cannot think with them. I have become as much a Commonwealer as any son of Collegium, but it is not enough sometimes. And then there are their beliefs… Of all things, it saddens me most that, being Apt, I cannot understand them.’
His words baffled Tynisa. ‘Surely you don’t believe in ghosts and magic,’ she stated. Inwardly, something twisted awkwardly at the thought. Tisamon, her father, had believed in such things, and in his company she had occasionally witnessed too much: sights that still hung on her mind the next morning, ones that sunlight could not dispel. She had been brought up and tutored by the practical people of Collegium, though, who believed in nothing that artifice and philosophy could not confirm with experimental proof. She had learned every year in College that there was no such thing as magic, for all that the old Inapt kin-den might claim otherwise. Magic was a crutch, a convenient excuse to cover all manner of crimes: A magician made me do it.
Gramo gave her a weak smile. ‘Of course, of course, and yet… I see the Dragonfly-kinden live every day of their lives as though magic was a real force, as potent and wild as the weather. I have come to terms with it. I do not pretend to understand it, but at the same time I will not mock them for it. And I have found that I cannot explain the way… everything works here, the chances and the odd coincidences, that they call fate and predestination. It seems to serve them well enough.’
Or it did until the Wasp armies reached them, was Tynisa’s thought, but she left it unspoken.
‘Who can say what may be true, so far away from Collegium’s white walls?’ the old Beetle murmured softly, and in his voice there was a young man’s longing, for far vistas and lost secrets, and for the world to be something grander than it was.
At the evening’s end, when Gramo had tidied away the supper bowls, he stopped her just as she was retiring to bed.
‘You’re not here on official business, are you?’ he said sadly.
She shook her head. ‘I mean neither you nor any other here any harm, I swear, but I do need to speak to the prince.’ Because I have burned all my other bridges, and this tenuous link with Salma is the only thing I have left.
‘May I ask what has brought you here, perhaps?’
She was at first not going to answer, but the shadows seemed to be building in the room around him as the fire guttered, and there were silhouettes there, clawing their way out of the grave of her mind. ‘Three dead men,’ she told Galltree shortly, then retreated to her hammock.
Three
By objective standards, her father Tisamon had failed at almost everything in his life.
He had failed as a Mantis, giving his heart to one of the Spider-kinden they so despised. Later, he had failed his second lover, the Dragonfly Felise Mienn, by abandoning her. He had failed his oldest friend Stenwold Maker by leaving his side in his hour of greatest need.
At the last, brought to bay in the Imperial arena, he had failed to kill the Wasp Emperor. It was his greatest deed, already immortalized in song and celebrated on stage: the Mantis that brought down an empire. Except that the Empire was already doing a good job of climbing right back up. Except that the Emperor had been dead even as Tisamon was at the centre of a knot of furious Wasp soldiers, shedding blood and being hacked at like an animal. The Emperor had been a victim of a Mosquito-kinden who had caught Tynisa, and had brought her to the arena so she could watch her father die.
She remembered, though. The blow he had struck, as he had fought his bloody, tattered way clear of the Wasp throng, was not against the Empire’s overlord, but to slay the Mosquito-kinden who was tormenting her. She had come all that way to save her father but, instead, at the end he had done what remained in his power to rescue her.
And he had died. The Emperor’s guard had made sure of that, cutting and slicing at the corpse long after life had made its exit. She had witnessed that, and felt her gorge rise, felt the horror and despair… but then all those feelings had burned away, for a moment. Her Mantis blood had risen within her, the half-heritage that Tisamon had bequeathed her. She had seen their butchery as the tribute it was, for he had shaken them so deeply, pride of the Empire as they were, that they could not risk even the slightest chance that he might yet live.
In one part of his life only could dead Tisamon claim success. He had been a killer, a relentless, poised and deadly killer, bearing as his credentials the sword and circle badge of the Weaponsmasters. To his daughter, he had given the only gift he had, by passing to her all he knew of the ancient art of separating lives and bodies.
She clung to it now. Here, alone and far from home, crippled by lost friends and by her own victims, she needed his guidance and his strength. All she had of him, though, was what she carried within her.
So it was that Tynisa found herself abandoned in Suon Ren.
That word would have been considered unkind by Gramo Galltree, who was doing everything in his power to make her stay a comfortable one: cooking and cleaning and making polite conversation about the weather, or trying to get her to talk about Collegium, his long-lost home. As a day passed, though, and then another, Tynisa became increasingly aware that Gramo’s power here was minuscule: he just did not matter to the locals, and neither did she. She could walk every one of the broad, almost unformed streets of the town, and it was as though she was invisible to all but the children, and even they kept clear of her – parental warnings no doubt ringing in their ears.
Sometimes the castle seneschal, or some other functionary, would come to the embassy for a few brief words with Galltree, and each time it was plain that the question was the same: Is she still here? Sometimes they came to stare at her, as though she was some grotesque piece of artwork, but they would not answer her questions, or even recognize that she was capable of speech.
With so little outside stimulus, she sank deeper into herself. Her days were spent hunting between the Commonwealer buildings, looking for she knew not what, but sensing others moving on parallel paths, always just out of sight, but constantly in her mind. When darkness fell they closed in, so that she would sit in her little room at the embassy and listen to the ghosts have their way with the place, moving just out of sight, the whisper of a robe’s hem, the harsh scrape of Tisamon’s boots. Sometimes she heard the distant echo of Salma, laughing gently at some remark made by who-knew-which shade, and she would hunch tight in her hammock, turning her back to the world and trying to blot it all out.
After two days, she took to her practising again, because that was the only part of the woman she had been that she cared to revive, and because it was a gift from her father. While Gramo pottered about in his garden, she used his large room as her Prowess Forum, rapier tasting the air, darting and stepping through all the intricate passes and guards of the Mantis styles, each coming unbidden and unrusted to her mind, a smooth-running sequence of steel. For two hours she strung her body through them all, and back again, fighting imaginary duels in her mind: against one, against many, against overwhelming odds; rehearsing that final dance that all Mantis warriors hoped for.
She completed her pass, blade glittering in the air, and found the rapier’s point falling into line with the chest of a Dragonfly man now standing in the doorway. He looked to be another of the seneschal’s stamp, wearing clothes of the same green, gold and blue colours, but more practically made and harder-wearing. His hair was a little longer than the fashion in Suon Ren, and bound back, and she guessed he was older than the seneschal as well.
‘I hope I do not interrupt,’ he said mildly. ‘I am sent from the castle.’
The surprise of actually being spoken to dried her throat, and it was a moment before she could speak. ‘The ambassador is not here.. .’ Abruptly a thought came to her, a certainty: ‘The prince is returned.’
‘As you say,’ the Dragonfly confirmed. ‘Seneschal Coren has reported a petition that disturbs him, a Lowlander demanding an audience.’
‘You are sent for me?’
‘I am sent here to find out what it is you want with the prince,’ he corrected her. There was a straightness in his bearing that was almost reminiscent of Tisamon, a pride rooted in ancient places. She wondered if the man was a Dragonfly Weaponsmaster come to kill her, if her answers did not suit.
Her rapier found its home in her scabbard, and she let out a long breath. ‘What do you want me to say?’ she
