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.’