Three Coins for Confession (9 page)

When the embrace was done, Kathlan hit him, and significantly
harder than she’d kissed him. Chriani shifted to evade the backhand blow, but
he was only rarely fast enough when Kathlan had hurting him on her mind.

“Have you had healing yet?” she asked when he turned back to her,
his cheek stinging.

“No. So maybe don’t…”

She struck him again, this time across his freshly stitched arm.
He had to stifle a cry as the pain shot through him, renewed.

“What in fate’s name were you thinking?” she hissed.

“I was thinking you wouldn’t be hitting me quite so much, or I’d
have left you outside.”

She sent her other hand toward his cheek but Chriani was ready,
catching her wrist in his fingers. That freed her up to slam him in the arm
again, which he realized had been her plan all along as another molten wave of
pain sent a haze of shadow across his eyes.

Though already on his knees, he collapsed back toward his cot,
worried that if he didn’t, he would simply keel over. But he twisted Kathlan’s
wrist at the same time, brought her around backward and wrapped his arms around
her. They hit the cot together and sent it crashing to the platform, Chriani
landing hard under her, but managing to hold her in a tight embrace.

A ribald call of approval rose from outside as footsteps passed
the tent. Then laughter, fading.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he whispered.

“Tremendously. Now answer the question.”

“You already know the answer, Kath. I wasn’t thinking. I leave
that to you.”

She said nothing to that. Just lay in his arms for a while.

“Were you worried?” Chriani asked at last.

“A little less when Makaysa set out after you.”

“You try to ride with her?”

“Maybe.”

“Umeni have to hold you back?”

“Maybe.”

He kissed the back of her neck. She swung around, setting her
weight against him. She avoided the wounded arm this time.

“I was looking for you,” Chriani said.

“I was at the healers, then with the horses.”

The stables were a place Chriani should have known to go back to.
Not thinking again.

Kathlan was the daughter of soldiers both dead, and had been
assistant to the Bastion’s stable master when she was named a tyro of the guard
at the High Spring before last, a year and a half gone. Chriani had requested
that she serve under him, adjutant to a guard superior. She was old for the
post, seventeen summers behind her and most tyros taking the writ by thirteen
years. Chriani had made rank himself only three weeks before that, was given
his guard’s commission that allowed him to take an adjutant at the same
ceremony.

Most members of the guard made squire and served at that station
two years or more before receiving commission, making Chriani and Kathlan’s
unlikely advancement the subject of much whispering. Chriani was above it,
mostly because he didn’t care. But partly also because the suddenness of his
commission came with tales swirling around it of what had happened on the
Clearwater Way. Kathlan, though, became the butt of quietly whispered jokes
heard among every rank of service and duty from the pages on up. A tyro at
seventeen. A stable hand in uniform.

The laughter had faded quickly the first time they saw her ride.

Kathlan had always been one of the best riders in the keep, but
only a select few had ever known it. Chriani. Eugen, the stable master. Barien,
maybe. Chriani had never had a chance to ask him. Kathlan had lived among
horses her whole life, but a bad break in her leg and a hip that had worn down
over years because of it made it painful for her to ride. She would exercise
horses shaking off bruises or colic, guiding them across the training grounds
of the keep with as much skill as any ranger or cavalry rider of the prince’s
guard. A kind of joy was in her when she rode, but never for more than a short
spell. When she was done, the limp that plagued her would be more pronounced
for days afterward.

The Prince High Chanist’s own healers had restored her leg.
Powerful magic, reserved normally for the crown and its captains. Chriani had
seen it done, made it another thing the prince high had promised on his behalf.
He had needed to talk Kathlan into it, though. Had needed to be there with her
while it was done, the healers protesting all the way. She had squeezed his
hand to cracking throughout the spellcasting, made the moonsign more times than
Chriani could count.

Word of that had gotten out. More jokes whispered behind her
back, by tyros who had never seen life-magic, by guards angry at a new-made
squire getting attention from the healers that none of them would ever warrant.

