Tynisa gazed about with fresh eyes. Of the score who had set out, only she and six others remained, four of the armoured nobles and a couple of the most fortunate peasants. The two of them, lean spearmen clad in leather cuirasses and helms, stood close together and regarded Tynisa with fear and awe. They did not look so very different to the bandits, and it seemed to her, in that moment, entirely possible that some of the flesh that had fallen before her blade might not even have been the enemy’s.
What am I doing? She asked herself, looking again at Telse Orian. His eyes were still fixed… no, not at her exactly, but as though he saw something – or someone – at her shoulder.
She saw the light go out, the last spark of what had been Orian, who, out of all Alain’s peers, had shown her kindness. For a moment she felt that she should run, should flee this place while she was still free of…
Tynisa shook her head to clear it of such foolishness. ‘We must report back to Alain,’ she told the survivors, assuming command effortlessly. ‘We must report how the bandits are driven back.’
For a moment they stared at her blankly, trying to equate her triumphant tone with the scene around them.
Che woke up into perfect awareness in the pre-dawn greyness, staring up at the ceiling. The previous night’s images stirred in her mind, but most of all she remembered Tynisa, fighting with breath-taking elegance and grace, and not alone. Her every move had been shadowed by a twisted figure always at her back, one hand on her shoulder, corded with vines and racked with thorns. Tisamon had found his daughter, and Che had witnessed how he was moulding her. What part of the Mantis Weaponsmaster that was still left to haunt the land of the living had obviously decided to cling to the ancient values of his kinden: blood and death, fierce and uncompromising, with not a hair’s-breadth gap into which mercy or regret could pry. Che remembered Tisamon, and what she had heard of the man’s last days. From what she gathered, regrets had eaten him alive, unable to reconcile his humanity with the impossible and terrible ideals his people aspired to.
It was plain that his ghost did not intend to let his daughter go the same way, even if he had to cut out her humanity to do so. What will Tynisa become?
Her sister was suffering, and there was nobody else who could go to her aid, but Cheerwell Maker.
By the time dawn had claimed the east, she was ready. She had dressed, recovered those of her possessions that Thalric and Varmen had brought with them, and now sat waiting impatiently for the light to waken her companions.
First up was Gramo Galltree, whom she had met briefly the previous evening, before she abandoned the world for much-needed sleep.
He eyed her cautiously. ‘You seem recovered.’
With what she now knew, such small talk seemed an unconscionable waste of her time. ‘Will the prince see me?’ she asked flatly. ‘Alternatively, will he mind if I take my leave…? Why are you smiling?’
Gramo coughed into his hand, a perfectly Collegiate way of hiding amusement. ‘Prince Felipe Shah departed, with his retinue, even as you were being… recovered,’ he told her. ‘He had an audience with one of your Wasp friends, and then he set off for Esselve. Today is the first day of spring. A prince-major is expected to visit his vassals, although for the last few years Prince Felipe has not been too prompt in that.’
After an audience with one of my Wasp friends… Che considered, hoping that Thalric had not managed to offend one of the most powerful men in the Commonweal.
The two Wasps rose soon after. Varmen was first to appear, bustling out of the embassy with only a brusque nod to her, off to check on his pack-beetle. Thalric stepped out a moment later, finding Che sitting near the door, looking towards the centre of Suon Ren, at the Dragonfly-kinden going about their business there.
She glanced at him, expecting that familiar closed look, the cynical Thalric armoured against the world, but instead she caught a strangely vulnerable expression there. Relief at her recovery, yes, but more than that. He stared at her without words, and at last she found her feet, with a flick of her wings, and walked over to him, holding his gaze.
‘You put me to a great deal of trouble, Beetle girl,’ he told her, but his voice trembled slightly, and she put her arms around him and hugged him tight, feeling his own embrace respond a moment later.
‘We must set off north, as soon as you’re ready to go,’ she murmured into his chest. ‘Tynisa needs me.’
He grunted. ‘Does she know that?’
‘No. Quite the opposite, probably. But I can’t abandon her to.. .’ She remembered that he would almost certainly not understand, and just let the sentence tail off.
‘Well, then, I can’t think of any urgent social engagements here that I can’t put aside,’ he told her. ‘Let’s beg some supplies and we’ll set off.’
Thalric had looked out a map, soon after they had arrived, in preparation for this moment. He produced it with something like embarrassment, because it made no sense to him, lacking the careful proportion and measurement of the charts used by the Imperial army. Che studied it with interest, though, seeing how the Inapt cartographers had set out their world, places and trails, landmarks and directions. She understood it perfectly.
When they were ready to set off, they found Varmen waiting for them, his laden beetle at his heels.
‘You’re heading back east?’ Che asked him.
He shuffled his feet. ‘Thought I’d come with you.’
She glanced at Thalric, who was frowning, clearly as surprised as she was. ‘You’ve been paid off?’ she pressed.
Varmen shrugged. ‘Paid, certainly. Listen, where you’re heading, it’s Rhael Province – bandit country. You’re saying you can’t use an extra sword?’
Che scrutinized his face, trying to detect treachery. She sensed a crack in his bluff and simple exterior, but she did not read guilt there, exactly. ‘What is it?’ she murmured, feeling obscurely that she should be able to tell precisely, to extract the knowledge from his face or his mind.
‘You were with Felipe Shah,’ Thalric noted, and Che readied herself for a display of suspicion, but instead the former Rekef man was nodding. ‘He’s hired you, hasn’t he, to look after Che?’
Varmen shrugged awkwardly. ‘He wasn’t exactly going to pay me anything to look after you,’ he said, still evasive. Thalric seemed satisfied with his own deductions, but Che could sense the gap, the discontinuity. Not that Thalric was wrong, but she knew there was more that was going unsaid by Varmen.
They set off shortly after, following a path that was little more than an animal track. They were barely a quarter mile from Suon Ren’s outskirts, though, when someone was calling them back. Glancing behind them, Che saw a figure swathed in a dark cloak hurrying to catch up.
‘It’s the world’s least subtle assassin,’ Varmen murmured, mirroring Che’s thoughts so closely that she could not suppress a bark of laughter.
‘It’s Maure,’ Thalric observed, ‘the… healer.’ It would be a desperate day indeed before the word ‘necromancer’ passed the Wasp’s lips willingly.
With that, there was no choice but to wait for the halfbreed to catch up. She stopped a little short of them, glancing from Wasp to Wasp, but looking mostly at Che.
‘What do you want?’ Thalric asked, a little harshly.
‘You just happen to be going the way I was heading,’ she told them, still hovering at that awkward distance, neither with them nor apart from them.
‘And what way’s that?’
‘Away from Suon Ren’s a good start,’ she told them. ‘Or you may not have noticed how I wasn’t exactly loved there, hmm? Got thrown out by that boot-faced seneschal on his master’s orders, first time round, and next thing I know is the prince’s soldiers are dragging me back, so I can look at you, lady.’ The nod she gave Che seemed overly respectful, endowing Che with the sort of gravitas that a great prince like Felipe Shah should own. ‘Now you’re well again, there’s no welcome for me here.’