The youth stepped forward, his eyes fixed on Paladrya. Stenwold would have assumed him just a young Spider-kinden lad, no more remarkable than any of the waifs and strays of the Spiderlands to be found making a life for themselves across the Lowlands. There was no golden glow of kingship about him, no apparent weight of authority: just another of Princep’s many orphans.
‘Is it you?’ the youth whispered, frowning, as Paladrya faced up to his scrutiny bravely. The Dragonfly’s thumb-claw had given her a savage, shallow cut, from her brow halfway to her chin, and she held up a torn piece of her robe to it to help the blood clot.
Her own eyes were steady. ‘Aradocles,’ she said again, and the youth’s face dissolved into lines of bafflement and wonder.
‘It is!’ he hissed, rushing partway towards her, then stopping abruptly. ‘What…? How have you come here? What is all this?’ His hands took in the bodies strewn about the courtyard, her wound, this desecration of the Monarch’s palace.
‘I came to find you,’ she told him. ‘We asked… we asked that man,’ she pointed at Sfayot, ‘but they turned us away. These others meant you harm. This was the only way.’
‘What is this?’ Aradocles repeated, but this time looking back uncertainly at the Butterfly-kinden.
For a moment she regarded him without expression, and then her voice emerged, surprisingly small. ‘I only wanted to keep you safe.’
Guards turned up then, a half-dozen Commonweal Dragonflies with spears. They stared at the carnage, obviously unsure what to do about it.
‘Find somewhere for these people within the palace,’ the Butterfly directed them, her hand taking in Stenwold and his fellows.
‘Monarch…’ Aradocles started to say, but an imperious gesture cut him off.
‘Later,’ she informed him. ‘You will have your chance to speak to them in the morning. For now they have caused enough harm.’
The guards escorted them to a part of the palace where three adjoining rooms together had been completed, and installed them in the chamber situated furthest in. Nobody seemed sure whether Stenwold’s people were prisoners or guests, and the guards hovered awkwardly outside, plainly ready to prevent an escape but without wanting to seem impolite. Blankets and food and drink were brought, and then different food after the sea-kinden turned their noses up at what was offered. Some salt fish was requisitioned from somewhere for them, but the one commodity that was not in the guards’ power to provide was answers.
Phylles sat apart, brooding over her grief and blatantly not inviting conversation. Stenwold was left to tend to Paladrya’s wounds, and his own, and to think glumly about Teornis. The victory of actually finding Aradocles tasted like ashes in his mouth.
Before dawn, Sfayot came to visit them, his lean old face looking stern in the shadows. His pointing finger picked out Stenwold only.
‘She wants to speak to you,’ the Roach said, and Stenwold hauled himself to his feet, with wounds and stiffened joints complaining bitterly, and limped after him.
They took him to a cell within the palace complex, just a simple room, unfurnished save for a pallet bed. Had he still been searching for Aradocles, he would have passed by such a place as unfit for anyone more than a menial, and yet it was here the Monarch of Princep Salmae slept.
She stood waiting for him, slender and solemn, with barely a glimmer of light dancing over her grey skin. Looking at her, Stenwold wondered, Is this what happens? Was the race of Moths born from Butterfly-kinden who lost their way? For it was clear to him that she had gone far astray from the woman Salma had spoken of – from that bright-fired dancer, the loving innocent with the miraculous healing touch.
But of course, Salma is dead and, if I recall, she watched him die.
‘War Master Stenwold Maker,’ she acknowledged him coldly.
‘And what am I to call you? You were Grief in Chains once, I recall.’
‘I am Grief again, and no more than that,’ she stated. ‘Why have you come here, War Master?’
‘Seeking the boy. His people have need of him.’
‘Arad,’ she murmured softly. ‘He has served me as my confidant, my companion, while they built these walls around us. He and Sfayot – I have no others to speak to.’
‘Are you so alone?’ Stenwold asked. ‘There’s a whole city of people out there who love you, or so I hear.’
‘Only because they do not know what I am. My guards say I should have you killed, since you have defiled the palace of the Monarch.’
Stenwold glanced around, but Sfayot had retreated and the guards she spoke of were not visible. Stenwold was alone with the Butterfly-kinden.
‘I’d recommend you finish your walls before you get serious about keeping people out,’ he said, trying for humour, but the words sounded leaden even as he spoke them and her expression admitted of no amusement. ‘I was Salma’s mentor and friend,’ he told her, watching her shrink at the name. ‘I do not deserve your hatred.’
‘Do you not? You who held the knife?’ she hurled back at him. ‘You who cast him into the fire again and again, until at last he could take it no more? You who killed him?’
‘The Wasps killed Salma,’ Stenwold responded flatly. ‘I cannot claim that I took best care of him, when he was in my charge, nonetheless he was a soldier sent by his people to make war on the Empire. He knew that, and he made his own choices in the end.’ He stared at her levelly, seeing at last what was written so plainly on her face. ‘We neither of us here are to blame.’
She just stared at him silently without any expression he could interpret, and so he added, ‘You grieve too much, and Salma would not have wanted that. He would never have wanted your Art to fail, your colours to grow dim.’
A single shudder racked her, just the one, and then she was still again. ‘You do not understand,’ she told him. ‘I am not changed because of Salma’s death, but because of the revenge I took afterwards. I am tainted by my own guilt. My people cannot kill, War Master, without losing the essence of what we are.’ A great sigh went through her. ‘And now you have come to take my page away from me.’
‘You know what he is?’
She nodded.
‘Then you must know that he too has subjects that need their true ruler. Believe me, I have seen the man who usurped his place, and a less fit man to rule I cannot imagine. I am sorry if this brings you pain, and I would help you if I could. When this is done, ask anything of me, or of my city, and I will try to perform it. For Salma’s memory, if for no other reason.’
For a moment a shimmer of colour traversed across her skin, the faintest guttering of what once had been.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if he wishes to go with you, then I will not stop him.’
The next morning found Stenwold and the three sea-kinden in what would doubtless, at some point in the future, be the palace’s grand audience chamber. Now it consisted of two walls and a tiered dais, and an open view across sun-bright grass, and Stenwold thought that it conferred more majesty on Grief that way than ever it would once completed.
They sat on the steps of the dais, the four visitors, with the Monarch of Princep Salmae a step higher than them, and a few servants or staff – or possibly just voyeurs – within earshot. The only other face there that Stenwold knew, apart from Aradocles himself, was the Beetle-kinden Ordley Penhold, watching with a dour and suspicious expression and folded arms as the heir of Hermatyre told them his story.
‘At first, when we came to the land,’ the youth explained, ‘I relied on my guards – on Santiren and Marcantor – for everything, and I waited daily for the call to return to my city, and to the sea.’ There was a faraway look in his eyes. ‘After a month had passed, I learned to trust Master Penhold here, who had taken us in, and the Mantis Cynthaen who had led us to him, but no others, and I would not talk as they talked, or do the things they did.’