Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

‘Princess, you have lost two sons,’ she stated.

The very words brought Elass up short, and there was a world of things to be read on her face for a moment, and none of them pleasant.

‘I knew Salme Dien. He was a good friend of mine, and a hero of the Lowlander war with the Wasp-kinden. They named a city after him, back home. He was a good man, and he knew a great deal about justice and responsibility. I think Tynisa and I, coming here, therefore expected a land of law and justice.’

The gathering remained utterly silent, waiting for Elass’s next words: likely a death sentence hanging in the air, and awaiting only her order to see it carried out. The princess just stared, though, as if struck dumb by the temerity of this short and ungainly foreigner.

‘You have taken me prisoner. Am I a criminal? If so, what is my crime? I have done nothing against you, or against your people. I came here of my own free will to see what could be done to resolve matters concerning my sister. That is all. Imprison me, harm me, and you have no justice.’

‘And how do you plan to resolve matters, as you put it?’ Elass demanded.

Che met her venomous gaze without flinching, remembering another Dragonfly-kinden she had known: Felise Mienn, who had died alongside Tisamon. Stenwold had brought that woman back to the Commonweal, shortly beforehand, and Che recalled very well how Commonwealer justice had then treated Mienn, the kinslayer.

‘My sister has killed your son,’ she stated. ‘She has freed your prisoners, all of them criminals. Why do you think she has done these things?’

‘It hardly matters,’ Elass snapped.

‘She has done it because she is not in her right mind. Because madness has touched her.’ And she felt a sudden freedom that she could say what she was about to say, and not one of them there would dismiss her as mad herself. ‘The ghost of her father, who died in violence and fury, has come to haunt her, and leads her astray. She is not responsible for what she does, and I know that, in the Commonweal, that makes her something other than a criminal.’

And she had got it exactly right, not overstated, but her point clearly made and understood, and everyone there looked to Salme Elass, knowing that Che was correct, but they said nothing.

‘It matters not,’ said the princess, at long last. Her tone was very quiet, but the silence was its match, and everyone there heard her. ‘It matters not whether she was mad or sane or haunted. She killed my son. I do not want justice. I do not want a trial. If she may go mad and murder who she will, so shall I. I will ransack the whole world in order to have my vengeance on that bastard Lowlands girl. You say I had two sons? Do you think I care what happened to that traitor boy who ran off to Felipe Shah’s court and abandoned me? Alain was all that was left to me, and I will have your sister executed in front of me. If the justice of the Monarch or the Lowlands or the bloody-handed Empress herself stands in my way, I shall batter it down.’ Her fierce glare cowed them all, her subjects and her followers, making them accomplices in all that she said. ‘I shall have vengeance for my son’s death, written in the blood of Tynisa Maker. And as for you…’ Abruptly there were guards holding Che’s arms once more. ‘We shall see how mad she is that she will not give herself to me to save her sister.’

The silence that had fallen around the fire was total: with the startled brigands-turned-fugitives staring at her in its guttering light. They had dug in to make camp, excavating a hollow between the roots of a great tree with practised skill and turfing out years’ worth of dead leaf mulch until the arching ribs of its roots had become the vaults of their low ceiling, and thus their fire would be hidden from any nocturnal hunters the Salmae might have sent out.

Or no longer the Salmae, for Salme Elass was the last of them now.

‘You killed the prince,’ Dal Arche said slowly. ‘I knew you’d make a play for my role sooner or later, but I think you might have overdone proving your qualifications, girl.’

‘I have no wish to be an outlaw,’ Tynisa snapped back.

‘Whoever does?’ remarked Avaris the Spider. ‘It’s more an honour that someone else pins to your chest, Bella Tynisa.’

‘The road leading to where we sit now is the same for us all,’ Dal stated, ‘although some of us apparently choose to ride it at a gallop. We’ve all been where you’ve been, girl; it’s just you’ve decided to achieve in grand style, and all at once, what most of us have made the work of a lifetime.’

‘Next you’ll be telling me that it’s a noble calling, to be a brigand. Or are you claiming to be a revolutionary, set on casting down the nobility?’ She tried to sound disdainful, but there was a curious note of need in her voice, despite herself. Can that be it? Can these ragged wretches have been right all along? Because that would mean I could justify what I’ve done…

‘A bandit, a man-hunter, a lawbreaker, a bow for hire,’ Dal replied. ‘I never wanted any grand cause. If it looks like I’m fighting tyrants, it’s only because the world’s so damned full of them that you can’t draw a sword without crossing some of their laws.’ He sighed, staring at the embers of the fire. ‘Easy as easy, it is, to become an outlaw. Come the war, they drafted me for their levy – emptied my village, and got pretty much everyone I knew from there killed. When the war was done, well, there was nothing to go back for, and nothing to eat. Twelve years of fighting and the farms had been turned into battlefields, or just left fallow because the labour was all off trailing the pike. And what food there was, half of it went to the Empire, can you believe? Terms of the Treaty of Pearl said that the food out of our mouths went to feed their soldiers. The other half went to the nobles, and you can bet they didn’t starve. Or maybe I’m too harsh. Maybe some of them stinted themselves and fed their people, but I never saw sign of it. They were our lords and masters after all, our betters, so there was hardly an incentive for them to help shoulder the burden.’

‘And so you lowered yourself to their level, is that it?’ she asked him.

His look was sharp. ‘I learned how easy it is to abuse power, girl. When you’re a soldier without a war, with a bow in your hand and nothing in your stomach, and you meet a man who has food and no bow, with no soldiering in him, it’s easy. He might be a merchant or a tax gatherer or a barge master or some noble’s prize messenger, but he has food, and you’re hungry and you can kill him for it. That’s all it takes. And next time maybe you don’t have to be quite so hungry, and eventually it’s become a way of life to take from others and, though you try to make a living at hunting fugitives or some such nonsense, the time will always come when someone has food and you don’t, and you’ll do it again. We’ve all been there, and now you’ve come to visit.’

There was a pause, and the Grasshopper, Soul Je, carefully added some more wood to the fire. Beyond their scooped-out hollow, Tynisa knew the fickle light would be all but invisible amongst the trees.

‘I don’t want to be your leader, and I don’t want to be a brigand,’ she said, and had to fight down a part of her that did. The ugly, violent thing that had driven her this far would relish it: somehow it seemed that one could have the same honour in killing thieves for a prince as killing princes for the benefit of thieves – so long as there was blood. She shuddered.

‘Then you’ve no need to share our fate, win or lose,’ Dal pointed out.

‘I…’ The world was out there, dark and harsh and unforgiving, and she had once again excised herself from it. If she left the company of these ragged creatures, then she would have nothing at all .