Thalric manoeuvred his trembling burden down, skidding a little on the slope before coming to a halt with a jar that made Tynisa clutch at him tightly. His face could not be read as he looked at the injured girl, but Che supposed miserably that he would rather she died as soon as they were out of sight of the Salmae, just to rid him of the burden.
As soon as they had stopped, Che was fumbling in her packs for some bandages, and a few little jars of medicine to clean wounds and to ease pain. And thank the world they didn’t take them off me, when I was caught. ‘Start a fire,’ she gasped. ‘Boil up some water.’
‘No time,’ Dal told her flatly.
She glared at him. ‘She’ll die-’
‘She may well die,’ he replied, ‘but we all will, if they catch us. You have minutes here only. Do what you can.’
The mistake Che made was in going for Tynisa’s face first, wetting a bandage with water from her canteen and then wiping away the mask of blood she had been left with. What she saw beneath made her recoil, for the blade’s single stroke had carved her sister from forehead to lips, in a long, crooked line. The mercy was that both eyes were still intact, one gummed shut with blood, but the wound had opened up Tynisa’s cheek and slit the corner of her mouth. The old Mantis-kinden had given her a new face to frighten children.
Che reached for her needle and thread, but Maure was already dragging at her sleeve. ‘No, Che,’ and she was indicating the wound at the Spider girl’s hip.
When she looked, there was so much blood that it seemed impossible that Tynisa could lay claim to it all, yet more kept coming. When Che peeled back the soaking rags of the wounded girl’s clothing it started to gush with a frantic rhythm while Tynisa arched back, ravaged face screwed up against the pain.
‘Stop the blood, stop the blood,’ Che said to herself, thrusting her hands against the wound, but she could not stem it. There was just too much. The life of her sister was emptying itself out between her fingers. A shadow fell over her, a presence looming at her shoulder. ‘Go away!’ she snapped, pressing harder until a brief, choking sound came from Tynisa’s lips.
‘Get out of the way, you stupid woman.’ A hand was on her shoulder and then she was abruptly slung aside. She heard the man grunt with pain as he did it, and recognized Mordrec kneeling at Tynisa’s side.
He’s going to kill her, so she doesn’t slow us down, she thought. Thalric had a palm extended, but was hesitating, as Mordrec put his own hands flat on to Tynisa’s hip, wrist-deep in blood instantly. Maure was holding her back, pleading, ‘No, Che, no,’ as she tried to lunge at the man, to drag him off her sister.
Tynisa keened, with a high sound like a saw biting into iron, one arm flailing madly at the Wasp, then Che saw a stuttering glow between Mordrec’s fingers, and smelt burning. Burning blood, burning skin.
She wanted to cry out, What is he doing? but realization came to her even as she opened her mouth.
After Mordrec stood up, whatever blood Tynisa had left inside her would be staying there, and the imprint of his big hand was seared into her skin in a glossy burn-scar that would surely stay with her for as long as she lived – however short that looked likely to be.
‘I didn’t know Wasp Art could do that,’ she admitted weakly, glancing at Thalric.
‘Don’t look at me. Mine tends to the opposite direction. I’d have blown her leg off.’
She saw Mordrec’s pallid face, sheened with sweat from the effort. ‘We have to go,’ he rasped.
Dropping back down beside Tynisa, Che took her wound-cleanser and soaked bandages in it, using every last drop. Her sister writhed and fought as she applied it, and from personal experience she knew how it stung, but Collegium doctors had long known how the difference between a fatal and a trivial wound would be whether it turned to corruption or not. She swabbed swiftly and aggressively at Tynisa’s face, cleaning away the blood and trying not to look at the twisted line of the scar, and then did her best with what Mordrec had left of the major wound on her hip. Tynisa looked paler than Che had ever seen another human being, or at least one who was still alive. The loss of blood might still kill her, or the shock, or any number of other things. Impulsively, Che took her hand, and was startled by the faint squeeze back. Tynisa was still conscious, and not through any of it had she let go, perhaps fearing that a temporary darkness could become permanent all too easily.
