Heirs of the Blade (65 page)

‘Gaved,’ she greeted him, and he started in surprise just as he was about to go and deliver his report. The Dragonfly scouts had landed directly in front of their mistress, but Che guessed it was safer for the Wasp to approach humbly on foot.

‘They came looking for me on dragonfly-back,’ he murmured as he neared the Beetle girl. ‘Every tracker the Salmae can call in is here. I’ve not slept since then – they sent me right out after the runaways. Your sister, she finally did it then? She finally snapped.’

Che said nothing, but he read her expression well enough to add, ‘I’m sorry. It happens to the greatest. What can I say?’ And then he was hurrying off to add to the other scouts’ briefing.

Shortly after dawn, Che was sent for. The warband, hunting party, retinue, whatever it was, had not set off again, but scouts had been back and forth, flitting into and around the woods, and Che assumed that either the brigands and Tynisa were lying low or waiting in ambush, or they had disguised their trail so well that the princess did not know which way to follow.

Che’s bonds were cut before she was presented to Salme Elass, but she did not get the impression that she should feel encouraged by that. It was more of a ceremonial matter, as if some tradition prevented bound prisoners from being allowed in the royal presence.
What manner of meeting will this be then?
she wondered;
a group inquisition or a private word?
Even as she considered it, she saw that matters were going to be a good deal more public. Salme Elass was holding court.

The princess herself, clad in her mail of red, blue and gold, knelt on a woven mat, while all around her were other nobles, a dozen of them in their own uniquely patterned mails. Beside and behind the princess knelt lowlier specimens, presumably her followers and staff, and each of her tributary nobles had their own orbiting system of retainers, so that what appeared just a random assembly of kneeling men and women resolved itself into a precise map of station and status, comprehensible even to Che’s eyes. The hollow in the ground Elass had chosen had thus become her courtroom, as thoroughly as if her people had put up walls.

Che found herself standing at the far end of that notional space, on an invisible threshold that she could somehow sense and not argue with. Her escort let go of her arms, and she felt the gravity of that system of interlocking circles draw her forward almost against her will, each noble and his followers forming a wheel that moved her on towards the princess who was the centre of it all, and yet who at the same time seemed quite alone in the midst of it.

Che put on her bravest face, straightened her shoulders, and made the approach as proudly as she could, though feeling all around her the disparaging looks of the mustered aristocracy and their creatures. She knew what it was to be looked down on as lesser kinden, she had experienced quite enough of that when amongst Wasps, Moth-kinden and the Masters of Khanaphes. Halfway towards the princess, it seemed suddenly too much, too unfair, and she felt something slip within her, opening up a crack in the dam of her reserve. There had been a slight rustle of movement, a mutter of inaudible but barbed words. Che stopped and closed her eyes for a moment, and heard the background murmur die away abruptly. When she looked again, the expressions visible to her had changed. Mouths were shut, eyes were wide or wary.
What had they seen?
But she might as well ask what Maure had seen in her, for it was that same mark: the anointing of the Khanaphir Masters, the inexplicable coronation that the Wasp Empress Seda had inadvertently procured for both of them. It rested inside her like a stone, something she had not asked for and could not yet make any use of, but just for a moment then it had been visible. She suspected that none of them could quite know what had flickered momentarily about her, but all of them were silent, and none sneered at her or mocked her any more.

Only Elass’s face had not changed. The cold mask of her displeasure was unaltered.

‘So, you claim to be her sister,’ she pronounced, when Che was still ten feet away from her.

‘By upbringing if not by blood, Your Highness,’ Che confirmed. ‘Your officer told me that she has freed your prisoners.’

She sensed at once that she had got it wrong, yet that was a feeling she was familiar with, and it no longer stung her like it used to. Instead she concentrated her gaze on Salme Elass, noting the seething fire behind her eyes, the raw emotions the woman held on a fraying leash behind that icy expression.

What has Tynisa done?
But she did not ask. Any words from Che, without full knowledge, would only harm her position, and she could see truth rising up behind Elass’s expression like a fish out of deep water, towards an inevitable breaching of the surface.

