‘My Prince?’ The Wasp was now studiously ignoring her.
‘Losing your touch with the vermin?’ Salma eyed him. ‘You’re lucky I was coming to meet you.’
Gaved’s face remained studiously neutral. ‘You’re here alone, my Prince?’
‘A little reconnoitring for Mother,’ Salma said, self-mocking, and still everything about him was maddeningly as she remembered it: his expression, his tone. When he flashed a smile her way, she felt her heart would break. She was not sure, standing there in the moonlight, whether she had simply gone mad behind her own back, her mind snapped and flying free. The impossible situation refused to resolve itself. Salma? It was Salma.
The Dragonfly prince had taken hold of an arrow, setting one foot on a corpse’s head to yank at it, but the shaft remained securely embedded. ‘I’m too skilled a shot for my own good, it seems,’ he murmured philosophically.
‘Salma…’ Tynisa said involuntarily.
The Dragonfly glanced up, and his smile was painful. ‘Another one of yours, Turncoat? You’re collecting Spider-kinden?’ He was grinning through it, though, and sketched her an elegant bow with much flourishing of hands. She had seen him do just the same once, at the College, to impress a magnate’s daughter.
‘Don’t you…?’ Don’t you know me? was the plaintive cry within her, but of course he could not know her. He was Salma: he was Salma to the very last detail as she had known him at College, three years ago. But this was a man who had never come south to learn the ways of the Lowlanders, never signed on with Stenwold Maker, never come too close to death while fighting the Wasps at Tark. This was a man who had never been enchanted and seduced by a stray Butterfly-kinden, or given his life in a desperate, heroic bid to defeat the Empire.
‘She’s none of mine,’ said Gaved forcefully.
‘Too clean by far to be Siriell’s get,’ Salma finished for him. ‘And she fights. You’ve hired yourself a bodyguard, Turncoat?’
‘An old acquaintance,’ the Wasp got out between gritted teeth, and sudden panic overtook Tynisa, the forgotten weight of Gaved’s knowledge slumping back on her like a landslide. One word now from Gaved and this miraculous dream would shatter. She’s a murderer, was all the Wasp needed to say.
But she caught Gaved’s eye, and saw her own thoughts reflected in his face: a tightly contained panic that at any moment she might give him away. He was a rogue and a thief, she knew, but what lies had he told to find himself a place here in the Commonweal? One word from me …
In that moment, within their conjoined silence, a guilty pact was made between them. Omission for omission, they would cover for one another and bury their pasts.
‘Tynisa Maker of Collegium,’ said Gaved wearily, ‘I present Prince-Minor Salme Alain of Elas Mar Province.’
Tynisa stared, caught off guard, because somehow she had never even considered the idea that Salma would have had family here beyond his mentor Felipe Shah. And she had already thought that the Salma that this Alain resembled so much was more that youth who had first come to Collegium, not the later man she had last seen planning battles against the Empire. A younger brother, but such a likeness nonetheless.
‘Why, then, what chance has brought you to grace our lands, Tynise?’ The flowery words were all mischief, but then he had always been like that.
There was a void in her heart where the answer to that question should have been and, as she opened her mouth to answer, she knew that she had no words. She had come here to the Commonweal because being anywhere else had become intolerable. She had come to Siriell’s Town because she wanted to find a Mantis death, and no amount of equivocation would hide that, now that she looked on her motives again. Looking into his face, though, and reaching for a response, the void was abruptly filled with one word: You. Salma had brought her here – and here he was, both in image and in manner. She felt the world was yawning open beneath her, the brink of a chasm at her very feet.
‘I… am travelling to your family,’ she finally got out, the words stopping and starting, and utterly beyond her ability to predict. ‘Salma… my Prince, I knew your brother. He was my friend. I bring word…’ She could say no more, but Salma was already looking towards Gaved.
‘Seems Dien made quite an impression,’ the Dragonfly said philosophically, but then the warmth of his smile was focused back on her, and she met his gaze boldly. ‘Well, such things have been known, and you make a better messenger than a turncoat Wasp. Will you come to Leose, then?’
