Heirs of the Blade

Five

Heedless of her expression Salma walked over to the dead men and studied them. ‘So, this is what lurks in Siriell’s Town,’ he remarked. ‘Ugly characters, certainly.’ He glanced up suddenly. ‘Turncoat?’

Tynisa jumped at the word, but it was Gaved who stepped forward.

‘My Prince?’ The Wasp was now studiously ignoring her.

‘Losing your touch with the vermin?’ Salma eyed him. ‘You’re lucky I was coming to meet you.’

Gaved’s face remained studiously neutral. ‘You’re here alone, my Prince?’

‘A little reconnoitring for Mother,’ Salma said, self-mocking, and still everything about him was maddeningly as she remembered it: his expression, his tone. When he flashed a smile her way, she felt her heart would break. She was not sure, standing there in the moonlight, whether she had simply gone mad behind her own back, her mind snapped and flying free. The impossible situation refused to resolve itself. Salma? It was Salma.

The Dragonfly prince had taken hold of an arrow, setting one foot on a corpse’s head to yank at it, but the shaft remained securely embedded. ‘I’m too skilled a shot for my own good, it seems,’ he murmured philosophically.

‘Salma…’ Tynisa said involuntarily.

The Dragonfly glanced up, and his smile was painful. ‘Another one of yours, Turncoat? You’re collecting Spider-kinden?’ He was grinning through it, though, and sketched her an elegant bow with much flourishing of hands. She had seen him do just the same once, at the College, to impress a magnate’s daughter.

‘Don’t you…?’ Don’t you know me? was the plaintive cry within her, but of course he could not know her. He was Salma: he was Salma to the very last detail as she had known him at College, three years ago. But this was a man who had never come south to learn the ways of the Lowlanders, never signed on with Stenwold Maker, never come too close to death while fighting the Wasps at Tark. This was a man who had never been enchanted and seduced by a stray Butterfly-kinden, or given his life in a desperate, heroic bid to defeat the Empire.

‘She’s none of mine,’ said Gaved forcefully.

‘Too clean by far to be Siriell’s get,’ Salma finished for him. ‘And she fights. You’ve hired yourself a bodyguard, Turncoat?’

‘An old acquaintance,’ the Wasp got out between gritted teeth, and sudden panic overtook Tynisa, the forgotten weight of Gaved’s knowledge slumping back on her like a landslide. One word now from Gaved and this miraculous dream would shatter. She’s a murderer, was all the Wasp needed to say.

But she caught Gaved’s eye, and saw her own thoughts reflected in his face: a tightly contained panic that at any moment she might give him away. He was a rogue and a thief, she knew, but what lies had he told to find himself a place here in the Commonweal? One word from me …

In that moment, within their conjoined silence, a guilty pact was made between them. Omission for omission, they would cover for one another and bury their pasts.

‘Tynisa Maker of Collegium,’ said Gaved wearily, ‘I present Prince-Minor Salme Alain of Elas Mar Province.’

Tynisa stared, caught off guard, because somehow she had never even considered the idea that Salma would have had family here beyond his mentor Felipe Shah. And she had already thought that the Salma that this Alain resembled so much was more that youth who had first come to Collegium, not the later man she had last seen planning battles against the Empire. A younger brother, but such a likeness nonetheless.

‘Why, then, what chance has brought you to grace our lands, Tynise?’ The flowery words were all mischief, but then he had always been like that.

There was a void in her heart where the answer to that question should have been and, as she opened her mouth to answer, she knew that she had no words. She had come here to the Commonweal because being anywhere else had become intolerable. She had come to Siriell’s Town because she wanted to find a Mantis death, and no amount of equivocation would hide that, now that she looked on her motives again. Looking into his face, though, and reaching for a response, the void was abruptly filled with one word: You. Salma had brought her here – and here he was, both in image and in manner. She felt the world was yawning open beneath her, the brink of a chasm at her very feet.

