Salute the Dark

Fourteen

‘You get used to the waiting, after a while, but I’m out of practice,’ Destrachis explained. They were at least arguably inside the castle: arguably because they were within the boundaries of the edifice, and yet there were no doors to keep them in, and few enough walls. They were instead in some kind of open garden, surrounded by a framework of struts that could become the supports for a ceiling or walls if needed. The town of Suon Ren was spread below and clearly within their vision, and Stenwold was constantly thrown by the loss of barriers, of structural certainty. In Collegium, I would have a score of people always close enough to touch, save for the walls between us. These Commonwealers certainly do like their space, their light and air.

‘They have a different sense of time, I suppose,’ Stenwold said vaguely.

‘The smallest measure of time they generally admit to is the passing of the seasons,’ Destrachis said. ‘But it’s their curse, I think, for they believe the world does not change, only revolves in its cycles. Their enemies – the Empire, the bandits – they try to make them seem just a passing blight that the next spring will cure.’

‘I hope I can convince them otherwise,’ Stenwold murmured. He meanwhile hoped that Allanbridge was not fretting too much. The invitation here, apparently, had been offered only to Destrachis and himself. Even Gramo had been turned away, mouth open like a fish’s, from the doors.

And yet I could probably spot them down there, somewhere, seeing as there’s nothing but space between us. Only etiquette kept anyone from simply walking inside the palace’s notional boundaries. Was this a lesson about the Commonweal?

‘Ah.’

Stenwold turned to see a Dragonfly woman standing in the garden, and it was hard to say precisely where she had emerged from. She was perhaps a little younger than either of the Lowlanders, yet her hair, cut very short, was starting to grey, and there were lines of care on her face, unusual for her kind. She wore a plain quilted robe of green, edged in a metallic blue cloth that Stenwold had never seen before. She was barefoot.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘The physician is which of you?’

‘I am Felise Mienn’s doctor,’ Destrachis said. The woman strolled to the garden’s centre and sat down on a flat stone there, surrounded by burgeoning shoots.

‘So possessive,’ she noted. ‘Well now, sit, if you will.’

Destrachis chose not to. ‘Do you know where she is? Felise Mienn?’

‘Now? No. I spoke with her before she left, though.’

Unwillingly, Destrachis sat down before her. Stenwold knew he himself should back out of earshot, even leave the room. There was no room to leave, though. He had no idea of the proper distances and borders observed here. Besides, he wanted to know more.

‘Now,’ the woman began, ‘you are known as Destrachis. You have been in the Commonweal almost long enough to be considered a native.’

‘On and off,’ Destrachis conceded. ‘Please…’

‘One might wonder why you came here.’

The Spider’s hands twitched in annoyance. ‘That’s my own business. The usual reasons, however, and all a long time ago. But-’

‘Felise Mienn has left this place,’ the woman explained. ‘You did the correct thing in bringing her to me.’

‘I didn’t bring her to you. Who are you, anyway? Tell me that at least,’ he demanded.

‘I am a mystic,’ she said with such simple gravity that the statement, which would have sounded ludicrous in Collegium, struck Stenwold as entirely reasonable. ‘You may call me Inaspe Raimm, if you wish, or whatever else you will.’

Destrachis visibly calmed himself. ‘I know the Commonweal well enough to know that the word “mystic” represents a world of possibilities in itself. Which are you, though, and what did you say to her?’

Inaspe Raimm smiled – a sad, pleasant thing. ‘Felise Mienn had lost her way,’ she said. ‘She had borne loss and pain more than she could carry. She had become detached from her purpose.’

‘Purpose?’ Destrachis asked.

‘All things have a purpose, although not all fulfil them.’

‘And this purpose, will it… will she…?’

Inaspe reached out and touched his face unexpectedly, making him flinch back. She looked straight into his eyes and Stenwold saw the Spider’s face twitch with undefinable emotion.

‘You have been a good friend to her, though never appreciated, Destrachis. You have saved her over and over. You have done all you can. If in the final cast of fate, she is not to be saved, then it is not you who have failed her. You have given of yourself all that could be given.’

‘I am a doctor,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’m supposed to save people.’

‘Not everyone can be saved.’

‘You think she’s going to die,’ he accused her. ‘You’ve sent her off to die?’

She was still touching his face, and that seemed to hold him in place. Stenwold saw one of his hands clench and unclench, as though wanting to reach for his dagger.

