Heirs of the Blade

Six

In Suon Ren, Tynisa had noted that Commonwealer houses comprised a strange double structure, with their central rooms surrounded by an encircling space shaped like a squared ring. She had noticed how the external walls to this outer chamber could be slid aside, or even removed, turning it into a sort of all-encompassing veranda. For the life of her, she had no idea what the point of this all was, but she learned a few days after coming to Gaved’s home.

The Salmae had ceded to their Wasp servant an isolated site beside a broad lake that Sef called the Mere. The inner house had three small rooms joined by a fireplace – no more than a single hollowed stone without a chimney. Tynisa felt the smoke should have filled the place in moments, but the angled slope of the roof gathered it up against the higher end in a roiling fug that eventually seeped out from under the eaves of the lower, yet losing no heat and almost impossible to see from outside. The weather had grown chill on their journey from Castle Leose, and as soon as they arrived Gaved took an hour making sure that the outer walls were securely in place, and sealing the gaps between them with some kind of grease.

Tynisa watched all this in bafflement, since in Collegium winters were barely worthy of the name.

The welcome she received was awkward. Sef, the Spider girl, was an escaped slave, and her habits had been honed by fear and subjugation. Since Jerez, she had grown bolder, Tynisa noted. Living with Gaved obviously suited her: she had not simply exchanged one master for another. Still, Sef remained shy and kept her distance, all the more so considering the tension that continued to twang between her and Gaved. For the first day, Tynisa could not understand why the Wasp had taken her in, rather than abandoning her at the gates of Leose.

Then, that evening, while Gaved was off scrounging for wood, the girl approached her, eyes downcast. ‘I did not think I would see you again,’ she whispered. Tynisa, who had thought of Sef not at all since parting, just shrugged.

‘I have carried a debt ever since. So few ever show my people any kindness in the place I once lived, so we hold our debts to our hearts. I had not ever thought that I could tell you how much it meant to be away from the masters, and to be free.’

‘You’ve spoken of this to Gaved, haven’t you,’ Tynisa guessed.

‘He knows how I feel.’ For a moment, the woman met her gaze, in a flash of personality that she would not have dared back in Jerez. ‘I know he does not like you, nor you him, but he knows that to show you thanks and to repay my debt in some small way will make me happy. He is a good man.’

Tynisa tried to equate ‘good man’ with a renegade Wasp-kinden, and failed, but she said nothing, just nodded.

During the following days Gaved went fishing, and Sef swam in the lake despite the cold. Tynisa’s hosts were wary of her, and inside the house’s small space they managed to leave her to herself a surprising amount of the time. In turn, she did not know what to do with the hospitality they tentatively extended, but then she did not know what to do with herself either. She slept under their roof and she shared their food, which was cooked for them by a Grasshopper girl from some nearby peasant family. Gaved was embarrassed about it, or pretended to be, but he told her that the Salmae would not hear of one of their retainers shifting for himself, not even the least-regarded one. Tynisa was not sure whether to believe this or not.

Then the cold came, dispelling Tynisa’s former assumption that it was already upon them. One evening she was in the outer room, practising her footwork as Tisamon had shown her. While she moved, she barely noticed the change, but as soon as she stopped, she saw that her breath was pluming pale in the suddenly chilling air. Outside, the darkening sky was crystal-clear, the stars like pinheads set in velvet. She was shivering even as she backed away from the small window, and a moment later Gaved slipped past her to fasten a shutter over it.

They retreated to the inner rooms and the hearth, closing themselves off from the surrounding space, letting the cold prowl between the walls until it succumbed to the slow advance of the fire’s heat. Even so, Tynisa slept in her hammock bundled up in two cloaks and a horse blanket, and still sensed the biting frost as though it was an enemy stalking outside the walls of the house, rattling the shutters and hunting for a way in.

It was hard for her to live thus in that double-walled house. Lying in the inner compartment at night, the outer house was busy with the sound of creaking wood and the battering of the wind. As the nights grew even colder, her mind grew tired of simply presenting her with shadow puppets of the dead, and diversified instead into footsteps – so that she could lie there awake, with Gaved and Sef and their servant all asleep, and listen to Achaeos’s shuffling tread, his nails scraping on the wall as though his figment was searching for a way in, out of the cold. But he has already gone to that final cold – and, if he found his way in, he would bring it with him.