‘I… am travelling to your family,’ she finally got out, the words stopping and starting, and utterly beyond her ability to predict. ‘Salma… my Prince, I knew your brother. He was my friend. I bring word…’ She could say no more, but Salma was already looking towards Gaved.

‘Seems Dien made quite an impression,’ the Dragonfly said philosophically, but then the warmth of his smile was focused back on her, and she met his gaze boldly. ‘Well, such things have been known, and you make a better messenger than a turncoat Wasp. Will you come to Leose, then?’

She had no idea what Leose was, but she nodded nonetheless. Let me go with you, she thought. She was terrified that, if he left her sight for an instant, she might lose him for ever.

But already he was waving a hand at Gaved. ‘Bring her with you, Turncoat. I must report to Mother, of course, but no doubt we’ll meet at the castle.’

She wanted to ask why they could not all travel together, but Alain put his fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. A moment later she heard a low drone that quickly built up into a buzzing roar of wings, as something descended on them from the skies above. The downdraught of its wings battered her, and Gaved’s little fire leapt and danced madly to the point of extinction. The dragonfly glittered like silver in the light, surely twenty feet from its stubby antennae to tapering tail. It hovered for a moment and then found a perch on one side of the defile, claws digging deep for purchase.

Seeing her expression, Alain was all smiles. ‘Lycene,’ he named the animal. ‘Only the Salmae breed dragonflies that can fly so well at night. You have your report, Turncoat?’

With a start, Gaved dug in his tunic to produce a messy fistful of paper. ‘There’s more. I’ve learned today-’

Alain waved it off. ‘Then it can wait until you get to Leose. You have a horse nearby?’

The Wasp nodded glumly.

‘Good, make best speed, and bring our new guest with you.’ Again the flash of teeth. ‘I will look for you in more civilized surroundings,’ he told Tynisa, ‘and I’d wish duty didn’t lay its hand on me so hard, but I must go.’

She tried to say something but her throat had dried up, and a single flick of his wings lifted him into Lycene’s saddle, where he holstered his bow. Then the insect was aloft again, its wings thrashing up a gale, and seconds later he was gone, swept across the vault of the sky far enough that even her eyes could no longer pick him out, as the sound of Lycene’s wings became a diminishing hum.

Horseback riding was not something Tynisa had been called upon much to do, and she would have found it uncomfortable and awkward even if not sharing a horse with a Wasp-kinden. After the fight, Gaved had broken camp and relocated to another sheltered place, but neither of them had slept much, constantly jabbed awake by mutual suspicion.

Before dawn he had tracked down his errant mount and they had begun their journey in silence. The land around them was inhabited once, for they passed a patch of lumpy, mounded earth and rotting sticks that had clearly been a village. The rolling countryside had been cut into tiers for agriculture in the past, but many years of neglect were softening the contours. Grass, nettles and thistles grew tall, even at the approach of winter, and the land was broken up by knots of densely growing trees.

‘Did the war do this?’ she asked, the first words uttered for more than two hours. Even as she asked, she was thinking that the abandonment looked far older. ‘Was there a plague here or something?’

‘More than a generation ago, the family of little princelings who ruled this province ran out of heirs, I think,’ was Gaved’s response. ‘And by the time some other petty nobles came round to claim the place, after decades of duelling genealogies, the locals weren’t exactly ready for someone lording it over them.’ He did not sound particularly disapproving, but then that prospect was probably inviting to him. ‘All over the Commonweal, there are whole provinces gone fallow. More so since the war, obviously, but it’s been going on for ever, from what I can make out. Place is falling apart. If it’s not bandits setting themselves up as princes, it’s princes going bad and turning bandit. Raids across principality borders, villages burned, or village headmen declaring independence, thieves on the roads and in the forests, peasants deciding they’d rather be free, or lords taxing the shirts off their backs. The Monarch’s a long way away, and the Mercers do what they can – the proper ones and the provincial sort like we’ve got – but how many Mercers can there be?’