‘I have sent her away to fulfil her purpose,’ Inaspe said, and then: ‘But that is sophistry. Ask yourself, does death represent part of Felise Mienn’s purpose? Her own death or the deaths of others?’

At last Destrachis relaxed, with the faintest, bleakest of smiles appearing on his face. ‘Well, of course,’ he replied blackly.

‘We are not blind, Destrachis. Our eyes see many things.’ Her voice had become very gentle. ‘You would go with her if you knew where she was bound. You would do that not because you are her healer, but because you wish only to be close to her.’

Destrachis made such a strange, wordless sound that Stenwold wished he had absented himself. This was something he should not hear.

‘Know this, noble doctor: we have removed her from your care not from our concern for her but because we value you yourself. Have you not foreseen that she would slay you, sooner or later, if you kept pace with her? You have given her a reprise, but you cannot save her from her purpose,’ Inaspe explained. ‘Instead, we choose to preserve you, in whom we have found such admirable qualities. If you seek a reward, for warding our wayward daughter, you shall have it. Prince Felipe Shah shall gladly bless you. Your part in her life is done, though, and we now save you for greater things. We welcome you as a servant of the Commonweal.’

Stenwold saw Destrachis rise to shout, to protest, but her hand was still on his face and something passed between them. Stenwold could explain it no more than as if Inaspe Raimm had somehow taken her own understanding and gifted it to the Spider, shining a light into his troubled mind. He opened his mouth again, and for a moment his face was just grief, all his buried emotion drawn to the surface by the woman that faced him.

‘She will die,’ he said.

‘All things die,’ she told him. Such a truism, it was the trite utterance of any street-corner philosopher, but coming from Inaspe Raimm it sounded different. ‘All things reach the end of their journey, be they trees, insects, people or even principalities. All things die so that others may take their place. To die is no tragedy. The tragedy is dying with a purpose unfulfilled. You have fulfilled your purpose, Destrachis. Now let Felise Mienn fulfil hers.’

A great sigh went through him. ‘Well, then,’ he said, and, ‘Well.’ He did not seem to have anything else to say. She took her hand away and he seemed to deflate, a ragged Spider-kinden man with greying hair. He looked so old, just then, older than any Spider that Stenwold had ever seen.

After Destrachis had left, locked up in his own thoughts, wrestling with what he had just been told, Stenwold came to sit before the self-proclaimed mystic.

‘My name is Stenwold Maker of Collegium,’ he announced, ‘but probably you knew that already.’

She smiled at him, almost conspiratorially. ‘How many ears have heard that name? How many mouths might have told me? Yes, Stenwold Maker, your name is familiar to me. It takes no magic to know it.’

‘And my purpose?’

‘I am not Prince Felipe Shah. This is his land, and therefore his is the right to summon you to audience. Which he will. I, however, have advised him on many things, and my words fall sweetly on him. I would therefore examine you, Stenwold Maker. I would assess you, inspect you.’

‘Are you going to tell me my future, O mystic?’ he asked wryly.

‘No, I am going to tell the future,’ she replied, thus silencing him. Immediately he became aware of movement all around him. A dozen or so Dragonfly boys and girls, all seeming perhaps fourteen years of age, had suddenly appeared, holding… mirrors? No, but sections of glass, coloured glass in broad, oddly shaped panes. As Stenwold stared at them, and without their even acknowledging his existence, they began to take to the air, flitting up to the wooden framework and hanging their burdens here and there about it. The pattern they created was bewildering, without any logic and yet precise. The separate plates of glass, two and three feet across, were aligned and linked until the open garden had become a patchwork glasshouse, with walls and roof of stained green and red and blue, and open patches where the glass did not reach. The entire operation, bizarre and intricate, was completed in just ten minutes as Stenwold watched, utterly confused.

He glanced at Inaspe when it was done, and saw that she, and the garden, and he himself, were all mosaiced in slashes of coloured light. The notional room had now become one bounded by colour, the sunlight being split around them into a prism of conflicting and complementing shades.

‘I have no idea what is going on,’ he admitted, bringing a wider smile to Inaspe’s face.

‘There are those in every age whose deeds echo in the world, for good or ill, and it is a great and terrible opportunity for a poor fortune-teller like myself to be faced with such a man. You have made yourself the point of destiny’s arrow, and by casting your future I might see the course the whole wide world will take. Indulge me, Stenwold Maker. Felipe Shah shall smile upon you for it.’ She cleared the ground between them, and he saw that it was precisely where the colours met: a kaleidoscope in miniature. The entire room around them had become a lens that focused its hues right here. The artificer in him protested. Light in the Commonweal did not seem to behave in the same way as light in Collegium.