And she knew he was not with her, but was dead by her hand, and that she was slowly losing her mind over it, but she felt fear stealing up on her even so.

One morning she awoke and knew that something must be wrong. There was a peculiarity to the light that pried through the edges of the house. She slipped from her hammock, a motion she was now practised enough to be confident with, and ventured into the outer section of the house, wrapped in a blanket.

There was a strange pale glare showing at the edge of the shutters, and limning each panel of the walls, as though the light of the sun had swooped very close to the world, but without bringing any of its heat. Bewildered, Tynisa wrestled with one of the wall-panels, until she could move it aside.

She stared, caught utterly unawares by the sight. The world outside had died, and some vast hand had draped it in a shroud. Everywhere the contours of the land had been smoothed by a universal covering of white, flurrying whenever the wind picked up. The lake had shrunk: clear water still lapped at its centre, but a shelf of solid ice had reached out from the shore as far as Tynisa could make out. She stared at it all, awestruck in a way that she had not been since her childhood.

She realized that she was shivering, and withdrew into the house, where she found the servant eating some oatmeal for breakfast.

‘Is that snow?’ she demanded.

The girl looked at her as if she was mad.

‘You’ve never seen snow before?’ Gaved stepped out, pulling on a tunic as he did so. ‘This won’t last. Two, three days and it will melt, is my guess. Still, when winter really gets into its stride there’ll be more.’

‘Oh.’ She found the prospect disappointing. The sight outside had seemed so utterly unprecedented to her that she had needed it to be universally significant, as though it was a sign of the end of the world. The blanched landscape had seemed to speak to her: I am changed, so shall you be. Something different is about to find you. Your life will not be the same. That was a message that she had badly needed to hear.

Sef came out too, then, wrapping a thick robe about herself, and Tynisa realized sourly that she and the Wasp had been busy in her absence. It was a bitter thought that the happiness of others should have become as hard to bear as freezing. Living with two people who were apparently content with one another was becoming untenable: they were forcing her either to feel her own solitude too greatly, or to find some excuse to look down on them for their lack of ambition and dearth of spirit.

A change did come, though, as if some part of her had turned magician and foreseen it. Past noon, with no sign of a thaw, and Sef spotted a rider approaching, around the rim of the lake.

The three of them gathered to watch as that single dark shape against an argent field resolved itself into a Dragonfly youth swathed in a russet cloak. There was a shortbow and quiver at his saddle, and the line of his cape was wrinkled by a short sword at his belt, but he approached them openly, his horse high-stepping in the snow, and when he drew nearer they saw that there was no bulge of armour beneath his cloak.

Tynisa’s rapier was in her hand, quivering in readiness, but the rider barely glanced at it, which seemed the clearest indication that he was no enemy. Instead, when he had reached what he clearly felt was the boundary of Gaved’s little fiefdom, he slung himself easily off the saddle, with just a flicker of wings, and waited there.

‘Come closer,’ Gaved called out to him. ‘All friends here.’

The visitor bowed elaborately, his hands moving in arabesques that Tynisa associated more with stage-conjurors than courtiers, but then both Salme Dien and Salme Alain had favoured the same kind of extravagance.

‘I seek Maker T’neese.’ Leaving his horse untethered and on trust, he stepped over towards them. He was very young, some years Tynisa’s junior.

It took her a moment to disentangle what he had done with her name. ‘That would be me,’ she said.

The youth smiled brightly. ‘My master has no wish to impugn the hospitality that you receive here, and places no obligation upon you, but if it be your pleasure, Lady Maker, you are invited to be the guest of Lowre Cean for whatsoever span of this winter you wish.’

The name meant nothing to Tynisa, but she saw its impact on her companions, and therefore concluded that this Lowre Cean was obviously important in some way.

‘May I confer with my host?’ she asked cautiously.

‘As much conference as you should wish,’ he allowed, ‘though I’d ask for some feed and water for my mount, if I may?’ This last, with raised eyebrows, was directed at Gaved and Sef. The Wasp turned back to the house, on the point of hailing their servant girl, but then some ghost of his old freelancer’s pride overtook him and he set to the task himself, leaving Tynisa to trail after him.

‘You’re honoured,’ Gaved told her, as he broke the ice on their water trough.

‘Why’s that? What’s this about?’

‘As to what it’s about, no idea. The man’s got a big old estate within Salmae lands, though, few days to the west of here. Couple of farming villages and his own compound, servants, soldiers, scholars, that sort of thing.’

