Heirs of the Blade

Forty-Five

They could do nothing but watch Tynisa’s tortuous progress back towards them, even as some of the Salmae’s people began to approach their own kneeling champion. Tynisa swayed, and each time she put weight on her right leg a shudder went through her, like a dying thing, but somehow she was still on her feet when Che reached out to clasp her arm, and take her weight. The duellist’s face was a mess of blood, the wounds impossible to trace beneath it. One eye was clear and open, but focusing on nothing. Her teeth were clenched together hard enough for Che to hear them grinding.

‘Into the trees,’ Dal Arche snapped. ‘Get beyond the treeline. Keep her on her feet until then.’

When Che rounded on him furiously, he made a wild gesture at all the Salmae’s people. ‘They’re staying where they are because she won, and even when the princess gets her voice back and starts telling them that the fight meant nothing, a lot of them will hold back. Tradition, just useless, rotten tradition, but this once it works for us. Our champion won, so going after us now counts as bad form.’ He spat the words disgustedly. ‘Oh, they’ll come, sure enough, but we have some time so long as it’s us that won.’

‘But…’ Che started, already moving for the trees with Tynisa leaning on her, barely more than a dead weight.

‘That fellow she took down is still alive back there, for all her sword’s sticking in him,’ Dal shot back. ‘If she just keels over in full view, well, she might be dead, then. In that case their man won, and we’re all dead a moment after that.’ He glanced back anxiously. ‘Tell the truth, I’m not sure who did win there. Bloody mess, all of it. Soul-’

‘Stay by the treeline and watch what they do,’ the Grasshopper pre-empted him. He had an arrow to his bow, his eyes flicking left and right across the breadth of the enemy host, and then up to the sky.

The trees loomed sooner than Che had expected. ‘A doctor, there must be,’ she said. ‘We have to…’ She looked down in horror at the sheer quantity of blood. ‘Bandages, medicines, something…’ She tried to catch Maure’s eye but the magician would not look at her.

‘Carry the girl into the woods,’ Dal stated flatly. He glanced at Thalric, who bristled for a moment, but then got an arm round Tynisa’s back and simply gathered up her knees with the other, hoisting the girl in his arms. She gave out a wretched, rasping cry, and Che almost hoped she would pass out, escape for a moment from the agony she must be in. But instead, Tynisa rested her head on Thalric’s shoulder, sheer willpower twisting her face.

‘Go,’ Dal urged, and he and Mordrec set the pace, letting the other two keep up as best they could. Released from Tynisa’s weight, Che’s injured leg took the chance to register its own complaints, for all her durable Beetle nature. She let herself lean on Maure’s arm, while Thalric strode and stumbled ahead, trying to balance Tynisa’s weight. If Mordrec had been unwounded then the two bandits might have got clear of them and simply vanished into the trees, but his shoulder was troubling him still, sapping his strength, and Dal hung back to match his friend’s pace.

‘She’s dying!’ Che called out, not caring who heard her now. ‘I need to tend her wounds, please!’

Dal looked back, and she saw the internal conflict on his face, the man who wanted to run for it fighting desperately with the man so many had chosen to follow. He cast his eyes about furiously, trying to judge how far they had come. Not far enough, was written plainly in his expression, but then one finger jabbed out, indicating a dip where the land fell away, offering some pitiful shelter from enemy eyes.

Thalric manoeuvred his trembling burden down, skidding a little on the slope before coming to a halt with a jar that made Tynisa clutch at him tightly. His face could not be read as he looked at the injured girl, but Che supposed miserably that he would rather she died as soon as they were out of sight of the Salmae, just to rid him of the burden.

As soon as they had stopped, Che was fumbling in her packs for some bandages, and a few little jars of medicine to clean wounds and to ease pain. And thank the world they didn’t take them off me, when I was caught. ‘Start a fire,’ she gasped. ‘Boil up some water.’

‘No time,’ Dal told her flatly.

She glared at him. ‘She’ll die-’

‘She may well die,’ he replied, ‘but we all will, if they catch us. You have minutes here only. Do what you can.’