‘And yet you’re working for Salma’s family. I’d have thought you’d be on the other side,’ she said darkly.

‘Me? I’m making a living,’ Gaved declared, glancing back at her briefly. That she could stick a knife in his back at any moment was something he was apparently managing to deal with phlegmatically. ‘When I left Jerez and headed west, I only had one name to conjure with, and that was your friend’s.’

‘Salma? You got here through trading on his name?’ she demanded.

‘Once I heard his family mentioned, I made my way over and talked myself into a job. Maybe tomorrow Sef and I’ll move on, turn brigand even, but for today I’m on the side of the Monarch. It’s that kind of world. I keep my options open. Or I try to. There was no need for that bloodshed, last night.’ His voice was careful and measured, and he must have felt the flash of anger going through her.

‘They were going to kill you.’

‘I could have talked my way out of it, with them, or with Siriell if need be. It’s part of what I do. She was probably only going to make me an offer.’

‘Oh, and that would suit you well, wouldn’t it?’ she accused him. ‘Just waiting for the chance to jump flags to join the outlaws, after Salma’s people took you in.’

‘I like to keep my options open,’ Gaved repeated. ‘But killing people closes doors. Who knows when I might need to go back there, on whoever’s business? Now I don’t know if I can.’

‘I’m not going to be anyone’s prisoner,’ Tynisa hissed through gritted teeth. She was starting to see flickers at the edge of her vision, one or other of her imaginary companions keeping pace with her. Achaeos, was it? Had he come to reproach her now for the blood she had spilled?

‘It’s not so simple-’ Gaved began, but she hissed at him so fiercely that he stopped.

‘I have been a prisoner once,’ she snapped. ‘You have no idea what that cost me and what parts of me I left behind, when I got out.’

The Wasp scowled at her over his shoulder. ‘Well, it’s done,’ was all he could manage. ‘But they’ll have people in the air, searching for us. Nobody kills that many of Siriell’s people without being hunted.’

‘So we’ll fight them again.’

‘No, we’ll lose them,’ Gaved decided. ‘We’ll keep riding as fast as the land permits and as long as the horse can keep the pace. We’ll head uphill, too. I know a good road for us to throw them off.’

‘There’s a forest?’ Tynisa asked, because tree cover was always the best way to hide from airborne spies.

‘Of sorts,’ Gaved confirmed, ‘but I doubt it’s what you’re expecting.’

They settled into a steady pace, with the Wasp refusing to be drawn on where he was guiding them. The land about them was already looking more promising, their trail winding between stands of gnarled trees which grew only denser ahead of them.

They kept up a pressing pace for hours, with Tynisa spotting the occasional dark shape high above that might have been a man or a hunting insect. Gaved was now angling them along the broad flank of a hill that was creased into a series of slopes and valleys still heavily hung with morning mist. The scrubby trees had given way now, left behind on the hill’s southern skirts. Here, down in the valleys, was a dense forest of another kind altogether. The mist contained a maze of tall, leafy canes, some as slender as a finger, some as thick as Tynisa’s thigh, as though a regiment of giant archers had loosed a thousand shafts at the hillside itself. This bristling cane forest seemed to preserve the mist even past midday, so that their progress deteriorated into a groping through a constantly shifting landscape of vertical shadows. Gaved led with apparent confidence, but Tynisa spotted him consulting a little aviator’s compass more than once. She was glad of that since, between the mist and the sameness of the landscape, she felt she would become lost almost instantly.

Some time later, Gaved let their weary mount plod to a halt, swinging from the saddle to feed and water it.

‘Won’t they catch us?’ Tynisa asked him, her eyes seeking their airborne pursuers. The mist about them was so heavy that even the sun was just a brighter smear.

‘They won’t come here,’ Gaved said. ‘We’ve lost them.’

‘Then what’s wrong?’ she pressed, because it was obvious that something was amiss.