The jokes ended the first time they saw her ride.

In those first months, Kathlan had put veteran rangers to shame
on patrols around Rheran. A month into mounted combat training, she was
assigned to assist Hestria, the cavalry sergeant-at-arms. Three months after
that came an offer to become his adjutant that she turned down. She showed a
focus, a discipline, that Chriani marveled at, even as he knew how bad it made
him look by comparison.

In those months, he realized he had never loved anyone more.

Only one in a hundred tyros were ever recommended for active
duty, and even fewer of those for duty with the rangers. Chriani had never come
close. Kathlan had been riding as his adjutant for just over a year when the
orders came. The pride she showed that day, the perfect light in her green eyes
was a thing he still remembered.

Because she was his adjutant, those orders came through Chriani,
but he understood with absolute clarity that as far as the ranger captains were
concerned, he would be accompanying Kathlan to the frontier, not the other way
around.

In his tent now, the two of them lay there for a time, not
speaking. A kind of peace hanging between them that Kathlan liked to call
the
between times.
The moment of rest and silence between duties, the moment of
waking between sleep and daylight.
Nothing else to think on, nothing else to
be done except hold each other.

Chriani remembered the first time she’d said it, one night not
long after the night that had first brought them together. He’d felt as if he
was humoring her then as he nodded his agreement, sensed her body tight against
his in the dark. He felt differently now.

“I need to go,” he said at last to break the perfect silence.

“Fine. I’ll get you a horse.” Kathlan lifted herself off him
slowly, as if it involved some great effort. “You’ll need a distraction to pass
the sentries. Then stick to the river. Harder for Umeni to pick up your trail.”

She laughed as Chriani swatted at her. But as he stooped to a
standing position beneath the tent’s low ceiling, he found himself smiling. It
was a thing that happened a lot around Kathlan. A thing he was still getting
used to, even after all the time that had passed.

“I need to see Rhuddry. And the war-mages.”

The second piece of information caught Kathlan’s attention. “What
do you want with the mages?”

“What they want with me. Debriefing on Makaysa’s orders.
Something in the forest. Not important.” He winced then as he carefully moved
his shoulder through full motion. Not because of how much it hurt, but because
only as he spoke of it did Chriani truly understand how much he didn’t want to
talk about what he had seen. What he’d felt that day.

As he hoped, his apparent pain refocused Kathlan’s attention.
“You need me to restitch that later, let me know,” she said, running her
fingers along his tunic sleeve. “You’re like a drunk sailmaker with your left
hand.”

Chriani found most of a clean uniform in his footlocker, dressed
quickly as Kathlan put his cot back together. “You’ll be here when I get back?”
he asked before he left.

“Count on it,” she said. She held him tight again for a long
while before she let him go.

There were rules about these sorts of things.
The official
conduct of fraternization between members of the prince’s guard,
as the
regulations called it. Soldiers in the field sought each other out for comfort,
especially in times of strife. It was known and accepted. Practically a
tradition in its own right. Kathlan was a product of that tradition, in fact,
telling Chriani when they first came together how her parents had met while on
patrol in the south.

The finer details of the regulations of official conduct didn’t
prohibit fraternization, but were dedicated to ensuring that fraternization
didn’t interfere with discipline, or take advantage of rank, or come at the
cost of recrimination or lovers’ spats in the field. Kathlan called it liberating.
Chriani found it daunting, only because the commitment he’d given to Kathlan in
the deep winter of the year before was still a relatively new thing to his
mind. The idea of having the captains implicitly sign off on it —
the idea that what passed between the two of them in the night might end up the
subject of report if it affected their conduct by day — put him on
edge.

From the first, even before they’d ridden out from Rheran
together in the forty-strong force from the Bastion guard reassigned to ranger
duty, Kathlan had set out her own terms for keeping boundaries between them.
“Call it paying sop to regulation,” she’d said the night before they left,
their last night in her loft above the stables.
Their loft,
Chriani had
come to think of it, spending more time there than in his own assigned bunk in
the Bastion barracks. “Call it keeping your head down. It’s all the same to
me.”

