Heirs of the Blade sota-7

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  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.’

  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 a
waiting 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.