery of
Aerach were spread around him and Kathlan, walking a slow patrol along the
edges of the platform. They were alert, cautious as if they expected a horde of
Valnirata to suddenly swing down from the adjacent trees. Beyond and below
them, where the well of shadow had been, Chriani could look down to see nothing
but ash now. The roots of the great tree were cracked and splintered where they
thrust up above that grey-black field. Between two of those roots, the twisted
pillar of stone had collapsed to a lighter grey stain.

He moved carefully, took three cautious steps toward the bodies.
All warriors in the grey armor of the cult, felled by Aerachi arrows. Some part
of his mind that cared about such things noted that the pale captain Raecla
wasn’t among them. Chriani set the thought aside. It didn’t matter anymore. It
was over.

Tician wasn’t there. That thought stayed with him a little
longer, though Chriani expected that the assassin must have bolted the moment
the Aerachi arrived in full force. But as his gaze swept the platform, he saw
the blood trail he’d left from the edge nearest the black tree, where he had
tried to step over and into oblivion. Tried and failed. He marked the smoothly
arcing lines that said he’d been dragged a half-dozen steps from that edge,
then marked the rougher movement where he had clawed his way forward with the
bloodblade in hand.

The ropes that had bound him were cast aside at the point where
he’d started moving on his own. He didn’t remember cutting them. Could only
recall the wounds at his wrists that a knife hacking through the ropes had
made.

He saw the rough edges of those ropes where they’d been severed.
Not by the razor-smooth edge of the bloodblade, which he had dropped as Viranar
died, then claimed again somehow. It was a smaller knife that had sliced
through them. A jagged blade, someone freeing him before the Aerachi arrived.
Tician had dragged him from the edge, had cut his bonds. She found Dargana’s
dagger, set it back in his hand.

The assassin had saved him. Again. Chriani set the thought aside,
let it slip into the shadow. It was over.

“Sergeant Kathlan. It’s all but done in the woods.” The voice
carried a strength that echoed heavy footfalls along the platform, a tall
figure wearing the insignia of an Aerachi captain approaching at a brisk walk.

“And here, lord,” Kathlan called in response. She shifted in
toward Chriani, who understood that by doing so, she was blocking the incoming
officer’s view of him for just a moment. He felt her push something into his
hand. The black ring, which she must have taken off him.

“That’s Captain Shara,” she said as Chriani slipped the ring to
his belt. “He commands this troop, made me an acting sergeant. You’re going to
come with us. Do you understand?”

Chriani nodded, turning toward the captain, but Kathlan stopped
him with a hand. He saw the cinched rope restraints she held.

“I need to arrest you,” she said quietly.

From the corner of his eye, Chriani sensed a pattern to the
movement of the guards around him that he hadn’t noted before. He understood
that he was at the center of the patrol they walked. It was him they were
watching, their eyes straying to the Ilvani leather he wore, the war-mark that
armor revealed at his shoulder.

“I understand,” he said. Pieces falling into place. Whatever
chance had brought Kathlan to his side in time to save him, this was an enemy
extraction, not a rescue mission. The charges against him as a result of the
war-mark at his shoulder being revealed, the fear of whatever plots of the
Ilvani he was part of, were both strong enough that a full troop had been sent
into the Ghostwood to find him. Repayment for his betrayal.

“I understand,” he said again, but for the benefit of the Aerachi
captain this time as he stopped close. Shara was an older veteran, wind-burned
and close-shaved, thickly muscled in the manner of one who’d been a warrior all
his life. Chriani was surprised, though, to see an even temper in his gaze.
None of the bluster in Venry, or the raw hatred he remembered from Jeradien’s
eyes, and which he saw echoed in three of the guards around him now.

Dargana’s bloodblade was on the platform two strides from where
he had woken. Kathlan stooped to pick it up, wiping it clean with a cloth from
her belt pouch before she handed it to Shara. He showed no fear as he took it,
held it up to examine it. Chriani saw only admiration in the captain’s gaze for
the quality and construction of the blade.

As Kathlan stepped close, she pushed Chriani’s wrists together,
preparing to bind him. They would leave his hands in front of him at least, for
riding. Chriani raised his hand to stop her, felt the quick tension in her.

“Captain Shara. Before I’m arrested, I have a favor to ask.”

The captain’s eyes flicked over to Chriani from the bloodblade,
angled so that the light danced across its glyph-etched steel. “You’re in a
poor position for favors, son.”

“How many did you lose in the assault, lord?”

Shara’s eyes narrowed. Chriani had no reason to hope for a
conversation with the captain, but something in the Aerachi’s manner made him
speak. Reminding him of Barien.

“Eight wounded, none dead,” Shara said, “by the grace of fate and
steel. Lucky for you and your cause, I’d say.”

“It wasn’t luck, lord. When you approached the temple, you would
have seen the patrol trails, but I’m guessing you met no sentries.” Shara made
no response, but Chriani saw acknowledgement flicker in the captain’s eyes.
“You have war-mages with you. I saw fire in the trees, then heard arrows to
follow. You saw the Ilvani scatter, then. They were fleeing even as you
attacked.”

“The Ilvani excel at skirmish tactics, son, but they know better
than to stand against Aerachi rangers on a mission. They broke when they read
the odds…”

“They broke because I slew the mage who led them and shut down
the magic of this place. I’d wager that your mages are on the ground right now,
reading the dweomer around the black tree. Feeling it fade. Ask them. And know
that if I hadn’t done what I did, this assault would have ended differently.”

Shara was silent a moment. His eyes drifted from Chriani to
Kathlan and back again. Carefully, the captain set the bloodblade into his
belt. As he did, Chriani realized that he had never wondered before at whether
the narneth móir held any of the magic said to be second nature to the
Valnirata Ilvani. The crafting and history of the blades had always made their
legend powerful enough in his own mind, even before he’d seen one for the first
time. But he was thinking now of the real power Dargana’s blade had fed to him
in that desperate moment at the platform’s edge. The memories of the exile
leader, and the strength of her that had saved his life.

“Lieutenant Venry has accused you of treason, son.” Captain Shara
said it evenly. Almost apologetically. “He has the duke’s ear in this. Fighting
against the Ilvani doesn’t absolve you of working for them in the first place.”

“I have one favor to ask of you, lord,” Chriani said again. “When
that’s done, Venry and your duke can accuse me of whatever they like.”

They left him unbound so he could climb, but Chriani had four
guards within striking distance the whole time as he led an Aerachi squad to
the sheltered platform where Dargana’s body lay. The exile showed no sign of
having been disturbed, her eyes still closed as if she might have been
sleeping. The blood on her had dried to black against the grey of her lóechari
armor. The guards stepped in front of Chriani to let him know he wasn’t to
approach, but he could see the platform clearly around her.