“It’s a waste of time and a lot of irritation,” Chriani had said
in reply. But he made good on the promise she extracted from him that night,
and the two had done their best to keep sight and sign of their bond to
themselves. Not that it had always been their doing alone. Sergeant Thelaur
knew they were together, because it was no secret, and it hadn’t taken her long
to use that to get back at Chriani for what had become a lengthening list of
failings. When he and Kathlan weren’t on patrol together, Thelaur seemed always
to have them assigned to the rangers’ intermittent perimeter watch at opposite
ends of the night, the two of them passing each other in his tent or hers for a
few fleeting moments in the deep darkness.

It was dark now as Chriani made his way past the camp’s central
pavilions. These were a stand of five-pillar tents surrounded by a
well-patrolled track, and set with a sentry platform atop a great white pine,
staked and tied to hold it secure against the wind. He stuck to the shadows,
watching for any movement from the captains’ pavilion as he passed beneath it.

His plan was to avoid Rhuddry for as long as he could, and he
knew that making his way first to the mages’ pavilion was as good a way as any
to do so. The captain’s distrust of the camp’s war-mages was
notorious — even when compared to the general distrust that
spellcasters held among many soldiers. For now at least, it was as good a place
as any to hide from the debriefing Chriani knew was coming.

The war-mages’ pavilion stood apart from the tents and meeting
places of the officers, set adjacent to the armories by custom, and keeping
that important corner of the camp clear of traffic and casual looting. Its
standard was the symbol of the mageguard — a gout of flame set
within intersecting crescent moons. That mark was a brand taken by those
arcanists who served the crowns of the four Ilmar nations — and who
were eventually tasked with hunting down any arcanists who attempted to avoid
such service.

Chriani rapped at the outside pole of the mages’ pavilion, the
tent already sealed up for the night. When a voice barked out from inside, he
entered.

The leader of the camp’s war-mages was the boisterous and
dismissive Magus Milyan, whose black robes were rumored to have reached that
shade simply by virtue of never having been washed. His steely eyes behind
their spectacle lenses caught Chriani’s gaze as he stepped into the tent,
pulling the door flap closed behind him.

“Seven stories promised me tonight, but only six rangers came to
sing them. I don’t like waiting.” Milyan’s voice carried the reedy tone of a
schoolteacher, but the thickly muscled set of his arms and the longsword at his
belt showed that he took his military service seriously. He wore his collar cut
low, so as to reveal the full extent of the mageguard brand he wore at his
neck. Its twisting lines were set in red against the shadowed skin that marked
him as hailing from Elalantar’s northern isles. “Chriani, they call you?”

“Yes, lord.” Chriani nodded to Milyan, then to Derrach behind
him. She was one of the war-mages’ many adepts — tyros in service to
the mageguard but not yet branded. Chriani had dealt with her more than once,
but she ignored his nod now with narrowed eyes, speaking to the nature of those
previous dealings. She sorted through papers spread across a broad oak table,
candles set across it and burning with an unnaturally bright light.

The tent was more books than walls, set with freestanding shelves
linked together by stanchions on which hung dried herbs, glass flasks, and the
skeletons of creatures Chriani didn’t recognize. He was more than certain they
were the bones of different animals simply reassembled into alarming forms to
frighten those who visited the tent — a squirrel with a bird’s long
beak, a sinuous fish with hands and a snakelike tail, something like an
oversized frog with bat’s wings erupting from its shoulders. However, he had never
seen fit to ask after the truth.

“Sit,” Milyan muttered. Chriani did, taking a stool across from
the room’s single chair, whose height seemed specifically designed to allow
Milyan to look down upon anyone he was speaking to. “Makaysa and the others have
come and gone with their reports. Spare me the tedious details they have shared
and expand my knowledge for a change.”