Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

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.’

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.