‘I don’t really believe that people can predict the future,’ he admitted.

‘People predict the future every day, Stenwold Maker,’ she replied, studying the rainbow carefully as the glass panels shifted slightly on the creaking wooded framework. ‘If you drop a stone, you may predict that it shall fall. If you know a man to be dishonest, you may predict that he will cheat you. If you know one army is better trained and led, you may predict that it will win the battle.’

He could not help smiling at that. ‘But that is different. That is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome.’

‘And that is also predicting the future, Stenwold Maker,’ she said. ‘The only difference is your source of knowledge. Everything that happens has a cause, which same cause has itself a cause. It is a chain stretching into the most distant past, and forged of necessity, inclination, bitter memories, the urge of duty. Nothing happens without a reason. Predicting the future does not require predestination, Stenwold Maker. It only requires a world where one thing will most likely lead to another. So it was that I could not tell Felipe Shah precisely that Stenwold Maker of Collegium would come to him and seek audience, but I could say: there will be emissaries from the south, and they shall come to speak of war, they shall come by air and – because they do not understand the air – they shall be caught in a storm.’

‘Guesswork after the fact,’ Stenwold protested.

‘Guesswork before the fact,’ Inaspe replied. ‘Once one has learnt how to converse with more abstract sources of information, one’s guesswork can become remarkably accurate.’

Stenwold felt a little shiver go through him. ‘I have known other people who believed in this. I too have seen things I cannot explain. But still, I cannot accept it.’

‘I have heard of those such as yourself in whose world the future is but darkness, while to us it is second nature to trust in prediction. To us you appear blind – and yet you are able to make such things, such metal creatures, and we are just as blind to your craft as you are to ours. How ingenious you are.’ The bleakness in her tone Stenwold ascribed to memories of the Twelve-Year War.

She had scooped something into her hand from a bag, and now she cast the whole handful on to the pattern of light before her. Straws, he saw, and most of them instantly blew away in the breeze. Only a few now remained: a random scatter of pale stalks dyed in all colours by the glass. He himself could see nothing there, no patterns, no significance. When he looked from this display to Inaspe’s face, though, something sank inside him. He saw there such a certainty of woe, as though a Fly-kinden messenger had rushed up to present her with it in writing. She met his eyes, and he saw how she would take it all back, her talk of prophecy, if she could.

‘Speak,’ he said. ‘For what it’s worth, speak.’

‘Perhaps you are wise not to credit prophecy,’ she said carefully, ‘for all your future is the shadow of the world’s own.’

Caught between doubt and dread, he forced himself on. ‘What have you seen?’

‘Do not ask me.’

His instincts were telling him that he should obey her in that, and leave his curiosity unsatisfied but, in the end, his heritage rose up within him, the practical Beetle impatient with such mummery, and he insisted, ‘Speak.’

She sighed. ‘Stenwold Maker, you are destined for great loss, to both yourself and those close to you. You are caught in the jaws of history, and its mandibles tear pieces from you.’

He shrugged. ‘It takes no prophet to foretell that.’

She looked up from the pattern to assess his reaction, as though the idle fall of sticks had produced such a clear picture that he should recognize it immediately. ‘Autumn leaves, Stenwold Maker, that is the future shown to me. It is not too late, not quite, for you to escape the vice of winter, but the leaves are already falling.’

Her hands passed over the sticks, and a slight cold breeze suddenly passed over Stenwold, and made him shiver. He heard the woman murmur. ‘A city by the lake sits beneath a rain of burning machines. Red hands, long dyed up to the elbows in the blood of others, plunge in one last time. The sky is on fire with the deaths of the brave. The slaves are being beaten. The hand that holds the whip is raised. I see a whole kinden on the brink of oblivion. A man with an iron fist reaches to snuff them out like pinching a candle flame. The proud one is in chains, and though he turns on his great master, he shall shed not one drop of his blood. The spinners’ webs are burning. The great plotter has out-thought himself.’

Her eyes were wide now, blazing with conviction. ‘They are fighting now, the warrior-breed, but there are flames around them. They are falling like moths in torchlight. So many, there are now so many rushing to their deaths.’

‘Enough-’ Stenwold started, but the rush of words did not heed him.

