Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Gramo stopped abruptly, and for a moment she could not work out why. Only after a moment’s reflection did she guess that a few more steps would actually have brought them notion-ally within, a separate space whose limits were entirely invisible to her.

‘Do we… Is there a bell we ring?’ she asked.

‘We wait,’ Gramo advised. ‘You must realize, the Commonwealers do not have that sense of urgency you may recall from Collegium.’

She could see people further within, who she guessed were servants busy about the tasks of maintaining the place, but none of them seemed to see her. The unseen walls of this place evidently blocked her from their notice.

With a little creaking of joints, Gramo seated himself. ‘Ah, but there is no such thing as idle time in the Commonweal. This is a time to reflect and to meditate upon one’s life.’

The idea brought a sour taste to Tynisa’s mouth. I have no more need of that kind of introspection. Anything but. ‘I can’t see how this sort of building can have stood them much stead during the war,’ she remarked, to burn away the silence.

‘Oh, this is no castle, in that sense,’ Gramo admitted. ‘This is Prince Felipe’s new home, built after the loss of his family’s original seat of power. There is little enough change in the Commonweal, but this is a new… interpretation, shall I say, of their architecture. Mind you, I’m afraid their stone castles hardly fared better than this one would. Perhaps that’s the point.’

There was a flurry of wings and a Dragonfly landed a few yards away, a lean man with high cheekbones and hollow cheeks, his hair a steely grey. As he approached them, he moved like a man in his prime, and nothing in his manner or stance suggested age. His clothing was in green and blue, a robe and under-robe as Gramo wore, but of far finer quality, being silk embroidered with gold. For a moment, Tynisa thought that this must, in fact, be the prince unexpectedly answering his own door.

‘Seneschal Lioste,’ Gramo named him. ‘You do me much honour with your presence.’

‘Ambassador,’ the seneschal replied, neither warmly nor coldly, but a simple statement of fact. His eyes flicked to Tynisa questioningly.

‘Ah, well.’ Gramo gestured vaguely in her direction, ‘we have a visitor from the Lowlands, as you may guess. She is sent by Master Stenwold Maker, who visited with the prince so recently.’ The full year that had passed did not make a dent in that ‘recent’, Tynisa guessed. ‘Tynisa Maker is here to pay her formal respects to the prince, or to his retinue during his absence.’

Seneschal Lioste stared at her and said nothing.

‘Your prince, of course, welcomed Master Maker on his visit, as did the Monarch, since when your prince has taken a refreshingly open stance, of course, towards my homeland,’ Gramo went on, hands worrying at the cloth of his robe. The Dragonfly glanced at him, face carefully blank, and then his eyes returned to Tynisa.

‘Mistress Maker is here at his behest – Master Maker’s, that is – formal greetings from the Lowlands… in this new, this day and age …’ Gramo faltered to a stop.

‘Prince Felipe has yet to return,’ the seneschal said, and Tynisa decoded his expression at last. Here was a man faced with something that he had no idea what to do with.

‘Mistress Maker was hoping to be admitted to the castle,’ Gramo tried gamely. ‘Master Maker, when he was here, was summoned, of course …’

‘Master Maker had brought home one of the Monarch’s subjects,’ the Seneschal reminded him, apparently seizing on something that he at last understood. It was plain that, however progressive the prince himself might be, in his absence his staff fell back on what they knew. ‘My prince shall return to Suon Ren shortly. Perhaps the Spider-kinden shall be sent for in due course.’ He was meticulously polite in words, manner and expression, but Tynisa could almost see the panic leaking out at the edges. The idea of allowing a stranger, a foreigner, into Felipe’s home behind his master’s back was obviously more than the seneschal could countenance.

Descending back towards the embassy, Gramo was full of apologies, defending the natural reticence of the Dragonflies, assuring her that the prince himself would send for her eventually. ‘You must get used to the slower pace, is all it is,’ he explained. ‘One does not rush, here.’

Gramo prepared her a room at the embassy, which mostly involved hooking up a hammock-like affair for her to sleep in. Her new chamber was dominated by a solid Collegium desk, the sort that a well-to-do academic would write his memoirs on. She was willing to bet it had seen no use in ten years, and there was no chair.

They ate later, still no word having come from the castle. Gramo prepared a meal of beans and roots and other vegetables, his choice of spices too subtle for her palate, the flavours seeming bland or else more bitter than she was used to, the variety broad, the quantities mean. Everything came from his own garden behind the embassy. He appeared to be entirely self-sufficient.

‘What about the people of Suon Ren?’ Tynisa pressed him. ‘Surely they don’t just ignore you?’

‘Oh, they’re very good,’ he protested. ‘The prince invites me to his castle sometimes. There are recitals, music, theatricals… Hunts and dances also, although I am somewhat unsuited to such diversions. It’s just,’ the old Beetle smiled wistfully, ‘I can never be one of them. It is not that they keep me out… only, I cannot fly with them, cannot think with them. I have become as much a Commonwealer as any son of Collegium, but it is not enough sometimes. And then there are their beliefs… Of all things, it saddens me most that, being Apt, I cannot understand them.’

His words baffled Tynisa. ‘Surely you don’t believe in ghosts and magic,’ she stated. Inwardly, something twisted awkwardly at the thought. Tisamon, her father, had believed in such things, and in his company she had occasionally witnessed too much: sights that still hung on her mind the next morning, ones that sunlight could not dispel. She had been brought up and tutored by the practical people of Collegium, though, who believed in nothing that artifice and philosophy could not confirm with experimental proof. She had learned every year in College that there was no such thing as magic, for all that the old Inapt kin-den might claim otherwise. Magic was a crutch, a convenient excuse to cover all manner of crimes: A magician made me do it.

Gramo gave her a weak smile. ‘Of course, of course, and yet… I see the Dragonfly-kinden live every day of their lives as though magic was a real force, as potent and wild as the weather. I have come to terms with it. I do not pretend to understand it, but at the same time I will not mock them for it. And I have found that I cannot explain the way… everything works here, the chances and the odd coincidences, that they call fate and predestination. It seems to serve them well enough.’

Or it did until the Wasp armies reached them, was Tynisa’s thought, but she left it unspoken.

‘Who can say what may be true, so far away from Collegium’s white walls?’ the old Beetle murmured softly, and in his voice there was a young man’s longing, for far vistas and lost secrets, and for the world to be something grander than it was.

At the evening’s end, when Gramo had tidied away the supper bowls, he stopped her just as she was retiring to bed.

‘You’re not here on official business, are you?’ he said sadly.

She shook her head. ‘I mean neither you nor any other here any harm, I swear, but I do need to speak to the prince.’ Because I have burned all my other bridges, and this tenuous link with Salma is the only thing I have left.