The mistake Che made was in going for Tynisa’s face first, wetting a bandage with water from her canteen and then wiping away the mask of blood she had been left with. What she saw beneath made her recoil, for the blade’s single stroke had carved her sister from forehead to lips, in a long, crooked line. The mercy was that both eyes were still intact, one gummed shut with blood, but the wound had opened up Tynisa’s cheek and slit the corner of her mouth. The old Mantis-kinden had given her a new face to frighten children.

Che reached for her needle and thread, but Maure was already dragging at her sleeve. ‘No, Che,’ and she was indicating the wound at the Spider girl’s hip.

When she looked, there was so much blood that it seemed impossible that Tynisa could lay claim to it all, yet more kept coming. When Che peeled back the soaking rags of the wounded girl’s clothing it started to gush with a frantic rhythm while Tynisa arched back, ravaged face screwed up against the pain.

‘Stop the blood, stop the blood,’ Che said to herself, thrusting her hands against the wound, but she could not stem it. There was just too much. The life of her sister was emptying itself out between her fingers. A shadow fell over her, a presence looming at her shoulder. ‘Go away!’ she snapped, pressing harder until a brief, choking sound came from Tynisa’s lips.

‘Get out of the way, you stupid woman.’ A hand was on her shoulder and then she was abruptly slung aside. She heard the man grunt with pain as he did it, and recognized Mordrec kneeling at Tynisa’s side.

He’s going to kill her, so she doesn’t slow us down, she thought. Thalric had a palm extended, but was hesitating, as Mordrec put his own hands flat on to Tynisa’s hip, wrist-deep in blood instantly. Maure was holding her back, pleading, ‘No, Che, no,’ as she tried to lunge at the man, to drag him off her sister.

Tynisa keened, with a high sound like a saw biting into iron, one arm flailing madly at the Wasp, then Che saw a stuttering glow between Mordrec’s fingers, and smelt burning. Burning blood, burning skin.

She wanted to cry out, What is he doing? but realization came to her even as she opened her mouth.

After Mordrec stood up, whatever blood Tynisa had left inside her would be staying there, and the imprint of his big hand was seared into her skin in a glossy burn-scar that would surely stay with her for as long as she lived – however short that looked likely to be.

‘I didn’t know Wasp Art could do that,’ she admitted weakly, glancing at Thalric.

‘Don’t look at me. Mine tends to the opposite direction. I’d have blown her leg off.’

She saw Mordrec’s pallid face, sheened with sweat from the effort. ‘We have to go,’ he rasped.

Dropping back down beside Tynisa, Che took her wound-cleanser and soaked bandages in it, using every last drop. Her sister writhed and fought as she applied it, and from personal experience she knew how it stung, but Collegium doctors had long known how the difference between a fatal and a trivial wound would be whether it turned to corruption or not. She swabbed swiftly and aggressively at Tynisa’s face, cleaning away the blood and trying not to look at the twisted line of the scar, and then did her best with what Mordrec had left of the major wound on her hip. Tynisa looked paler than Che had ever seen another human being, or at least one who was still alive. The loss of blood might still kill her, or the shock, or any number of other things. Impulsively, Che took her hand, and was startled by the faint squeeze back. Tynisa was still conscious, and not through any of it had she let go, perhaps fearing that a temporary darkness could become permanent all too easily.

In Che’s mind was a great deal of dread, a terror of a future that did not have this woman in it. We came so far, and it cannot just have been to lose you now.

And: in the midst of her whirl of panicked thoughts, I will not have it.

She blinked. For a moment she had seemed to feel the world shudder, just a little, around her – the air and the earth trembling minutely, out of step with each other. She found herself meeting Tynisa’s gaze.

‘We have to move,’ Che whispered urgently. ‘I’m sorry…’

Tynisa squeezed her hand again, stronger this time, and then Thalric stepped in without being asked and picked her up. Straightening with a grunt, he glanced towards the sky, where a flurry of white was blowing between the branches. The last echo of the Commonweal winter had picked this time to enter its death throes.

