Suddenly there were repercussions and uncertainties, no matter how honest he was being with her, and an uncomfortable part of herself said that was because life was never as simple as she was trying to paint it.
But she had come this far, and she knew that, after killing him, she would be able to paint again, to interpret the result however she wished. What other witnesses were there to gainsay her? She realized that she was on the brink of a precipice within her mind, and to go one step further would be to lose some fraying but fundamental connection with the world.
She felt her body flow into line, taking up her fighting stance within herself, even though nothing showed outwardly, so that, when the attack came, she would be sublimely ready for it.
Gaved must have sensed something, too, for he exploded into motion that was a counterbalance for her poised stillness. His wings took him back, ten feet away from the fire, his hands outstretched, one before him, the other pointing upwards.
Already the Dragonfly-kinden were dropping down towards them. A half-dozen came sleeting down around the fire like random arrows, while Tynisa could hear at least a dozen more approaching from all round. In their bickering, she and Gaved had let them get perilously close.
That they were Siriell’s Town natives was clear enough: there was nothing of Prince Felipe’s court about them. All wore a mismatch of armour, from leather and chitin to fragments of glittering noble plate and discarded Imperial war leavings. Several carried bows but, as their grounded infantry approached cautiously, she saw the bulk of them had spears, along with the occasional long-hafted sword. Some were lean and lanky Grasshoppers, but the bulk were Dragonflies, and she looked in their faces, feeling such a sense of waste. They were poised and elegant, but where they should have been beautiful, their harsh lives and harsher deeds had marked them with scars and filth and ugly expressions.
‘Now then,’ Gaved said quietly. He had his hands each directed at one of the archers, and in return most of the arrows were angled his way. Tynisa had attracted her share of the spears, but they were misreading her calm quiet and seeing her as the lesser threat.
‘You’ve got an invitation, Gaved,’ said one of the few swordsmen, thus helpfully identifying himself to Tynisa as the leader of this little rabble. ‘Siriell has a few more questions for you, about just what your business here is.’
‘Not a problem,’ the Wasp replied, his easy tone belied by his stance. ‘I’ll drop in on her when I’m next passing through. I always have time for Siriell.’
‘Now, Gaved,’ the leader demanded. ‘Tonight.’
Their numbers should have been overwhelming, of course, but they hung back. They don’t want to hurt him? Want to keep him alive for Siriell? Tynisa wondered, but she noticed how they swayed back a little, whenever Gaved moved. It’s because he’s a Wasp, she realized. These cowards think he’s got the Light Airborne hidden in his pocket or something.
‘Take him,’ the leader snapped, with the confidence of a man who isn’t the one having to do so. Two spearmen stepped forward unhappily, weapons held aside as they reached as hesitantly for the Wasp as for a nettle. They stepped into the aim of the archers as they did so.
‘Enough of this,’ Tynisa decided, and let fly all the pent-up anger and frustration she had been nursing since before she ever reached Siriell’s Town.
She ignored the leader, in that first moment, hoping he would prove a challenge later. There were two archers within reach and she impaled one through the eye – after slashing the throat of a Grasshopper spear-carrier to get there – and whipped her blade back to sever the other’s taut bowstring. Her momentum carried her past the archer even as the cut string lashed the woman’s face – then she was standing between two spearmen who desperately tried to drag their weapons towards her, but too cumbersome and too close. She let the razor-sharp edge of her blade open one up, feeling her steel keen through layered leather as though it was not there – a move that served to draw back her arm so that she could ram the point into the other spearman’s chest. She watched her blade hardly bend as it punched through chitin plate and then between ribs, before sliding out again like water.
She heard Gaved’s stings crack and sizzle and knew, without looking, that his targets would be the other archers, the greatest threats towards him, who would now be turning to look for Tynisa in the spot where she had been standing just a moment before.
Then she had spears all about her, their wielders fighting to keep distance, the long, narrow points trying to fence her in, so that for a few tense moments she almost lost the rhythm, batting them aside with blade and offhand, vaulting and stepping aside to keep out of their lancing approaches. She kept lunging at every gap, making individual brigands draw back, but without breaking the cage that enclosed her. Then an arrow flowered in the shoulder of one, providing the key that unlocked it all, and she was out from their midst – two Grasshoppers spinning bloodily away, to mark her exit.
She felt it was time to engage the leader, who had been backing away since things had gone so very badly wrong. That she would be confronting four or five of his followers at the same time was just grist to her mill. Gaved’s sting spat again, and she caught its flash in the corner of her eye. Another arrow picked off the last archer, striking him low in the gut and doubling the wretch over.
The spearheads flurried for her like fish, but she turned sideways to them, her sword point-down as she advanced, parting their little hedge of spines until she was right amongst them. Even then, they nearly had her, moving faster as individuals and more cohesive as a group than she’d expected. Two closed with her, their spear- shafts walling her in, whilst another two stepped back to gain distance. She felt one spear point graze past her cheek and another cut her biceps as she twisted away, putting a knee to someone’s groin to her left, and her sword’s jagged guard into a face over to her right. The trap opened up again, and she cleared the air about her with her sword, forcing them to retreat or fall.
Close, too close. But wasn’t this just the sort of death that she was looking for, after all?
For a bitter moment she thought their leader was going to fly off, but then he screamed in her face and went for her, bringing his long sword down in a vicious strike that would have cut her in two had it only landed. He was fast, though, wielding the sword two-handed with a nimbleness she had not expected, turning each attack into the next without overextending, so that he drove her before him in a mad blaze of steel.
She watched, and learned his patterns and his limitations, and understood that what she saw was all there was: speed and fury but no precision, no flexibility. When she moved with his strike, letting the sword chop to her left as she moved right, so that he was past her before he realized, he could not recover in time. She almost held off, in the fond hope he might have something more, but the rapier itself had decided to end it, and she pierced him under the armpit, where his armour left off, and dropped him in mid-yell.
That was enough for the survivors, who went flying, running and leaping away into the night, leaving a litter of bodies behind them. At least one more dropped, with an arrow in his back.
So whose arrows are those then?
Even as she thought it, the archer was approaching, stepping into the firelight while Gaved was brushing down his cloak and looking about him at the bodies. Tynisa turned to the newcomer – and her world stopped dead.
Her hallucinations had always been corner-of-the-eye things, melting before her direct stare as if unable to bear the weight of her attention. But here he was in plain view, the bow in his hand, as though he had never been killed by the Wasps after all. As though it had simply been some raconteur’s exaggeration to say that Salme Dien was dead.
She couldn’t breathe. She felt that her heart had ceased to beat. Her fingers twitched nervelessly, though her sword still clung within her grip.
‘Salma?’ she managed.
And the man before her, the Dragonfly-kinden with that oh-so-familiar, cocky smile, said, ‘Yes?’
Five
Heedless of her expression Salma walked over to the dead men and studied them. ‘So, this is what lurks in Siriell’s Town,’ he remarked. ‘Ugly characters, certainly.’ He glanced up suddenly. ‘Turncoat?’
Tynisa jumped at the word, but it was Gaved who stepped forward.
