Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

‘I… am travelling to your family,’ she finally got out, the words stopping and starting, and utterly beyond her ability to predict. ‘Salma… my Prince, I knew your brother. He was my friend. I bring word…’ She could say no more, but Salma was already looking towards Gaved.

‘Seems Dien made quite an impression,’ the Dragonfly said philosophically, but then the warmth of his smile was focused back on her, and she met his gaze boldly. ‘Well, such things have been known, and you make a better messenger than a turncoat Wasp. Will you come to Leose, then?’

She had no idea what Leose was, but she nodded nonetheless. Let me go with you, she thought. She was terrified that, if he left her sight for an instant, she might lose him for ever.

But already he was waving a hand at Gaved. ‘Bring her with you, Turncoat. I must report to Mother, of course, but no doubt we’ll meet at the castle.’

She wanted to ask why they could not all travel together, but Alain put his fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. A moment later she heard a low drone that quickly built up into a buzzing roar of wings, as something descended on them from the skies above. The downdraught of its wings battered her, and Gaved’s little fire leapt and danced madly to the point of extinction. The dragonfly glittered like silver in the light, surely twenty feet from its stubby antennae to tapering tail. It hovered for a moment and then found a perch on one side of the defile, claws digging deep for purchase.

Seeing her expression, Alain was all smiles. ‘Lycene,’ he named the animal. ‘Only the Salmae breed dragonflies that can fly so well at night. You have your report, Turncoat?’

With a start, Gaved dug in his tunic to produce a messy fistful of paper. ‘There’s more. I’ve learned today-’

Alain waved it off. ‘Then it can wait until you get to Leose. You have a horse nearby?’

The Wasp nodded glumly.

‘Good, make best speed, and bring our new guest with you.’ Again the flash of teeth. ‘I will look for you in more civilized surroundings,’ he told Tynisa, ‘and I’d wish duty didn’t lay its hand on me so hard, but I must go.’

She tried to say something but her throat had dried up, and a single flick of his wings lifted him into Lycene’s saddle, where he holstered his bow. Then the insect was aloft again, its wings thrashing up a gale, and seconds later he was gone, swept across the vault of the sky far enough that even her eyes could no longer pick him out, as the sound of Lycene’s wings became a diminishing hum.

Horseback riding was not something Tynisa had been called upon much to do, and she would have found it uncomfortable and awkward even if not sharing a horse with a Wasp-kinden. After the fight, Gaved had broken camp and relocated to another sheltered place, but neither of them had slept much, constantly jabbed awake by mutual suspicion.

Before dawn he had tracked down his errant mount and they had begun their journey in silence. The land around them was inhabited once, for they passed a patch of lumpy, mounded earth and rotting sticks that had clearly been a village. The rolling countryside had been cut into tiers for agriculture in the past, but many years of neglect were softening the contours. Grass, nettles and thistles grew tall, even at the approach of winter, and the land was broken up by knots of densely growing trees.

‘Did the war do this?’ she asked, the first words uttered for more than two hours. Even as she asked, she was thinking that the abandonment looked far older. ‘Was there a plague here or something?’

‘More than a generation ago, the family of little princelings who ruled this province ran out of heirs, I think,’ was Gaved’s response. ‘And by the time some other petty nobles came round to claim the place, after decades of duelling genealogies, the locals weren’t exactly ready for someone lording it over them.’ He did not sound particularly disapproving, but then that prospect was probably inviting to him. ‘All over the Commonweal, there are whole provinces gone fallow. More so since the war, obviously, but it’s been going on for ever, from what I can make out. Place is falling apart. If it’s not bandits setting themselves up as princes, it’s princes going bad and turning bandit. Raids across principality borders, villages burned, or village headmen declaring independence, thieves on the roads and in the forests, peasants deciding they’d rather be free, or lords taxing the shirts off their backs. The Monarch’s a long way away, and the Mercers do what they can – the proper ones and the provincial sort like we’ve got – but how many Mercers can there be?’

‘And yet you’re working for Salma’s family. I’d have thought you’d be on the other side,’ she said darkly.

‘Me? I’m making a living,’ Gaved declared, glancing back at her briefly. That she could stick a knife in his back at any moment was something he was apparently managing to deal with phlegmatically. ‘When I left Jerez and headed west, I only had one name to conjure with, and that was your friend’s.’

‘Salma? You got here through trading on his name?’ she demanded.

‘Once I heard his family mentioned, I made my way over and talked myself into a job. Maybe tomorrow Sef and I’ll move on, turn brigand even, but for today I’m on the side of the Monarch. It’s that kind of world. I keep my options open. Or I try to. There was no need for that bloodshed, last night.’ His voice was careful and measured, and he must have felt the flash of anger going through her.

‘They were going to kill you.’

‘I could have talked my way out of it, with them, or with Siriell if need be. It’s part of what I do. She was probably only going to make me an offer.’

‘Oh, and that would suit you well, wouldn’t it?’ she accused him. ‘Just waiting for the chance to jump flags to join the outlaws, after Salma’s people took you in.’

‘I like to keep my options open,’ Gaved repeated. ‘But killing people closes doors. Who knows when I might need to go back there, on whoever’s business? Now I don’t know if I can.’

‘I’m not going to be anyone’s prisoner,’ Tynisa hissed through gritted teeth. She was starting to see flickers at the edge of her vision, one or other of her imaginary companions keeping pace with her. Achaeos, was it? Had he come to reproach her now for the blood she had spilled?

‘It’s not so simple-’ Gaved began, but she hissed at him so fiercely that he stopped.

‘I have been a prisoner once,’ she snapped. ‘You have no idea what that cost me and what parts of me I left behind, when I got out.’

The Wasp scowled at her over his shoulder. ‘Well, it’s done,’ was all he could manage. ‘But they’ll have people in the air, searching for us. Nobody kills that many of Siriell’s people without being hunted.’

‘So we’ll fight them again.’

‘No, we’ll lose them,’ Gaved decided. ‘We’ll keep riding as fast as the land permits and as long as the horse can keep the pace. We’ll head uphill, too. I know a good road for us to throw them off.’

‘There’s a forest?’ Tynisa asked, because tree cover was always the best way to hide from airborne spies.

‘Of sorts,’ Gaved confirmed, ‘but I doubt it’s what you’re expecting.’

They settled into a steady pace, with the Wasp refusing to be drawn on where he was guiding them. The land about them was already looking more promising, their trail winding between stands of gnarled trees which grew only denser ahead of them.

They kept up a pressing pace for hours, with Tynisa spotting the occasional dark shape high above that might have been a man or a hunting insect. Gaved was now angling them along the broad flank of a hill that was creased into a series of slopes and valleys still heavily hung with morning mist. The scrubby trees had given way now, left behind on the hill’s southern skirts. Here, down in the valleys, was a dense forest of another kind altogether. The mist contained a maze of tall, leafy canes, some as slender as a finger, some as thick as Tynisa’s thigh, as though a regiment of giant archers had loosed a thousand shafts at the hillside itself. This bristling cane forest seemed to preserve the mist even past midday, so that their progress deteriorated into a groping through a constantly shifting landscape of vertical shadows. Gaved led with apparent confidence, but Tynisa spotted him consulting a little aviator’s compass more than once. She was glad of that since, between the mist and the sameness of the landscape, she felt she would become lost almost instantly.