Soul Je suddenly arrived, a shape leaping and bounding between trees. In one hand he held his bow, an arrow clasped across it.

‘All kinds of shouting,’ he reported. ‘Princess is telling them to get moving. They don’t like it.’

‘It won’t last,’ Dal decided. ‘Some of them will be keen enough to retain her favour. It won’t be all of them, but frankly it won’t need many.’

Thalric began walking away, almost at random, and a moment later they were all on the move.

Dal squinted up at the white-grey sky. ‘The snow’s a curse when it’s light. We can’t hide our tracks. If it’s heavy, though, there’ll be no tracks. We might hide in it all the way to the border.’

‘If it’s heavy, the cold will kill her,’ Che chided him.

‘Then find a way to stop the snow,’ he replied with a shrug. When Che just halted, he carried on.

She looked up at a lattice of branches with the flakes flurrying through.

‘Maure.’

The magician glanced back. ‘Che, no.’

‘Then what good is it, any of it? Or is that the great secret of magic, that it’s dwindled to uselessness, and that’s why the armies of the Apt run roughshod over the world? Have I come so far just to join the losing side?’

‘Che, you’ve power, but you’ve no direction, no training, and the power you have, it’s… not native to you. It was never intended for a Beetle-kinden to use.’

Che shrugged. ‘One thing about Beetles is that we adapt.’ And with that, she thrust her arms out into the chill air, directed back the way they had come, towards the invisible Salmae. For a moment nothing happened, and she could conceive of no possible way that she could affect the world. Magic was a fiction, of course, and all her early years of study confirmed that. Then she sensed the faintest catch, as though her fingers had brushed some kind of trailing veil, invisible in the air.

‘Masters of Khanaphes, you crowned me,’ Che murmured, less to herself than to the world at large. ‘You made me something new, me and the Empress – you gave us some mark or mantle of yours, made us your champions, however it works. After a thousand years of exile beneath the earth, you have recognized us. Does that mean nothing? Does that mean that when I speak to the wind, it just whisks my words away? What good is it all, then? What is the point of it all?’

She heard Thalric calling to her distantly, but the wind was picking up now, and she caught none of his meaning.

‘I am caught between two worlds,’ she considered, as Maure shifted from foot to foot beside her, keen to get away. ‘Child of the new, but scion of the old. Nobody could have intended that, but it has happened, and I refuse to let it become nothing more than a handicap.’ She was speaking quietly, calmly, but with that last word she summoned her will and pushed it through both hands, tearing at the sky with invisible fingers, clutching and dragging and throwing…

The wind changed direction with an audible whump, and was abruptly whistling past her, back towards the pursuers that were surely coming. She heard it keening through the trees, followed by the snow, thicker than it had been a moment ago, rushing to fly in the faces of their hunters, while obliterating all tracks.

She felt something go out of her, as if some great reservoir had been emptied all at once – expended in a flood of power sent to batter the very heavens into submission.

But had I been skilled, oh then… For in that moment she saw that given a little application, a little care, she might have achieved the same result from so much less effort, and thus have something still in hand to deal with her enemies when they did finally catch up. For now, though, she felt leaden, hollowed out, and could only stumble behind Maure as the magician led her after the others.

The fierce snowstorm that would now be making their followers’ lives a misery was well behind her, and it stayed behind her as she hurried to catch up with Thalric. The air ahead and immediately around her remained crisp and still, the wind itself waiting for her to pass by before claiming another yard of ground.

Her progress was a mad lurch through the forest, the snow always building right behind her, gusting about her heels as though she was the harbinger of a second winter. Maure, helping to take Che’s weight, was shivering, the tips of her ears and nose turning blue with cold, but Che herself felt none of it.

Consequences, she thought to herself. I must be more careful whenever I try to move the world. My standpoint is more solid than I thought. At the same time, though, the scholar in her was considering, And though I believe I moved the weather, yet Thalric would simply claim that this snow was fortuitous. Magic must creep, now. It is not the fire and grandeur of the Bad Old Days.

