The birds were gone back to the darkness as he ran to the horse, leaving the torch behind him but pulling another from the saddlebags. He spooked the animal as he did so, had to remember to fumble the black ring from his finger before he snatched up the reins, pulled himself to the saddle and spurred away. He didn’t look back to the shrine behind him.
His injured arm was agony as he rode, a useful combination of focus and fear masking it before, but now long gone. He held himself low along the horse’s neck as he raced back along the trail that had brought him there, the torch above and behind him to keep it from the horse’s eyes. It lit up a narrow well around them, the motion of the ride setting it flaring, the light pulsing back from the trees where they pushed in from all sides. For long stretches, Chriani felt as though he and the horse were held suspended and motionless, trapped in a shimmering sphere of light as the forest flashed past them at speed.
When he rounded the bend that marked the haze of light where the rangers were waiting, Chriani wasn’t surprised to see two of them with bows drawn, tracking his approach until they confirmed it was him. He was surprised, though, to find them already mounted, faces ashen and eyes bright with fear.
He slewed to a stop where Makaysa sat astride her horse. She was six paces back from where the bodies of the four Ilvani prisoners were sprawled across each other on the ground. Their hands and feet were still tied, their limbs twisted as if they’d been broken. The three Valnirata who had died in the initial assault had been inexplicably moved by the look of them. Within the shadow of the fallen horse, their bodies were tossed across the empty ground, backs arched and limbs splayed in some grim contortion.
Where he could see the mouths and hands of the fallen Ilvani, Chriani saw the flash of gold shine bright in the torchlight.
“We were almost done waiting for you.” Makaysa’s voice carried the same tone of indifference but the smile was gone. She made the moonsign as she nodded to Chriani, as if warding herself against the chance that his sudden reappearance was more than it seemed.
“What happened?” Chriani asked, though his guess at the answer was already rooting in the shadow that filled his mind. He spurred his horse past Makaysa toward the bodies, but the animal balked at the command. Three paces but no closer, as if it could sense the magic pulsing as points of golden light in the shadows.
“Something killed them,” Makaysa said evenly. “They screamed as one, then shook. Some force pushing through them, twisting them like rag dolls. Then the ones already dead moved the same way, leaving them all as you see them.”
The prisoners had been searched as a matter of course. No way for the coins to have been hidden on them, let alone be left within reach of their hands, bound tight with cord and twisted behind their backs. No way for the Ilvani to have placed the third coins in their slack and open mouths. In the light of Chriani’s torch, their dead eyes gleamed violet and blue, brown and green.
“Ride,” he said, but the other rangers were already moving. He let Makaysa spur away ahead of him, pulling up the rear as they raced away. The light of their torches pulsed bright in the darkness of the forest as they galloped west, leaving the bodies and the darkness behind.
THEY RODE HARD TO ESCAPE the trees, Chriani sensing the others as shimmering light swerving through the darkness around him. No formation to their movement, no sense paid to whether they might be followed. Just a focus on the trail ahead, swerving to avoid branches and vines as they slipped within the light, flashed past, were gone again.
A surge of speed took Chriani’s horse as it sensed the open air a moment before his eyes caught the change in the light. Then all of them broke out across the threshold of the grasslands with torches held high, Chriani seeing Grus standing in the saddle, gasping the open air as if he might have been drowning in the closeness of the trees.
Night was falling in the world outside the forest. The real night of stars and wind, not the darkness of the shrouding canopy of leaves. The warmth of the waning summer had been lingering through two weeks of clear weather, though it was beginning to grow cold by dark. The sky was clear this night, the shimmer of starlight and the last glow of the sunset bright enough to ride by, but the seven of them kept their torches burning as they turned for the camp.
Makaysa led a two-rank formation, picking an easy pace to cool the horses. Chriani checked that pace even further to let himself slip back from the two rangers he rode alongside. Not wanting to see the looks on their shadowed faces, their fear too bright to his eyes. He looked back at intervals, feeling the ache at his injured arm grow more acute as the trail disappeared into darkness behind them. There was no sign of any pursuit.
As they rode, no one spoke.
When the first lights of the camp perimeter were seen, Makaysa ordered the horn call that was standard procedure for riders returning from patrol or calling to regroup. Two short blasts repeated at intervals until an answer was heard. It wasn’t a code of the same type as the forest call signs, but simply a heads-up for the close camp patrols and the perimeter guards. Less chance of being shot on sight that way.