‘Just imagine,’ Gaved said, ‘that you’re in the house of someone very polite, but very dangerous. Behave as a good guest and we’ll be fine.’

Tynisa glanced about, seeing only cane-striped mist. ‘What lives here?’

‘Oh, some fair-sized mantids, some spiders, centipedes,’ Gaved replied casually, ‘but people too, of a sort. I’ve come through here twice before, under similar circumstances, and I can’t say I’ve definitely seen any of them, but I’m told they’re here, and I believe it. The brigands don’t come raiding here and the nobles don’t hunt. This place is supposed to be Stick-kinden land.’

‘There are Stick-kinden?’ Tynisa demanded incredulously.

Gaved held up a hand to indicate that she should keep her voice down. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. But you don’t, apparently. I heard that a travelling noble decided to pass through here with his retainers, and killed the animals and had his people burn the cane back. He got a five-foot arrow in his chest, while he was taking his supper, and nobody ever saw the archer. I heard that one of Siriell’s predecessors tried to use this place for launching raids from, and he and those few that got out of here talked like the forest itself had come to kill them. So we won’t draw any weapons, and we won’t make too much noise, because they prefer the silence. And when we’re done camping I’m going to leave a few thank-yous about the place, just in case.’

He was as good as his word, though Tynisa never found out exactly what was in the pouch he left beside the ashes of their campfire. The rising sun made inroads into the mist, but never quite dispelled it, and it was easy to see the tall, thin shadows looming on every side as something more sinister. And probably there are no Stick-kinden, Tynisa told herself, for whoever heard of stick insects having a kinden? But she was far from home now, and many unthinkable things might turn out to be true.

Towards evening when they were, according to Gaved, nearing the cane forest’s edge, she thought she saw one of the shadows shift and fall back between its brethren, giving her a momentary impression of a fantastically tall and attenuated figure carrying a staff that might have been a bow, and trailing a grey cobweb cloak off into the mist. Later she was sure that she had imagined this, as she imagined so much else, but by then they were clear of the cane and crossing the border into the next province.

Leose was the princely seat of the Salmae, Gaved explained. Unlike Felipe’s family, they had not lost their stronghold to the Empire. The war had come close, chewing at the edge of Felipe’s great domain and gnawing away odd provinces, but in the end the Treaty of Pearl had put the Wasp-kinden territorial ambitions on hold.

The Wasp spoke of his own people with a studied detachment, neither condoning nor apologizing for them. He was working hard at being someone in no position to have an opinion on Imperial affairs.

They had now passed a number of smallholdings, isolated stretches of farmland where the hillsides had been amenable to step agriculture, with clusters of low buildings with sloping roofs on the hilltop above. The land here was both more rugged and more heavily forested than Prince Felipe’s southern holdings, and Gaved’s chosen path meandered wherever the clearest land went, avoiding the deep woodland. Those trees extended easily over the border of Leose province, he explained, and then into the lawless lands to the south which they had just escaped from. Those thick woods were known as ‘bandits’ roads’ by the local peasants. Sometimes, when the brigands were bold, they played deadly hide-and-seek games between the trees with the Salmae’s Mercers. At other times the woods were left for the peasants to herd their aphids through, or for the hunting excursions of nobles.

They were obviously nearing the province’s heart, but they had seen few others travelling, and none following the same route as they did. There was none of the traffic Tynisa would expect, when approaching a town. ‘So how far to this Leose?’ she pressed.

‘Depends what you mean by Leose,’ Gaved replied. ‘Every part of Elas Mar within a few miles of the castle is Leose. There’s no town as such, just villages dotted about the place. Remember, Suon Ren’s almost the closest to a proper city the Commonweal has – after the capital. Most of the Commonwealers live spread out like this, making the best use of the land. What you’re looking for is Leose castle, and we’ll see that by tomorrow. That’s where the Salmae live, but their people are spread all over.’

