Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

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.