She heard Dal Arche cry out from ahead of her, his words lost in the wind, but they could mean nothing good. Maure put on an extra burst of speed, without being asked, and a moment later Che saw Thalric, his hands outstretched, looking wildly around. Tynisa crouched at his feet, plainly awake and aware. Her eyes locked on to Che’s and she shouted hoarsely, ‘Look out!’

The snow had not been enough. Even as Tynisa called her warning, a horse thundered between them, close enough to nearly shoulder Che aside. Something whistled by her head, like a large insect, and she only realized afterwards that it was a sword blade.

The horse reared as its rider tugged at the reins to turn it back. Soul Je’s arrow nipped past him, clipping the armour on his shoulder. Then there were more of them. The snowstorm had stripped Salme Elass of most of her force, losing them in the labyrinth of trees and foul weather that Che had turned the forest into. They would have had other magicians, though, to cut a course for them through the wild wind, and now this handful of cavalry had found them, and there would soon be more to come.

Another rider bore down on Che and Maure, a spear couched in his arm, but Dal Arche’s arrow flowered suddenly from the horse’s neck, and the luckless animal rolled forward and over, its rider’s wings flourishing briefly to bring him down firmly on his feet. A moment later Thalric’s sting knocked him down, cracking his intricate armour like an eggshell. A further crackle of stingshot sounded further off, as Mordrec defended himself from more of the Salmae’s followers.

The swordsman had now turned to ride down Soul Je, who kicked himself backwards in a long arc, fifteen feet of leap at least, loosing another shot even as he sprang from the man’s path. Then Che lost track of him, because an arrow drove deep into Maure’s arm, and she cried out in pain and sat down hard.

The archer was mounted, holding his horse still to improve his aim. Che saw him select another arrow from his quiver and nock it to his bow. His face, those pleasant, golden-skinned Dragonfly features, was dispassionate, almost bored.

She knelt over Maure and reached out for whatever magic she could find.

‘Go to her!’ shouted Tynisa, or at least she tried to shout, pushing Thalric away. He gave her an exasperated look, then was flying towards Che, but surely too late to stop the arrow. Tynisa ground her teeth together and stood up, clutching for the sword that she had left behind. The mounted archer sighted carefully, and then his hand flew open in release, the string invisible as it whipped the arrow straight at Che.

The fist of wind that buffeted them all at that moment had to be a freak of the unseasonal weather, Tynisa knew. She saw Che stagger under its battering, and the archer’s horse reared madly. Where the arrow went, she could not discern.

Then Thalric had reached him, grappling the man off his horse under the full speed of his wings, and Tynisa heard the hiss of his Art burning into the archer’s body from point-blank range.

There was a tremor in the ground, a flicker of motion, and Tynisa tried to cast herself aside, managing only an ungainly collapse, the pain roaring through her like a fire, just as the next horse passed by, hoofs inches from trampling her. Without looking up, she knew, and was already forcing herself upright, determined to meet her fate on her feet. The strength – borrowed from who-knew-where – ebbed and flowed within her, always on the point of running dry, and yet she found herself standing up again, swaying and shuddering.

Salme Elass stared down at her icily, a long-hafted sword resting on her shoulder. The moment seemed endless as she studied her prey, and it was all Tynisa could do to stay standing and return the woman’s gaze.

‘Child of the Lowlands,’ the Dragonfly princess said, ‘what brought you here to kill my son? Tell me it was the business of the Empire. Tell me I have an enemy in some Beetle city. Make me understand.’ Her hand flexed on the sword’s grip, and Tynisa could envisage the diagonal cleaving stroke as Elass leant forward in the saddle to hack into her collarbone and come near to decapitating her. The princess was a skilled horsewoman who had judged the distance precisely, her victim well within reach.

None of Tynisa’s comrades seemed to be close enough to intervene, this time. Thalric was still protecting Che, and the bandits were looking after their own.

Well, then, let it be this.

‘Alain made me his sword to use in war,’ she said simply. ‘But when it then came to peacetime, he was careless and so he cut himself. Do not blame the sword.’

