spear driven so deep between its jaws that more than half the shaft was hidden from view.
Alain was already starting to rise, shaking his head groggily, but Tynisa began running towards him.
‘Still!’ she cried out. ‘Alain, stay still!’
She had a brief sense of other hunters reacting to this – with puzzlement or with annoyance at such familiarity – but then Isendter was also moving.
‘My prince,’ he snapped, ‘heed her and be still.’
Alain froze, his eyes flicking from Tynisa to the Mantis, then to the stag’s great rounded body, and back again. Behind Tynisa, the nobles had gone suddenly quiet, aware that something was amiss but not at all sure what.
She was close enough now that she could not keep running, so she made herself as still as she was willing Alain to be. She was poised at the very edge of a boundary that was invisible, and yet glaringly apparent to her and to the other Weaponsmaster. It was a boundary that Alain had unwittingly crossed.
The thing that loomed over Alain, so motionless as to be utterly unnoticed amongst the trees, now shifted slightly, swaying a fraction, and a murmur of shock ran through the noble hunters. Tynisa heard the slight creak of a bow being drawn.
‘Make no moves,’ she instructed, without looking back at them. ‘Not while he is there.’
‘This is absurd-’ she heard a familiar disdainful voice start, and then another woman hissed, ‘Velienn, shut up.’
Isendter was standing at that notional boundary, and dropped to one knee as if to survey the ground. He shot a glance at Tynisa, and understanding passed between them without the need for words.
He nodded, just once.
Tynisa began to advance, not in a headlong rush as previously, but at a slow shuffle, pushing the boundary back and back, her sword extended before her as though she were facing a fellow duellist at the Prowess Forum. Her eyes were fixed on her opponent, which meant tilting her head back considerably.
Isendter reached out a hand to his master. ‘To me, my Prince – but slowly. Move as the girl moves, stop when she stops. Do not look back. ’
Alain gritted his teeth, keeping his eyes only on Tynisa. She shifted forward three steps, and he crawled the same distance towards Isendter. Two cautious steps in, matched by two careful steps out. Behind and above Alain, the great forest mantis shifted again, its all-seeing eyes watching each of them simultaneously. Alain was still well within the range of its spined forelimbs.
Tynisa could sense something else now, the same presence that had caused the stag to turn at bay. It was not the predator – though that was surely up to making a meal of the huge beetle – but something beyond it.
‘Do your own people live here, Whitehand?’ she hissed at Isendter from the corner of her mouth.
‘Once they did,’ he replied, which was the worst answer for her to hear. She had known places before where the Mantis-kinden had once lived, but dwelt no more. Sometimes they remained there, even though their living bodies had departed. She had not expected to find such a place in the Commonweal.
Another few steps in and she had passed Alain, usurping his place within reach of the insect’s killing arms. As she held up her tiny needle of a sword, a subtle succession of sounds behind told her that Alain had made good his retreat, and was being drawn away by Isendter.
Which just leaves me, she thought. She heard the creak of the bow again, and knew it was Orian, and that the young nobleman was intending to do something noble and foolish. She thrust her left hand back towards him, palm out: Wait!
No arrow sped past, although the insect’s head was cocked to one side now, the mandibles twitching like knife-tipped fingers. Slowly she reached for her brooch, tugged it from her jacket and held it up at arm’s length. You recognize this, don’t you? her gesture said.
Its triangular head tilted further forward, and she somehow knew that it was regarding the Dragonfly-kinden arrayed behind her. ‘They are under our protection,’ she murmured, knowing that Isendter was still there and ready to back her up. The overarching mantis swayed again, as though trying to study the situation from all points of view.
Then it was picking its way backwards, with its killing arms still raised, until it reached a precise distance from her where their circles of influence no longer intersected. Whereupon it dropped down and moved off unhurriedly between the trees, a long, dark insect that was soon lost amid the confusion of trunks.
In its place, Tynisa now saw what she had known must be there. Twenty yards behind where the mantis had reared up was a circular clearing. It was not large, and the vegetation had made ample inroads into recolonizing it, but the weathered stump at its centre had been a totem once, such as she had seen far south of here on the same night she had earned the badge that was still clutched in her left hand.
A Mantis-kinden ritual site. Any questions she might have had about whether the Commonwealer Mantids were substantially different from their Lowlander kin were now answered. Blood had been spilled here, year after year, and though the Mantis-kinden had moved on, their legacy remained.
And then she saw him, hovering grey in the air above the ruined idol. Filmy and translucent he might be, but unmistakable. She risked a glance at Isendter, then at Alain, and it was clear that neither of them could see. Only she could preceive how, coalescing into view within the Mantids’ sacred place here, was her father. Not that bloodied walking corpse that had lurked at the edge of her vision since his death, its outlines rendered barely human by the hacking treatment the Wasps had inflicted. This was the man unwounded and whole, for all that the trees showed through him, and though she stared and stared, he did not vanish, but grew stronger, heartbeat to heartbeat.
There was a moment when her three imagined haunters encroached on her, looming at her shoulders – Achaeos with his load of guilt, Salma’s bright smile, slaughtered Tisamon. In contrast to it, though, they were faint echoes. She had known hardship and horror, loss and remorse. She had seen her father hacked to death, had lost her beloved, had dealt a friend a mortal blow, and small wonder that she had peopled her world with reminders. Only now did she realize that they had been merely her crutch, forever distracting her, forever swatting her mind away.
She appreciated how far she had been from being mad until now, for the momentary glimpses of those three dead men were nothing in comparison to this. My father. Tisamon.
He was gazing at her with that smile he sometimes wore as he fought. How hard he must have fought, indeed, to claw his way back thus from death. She wanted to drop to her knees, but instead she found that she was holding her stance, keeping her blade up ready to fight.
I do not believe in magic. But those words became a distant, waning refrain, banished utterly as soon as she heard his familiar lost voice inside her head.
My daughter, spoke Tisamon. I am proud of you. I have so much left to teach you.
He had his hand held out towards her, and she had a dreadful sense of vertigo, as though she stood at a cliff edge, with a fathomless void below her, and she was leaning out… and leaning out, and.. .
Surely this is a terrible mistake. The dead must stay dead. But he was her father, and she was far from home and lost, and more in need of help than she had ever been.
She reached and took his hand.
Twenty-Three
The fires would be seen for miles, making a statement that Dal had not quite wanted yet, but the fire- starters had intended just that, and he had not felt it politic to stop them.
Dal Arche had not known this village’s name before he arrived here, or at least he had not been sufficiently interested to find out. Sara Tela was the name they had later supplied to him, though a piece of knowledge growing fast obsolete. All the houses were alight by now, those nearest the storehouse just starting to catch fire, whilst the first couple to be torched were blazing skeletons, with their outer shutters peeled away, and the inner walls merely ragged strips of charred wood. The wholesale destruction was a little ahead of schedule, for sparks were already drifting on to the storehouse’s sloping roof even as his people were still loading up inside. There was food here, and wine, jars of kadith, bales of silk and cotton, all of it intended for onward barge to Leose. Unexpectedly there was