The castle, when they had sight of it, did not disappoint. They had been following the course of a canal for some hours before the edifice came into view, and Tynisa saw that it had been placed to command the watercourse where it had cut a deep valley between two hills. It was a broad, squat mass of stone surmounted by tapering battlements, held in place against the land by a half-dozen spidery buttresses, seeming as though it might at any moment pick itself up and walk away. Two of the arching buttresses spanned the river itself, forming narrow bridges leading from the far side to the castle’s very door.

‘So that’s where you live, is it? Very grand,’ Tynisa remarked.

‘Me?’ Gaved shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t let me past the door, believe me, but I’m useful enough that they found Sef and me a little abandoned place not too far away, and we do all right there. There’s a little lake you can see from the door. That’s important…’ He made an awkward face.

‘So what now…?’

‘Now I report to my betters,’ Gaved explained. ‘I’ll tell them how Siriell’s in a restless mood, anyway. Then perhaps some peace and quiet over winter? That would be nice.’

The castle seemed to grow and grow as they approached, so that what had seemed a mere fort, at a distance, became a great architectural sprawl. Even the slender buttresses were revealed as a marvel, suspended impossibly against the universal pull of the ground. This arching stonework seemed to spring from utterly different hands to the light wooden walls of Suon Ren

The great double doors were barred, and apparently unguarded, but there must have been watchers above, for Tynisa had a glimpse of flurried movement within, at a higher storey. Then again there was nothing, and little enough sign that the place was occupied at all.

‘So who lives here?’ she asked.

‘The Salmae and their retainers and, yes, they rattle about in there like dried peas when some other noble hasn’t come to guest with them. These castles, all of them, they’re built like they’re for people nine feet tall with a thousand servants each. Very few of them are even half used: the same way as half the land in the Commonweal seems like it’s given over to outlaws or beasts because there aren’t enough law-abiding folk to till the soil. Place isn’t what it was.’

The doors opened then, before Gaved could expand on his theory. A pair of Dragonfly-kinden warriors, in full scintillating armour, scrutinized them uncharitably, before a slender, grey-clad Grasshopper woman hurried out to greet the newcomers. Behind her, Tynisa could see a courtyard of some kind, that was crossed by strange shadows.

‘Ah, Turncoat,’ she observed, ‘you come with news?’ At his nod, the Grasshopper inclined her narrow head. She was tall and sallow, like most of her kin, and her long hair was pulled back into a tail. Tynisa guessed that she was on the far side of middle age, but she had a straightness of bearing and lightness of step that belied it.

‘You’d better come in then, you and your… woman,’ the woman suggested frostily.

The iron gaze of the guards still did not trust these arrivals in the least.

Behind the gates, Tynisa saw that the courtyard had a roof of sorts, but one that was no more than a lattice of sturdy timbers that would keep out neither enemy nor weather. She presumed that some manner of covers or hatches could be put in place if there was ever an assault on Castle Leose, or perhaps the courtyard was intended to be abandoned to the foe, who could then be penned in and shot at from the castle proper. In the end she was forced to admit that her grasp of siege warfare was lacking, and that whoever had gifted the Commonwealers with these edifices had been of a strange turn of mind.

There were servants, though: Dragonflies and Grasshoppers who led their badly used horse off for feeding and grooming in stalls that were set into the castle walls to the left and right. Before them was another grand portal, this one inlaid with symmetrical patterns of brass, or perhaps gold. A smaller portal was set into a corner of one of the grand doors, and the grey-robed woman now sent a youth of her own kinden hurrying through it.

‘The princess has been sent for,’ she explained. ‘She will come in her own time, as I’m sure you know, Turncoat.’

Gaved nodded. ‘We can wait.’

A jug of good honeydew was brought to them by another servant, whereupon Gaved simply seated himself on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, on a blanket he had already scavenged from his saddle.