Elass’s face contorted in fury and her blade whipped forward even faster than Tynisa had anticipated. She closed her eyes.

The sound of steel on steel came in a single ringing impact, and then she heard Elass’s horse whinny, and its mistress curse. When Tynisa’s eyes opened, Elass was on foot, thrown from her horse, and the animal running off with its bridle swinging. Between her and Tynisa stood a pale figure. In fact Tynisa had never seen a paler. It was not just the grey leathers, which were torn and stained, but he carried the bloodless pallor of a dead man. Isendter, named Whitehand, stood before his mistress with his claw upraised. He was breathing like a dying sprinter, the red on his lips vivid against his blanched skin, and the web of bandages about his wound was running with fresh blood.

‘Traitor!’ Elass screamed.

‘This is shameful,’ came Isendter’s reply, his voice as weak and ragged as Tynisa’s own. ‘I swore to defend your honour. She won! ’

‘Traitor.’ This time the word was flat and ugly. Tynisa saw the blow before it landed, and cried out in warning, but Isendter must surely have foreseen it too. He made no move, did not dip his upraised blade by so much as an inch, accepting the rebuke of his mistress.

She ran him through, ramming the straight blade beneath his ribs, hard enough to lift him on to his toes. With a scream, Salme Elass wrenched her blade free from his body, and he dropped to his knees in the snow and keeled over. Tynisa needed only a glance to know that Isendter was dead.

Then Elass’s blade was in motion again, scything in a flat arc towards Tynisa.

She turned it with her own and, though the impact seemed to shock half of the remaining life from her, her form was perfect and the smallest motion of her wrist deflected the heavy blow by just enough. In the back of her mind, where her father’s ghost had once lurked, she felt a long chain receding into the past, master and student in an unbroken line of tradition: Weaponsmasters, just as Isendter had been, who had deserved a better end than that. The chain that bound her to that antique order was purchase enough to hold her on her feet – just as it had sufficed to bring Isandter to her aid – although the pain of her wounds had its teeth in her and would not let go.

Elass stared at her, then at the rapier in her hand. Where it had been until now, after they had so carefully removed it from Isendter’s body, Tynisa could not say, only that it had come to her when she called. Isendter’s last breath had changed something in her. She had given up on a passive, easy death. She was a Weaponsmaster, of Spider and of Mantis blood, and neither of her parents would have stood and waited for the headsman’s axe.

Then Elass struck at her again, putting all her strength into the blow, to batter through Tynisa’s guard. The cut would have been impossible to stop, but Tynisa felt her arm and sword move along paths made easy by her training, not blocking but simply deflecting, so that in the aftermath of the ringing clash, Salme Elass had struck her rapier from her hand, but the noblewoman’s own blade had been thrown wide by the narrowest of margins.

There was renewed shouting, now, from the other Salmae riders, the movement around them intensifying, the thunder of more hoofs, but Tynisa and Salme Elass were in a vicious little world made for two.

Elass’s eyes flicked to the rapier, lying in the snow and out of reach, but in the heartbeat it took her to draw her blade back, the slender weapon was in Tynisa’s hand again. A Weaponsmaster was never to be parted from her sword. Just as she had awoken with the ancient Mantis weapon in hand, so long ago in Collegium, now it stayed with her no matter what.

The sight seemed to enrage Elass even more than the death of her son, as if the rapier and not the injured girl was her enemy. She struck again – at the sword itself, as if she were a rank novice, knocking it from Tynisa’s slack grip, and yet there it was again, directed at her, even before it had time to hit the ground. Had Tynisa possessed an ounce of strength, she could have ended the fight then, a riposte past the other woman’s blade and a clean and instant kill, but she could do nothing but hold her trembling stance.

And then there were more horses flashing past on every side, their riders’ armour gleaming even through the snow, cloaks rippling behind them, and Tynisa realized that it was now too late.

She still waited for the next strike because, even if she was doomed now, even if a spear or sword was about to plant itself in her back, it was not in her nature to surrender. Let the bitch work for her blood!