‘The machines of war are turned on your own people. Your friends are loyal to you, and they shall die for it, or be scarred through, and never to recover what they once were. Blood is born of blood, welling up between the trees, beneath the gold lightning. Ancient evils brought to light, the dead tradition of the life-drinkers remade, and armies marching under a standard of black and gold and running red. A pillaging of the past for power, so that even the worst excesses of the old times are dug up. The worms of the earth! I see the worms of the earth feasting on all our corpses. Autumn leaves, Stenwold Maker. So many that you shall not see again. They fall and fall, the leaves of autumn, red and green and black and gold.’

‘But can we win?’ he demanded, forgetting that he did not believe.

‘What is it to win? How much will you sacrifice for it, when victory is more costly than defeat?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Your future. All our futures. I am sorry.’

Felipe Shah was a man of indeterminate age. His face was that of a young man, but his hair grey above the ears. His princely court was open to the sky, a courtyard within the palace-castle that overlooked Suon Ren. He was like the rest of his kind to Stenwold’s eyes: slim and golden-skinned, dark-haired. He sat in the courtyard’s centre, on a blanket spread on the ground. The four figures standing round him, whom Stenwold had initially taken for soldiers, became statues of burnished wood when he looked closer. Felipe wore a robe of shimmering red and blue, with an edging of gold discs, very much like the robe in which Salma had first arrived in Collegium, wondering why everyone found him such a spectacle.

The rest of his court, about thirty other Dragonfly-kinden, sat about him in what Stenwold assumed was a precise pattern, not just before him but on all sides. Some sat in nooks up on the walls. Some held scroll and stylus, poised to write. Others were simply sitting there, not even paying any particular attention to Felipe Shah. They wore the usual loose, flowing Dragonfly garments, and Felipe Shah himself was by no means the most ostentatious. Like Spiders they managed to carry it off without seeming overdressed. If I had myself got up like that, I’d be vulgar, Stenwold conceded.

Stenwold himself now sat to Felipe’s left, and he had no idea whether this was a position of honour, of security, or what any of it meant. The precise patterns on which the Commonwealers so obviously organized their court were opaque to him. He wished Destrachis was still here to advise him.

Looking around, Stenwold spotted the fortune-teller, Inaspe Raimm, with three other Dragonflies seated in a shallow curve behind her. She did not glance at him, however, looking straight ahead only. There was something strange about the way she sat there, something in her positioning, that suggested things were not as he had understood them – but more than that he could not discern.

A whole life spent in the intelligence business and I’m now completely out of my depth.

There was a handful of Mercers present in their full armour, and now one stepped forwards to hand something to the prince. It was Salma’s letter, Stenwold saw: Prince Salme Dien’s message to Prince Felipe Shah.

The prince read it in silence and the court waited. Nobody had mentioned what this document was and yet everyone seemed to already know, as though they were Ant-kinden linked by a common mind. Stenwold increasingly felt that he was skimming the surface of a vastly complicated world. Of course the Commonweal is both vast and complicated, so I should expect this bafflement. Yet it is still hard to deal with, when matters are so pressing back home.

There had been no news, of course. For all he knew, Sarn could have fallen by now.

Prince Felipe Shah began to weep, and Stenwold started in surprise. He had not set eyes on Salma’s message, but he could not think of anything his former student might have written that would have sparked this reaction. Still the Prince wept silently, tears trickling down his face, unwiped, and falling to spot his robe. It was impossible, Stenwold realized, to tell what emotion was being displayed here, only the intensity of it. All around, the other Dragonflies were nodding silently, clearly approving whatever was going on. Stenwold ground his teeth in frustration at his inability to grasp it.

A servant stepped forwards with a white cloth. Felipe Shah quickly wiped his eyes and then sat with the letter in one hand, the cloth clutched so tight in the other that his fist shook. The rest of him, in poise, manner and expression, remained utterly calm, as though he had transferred his inner feelings over to the cloth as naturally as doffing a hat.

‘Master Stenwold Maker,’ Prince Felipe began, ‘your ambassador has stated that you wish an audience.’

Stenwold was aware of how Gramo, sitting nearby, straightened up proudly.

‘I would owe you the hospitality that I owe to all who visit my court in peace,’ Felipe continued slowly. ‘I owe you more than this, though, for you have brought me the farewell of my kin-obligate, who I shall not see again.’

Stenwold, though bursting with questions, forced himself to remain silent, but something must have shown on his face.