‘He’s, what, a local chieftain? A bandit prince made good? What?’

Gaved uttered a strange sound. ‘Don’t – seriously don’t – ever say that to anyone around here. Prince-Major Lowre Cean is probably the greatest war hero the Commonweal has. He was just about their only general who had any luck against the Empire, and he’s also one of the Commonweal’s greater nobles, on a par with your friend Prince Felipe. So, no, he’s not a bandit prince made good, or if he is, the making good happened a few thousand years ago, when the Commonweal was putting itself together.’

‘Then what’s he doing living inside the Salmae borders?’ Tynisa asked him, somewhat put out at his obvious amusement. ‘How can he be all that important? Why’s he not even on his own lands?’

Gaved gave her a look, and she understood, feeling abruptly chagrined.

‘Right,’ he confirmed. ‘The war. All gone. At least Felipe survived with the majority of his principality intact. Cean lost his lands, all his people, children, grandchildren, everything. Now he’s basically living on the charity of Prince Felipe and Princess Salme, and pretty much waiting to die.’ His gaze appraised her. ‘But for some reason he’s taken an interest in you.’

‘You think I should go?’

‘I’d go myself, if he asked for me, only I imagine he’s seen enough Wasp-kinden to last him for the rest of his life. I don’t imagine he wants to murder you or force you into marriage, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘I don’t know what I’m worried about,’ she told him, but at the same time something had stirred inside her. She realized she agreed with Gaved, that this did not look like trouble, and she realized also that danger was what she would have preferred. Even this, though, would be something. She had a new purpose, a new direction. It might keep her going for only a tenday, perhaps, but it was better than nothing.

The road to Lowre’s home, his manse as the messenger described it, was longer than Gaved had told her to expect, although that was probably due to the encumbrance of the snow. Caught frozen in white, the Commonweal seemed like a dream place, or some make-believe land that some scholar might write a fanciful book about, a land unfinished, half shapeless and awaiting detail from some great moulding hand. They encountered precisely one other human being, a herdsman’s daughter trudging through the snow as she followed the tracks of an errant aphid that had somehow escaped its pen and blundered off into the cold.

The world was white as a fresh page, Tynisa thought, and each living thing left a scrawl of writing that told all who cared precisely what manner of creature had passed, and where it had gone. She herself had left a similar travelogue that stretched all the way back to Gaved’s door, and would do so until it snowed again, or a thaw came.

At last, after several nights so cold that she and the messenger practically slept on top of each other inside his small tent, necessity easily overcoming propriety, the home of Lowre Cean presented itself. That day the sky was clear, and the snow around them starting to dissolve back into the earth, or so it seemed to Tynisa. The ground, which had been hard, now became muddy with it, and they had to pick their way carefully down towards the little walled village which Tynisa understood to be the exiled prince’s home.

The scene within the walls was reminiscent of the aftermath of a siege. In the centre of the compound, a band of ferocious-looking warriors had built up a grand fire and were now singing raucously and handing round a skin of some potent liquor. They were long-haired and bearded, and wore furs and brightly dyed homespun, and Tynisa had no idea what kinden they might be, save a very noisy one indeed. Around them, a fair number of Dragonfly peasants hurried about, carrying bundles and buckets, lifting, cleaning, clearing and obviously doing their best to ignore their barbarous guests.

There were a dozen buildings within Lowre’s little domain, and Tynisa was surprised to see that many of them were of stone, and not the ancient stone of the Commonwealer castles, but something more like the civilized architecture she was used to. One such was plainly a forge, from the ring of hammers issuing from it, but there were a couple of larger buildings of unclear purpose, although back home she would have labelled one as a workshop.

The prince’s own home must be the largest structure there, its lower storey stone-built and the upper two constructed sturdily of wood. The general shape was borrowed from the local castles – as Felipe’s had been – but unlike that fragile construction, Lowre had obviously retired here to somewhere that could be defended. Tynisa read in this that he was, in some way, still fighting the war.