There was a confusion of horses all around, a score of riders perhaps, circling, breaking fights apart, archers training arrows on everyone they found, and one cried out, standing up in the saddle with his wings flaring, ‘Mercre Monachis!’

Salme Elass was no longer attacking. Her sword hung like a dead weight in one hand as she stared about at the newcomers. These were not her own followers. Allowed a moment to herself, Tynisa took a better look at them. Their armour looked both plainer and more functional than Salme Elass’s people’s, and their horses were a hand taller at least. These were lean, fierce, men and women, guiding their mounts with the casual synchronization of a shoal of fish. She saw both Elass’s people and the brigands, all of them separated now, staring about at the strangers who had cut between them and now surrounded them. To Tynisa’s left, Thalric was helping Che to her feet, and the halfbreed magician was sitting up, grimacing at the shaft in her arm. On the far side, Soul Je stood over Mordrec, the Wasp propped up on one elbow, with his metal-lined armour cut open and a bloody wound in his scalp.

One of the newcomers was sharing his steed, Tynisa noticed. Sitting ahead of an armoured woman, his wrists tied behind his back to the saddle pommel, was the Spider-kinden Avaris, with his face bruised, looking wretched and miserable. It was plain the newcomers had been busy.

Ten yards away from Tynisa, Dal Arche still had an arrow nocked and half drawn back as though waiting for a target to present itself. Perhaps it now did, although Dal wisely chose not to loose the shot. Two new mounts were picking their way between the trees, the riders cloaked against the gusting snow that only now seemed to be letting up. Tynisa knew them both, even before they were close, and so did Salme Elass.

The man lagging behind slightly was Lowre Cean, looking older than ever, as if physically pained to be drawn from his recluse’s life for this belated adventure. The man he followed was his fellow Prince-Major, Felipe Shah.

Prince Felipe approached Princess Salme slowly, his face expressionless. ‘I see you have caught your bandits,’ he noted.

The look that briefly flashed in the princess’s eyes was pure venom, but her voice remained controlled as she said, ‘A shame the Monarch’s response is too late.’

‘Or just in time,’ Felipe remarked mildly. ‘How many years have you been cautioning us against the great uprising from Rhael, I wonder?’

‘And I was right!’ she snapped. ‘The traitors have defied the law of the Monarch and raised an army, burned villages, murdered…’

Felipe guided his horse on a little further until it was beside her. ‘And here you have bearded their great chief, I believe,’ he said mildly. ‘Am I right?’

Another figure stepped from the trees, though keeping a careful distance from Salme Elass. ‘You are, my lord. Dal Arche, they called him at Siriell’s Town,’ explained Gaved, looking as though he would take to the air at the first hint of trouble.

Elass’s hand clenched on her sword hilt, but she simply looked aside, as if disdaining to notice the Wasp.

Tynisa had no such compulsion. ‘You live more lives than most, Gaved,’ she called out to him. ‘Changing your stripes already, is it?’

The look the Wasp gave her was a study in equivocation. ‘You’d be surprised, when a man sets out to have no master, how often he collects two, or even more,’ he replied philosophically.

‘Dal Arche,’ Felipe Shah called.

The brigand chief tensed, arrow still in place, but the newly arrived riders had several shafts already trained on him, and he simply held his shot, the string slightly tensioned, as though he had forgotten it was there. ‘These are the real thing, then, are they? Mercers?’ he enquired. ‘Servants of the Monarch’s throne, not just lackeys to some provincial princess-minor?’

Again Elass quivered with suppressed rage, but she held her tongue.

‘Indeed, and I’m lucky I was able to gather them so quickly. They – we – are spread wide these days, fewer of us each year, and the Commonweal as vast as ever,’ Felipe’s tone was conversational. ‘I’ve heard much of your exploits, Dal Arche.’

The bandit chief glanced first at Soul Je and Mordrec, then at Avaris, and Tynisa read the man’s thoughts in his eyes. He’s wondering if he can spare them somehow, wondering if his confession or his surrender might do it. But the Dragonfly brigand’s face then hardened. He knows there is no way out.

