Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

‘My Princess!’ the patrol leader called, and the nearest rider cocked back her helm and glowered down at the new arrivals. In that face, Che could read the same lineage that had produced her friend Salme Dien, and the briefly glimpsed Salme Alain.

‘You have her,’ the woman remarked, neither praising nor condemnatory. Her eyes, resting on Che, were loveless and bleak. ‘Bind her, put her on a horse, bring her along. I’ll speak to her once we have an idea of where the vermin have gone.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘And her companions, too.’

‘She was the only one who surrendered to us.’ The faces of the patrol were united in a conspiracy of omission.

Minutes later, Che was sitting astride a solid, patient beast moving alongside the one being ridden by the patrol leader, who had clearly hoped to be rid of her by now. Whether Che would have ever taken to riding if left to her own devices, she would never know, but having her wrists roped together to the saddle bow only meant constantly wrenching her arms every time she slid sideways. If the column had not been limited to moving at the speed of the foot soldiers, then she would probably have soon broken her neck somewhere along the way. As it was the progress was merely painful and difficult rather than fatal.

At last, with the dawn light appearing in the east, they stopped, but nobody dismounted. Che sagged against her restraints, feeling more exhausted than if she had been forced to walk the whole distance. She could see woodland ahead, and wondered if there was fear of an ambush, but shortly she spotted a scattering of figures winging their way over. One of them was clearly not Dragonfly-kinden, and she recognized him long before he landed.

‘Gaved,’ she greeted him, and he started in surprise just as he was about to go and deliver his report. The Dragonfly scouts had landed directly in front of their mistress, but Che guessed it was safer for the Wasp to approach humbly on foot.

‘They came looking for me on dragonfly-back,’ he murmured as he neared the Beetle girl. ‘Every tracker the Salmae can call in is here. I’ve not slept since then – they sent me right out after the runaways. Your sister, she finally did it then? She finally snapped.’

Che said nothing, but he read her expression well enough to add, ‘I’m sorry. It happens to the greatest. What can I say?’ And then he was hurrying off to add to the other scouts’ briefing.

Shortly after dawn, Che was sent for. The warband, hunting party, retinue, whatever it was, had not set off again, but scouts had been back and forth, flitting into and around the woods, and Che assumed that either the brigands and Tynisa were lying low or waiting in ambush, or they had disguised their trail so well that the princess did not know which way to follow.

Che’s bonds were cut before she was presented to Salme Elass, but she did not get the impression that she should feel encouraged by that. It was more of a ceremonial matter, as if some tradition prevented bound prisoners from being allowed in the royal presence. What manner of meeting will this be then? she wondered; a group inquisition or a private word? Even as she considered it, she saw that matters were going to be a good deal more public. Salme Elass was holding court.

The princess herself, clad in her mail of red, blue and gold, knelt on a woven mat, while all around her were other nobles, a dozen of them in their own uniquely patterned mails. Beside and behind the princess knelt lowlier specimens, presumably her followers and staff, and each of her tributary nobles had their own orbiting system of retainers, so that what appeared just a random assembly of kneeling men and women resolved itself into a precise map of station and status, comprehensible even to Che’s eyes. The hollow in the ground Elass had chosen had thus become her courtroom, as thoroughly as if her people had put up walls.

Che found herself standing at the far end of that notional space, on an invisible threshold that she could somehow sense and not argue with. Her escort let go of her arms, and she felt the gravity of that system of interlocking circles draw her forward almost against her will, each noble and his followers forming a wheel that moved her on towards the princess who was the centre of it all, and yet who at the same time seemed quite alone in the midst of it.

Che put on her bravest face, straightened her shoulders, and made the approach as proudly as she could, though feeling all around her the disparaging looks of the mustered aristocracy and their creatures. She knew what it was to be looked down on as lesser kinden, she had experienced quite enough of that when amongst Wasps, Moth-kinden and the Masters of Khanaphes. Halfway towards the princess, it seemed suddenly too much, too unfair, and she felt something slip within her, opening up a crack in the dam of her reserve. There had been a slight rustle of movement, a mutter of inaudible but barbed words. Che stopped and closed her eyes for a moment, and heard the background murmur die away abruptly. When she looked again, the expressions visible to her had changed. Mouths were shut, eyes were wide or wary. What had they seen? But she might as well ask what Maure had seen in her, for it was that same mark: the anointing of the Khanaphir Masters, the inexplicable coronation that the Wasp Empress Seda had inadvertently procured for both of them. It rested inside her like a stone, something she had not asked for and could not yet make any use of, but just for a moment then it had been visible. She suspected that none of them could quite know what had flickered momentarily about her, but all of them were silent, and none sneered at her or mocked her any more.

Only Elass’s face had not changed. The cold mask of her displeasure was unaltered.

‘So, you claim to be her sister,’ she pronounced, when Che was still ten feet away from her.

‘By upbringing if not by blood, Your Highness,’ Che confirmed. ‘Your officer told me that she has freed your prisoners.’

She sensed at once that she had got it wrong, yet that was a feeling she was familiar with, and it no longer stung her like it used to. Instead she concentrated her gaze on Salme Elass, noting the seething fire behind her eyes, the raw emotions the woman held on a fraying leash behind that icy expression.

What has Tynisa done? But she did not ask. Any words from Che, without full knowledge, would only harm her position, and she could see truth rising up behind Elass’s expression like a fish out of deep water, towards an inevitable breaching of the surface.

And Elass was on her feet, in a single, almost brutal motion, with fists clenched. Despite this, her voice was stony calm when she declared, ‘She has killed my son. ’

Che held that furious, knife-edged gaze, and registered no surprise in herself at all. The fact, now it was spoken, seemed as though inevitable from the first moment Che had seen the two of them together. Tynisa had killed Salme Alain, and any misdeed regarding the prisoners was a poor second.

‘I see,’ was all she said. Che was waiting for a rush of feeling, the guilt, the sense of grief, the apologies, all the usual baggage that seemed so inseparable from her normal dealings with the world: taking responsibility for all sorts of of aspects of it she could do nothing about. The reaction remained conspicuous in its absence and, for once in her life Che remained wholly calm. Thalric would be proud of me.

‘We will hunt her down and execute her like the base criminal she is,’ Elass hissed, stepping closer. ‘And you will help us, Beetle-kinden.’

Che sighed deeply, mostly in regret for what she was going to say, because she was now about to make Uncle Sten proud of her, too, in a curious way. She felt his presence close to her, remembering his bold speeches delivered in the Collegium Assembly, his lack of compromise, his locking horns with his adversaries and casting them down, through rhetoric and logic and simple truth.