Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Standing there in her borrowed garments, in this unfamiliar castle, she felt her self-confidence tarnishing by the moment. She did not know what to do, nor how to act, and a lifetime in Collegium had not prepared her for the web of intricate etiquette that bound these people together. Abruptly her simple room seemed close and crowded, and she heard Achaeos’s spiteful reminder: And you cannot even fly, which all these people take for granted. The Beetles have ruined you for polite company. Tynisa shook her head, determined now to prove him wrong.

A dance, Alain had said. Well, it had indeed been a while since she had last trod a measure, but she knew that game. She knew the Beetle-kinden dances, which involved a great deal of romping back and forth in lines, changing places, turning round and, in the case of older, fatter or drunker dancers, falling over. She had skipped her way through enough of those, and even been admired for it. Then, again, there were the Spider dances, where the musicians set the measure and the dancers paired off and let their inspiration guide them, making grace and elegance their only standards. She felt she was ready for these Commonwealers.

The feast was disappointing. There were long, low tables seating a clear grading of guests, and she was placed at the end furthest from all the important people, meaning Alain and his mother and the more favoured of their noble invitees. She sensed Lisan Dea’s hostile influence, but there was little she could do about it. Aside from herself, this gathering plainly represented Dragonfly aristocracy, resplendent in a rainbow of silks, cloth of gold, silvered leather and enamelled chitin. There was very little conversation between them, and none at all directed at Tynisa. If this gathering was to celebrate Alain’s victories, nobody said anything about them, and his mother made no speeches. It was as though everyone had been thoroughly briefed beforehand, with only Tynisa left out. She ate in silence, finding the food too sharply and unexpectedly flavoured, and the portions small.

Then the gathering all adjourned into a further room, a circular space with a vastly high ceiling painted in patterns of blue and white and gold, where a little troupe of Grasshopper-kinden stood ready with instruments: long-necked lutes and rebecs and deep-throated drums. The guests spread out along the room’s periphery, where Tynisa noticed several of them pairing off for the first dance. Her eyes sought out Alain, but he had already been secured by a coolly elegant Dragonfly lady, the two of them slotting together without preamble, as though the partnering had been arranged beforehand. Tynisa turned away, but there was someone unexpectedly at her elbow. For a moment she found her hand twitching for the sword she had left in her room, but it was a young man who had been seated near her at the table.

‘Lady Lowlander, would you honour me with your hand for this dance?’ he enquired.

She had no idea who he was, but his familiarity suggested that they had already been introduced. In truth, she had not paid her neighbours much attention during the meal. Seeing him standing so solemnly before her, she began to feel curiously off-balance.

‘Of course,’ she said nonetheless, because she could not back down now. Even then the drummer was moving his fingers over taut hide, producing a patter of fluid sounds like no drum Tynisa had heard before. Dancers were moving into place as if drawn by some magical resonance, each to a precise spot.

‘We shall join the lower tier, of course,’ her partner told her bafflingly, and then abandoned her to take his position across the room. In the end, she only knew where to go when two concentric circles had formed, with a single glaring gap in the outermost.

Faster than she was expecting, the music struck as soon as she had found her feet there, and she tried to move with it, but in a moment she realized that a Commonweal dance was something far removed from her experience of either Spider-kinden or Lowlanders. The inner circle of dancers had taken to the air immediately, converging in the chamber’s centre and circling one another, whilst the outer ring began following some complex pattern of its own that seemed to have no relationship to that of their fellow dancers aloft. Small groups of them would come together, turn about one another with solemn grace, now facing in, now out, and then their smaller circle would scatter in a single instant, each leaping to another point either on foot or by wing. It should have produced a chaos of tripping and collisions, but Tynisa realized very swiftly that each and every one of the participants knew their moves as if they had been rehearsed in them. This was no Beetle bumble with some half-drunk dance-master calling out the moves, nor a Spider-kinden improvisation where individual inspiration was all. These noblemen and women had been schooled in some intricate dancing art, move by move and step by step, so that they worked together to an invisible pattern that she had no access to.

Tynisa soon backed out hurriedly, because the alternative was to get in someone’s way, and already she had hopelessly lost the rhythm of the music. Across the room she saw the young man who partnered her also retiring, his face kept carefully neutral.

She was embarrassed. It was a new feeling for her: she had discovered something that she could not do. Worse, Alain would have noticed her fail at it. Even though the dance went on, she felt all eyes on her. Achaeos’s mocking laughter sounded in her head – and she knew that Salma’s imaginary smile was merely polite now. She had failed his people, and he had witnessed it, for all he was a year buried in the earth.

Those angry thoughts kept her busy until the dance reached its preordained conclusion, and Tynisa hoped naively that they might pass on to some other entertainment. Instead, she saw a swapping of partners, hands changing hands, and a new pattern being laid out in feet and bodies, whilst the musicians conferred briefly. No signal had been given, but as soon as the drummer started tapping away, everyone there immediately recognized the measure and was ready for it, leaving Tynisa again clinging at the sidelines, frustrated and surplus to requirements.

This time, Alain was partnering another young noblewoman, an iridescent creature who reminded Tynisa far too much of the Butterfly-kinden that Salme Dien had fallen for. Grimly she watched the two of them pirouette and soar together, each beat of the music grating on her nerves, until she felt that she would have to quit the gathering, or else do something she might regret.

Instead, some stubborn part of her had rooted her feet to the floor, even as her temper wound tighter and tighter. The next dance proved even more intricate, dancers skipping from the floor all the way to the arched ceiling and back, hovering and darting and circling like so many mayflies. And, all the while, Tynisa just stared and stared.

She recalled now Lisan Dea’s curious reaction to her, the pity the seneschal seemed to show, even that question about how Tynisa would defend herself. Well, now she knew what the woman had meant. She, who had found her own way amongst so many different kinden and cultures, had now encountered heights that she could not ascend to. Whatever her gifts, or her Art, or her training, she was still a low-born Lowlander. In contrast, these people were aristocracy, and their world was different to hers.

An older world, a wiser world, Achaeos whispered in her ear, but you were so bound up with your Beetle learning that you abandoned your own heritage, and what are you now? Apt? Inapt? You have lost them both. He was a presence at her elbow, and she dared not look round to banish him in case she found him stubborn, standing there with that bloodstain spreading across his body and his hand held out to partner her. She felt herself begin to shake ever so slightly. Every eye seemed to slide off her, with contempt or pity or simple embarrassment in each look cast her way. She was scanning the host for Salme Alain, desperate to catch his eye. Just the once, she caught sight of his face amidst the crowds, and read only amusement there. At her? Who could know, but it cut her anyway.