‘This is the man who has rebelled against my rightful authority,’ Elass declared, her voice pure winter. ‘This is the Monarch’s enemy. If you are her Mercers, then do your duty, and I only wish that you had heeded me sooner, and that we had purged Rhael of this filth before they grew so bold.’

To Tynisa’s ears she was overacting, playing the outraged voice of law and justice to cover the terrible, personal hatreds seething under the surface.

‘And this one is a murderess! She turned her blade on my own son! On my son, Prince Felipe!’

Felipe looked at Tynisa with a sad smile. ‘I have already mourned one of your sons, Princess Salme. You yourself must mourn the other.’

‘Is that all you have to say? What will you do? ’

‘I will ask why Siriell died, and why the stores at her town were burned.’

Elass stared at him blankly, utterly thrown.

‘Did you think your concerns were ignored, Princess? And did you forget that I served the Monarch as spymaster during the war? As my agents spied out the Wasps then, so they were in Siriell’s Town, evaluating your concerns. They told me that the wild and savage people of Rhael Province were at last working their way to something approaching civilization. And then your son and followers came, and killed the woman who had wrought such progress, and destroyed their foodstocks, and ensured that some, at least, would strike back at you, and thus give you your excuse to take Rhael for your own – as I had forbidden you time and time again.’

‘But they were outlaws!’ Elass snapped, not even attempting to deny a word of it. ‘They had turned away from the Monarch’s grace. They had defied our rule! That land had been left fallow for too long. I had a duty-!’

‘Your duty was to obey your Prince-Major, and no more. You do not owe fealty to the Monarch, but to me, and it is I who judge how best you should serve. For example, this girl…’ He nodded at Tynisa. ‘She is under my protection. She has rendered a rare service to me, and I am in her debt. Thus I absolve her of all acts committed in this, my principality.’

Elass gaped at him, aghast. ‘But my son-’

‘Has benefited from just such leniency on many an occasion, under your own justice. He chose to live by that sword. If you will maintain an arbitrary rule, learn to be ruled arbitrarily in turn.’ He held her incandescent gaze for some time, with no further sound but the echo of his voice in every ear. At last he turned those keen eyes on the brigand chief. ‘Dal Arche, you fought in the war, I’d guess.’

The brigand chief nodded curtly, his expression not inviting further questioning, and Felipe went on, ‘Your home is under the black and gold now, perhaps? Or maybe you’re no longer the same man that called such a place home. I hear much of you from my agents, and some from your own men.’ He nodded at Avaris. ‘But Salme Elass is correct in one thing: Rhael cannot be allowed to slide back into anarchy. I had hoped Siriell would tame it, but alas… Now I shall be cruel to you, Dal Arche, more so than you might expect. You would have your followers live beyond today?’

Again that terse nod.

‘Then you must do something for me, O leader of outlaws. You must swear fealty to me, body and mind, abject and without condition. For I will have you made Prince of Rhael.’

Somewhere nearby Salme Elass let out a screech of protest, but in that moment Tynisa was wholly taken up with the greying brigand’s face, and the battle there between hate for the aristocracy and fear for his fellows. She saw his hand twitch twice on the bowstring, making as if to pull it taut, but somehow he held himself back.

‘It’s that, is it? Is that the choice I get?’ he grated.

Felipe smiled bleakly. ‘Do you like my Mercers? I wonder what they represent to you. Do they populate your nightmares, these the Monarch’s most skilled servants, thief-takers and bringers of justice? And would it surprise you to know that the greatest duty of the Mercers is to keep watch on the nobility and punish those lords and ladies who use for selfish ends the power the Monarch grants? As I say, they are few, and the times are wicked, but they are enemies of more than just brigands. Your answer, Dal Arche?’

‘You’re a madman,’ Dal told him.

‘I’d not be the first prince-major to be so,’ Felipe replied implacably, and then demanded again, ‘Your answer.’