‘You do not have this custom, in your own land, I am sure,’ the Prince said. ‘Here we do not keep our children close to us, Master Stenwold Maker. We ensure, instead, that they reside in the houses of others, to thus learn their ways, their world. So they learn to judge, or to labour, or to peer into the waters. Prince Minor Salme Dien came to me, when he was young, to learn governance. He was not my son, and yet he was a son to me, while my own children were far away.’

‘Did…’ Stenwold waited to see if he would be silenced, but Felipe Shah nodded for him to continue, ‘did you send him to the Lowlands, master – your Highness?’

Felipe inclined his head then. ‘It was my choice that he went.’

‘We have been very blessed in his addition to our people,’ Stenwold proclaimed, aware that he was becoming rather over-florid in attempting simply to be polite. ‘Could I ask why you did so? Otherwise there has been very little contact between our peoples, the ambassador excepted.’

There was a pause then, and it was to Inaspe Raimm that the Prince’s eyes flicked. ‘Two reasons suggest themselves,’ Felipe said at last. ‘But who can say which is the truth? After the war with the Empire, I thought we needed to know more about our neighbours. Also divination suggested that the Commonweal would benefit.’

‘I cannot comment on the second reason,’ said Stenwold awkwardly. ‘As for the first, we are fighting the Empire even now.’

‘We know this,’ Felipe Shah confirmed.

‘And if the Empire defeats the Lowlands, then they will come north.’ Realizing what he had just said, Stenwold smiled weakly. ‘I’m no fortune-teller, but I can predict that, I think.’

Felipe put the tear-stained cloth down and placed his hands on his knees, and from the reaction of the entire court Stenwold saw that this was a significant gesture, as though, back in Collegium, one man around a table had just stood up to speak.

‘Before you came, we had long discussed this,’ the Prince declared. ‘The Commonweal has suffered greatly under the Empire’s advance. Our people have died and been enslaved, in numbers so great they make us weak to consider it. Now you, the new kin-obligate of Salme Dien, have come asking us to join in a common cause.’

Stenwold blinked at the new designation he had been given, but nodded anyway. ‘That is so,’ he allowed.

‘We fought the Empire,’ the Prince said, his voice falling so low that Stenwold could barely hear it. ‘We resisted them with our blood and our bodies. The road their war machines travelled on was made up of the bones of our people. There are those among us who wonder what it was for, all that valour and passion. What did we accomplish, that our sons and daughters bled for?’

Stenwold opened his mouth to retort, as though this was the Collegium Assembly, but the character of the silence told him that his words were not wanted. For a long while the Dragonfly lord stared at the ground, and not a single one of his followers moved. Autumn leaves, came a voice in his memory. Green and red and black and gold.

‘The place is not mine,’ Felipe Shah said at last. ‘I am but a prince amongst princes. The Monarch alone must give you our answer.’

‘It is then possible to secure an audience with… with the Monarch?’ Stenwold felt as though he was walking a fragile tightrope of etiquette. The Commonweal was vast, the Monarch doubtless distant and mighty. How many such baffling audiences would he have to sit through, how much time before he could put his case? Could the Lowlands last that long?

Felipe Shah’s melancholy did not break, precisely, but there was a curious spark in his eye, a slight creasing about his face, as though he nonetheless saw that something in his view was amusing. Looking around, Stenwold saw an identical expression on all the courtiers’ faces, a polite and pointed fixedness of feature.

At last he saw that one Dragonfly face remained composed and still, and then he understood.

With the greatest possible care, Stenwold stood up and made a low bow before Inaspe Raimm – teller of the future and Monarch of the Commonweal.

‘I… am a fool,’ he confessed.

‘That understanding is the first step to wisdom,’ the Monarch replied softly. ‘Perhaps Prince Salme Dien has not spoken to you of the proper role of a prince of our Commonweal. It is not to be heaped with honours and raised high, but to stoop low, to bear burdens for the people that the prince must serve. So it should be for a prince, and so much more for a monarch.’

‘And I am fortunate to come and find you here when…’ His voice trailed off. ‘Or you knew, and came here especially to meet what the Lowlands would send.’ He had no scepticism left. Here in this ephemeral court they had finally drained him of it.

She nodded slowly. ‘I have enjoyed our meeting, Stenwold Maker.’

‘But if I had known… I have requests…’

‘I am glad for your ignorance, then. I know already what you would request.’

‘What I came all this way to ask…’ he put in, feeling that he was teetering on the very edge of propriety. ‘Please, let me ask it.’

‘Even if we are bound to refuse?’ she said, and he gaped at her.

‘But you can’t know what I intend to ask you.’