Along the empty trail they followed, they heard griffon riders above them once but never saw them. The elite gavaleria aerial patrols of the Valnirata flew across the camp each night on some schedule only they knew. The shriek of their griffon mounts sent a ripple of unease through the horses, but their fast movement was all but impossible to track across the shimmer of starlight. The Clearmoon was at its last crescent but not yet risen. The Darkmoon had been waning thin for a week or more, barely visible at dusk as it pursued the sun on its descent.
The gavaleria hadn’t engaged with the Ilmari on either side of the Greatwood in long years now, but their presence by night was an unnerving reminder of the mysteries the forest held. No one knew how far into the deep wood the griffons and their riders were based, or how far they ranged out from the trees. No one knew whether their missions were solely designed for disruption or whether they were looking for something. Watching and waiting as they shadowed the Ilmari camp lines and the patrols that prowled the frontier.
The camp ran no outriders after dark, but Chriani saw the perimeter guards marked out by starlight as Makaysa led them onto the main trail bisecting the rise of low hills on which the camp was spread. Bows were drawn and arrows nocked against them, archers watching darkly as they approached. Only when visual contact was made did they drop their aim.
The camps of the rangers never held to a single location long enough to become anything like a permanent presence along the frontier. Among the nearby settlements, this site was simply the ranger camp. Among the rangers, though, the frontier stations were named for warriors dead or retired, gone to legend or the anecdotes and grumbling of those who had followed them.
Konaugo Post was the designation for this camp. Established six months past, east of Alaniver and across the Locanwater River. The name carried a darkness for Chriani that not even Kathlan understood. The late Captain Konaugo had been a legend in the Bastion, and on the frontier where he had ridden in his youth. He had come back to that frontier with his prince a year and a half before, and had been ordered by that prince to escort the Princess Lauresa safely to Aerach along the Clearwater Way.
Chriani had hated Konaugo, as he knew the captain hated him. He’d been convinced that Konaugo was complicit in Barien’s death, had doubted and distrusted him right to the end. But that end had seen Konaugo fall while executing the same duty Chriani had taken up, the same pledge he had made. To protect the princess even if it cost him his own life.
The name was for the rangers alone, seen nowhere among the banners that flew from six points around the perimeter, then again above the central clustered tents of the captains and the war-mages. The falcon that was the symbol of Brandishear stood highest among the standards, with the interlocking spears beneath it that stood for the strength and bond of all four of the Ilmar principalities. Brandishear and Elalantar to the west of the Greatwood, Aerach and Holc to the e
ast. The horse-and-axe insignia of the Prince High Chanist’s house hung below those, twisting in the breeze that picked up as the sun disappeared.
It was that same standard under which Chriani and Kathlan fought — the regiment of Rheran and the Bastion. But four more standards flew alongside it, marked with shield and blade, axe and wolf and mountain lion. The signs of the five regiments of Brandishear’s eastern frontier, which made up the bulk of the camp’s four-thousand-strong force.
As they passed through the first checkpoint, Makaysa gave the signal to stop as she summoned two sentries close. Chriani didn’t hear the words that passed between them, but he was fairly certain he saw one sentry glance his way before turning and taking off at a run. Makaysa spurred ahead, the squad following.
Chriani brought up the rear, as before. He slowed to hail the sentry Makaysa had talked to, saw the squire’s insignia in bronze at his shoulder. “Umeni’s squad, and the rest of Sergeant Thelaur’s,” he said quietly, one eye on Makaysa and the others moving ahead of him. “When did they make it back?”
“Who’s asking?”
Chriani knew the sentry to see him but had never bothered learning his name. The attitude of bored indifference was such a common feature among the camp guard that he’d yet to see the point in differentiating between them.
“Chriani, temporarily reassigned to Sergeant Thelaur’s first squad under Guard Second Rank Makaysa,” he said with a maximum amount of ire. “Acting head of second squad after Sergeant Thelaur’s death.” Though none of that was exactly true, all the time since he’d taken commission, both in the Bastion and on the frontier, had taught Chriani that there was a mutable line between actually having authority and simply sounding as if you did.
The sentry shot to something resembling attention. “They arrived just at dusk, three missing and Sergeant Thelaur dead.”
“One of the injured was Kathlan of third squad. You’d have seen the arrow she was holding in her shoulder.”
“She was with them, and headed for the healers, I heard.”
Chriani spurred forward with a nod. Ahead of him, he saw Grus turned back and watching darkly.
Makaysa led them to the southwest stables, one of four set deep within the camp as protection from direct attack. They made their way along mud paths packed down with straw, passing between tents set onto wide platforms. Those platforms were arranged in tight arcing rows, spreading in semicircles cut through with radial paths for ease of movement within and across the camp.