Tynisa genuinely believed the brigand was going to refuse, his loathing of the nobility stronger even than his love of his friends, but then his shoulders sagged. ‘Let it be so, though it’s a mad world.’ He looked more like a man condemned to death than a candidate for the nobility.

The movement, when it came, was so swift that Tynisa nearly missed it, and she was caught by a weird sense that she had been here before: only then she had been the victim, and another’s blade had stood in the way. Salme Elass had taken more than she could bear, and Tynisa would never know whether it had been the loss of her son or of her ambitions that snapped her.

Her blade whistled up towards Felipe Shah, who had not even drawn his own. The world seemed to stand still.

Tynisa found that her own blade was already moving to intervene, but the angle was wrong to simply flick the woman’s blow aside. To beat it away from herself would only be to speed it on its way. Instead she snaked her narrow sword between Felipe and the blow and put all the strength she could into her parry, so that Elass’s sword swung round at her, narrowly missing her torn face as she fell backwards. Elass was screaming, blade raised to impale her, heedless of rank and station, and Tynisa lifted her own weapon with trembling arms, knowing she was not strong enough even to roll aside.

The arrow struck Salme Elass in the jaw and drove in halfway to the fletchings, snapping the princess’s head sideways at an unnatural angle, a brief, bloody choking sound the only exclamation she could muster. The sword fell from her fingers, end over end, on to the snowy ground, then she collapsed.

Dal Arche lowered his bow, his hand automatically reaching for his quiver, but finding no more arrows there. If he was satisfied that he had, at least, been permitted one last act of rebellion, his face showed none of it. Indeed there was a tense silence that overcame everyone there, each face frozen as they waited for the prince’s response. The only true mourner of Salme Elass, judging from his expression, was Felipe Shah himself.

‘Another dynasty ended, then,’ he murmured, so that only Tynisa could hear him. ‘Another prince to find.’

His private thoughts seemed to exercise a magical power over the watchers for, although Felipe’s head remained bowed, all other eyes were drawn to Lowre Cean.

‘No, no.’ The old man shook his head. ‘Not that. Not again. Don’t ask me, Shah.’

‘There must be someone, or Elas Mar will become a new Rhael within a year. Find me an alternative. Give me their name, their pedigree. I must work with the tools that I have, Cean. You must rule from Leose, or what have we gained, out of all this?’

The slump of Lowre Cean’s shoulders indicated a despondency every bit as profound as Dal Arche’s.

‘Gather up, all of you,’ Felipe Shah called out, his voice again reaching all ears. ‘Followers of the Salmae, know that at the end your mistress betrayed her Monarch and her prince. You serve the Lowrae now, and may that bring you more honour than your service to the Salmae.’ The words were merely formal, for Tynisa knew well that Cean was the last of the Lowre bloodline, just as Elass had been the end of hers.

The motley collection of followers that Elass had kept with her formed an awkward group, sullen and uncertain, whilst their former enemies drifted together into a distinct band with Dal Arche – Prince Dal – at their head. Tynisa took the chance to sit up painfully, grateful when Che reached out to help her.

‘This is the will of the Monarch,’ Felipe Shah stated ‘declared through me, her Prince-Major. I hereby invest Lowre Cean as Prince of Leose, and Dal Arche as Prince of Rhael, and I charge them both to keep a better order in their new domains than has been the case there before now. Let us have peace and prosperity, as much as this late age allows it.’ He broke off, looking beyond the gathered groups, and Tynisa followed his gaze. Another rider was coming, and she recognized the same youth who had served Lowre Cean as messenger.

‘Marcade, what news?’ Lowre called out, for the young man’s expression was pale and terrible, and he gripped a scroll in a hand that shook when he proffered it to the old man.

Lowre read the contents grimly, and passed it wordlessly to Felipe. Watching him, Tynisa saw something go out of the Prince-Major, some briefly kindled flame of hope. When at last he spoke, his gaze found hers.

‘My agents report… The Empire has brought its armies to Myna. The war has started again. They are coming for us,’ his sombre gaze passed from Tynisa to Che. ‘Or for you.’