Her face remained very composed, solemn with melancholy. ‘We already know, Stenwold Maker, but if it would help you, please speak your requests. Let there be no possibility of doubt between us.’

He had by now lost track of Commonweal opinion, whether he was being honoured or just very rude. He was struck suddenly with a great sense of urgency, absurd considering the long journey here, the distance involved. ‘We fight the Wasps even now, as they march on our cities. We lack strength to fight them, our enemies – the enemies of all of us, the Wasp Empire.’ The words came spilling out from him unsorted and jumbled, but still he pressed on. ‘I know from Salma the injuries they did to your own people, the bitter years of war, the principalities they stole from you with their treaties and their demands. I am a fool, perhaps, but not such a fool that I cannot see common cause. The Empire’s armies run thin, for they are fighting on all fronts, pushing outwards. They are mad for conquest. A Commonweal force that marched or flew east now could reclaim all that you have lost, and the Wasps would have no strength to resist you. And while they recoiled from you, their strikes at us would also weaken. They would be stretched until they snapped.’

He finished, slightly out of breath, waiting anxiously for her response.

It was too slow in coming. ‘Help us,’ he begged. ‘Help us, and help yourselves – please.’

Inaspe Raimm lowered her gaze. ‘You do not understand. We cannot do as you ask. It is impossible.’

Stenwold made sounds that he could not force into words. At last he said, ‘But… even a modest force?’

‘We cannot retake the lost Principalities,’ she said, simply. ‘The reason is very clear: we have signed the Treaty of Pearl. Those lands were ceded to the Empire.’

Stenwold felt his mouth fall open, staring. ‘But they forced you to sign that treaty. You cannot have signed it willingly. Twelve years of war…’

‘I signed the Treaty of Pearl,’ she told him, and the hint of emphasis in her voice silenced him. ‘It is a shame that I myself shall continue to bear, and pass on to each monarch that succeeds me. True, we were dragged to it through a sea of our people’s blood. True it was a device of the Empire that they themselves would not pause for a moment before breaking. But that is not material.’

‘I don’t understand…’ he began.

‘Then I am sorry. Perhaps the Wasps did not understand either, when they bound us to the treaty, but I am the Monarch, and therefore responsible for all my people. The whole of my kinden have pledged themselves, through me. It was an oath, a promise made by the Commonweal entire. So we can never march upon those lost lands. We cannot go against our own soul. We cannot go to war with the Empire to aid you, though we would dearly wish to. Our word is final.’

‘Oh…’ Stenwold said weakly, feeling as though she had just stabbed him through the gut. ‘Oh…’ All this way, through storm and bandits, and for nothing. Losing Felise, losing Destrachis, and all for nothing.

‘The Wasps will tear that paper up as soon as they are done with us,’ he protested hoarsely.

‘It seems likely,’ the Monarch agreed sadly. ‘Until they do, we remain bound by it. I am sorry that we cannot help you, Stenwold Maker. Your need is great and you are deserving. Perhaps some escort could travel with you back to your lands, to safeguard you.’

‘A Lorn detachment,’ Stenwold said, although they would not recognize the term. All hope was leaking out from him like life’s blood.

To stand so fast by a meaningless treaty. The Wasps truly cannot have known what they were winning, through that one piece of paper.

And then a thought: the Wasps will still be ignorant of what they have gained.

‘I… have an idea, O Monarch,’ he said slowly.

‘Speak, Stenwold Maker.’

‘Sleight of hand, Monarch. Shadows and illusions. Spider games. You are not without such resources, here in the Commonweal?’

A few knowing looks around them. ‘Indeed we are not,’ Inaspe Raimm replied.

‘Then…’ This time he ordered the words carefully before he uttered them. ‘If a force was to mass… close to the borders of the stolen principalities. An army of soldiers, beasts…’ He had nearly added engines, war machines. ‘All the business of war, in fact. The treaty makes no mention of that, I am sure.’

She regarded him, but he thought he saw a slight smile of comprehension there.

‘A Commonweal army on the border, O Monarch,’ Stenwold continued. ‘That is surely the current nightmare of the Empire, the Dragonflies returning for their lands. They cannot know, they do not know, that you will still honour your word. It would never occur to them, who would break their own so readily. Is that possible, O Monarch?’

Inaspe Raimm looked past him to encounter the gaze of Felipe Shah. When she met Stenwold’s gaze again, she was nodding. ‘It is possible,’ she said. ‘It might indeed be accomplished.’