‘You know her, I take it,’ Tynisa noted, nodding towards the Grasshopper woman, who was currently chastising one of the grooms over some point of detail. ‘She seems a barrel of laughs.’

‘She’s not so bad,’ Gaved said mildly. ‘Her name’s Lisan Dea, and she’s been seneschal to the Salmae since before the old man died.’

Tynisa realized, with a vertiginous lurch, that ‘the old man’ meant Salma’s father, of course. Feeling suddenly off balance, abruptly too close, too soon, to the heart of things, she changed the topic with, ‘I’d get tired being called “Turncoat” all the time.’

Gaved gave her a glance without expression. ‘I reckon they might have chosen something worse, so I’ll settle for it.’ A moment later he was scrabbling to his feet, as both of the grand and gold-chased doors swung open.

A woman stormed through them, outpacing her retinue of attendants. She was tall, for a Dragonfly, and more imperious than a regiment of Wasp-kinden. Her heart-shaped face was perfect and, although she was clearly a peer of Felipe Shah, her cold beauty admitted nothing of her age. She wore high-shouldered formal robes in red and pale blue and spotless white, starched and edged with gold plates, and Tynisa caught her breath, because she had seen Salme Dien wearing just such a garment in Collegium.

‘Turncoat!’ the woman snapped. ‘Where is my son?’

Gaved was down on one knee, but Tynisa hesitated for a moment, pride battling with propriety, before grudgingly doing the same.

‘He had set out on his Lycene for Leose before me,’ Gaved reported, staring down.

‘Feckless boy,’ the woman exclaimed, obviously not caring who heard her. ‘Probably having the run of every bandit camp and village from here to Tela Nocte. Idiot child.’

Tynisa stole a glance at her, seeing her regarding Gaved with distaste. By now her retinue had caught up with her, somewhat raggedly. There were a dozen or so finely dressed Dragonflies, either privileged servants or attendant lords, but Tynisa’s eye was drawn away from them towards one particular figure. For a moment, as his presence impinged upon her, Tynisa took him for yet another hallucination, mimicking her father’s intensely focused poise at the noblewoman’s shoulder. Then Tynisa’s gaze lifted further, and she realized that this was a different man, a living man. It is getting hard to tell, she recognized unhappily. First Salme Alain and now this newcomer. There would come a time when she would no longer be able to trust her eyes, and then where would she be?

The man was dressed in an arming jacket and breeches of pale grey leather, obviously far from new, and his boots were of a similar vintage, well crafted and just as well worn. Looking up furtively from her low vantage point, what caught her attention first was his utter stillness, for she had seen that particular brand of motionless calm before and she felt that this man was like a bow drawn back and ready to strike at any moment. She had known him for Mantis-kinden from the first glance. He was paler than the Dragonflies, and older than Tisamon had been when he died. This Mantis had hair gone completely white, and a hook-nosed face creased with lines of bitter experience. For all his years, Tynisa shivered when she saw him. A moment later her eyes picked out the brooch over his breast. The style of it was different, but she recognized the sword and the circle and knew him for one of the same order that she herself had been initiated into, and that Tisamon had been a master of.

‘My Princess, I have important news of the bandit communities to the south,’ Gaved added hopefully.

The woman, Salma’s mother, dismissed that comment with a wave of her hand. ‘Tell it to my seneschal and my champion,’ she told him. ‘If you’ve no more news of my son, I am done with you.’

‘Alas, no, Princess,’ Gaved replied, but the woman had already turned and was about to walk away.

Tynisa found herself on her feet so abruptly that the Mantis took a step in, to put himself between her and the princess.

‘My lady. Princess.’

The Dragonfly woman turned and regarding Tynisa blankly. ‘What is this?’

Gaved grimaced, and took a moment too long in deciding how to answer, and Tynisa declared. ‘My lady, I am come from the Lowlands.’

From the Dragonfly’s expression, she might never have heard of such a place. ‘On what business?’