The stations of the Brandishear rangers were mobile defensive, scouting, and attack platforms, setting up for a season or a year, then shifting to keep pace with weather and threats. They had long been a staple of the southern frontier, keeping watch on the old mountain passes and the Orcish war-bands that still made use of them, or hunting the fell wolves that appeared on the southern plains with dread predictability in the last days of winter.
The Greatwood had been of less concern since the end of the Ilvani Incursions of a generation ago, and it had been almost that long since the camps had been seen along Brandishear’s forest frontier. The patrols that kept a watchful eye on the Ilvani had long been content to range out from the fortified towns flanking that frontier, anchored between the eastern cities — Cadaurwen and Alaniver, Welbirk and Addrimyr, and Caredry to the far north, whose gates and walls marked the entrance to the Clearwater Way.
A year and a half ago, the long sense of uneasy peace and isolated skirmishes along the forest had changed.
East and south of Alaniver, Konaugo Post was a day’s easy ride from that city, and less than a league from the wall of the forest. The impermanence of the ranger camps was designed to balance their close proximity to the Greatwood, allowing them to stay close to towns and cities along the frontier for defense and resupply, but to not give the Valnirata a reason to increase their own standing forces like a permanent presence would.
Building permanent forts so close to the forest created an invitation for Ilvani raids, though it had been long years since the Valnirata had ventured out in numbers to assault settlements in Brandishear. Many said that was changing, though. The Prince’s Guard of Brandishear had been actively recruiting as it hadn’t for a generation. Another sign of the events of a year and a half before.
As they dismounted and led their horses toward the grooms, Makaysa brushed dust from her leathers, the other rangers pulling personal gear from their saddlebags. Chriani grabbed a waterskin from off his own borrowed horse before it went, stifling a wince where he felt his injured arm stiffening. He caught the groom’s look of unfamiliar appraisal, clearly recognizing the horse but not its rider. As he drank, then splashed water to his face, Chriani thought on how that suited him fine this night. He didn’t know how long he would have before Umeni found him, but the fewer people who saw him until then, the better.
“First squad on duty,” Makaysa called. The others stood to attention, Chriani managing to lift himself out of the slouch of too long a day in the saddle. “But all of us are to the war-mages, now.” She met the eyes of each of her rangers in turn as she spoke, but Chriani didn’t nod as the others did. “Debrief on what was seen. No discussion among yourselves first. When the mages are done, the five of you are off duty.” The sweep of her hand made a specific point of excluding Chriani from the second half of her orders. To him, she added, “When you’re done, report to Captain Rhuddry. She knows you’re coming.”
Chriani understood what message the sentry had run on Makaysa’s command. He nodded this time.
Guard Captain Rhuddry led the Crimson Shields, the guard regiment of Alaniver. A veteran ranger, decorated in her home city and Rheran, though from what Chriani knew of her record, she hadn’t spent more than six months behind city walls in over two decades of military service. He knew her as less dedicated to discipline for its own sake than to the fighting form that discipline was meant to shape, which put her ahead of most captains in his view. But for those whom discipline couldn’t shape — including Chriani — Rhuddry had very little patience. He didn’t expect that would change tonight.
He fell into step with the others, striding behind and to the left of Makaysa. He tried at first to slip back to last rank, but Grus’s boot at his heel told him the veteran was watching for that particular move. So Chriani waited until they passed through the main-path intersection between the mess tents, the smell of roast meat and wood smoke hanging heavy, a twisting mass of foot traffic converging from three different directions.
He waited for his moment, sidestepping easily to avoid a supplies cart slowing in front of them, bogged down on one side in a muddy rut. Then he kept on sidestepping, away from Makaysa and the others and onto a track running off behind the stores tents.
Chriani felt Grus moving before he saw him, knew that the veteran had been watching for his escape. Even still, he was barely fast enough as he twisted away. He slipped beneath the warrior’s first punch, then came up into his jaw with the elbow of his good arm, stopping the shout he was about to make.
As Grus stumbled back, Chriani dropped to a defensive crouch, slipped back two paces. It was dark between the tents, the spill of firelight from the mess fading to shadow around them. It would work to his advantage. “The mages hate to be kept waiting,” he said in a cold whisper. “You’re sure you want to do this now?”
Grus’s answer came as a flying tackle from a standing start, coming at him so fast that Chriani managed only to get his injured arm behind him before he was hit. He wrapped his left arm around Grus’s neck, holding on as the heavier warrior pushed him back, and knowing that one solid shot to his injured arm might drop him.
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.”
Three Coins for Confession Page 6