She had no idea what Leose was, but she nodded nonetheless. Let me go with you, she thought. She was terrified that, if he left her sight for an instant, she might lose him for ever.
But already he was waving a hand at Gaved. ‘Bring her with you, Turncoat. I must report to Mother, of course, but no doubt we’ll meet at the castle.’
She wanted to ask why they could not all travel together, but Alain put his fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. A moment later she heard a low drone that quickly built up into a buzzing roar of wings, as something descended on them from the skies above. The downdraught of its wings battered her, and Gaved’s little fire leapt and danced madly to the point of extinction. The dragonfly glittered like silver in the light, surely twenty feet from its stubby antennae to tapering tail. It hovered for a moment and then found a perch on one side of the defile, claws digging deep for purchase.
Seeing her expression, Alain was all smiles. ‘Lycene,’ he named the animal. ‘Only the Salmae breed dragonflies that can fly so well at night. You have your report, Turncoat?’
With a start, Gaved dug in his tunic to produce a messy fistful of paper. ‘There’s more. I’ve learned today-’
Alain waved it off. ‘Then it can wait until you get to Leose. You have a horse nearby?’
The Wasp nodded glumly.
‘Good, make best speed, and bring our new guest with you.’ Again the flash of teeth. ‘I will look for you in more civilized surroundings,’ he told Tynisa, ‘and I’d wish duty didn’t lay its hand on me so hard, but I must go.’
She tried to say something but her throat had dried up, and a single flick of his wings lifted him into Lycene’s saddle, where he holstered his bow. Then the insect was aloft again, its wings thrashing up a gale, and seconds later he was gone, swept across the vault of the sky far enough that even her eyes could no longer pick him out, as the sound of Lycene’s wings became a diminishing hum.
Horseback riding was not something Tynisa had been called upon much to do, and she would have found it uncomfortable and awkward even if not sharing a horse with a Wasp-kinden. After the fight, Gaved had broken camp and relocated to another sheltered place, but neither of them had slept much, constantly jabbed awake by mutual suspicion.
Before dawn he had tracked down his errant mount and they had begun their journey in silence. The land around them was inhabited once, for they passed a patch of lumpy, mounded earth and rotting sticks that had clearly been a village. The rolling countryside had been cut into tiers for agriculture in the past, but many years of neglect were softening the contours. Grass, nettles and thistles grew tall, even at the approach of winter, and the land was broken up by knots of densely growing trees.
‘Did the war do this?’ she asked, the first words uttered for more than two hours. Even as she asked, she was thinking that the abandonment looked far older. ‘Was there a plague here or something?’
‘More than a generation ago, the family of little princelings who ruled this province ran out of heirs, I think,’ was Gaved’s response. ‘And by the time some other petty nobles came round to claim the place, after decades of duelling genealogies, the locals weren’t exactly ready for someone lording it over them.’ He did not sound particularly disapproving, but then that prospect was probably inviting to him. ‘All over the Commonweal, there are whole provinces gone fallow. More so since the war, obviously, but it’s been going on for ever, from what I can make out. Place is falling apart. If it’s not bandits setting themselves up as princes, it’s princes going bad and turning bandit. Raids across principality borders, villages burned, or village headmen declaring independence, thieves on the roads and in the forests, peasants deciding they’d rather be free, or lords taxing the shirts off their backs. The Monarch’s a long way away, and the Mercers do what they can – the proper ones and the provincial sort like we’ve got – but how many Mercers can there be?’
‘And yet you’re working for Salma’s family. I’d have thought you’d be on the other side,’ she said darkly.
‘Me? I’m making a living,’ Gaved declared, glancing back at her briefly. That she could stick a knife in his back at any moment was something he was apparently managing to deal with phlegmatically. ‘When I left Jerez and headed west, I only had one name to conjure with, and that was your friend’s.’