‘I was a friend of Prince Salme Dien,’ Tynisa declared, pronouncing his full name carefully.

Salma’s mother stared at her for a long moment. ‘You are seeking employment – like this one?’ She threw Gaved the smallest nod imaginable.

‘No, my lady, I only wished…’ For some reason, though her mission to Felipe Shah had seemed utterly natural, before the cold gaze of this woman she faltered. ‘I aided your son Salme Alain at Siriell’s Town, and had hoped to meet him here. And I would speak with you of your elder son, if I could.’

The princess’s expression, already cold, froze entirely. ‘As you have heard, Prince Alain is not here. As for Dien, no doubt there were many Lowlanders he was… familiar with.’ Then she had turned and, with her robe flowing behind her, was gliding back through the gold-chased doors, her retinue following her hastily. Tynisa had her mouth open, wanting to call the woman back, but was suddenly aware of the line of etiquette that would transgress. The Grasshopper seneschal’s stern frown did not encourage her to push her luck.

Then the doors were closing again, and only Lisan Dea and the Mantis-kinden remained with them.

‘We passed through what they’re calling Siriell’s Town…’ Gaved started, but the Mantis was paying him no attention.

Tynisa took a step back, to allow herself fighting room. Since she first saw the man she had been waiting for this. Mantis-kinden and Spiders did not get on, and it would make matters considerably worse if he found out she was not a pure-blood Spider at all. His face did not betray the kind of fierce loathing she had encountered in the Felyal Mantis-kinden, when she had travelled there with Tisamon, but nonetheless he regarded her sternly, and his eyes were like steel.

‘Show me your blade,’ he instructed her, and it was as though Gaved and the Grasshopper were simply not there.

At first she misunderstood, taking the weapon half from its sheath, wondering whether this was some trick to disarm her, or whether he was a smith or a collector – or whether he just wished to satisfy himself that here was a Spider bearing a Mantis-crafted rapier, before he attempted to kill her. But something in his stance belatedly communicated itself to her, and she realized that his words were a ritual challenge.

She dropped back into a defensive stance, blade out and levelled at his heart, along the straight reach of her arm, weight poised on the back foot. He had a leather and steel gauntlet on his left hand, she noticed, with a short, slightly curved blade jutting from between his fingers, but folded back along his arm for now. That was a weapon she knew well. She waited for him to take up his own stance, the last formality before the inevitable duel, but instead he just regarded her.

‘Good,’ he said, at last, with a nod of approval reminding her of nothing so much as her old sword-master, Kymon of Kes, dead these several years past. ‘I see the Lowlands contains some virtue in it yet.’

She blinked, surprised enough to straighten up from her guard. If he had struck at her then, she might not have been fast enough to parry him.

Without warning she was abruptly conscious of her own badge. For all that it was hidden out of sight, the Mantis had marked it in some way. Weaponsmasters acknowledged their own, she now discovered, and she would have spoken further with him then, save that he had already turned to Gaved.

‘Report,’ the Mantis ordered, and Gaved gave a concise account of Siriell’s Town and its circumstances, numbers, factions, in a dizzying blur of information; names such as Pirett, Seodan, Ang We, Dal Arche; rivalries and alliances, and little of it meaning anything to Tynisa.

‘Nothing may come of it,’ the Wasp finished up. ‘Siriell wouldn’t manage to mobilize one in three of the fighting population there, and there will be a dozen contenders ready to take what she has away from her. If we were to strike there, it might cut off the centipede’s claws – or it might just stir them all up.’

Lisan Dea nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘It will be the princess’s decision, of course,’ she said, but unhappily.

‘She will listen to her advisers, I am sure,’ Gaved remarked.

It was clear that the Grasshopper was far less certain of that, but the Mantis nodded briskly.

‘No doubt we shall call on you again, Wasp-kinden.’ He said the words without much relish, but to Tynisa’s ear Wasp-kinden sounded a great deal better than Turncoat.

