What am I doing now? What is my body doing now? What of Alain? Am I killing Alain?
Her blade still directed with a straight arm at the magician, she froze. ‘No,’ she whispered to herself. ‘No, no, not this. Please, not again…’
‘This is shameful,’ the woman chided. ‘Come now, there’s no need to hide. I’m right here. You want me dead, I can see that, and you’re not the first. Come try me, then. Perhaps you’ll succeed, for I understand you had a reputation in that field. But not through this girl. What courage does that show, Mantis-kinden?’
Tynisa stared at her wildly, not understanding what she meant. The woman suddenly seemed to really focus on her, although she had been looking her in the face all this time.
‘Tynisa Maker, I am sent by your sister. She is coming for you. She wants you to be strong, do you understand? Be strong, and do nothing unwise.’
‘My sister…?’ Cheerwell?
But then the magician was looking not-quite-at Tynisa again, giving out a mocking little laugh. ‘Oh, is this really all you’re cut down to? I thought they called you a hero over Collegium way? The man who killed the Emperor, and here he is hiding behind his daughter’s skirts?’
And she felt someone move behind her, rushing forward, and in that instant something had left her, surging out from her in raging fury. The magician was already dancing away between the trees, though, and she saw the indistinct form of Tisamon chasing after her, his metal claw drawn back to strike, but forever just too far away, receding and receding and…
She woke up, crying out, and leapt to her feet still clutching her blanket. There was a faint lightening through the trees to the east, and all around her the earliest risers were already about their business.
She stared at them blankly, the foot soldiers of the Salmae’s army, those glorious, exultant bringers of justice. They sat in their huddles, spears leaning haphazardly nearby: Grasshopper-kinden and Dragonflies in padded cuirasses that were dirty and torn. Many were wounded, and she saw at least two who must have died overnight.
They looked frightened, she realized. They were tired and abused, men and women who had no taste for this conflict, but had been brought to it anyway, sore and bloodied and unwilling. It struck her that some of them probably had family and friends in the village that had been burned, or in places like it, and they had not been able to defend them or get them away to safety. They none of them want to be here. The revelation, in the face of the frenzy she had felt before, was shocking.
And how many had she consigned to death by not warning Alain of the trap? Was that costly victory really worth it?
‘This has gone on long enough,’ she said, and went off to seek out Lowre Cean.
When she arrived at his tent she found him sitting up in his hammock, dressed in a crumpled white silk robe. There was a bowl in his hand, two jugs at his feet, one lying on its side, already empty.
‘Morning, Maker Tynise,’ he addressed her, with a slight and melancholy smile. There had been no guards nearby. If she had been an assassin, she could have slain him right there, and walked out leaving his followers none the wiser. She briefly wondered if that was his intent.
She sat down, cross-legged like a schoolchild, and gazed up at him. ‘Prince Lowre, there is a question I have to ask you – and then a request, after that.’
‘I thought as much. I’d expected you sooner, but you seemed to be so… so caught up in this…’ His hand made a vague gesture encompassing a world of skirmish and conflict beyond the cloth walls of his tent.
‘You are a war hero,’ she said flatly.
His smile turned sour and he shrugged, before hooking another bowl from beneath the hammock with one bare foot. He stooped to reclaim it and the full jug, then divided the remaining wine between the bowls, with some juggling, before eventually handing her one of them. Had she not been watching carefully she would have taken him for a drunken clown, save that he did not spill a drop.
The wine she drank was the colour of blood, dry and sharp. After a mouthful, she repeated, ‘You are a war hero,’ almost accusingly. ‘They all say so. When the Wasps came, you commanded an army, and of all the Commonweal tacticians, you alone slowed the Empire down. You commanded at Masaka, when the Sixth was destroyed. In the Lowlands a man like you would be found at the heart of things, a statesman and a leader. When times of trouble come, such a man would be the man persuading others, rather than having himself to be persuaded.’
‘Ah, the war,’ he sighed, as though he was just catching up with her first words. ‘You’ve had war in the Lowlands, of course. For two years, was it? But then the Wasps had learned a lot of lessons after they finished with us. They had no idea, poor fools. I think, if they’d truly understood the size of the Commonweal, just how many of us there were, they’d never have started. It was a mad venture, and we outnumbered them massively on many of the battlefields, especially at the start. What could they have thought when they saw the size of a true Commonwealer army?’ He raised one white eyebrow at her, and she looked back at him uncertainly.
‘Contempt,’ he pronounced precisely. ‘Because if they had ten thousand, and we had a hundred thousand, still they had real soldiers, and we had… farmers, tradesmen, labourers. We depended on men and women whose lives were spent tilling the land, who had the next harvest to worry about, whose hands reached for the hoe and the rake, not the spear.’
She made to retort, but he silenced her with just a small motion of one hand. ‘I was at the Monarch’s court when news first came of the Wasp invasion. We had known that they were seizing the cities at our south-eastern border, of course, but we had the castle at Shol Amen, that had never been taken, and we… we had not believed it was possible, that those hill tribes would even dare to step on to the royal earth of the Commonweal. I remember…’ He drank, eyes looking into a lost past. ‘I remember how the Monarch called for his greatest seer, and demanded to know what response the crown should make to such impudence. She said… she said there were one million reasons to surrender and only one reason to fight. One of us, it might even have been Felipe Shah, asked her what that one reason was. “Freedom,” she replied. The Monarch ordered that we should resist the Empire to our last breath. He was a bold man. His daughter, who is Monarch now, might not have done the same.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Tynisa admitted. ‘Surely there is nothing greater to fight for than freedom?’
‘One million reasons,’ Lowre intoned solemnly, before draining his bowl. ‘I had a son, you know. My son, my Darien. He was a hero. I planned the battles, but he fought them. He even continued fighting after the Treaty of Pearl. He would never accept that we had lost. They killed him, of course, as they always do. My bold and dashing son. And all the men I led, in my victories,’ he spoke the last word with an unexpected bitterness and force, ‘where are they now? How long do you think I kept them alive, after all, after victory turned to ashes? All those farmhands and smiths and woodsmen and artisans, with spears in their hands. All my clansmen, my Mantis warriors, my nomads. All the many many who followed my banner.’
He turned his aching red eyes on her, for a moment appearing such a fierce figure that she felt a shock of fear run through her.
‘I have known so many people during my long life, Maker Tynise, and most of them I led into a just war, for a good cause. What, as you say, is sweeter to fight for than freedom? Surely freedom is worth any price? But one million? One million? Can you even conceive of that number? Nobody asked the seer what the one million reasons to surrender were: men and women and children, families, communities, friendships, all that would have been saved had we simply bowed the knee to the Empire. If I could do it over again, I know what I would counsel.’