The messenger, who had never volunteered his name, had a boy come and lead her horse away, then informed her that he would go find his master and announce her arrival. He left Tynisa standing somewhat bemusedly in the centre of the compound, with all the business of a noble’s estate bustling away on all sides. One of the uncouth-looking warriors called out some unintelligible suggestion to her, and she glared at the lot of them, to their great amusement. Then there came a Roach-kinden man leading a string of horses, whom she was forced to stand aside for, which in turn put her in the path of a peasant woman, two buckets yoked over her shoulders, on her way to fill the water-troughs. One of the savages had meanwhile started up some ferocious howling noise which she realized belatedly was intended as a song, and from the far side of the buildings she heard a fierce chirring, as a pack of house crickets began stridulating in protest.

And then the messenger appeared at her elbow once again. ‘My master will see you now.’

Lowre Cean was neither enthroned like a prince nor practising at arms like a warrior noble. Instead she found him in a strange room lined with little wooden hutches, each fronted with latticed wire, so that she assumed this man kept crickets or jewel beetles, both of them common pets back home. He was a tall old figure, his hair white and thinning, and his long face was creased by the echoes of a hundred strong emotions. He wore a long grey smock, looking nothing like a prince or a war hero. There was a sharp, sour smell about the whole room that was utterly unfamiliar.

‘Maker Tynise, my Prince,’ the messenger announced, then stepped back and away to leave the two of them alone.

Tynisa could only wonder at the way these Commonwealers seemed to have no fear of strangers bearing ill intent. Were there no assassins in Dragonfly-kinden history?

She was indeed no threat, or so she hoped. That cold rage had not touched her again since Siriell’s Town. Perhaps this equally cold winter had put it to sleep.

‘My lord.’ She tried something like their type of formal bowing, got it wrong, but Lowre Cean was not watching. Instead, he was cupping something in his hands with infinite concentration. She took a step forward to get a look at the things in the cages, and recoiled back to the doorway with a yelp. She had never seen anything like them.

They were tiny enough to fit into the palm of his hand, and they were manic, leaping and darting inside their little boxes as though furious at their captivity. They had two stick-thin legs ending in little clawed hands, and ragged paddles for arms – no, for wings, she realized, although they hardly seemed the right shape for taking to the air. Their little round heads had madly staring little round eyes and a beak like a tiny blunt dagger-blade, and their skin was furred with something a little like the scales of a moth’s wing. They had been quiet, but her approach had set them off into a twittering, piercing cacophony of sound, a random and tuneless assault on the ear.

The lean old Dragonfly in their midst turned and gave her a wry smile. He was actually holding one of the vile creatures in his hands, a thought that made Tynisa’s skin crawl. ‘Forgive me,’ she heard him say, over the racket. ‘I had forgotten how my little pets are an acquired taste. My family has always bred these little singers, and since the war I have begun to devote more of my time to our old fancy here.’ With infinite care he replaced his charge in one of the boxes and closed the grill, whereupon the little creature began yammering and twitching like all the others.

‘You are Prince-Major Lowre Cean?’ Tynisa began uncertainly. She had seen Felipe Shah eventually behaving like a prince, and Salma’s mother most certainly like a particularly arch princess. This man was not conforming to her expectations.

‘That is the curse I bear,’ he confirmed, washing his hands before removing his smock. Beneath it he wore a plain, pale robe, something even a servant would look drab in. ‘And you are the Lowlander? Fascinating.’

‘Please, master, why did you send for me?’ she asked. ‘How did you even know about me?’

‘Why magic, of course. Your coming was foretold centuries ago.’

She goggled at him in astonishment, and it was only after he had stepped out of the menagerie that she saw how a mischievous twinkle had entered his tired eyes.

‘Or perhaps it was a Fly-kinden messenger from Suon Ren bearing word from my old friend Felipe Shah,’ he added. ‘Shah believed that you might find yourself a little stranded here in Leose, so asked that I extend to you all hospitality due to an honoured ambassador from the Lowlands.’ For a man of his age he stood very straight, and despite his dress and circumstances she had a brief glimpse of the man he had been during the war. ‘If you wish it, that is.’

Tynisa thought again of Salme Alain, who would no doubt return home sooner or later. She thought of Gaved and Sef, whose resources were meagre and who would doubtless prefer to retain their privacy over the winter.

More than that, though, she thought of Felipe Shah, and of this old man now before her, two Dragonfly nobles whose war-wounds were borne on the inside, but who could still find charity for a stray Lowlander out of nowhere, penetrating all her angst and guilt and fretting about her purpose, she felt a moment’s sunlight touch her.

‘I wish it,’ she told Cean with profound gratitude.