And Elass was on her feet, in a single, almost brutal motion, with fists clenched. Despite this, her voice was stony calm when she declared, ‘She has killed my son
.
’

Che held that furious, knife-edged gaze, and registered no surprise in herself at all. The fact, now it was spoken, seemed as though inevitable from the first moment Che had seen the two of them together. Tynisa had killed Salme Alain, and any misdeed regarding the prisoners was a poor second.

‘I see,’ was all she said. Che was waiting for a rush of feeling, the guilt, the sense of grief, the apologies, all the usual baggage that seemed so inseparable from her normal dealings with the world: taking responsibility for all sorts of of aspects of it she could do nothing about. The reaction remained conspicuous in its absence and, for once in her life Che remained wholly calm.
Thalric would be proud of me.

‘We will hunt her down and execute her like the base criminal she is,’ Elass hissed, stepping closer. ‘And you will help us, Beetle-kinden.’

Che sighed deeply, mostly in regret for what she was going to say, because she was now about to make Uncle Sten proud of her, too, in a curious way. She felt his presence close to her, remembering his bold speeches delivered in the Collegium Assembly, his lack of compromise, his locking horns with his adversaries and casting them down, through rhetoric and logic and simple truth.

‘Princess, you have lost two sons,’ she stated.

The very words brought Elass up short, and there was a world of things to be read on her face for a moment, and none of them pleasant.

‘I knew Salme Dien. He was a good friend of mine, and a hero of the Lowlander war with the Wasp-kinden. They named a city after him, back home. He was a good man, and he knew a great deal about justice and responsibility. I think Tynisa and I, coming here, therefore expected a land of law and justice.’

The gathering remained utterly silent, waiting for Elass’s next words: likely a death sentence hanging in the air, and awaiting only her order to see it carried out. The princess just stared, though, as if struck dumb by the temerity of this short and ungainly foreigner.

‘You have taken me prisoner. Am I a criminal? If so, what is my crime? I have done nothing against you, or against your people. I came here of my own free will to see what could be done to resolve matters concerning my sister. That is all. Imprison me, harm me, and you have no justice.’

‘And how do you plan to resolve matters, as you put it?’ Elass demanded.

Che met her venomous gaze without flinching, remembering another Dragonfly-kinden she had known: Felise Mienn, who had died alongside Tisamon. Stenwold had brought that woman back to the Commonweal, shortly beforehand, and Che recalled very well how Commonwealer justice had then treated Mienn, the kinslayer.

‘My sister has killed your son,’ she stated. ‘She has freed your prisoners, all of them criminals. Why do you think she has done these things?’

‘It hardly matters,’ Elass snapped.

‘She has done it because she is not in her right mind. Because madness has touched her.’ And she felt a sudden freedom that she could say what she was about to say, and not one of them there would dismiss her as mad herself. ‘The ghost of her father, who died in violence and fury, has come to haunt her, and leads her astray. She is not responsible for what she does, and I know that, in the Commonweal, that makes her something other than a criminal.’

And she had got it exactly right, not overstated, but her point clearly made and understood, and everyone there looked to Salme Elass, knowing that Che was correct, but they said nothing.

‘It matters not,’ said the princess, at long last. Her tone was very quiet, but the silence was its match, and everyone there heard her. ‘It matters not whether she was mad or sane or haunted. She killed my
son.
I do not want justice. I do not want a trial. If
she
may go mad and murder who she will, so shall I. I will ransack the whole world in order to have my vengeance on that bastard Lowlands girl. You say I had
two
sons? Do you think I care what happened to that traitor boy who ran off to Felipe Shah’s court and abandoned me? Alain was all that was left to me, and I will have your sister executed in front of me. If the justice of the Monarch or the Lowlands or the bloody-handed Empress herself stands in my way, I shall batter it
down
.’ Her fierce glare cowed them all, her subjects and her followers, making them accomplices in all that she said. ‘I shall have vengeance for my son’s death, written in the blood of Tynisa Maker. And as for you . . .’ Abruptly there were guards holding Che’s arms once more. ‘We shall see how mad she is that she will not give herself to me to save her sister.’