In Che’s mind was a great deal of dread, a terror of a future that did not have this woman in it. We came so far, and it cannot just have been to lose you now.
And: in the midst of her whirl of panicked thoughts, I will not have it.
She blinked. For a moment she had seemed to feel the world shudder, just a little, around her – the air and the earth trembling minutely, out of step with each other. She found herself meeting Tynisa’s gaze.
‘We have to move,’ Che whispered urgently. ‘I’m sorry…’
Tynisa squeezed her hand again, stronger this time, and then Thalric stepped in without being asked and picked her up. Straightening with a grunt, he glanced towards the sky, where a flurry of white was blowing between the branches. The last echo of the Commonweal winter had picked this time to enter its death throes.
Soul Je suddenly arrived, a shape leaping and bounding between trees. In one hand he held his bow, an arrow clasped across it.
‘All kinds of shouting,’ he reported. ‘Princess is telling them to get moving. They don’t like it.’
‘It won’t last,’ Dal decided. ‘Some of them will be keen enough to retain her favour. It won’t be all of them, but frankly it won’t need many.’
Thalric began walking away, almost at random, and a moment later they were all on the move.
Dal squinted up at the white-grey sky. ‘The snow’s a curse when it’s light. We can’t hide our tracks. If it’s heavy, though, there’ll be no tracks. We might hide in it all the way to the border.’
‘If it’s heavy, the cold will kill her,’ Che chided him.
‘Then find a way to stop the snow,’ he replied with a shrug. When Che just halted, he carried on.
She looked up at a lattice of branches with the flakes flurrying through.
‘Maure.’
The magician glanced back. ‘Che, no.’
‘Then what good is it, any of it? Or is that the great secret of magic, that it’s dwindled to uselessness, and that’s why the armies of the Apt run roughshod over the world? Have I come so far just to join the losing side?’
‘Che, you’ve power, but you’ve no direction, no training, and the power you have, it’s… not native to you. It was never intended for a Beetle-kinden to use.’
Che shrugged. ‘One thing about Beetles is that we adapt.’ And with that, she thrust her arms out into the chill air, directed back the way they had come, towards the invisible Salmae. For a moment nothing happened, and she could conceive of no possible way that she could affect the world. Magic was a fiction, of course, and all her early years of study confirmed that. Then she sensed the faintest catch, as though her fingers had brushed some kind of trailing veil, invisible in the air.
‘Masters of Khanaphes, you crowned me,’ Che murmured, less to herself than to the world at large. ‘You made me something new, me and the Empress – you gave us some mark or mantle of yours, made us your champions, however it works. After a thousand years of exile beneath the earth, you have recognized us. Does that mean nothing? Does that mean that when I speak to the wind, it just whisks my words away? What good is it all, then? What is the point of it all?’
She heard Thalric calling to her distantly, but the wind was picking up now, and she caught none of his meaning.
‘I am caught between two worlds,’ she considered, as Maure shifted from foot to foot beside her, keen to get away. ‘Child of the new, but scion of the old. Nobody could have intended that, but it has happened, and I refuse to let it become nothing more than a handicap.’ She was speaking quietly, calmly, but with that last word she summoned her will and pushed it through both hands, tearing at the sky with invisible fingers, clutching and dragging and throwing…
The wind changed direction with an audible whump, and was abruptly whistling past her, back towards the pursuers that were surely coming. She heard it keening through the trees, followed by the snow, thicker than it had been a moment ago, rushing to fly in the faces of their hunters, while obliterating all tracks.
She felt something go out of her, as if some great reservoir had been emptied all at once – expended in a flood of power sent to batter the very heavens into submission.
But had I been skilled, oh then… For in that moment she saw that given a little application, a little care, she might have achieved the same result from so much less effort, and thus have something still in hand to deal with
