Heirs of the Blade (10 page)

‘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.’

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.’