Forty

The silence that had fallen around the fire was total: with the startled brigands-turned-fugitives staring at her in its guttering light. They had dug in to make camp, excavating a hollow between the roots of a great tree with practised skill and turfing out years’ worth of dead leaf mulch until the arching ribs of its roots had become the vaults of their low ceiling, and thus their fire would be hidden from any nocturnal hunters the Salmae might have sent out.

Or no longer the Salmae, for Salme Elass was the last of them now.

‘You killed the prince,’ Dal Arche said slowly. ‘I knew you’d make a play for my role sooner or later, but I think you might have overdone proving your qualifications, girl.’

‘I have no wish to be an outlaw,’ Tynisa snapped back.

‘Whoever does?’ remarked Avaris the Spider. ‘It’s more an honour that someone else pins to your chest, Bella Tynisa.’

‘The road leading to where we sit now is the same for us all,’ Dal stated, ‘although some of us apparently choose to ride it at a gallop. We’ve all been where you’ve been, girl; it’s just you’ve decided to achieve in grand style, and all at once, what most of us have made the work of a lifetime.’

‘Next you’ll be telling me that it’s a noble calling, to be a brigand. Or are you claiming to be a revolutionary, set on casting down the nobility?’ She tried to sound disdainful, but there was a curious note of need in her voice, despite herself.
Can that be it? Can these ragged wretches have been right all along? Because that would mean I could justify what I’ve done . . .

‘A bandit, a man-hunter, a lawbreaker, a bow for hire,’ Dal replied. ‘I never wanted any grand cause. If it looks like I’m fighting tyrants, it’s only because the world’s so damned full of them that you can’t draw a sword without crossing some of their laws.’ He sighed, staring at the embers of the fire. ‘Easy as easy, it is, to become an outlaw. Come the war, they drafted me for their levy – emptied my village, and got pretty much everyone I knew from there killed. When the war was done, well, there was nothing to go back for, and nothing to eat. Twelve years of fighting and the farms had been turned into battlefields, or just left fallow because the labour was all off trailing the pike. And what food there was, half of it went to the Empire, can you believe? Terms of the Treaty of Pearl said that the food out of our mouths went to feed their soldiers. The other half went to the nobles, and you can bet
they
didn’t starve. Or maybe I’m too harsh. Maybe some of them stinted themselves and fed their people, but I never saw sign of it. They were our lords and masters after all, our
betters
, so there was hardly an incentive for them to help shoulder the burden.’

‘And so you lowered yourself to their level, is that it?’ she asked him.

His look was sharp. ‘I learned how easy it is to abuse power, girl. When you’re a soldier without a war, with a bow in your hand and nothing in your stomach, and you meet a man who has food and no bow, with no soldiering in him, it’s easy. He might be a merchant or a tax gatherer or a barge master or some noble’s prize messenger, but he has food, and you’re hungry and you can kill him for it. That’s all it takes. And next time maybe you don’t have to be quite so hungry, and eventually it’s become a way of life to take from others and, though you try to make a living at hunting fugitives or some such nonsense, the time will always come when someone has food and you don’t, and you’ll do it again. We’ve all been there, and now you’ve come to visit.’

There was a pause, and the Grasshopper, Soul Je, carefully added some more wood to the fire. Beyond their scooped-out hollow, Tynisa knew the fickle light would be all but invisible amongst the trees.

‘I don’t want to be your leader, and I don’t want to be a brigand,’ she said, and had to fight down a part of her that
did
. The ugly, violent thing that had driven her this far would relish it: somehow it seemed that one could have the same honour in killing thieves for a prince as killing princes for the benefit of thieves – so long as there was blood. She shuddered.

‘Then you’ve no need to share our fate, win or lose,’ Dal pointed out.

‘I . . .’ The world was out there, dark and harsh and unforgiving, and she had once again excised herself from it. If she left the company of these ragged creatures, then she would have nothing at all
.

Perhaps Dal saw something of the truth from her face, for he did not press the issue.