Then, just as Lisan and the Mantis were turning for the gates, Tynisa spoke up: ‘What about me?’

‘You say you are an acquaintance of our young prince?’ the Grasshopper enquired.

‘I am, yes,’ Tynisa replied with some force, perhaps more to convince herself than the other woman.

‘When he returns, he may send for you,’ Lisan Dea suggested simply.

‘Can I not… wait for him here?’ Tynisa asked, aware that she was breaking delicate rules of conduct that stretched like a web all about her.

There might even have been some sympathy in the Grasshopper’s expression. ‘Without the invitation of my lady, you may not enter.’

After the two of them had gone, Tynisa felt as though some part of her had been ripped out. The princess had not wished to hear of Salma. Tynisa had been turned away at the Salmae’s very gate. Alain was not here, her purpose was evaporating, and she had nowhere to go.

‘That was…’ Gaved said awkwardly, and Tynisa rounded on him, expecting him to mock her. Instead he was shaking his head. ‘What was that between you and Whitehand, anyway? I thought you were about to fight each other.’ At her questioning look, he elaborated, ‘Isendter, the Salmae’s champion – Whitehand, as they call him.’

‘I thought he would call me out because of my kinden,’ Tynisa said numbly.

Gaved was shaking his head again. ‘That’s a Lowlander thing. Mantids here don’t care. None of them ever had any issues with Sef. They just keep to themselves mostly, or serve the nobles.’ He was already turning his back on Leose, heading for the stables to saddle up a new mount. When he came out, leading the beast by the reins, she was still standing there before the closed gate, and he stopped to stare at her.

When she rounded on him, expecting a smug look, a snide remark, his face remained carefully closed.

‘You’re going to wait until the boy comes back?’ he asked her. At her nod, he went on, ‘Could be tendays. You know winter’s almost on us, right?’

‘So?’

‘So this is the Commonweal. Winter kills here, if you’re not ready for it. A lot of my kinden found that out during the war. You can’t just camp outside the castle gates until he gets back.’

Of course. Because that would be too simple. The thought came to her of heading south to Siriell’s Town, finding some place there amidst the scum and the outlaws. Killing and killing until they… But her own internal reaction surprised her: I don’t want to die. I have something to live for now. The iron drive towards self-destruction that had goaded her this far had rusted as soon as she had set eyes on Alain. ‘I’ll manage,’ was all she replied.

Gaved stared at her thoughtfully. ‘You were going to kill me, before. I could see it in you.’ It was not even an accusation, more an observation. She could only shrug at the comment, so that he continued, ‘I don’t see it now. Do I get to sleep in peace? Or am I living in fear?’

At that, she really did try to summon up some ire, and to remember what it had felt like when she had stalked him from Siriell’s Town, when ridding the world of him had seemed such a self-evidently noble aim. That state of mind had deserted her utterly, leaving nothing but doubt in place of those certainties.

Gaved studied her for a long time. ‘Sef and I live a few days from here, on the lakeshore,’ he told her, at last. ‘We can find room for one more.’

‘Why…?’ Tynisa breathed. She felt as if she was engaged in some kind of duel, the rules of which she did not grasp. Gaved was plainly unhappy with the offer, even as he made it, but something had driven him to it.

‘Not for me, but Sef… speaks of you, sometimes. And of the Mantis, Tisamon. You rescued her from her masters, back in Jerez – and I know what happened there after, but I’ve left my past behind, for now, so let’s leave yours there too. I know full well how you wanted to put a sword in me back at Siriell’s Town. To tell the truth, if I could have gotten rid of you without consequence, I’d have done the same. But now we’re both here on the Salmae’s graces, so killing each other isn’t an option.’

‘Why?’ she asked again, still infinitely suspicious, but something within her was breaking before this unexpected mercy.

He shrugged. ‘Because Sef owes you – and because of the things we both saw in that place. The same thing that we’d kill each other for, when you think about it.’