‘Traitor!’ Elass screamed.
‘This is shameful,’ came Isendter’s reply, his voice as weak and ragged as Tynisa’s own. ‘I swore to defend your honour. She won! ’
‘Traitor.’ This time the word was flat and ugly. Tynisa saw the blow before it landed, and cried out in warning, but Isendter must surely have foreseen it too. He made no move, did not dip his upraised blade by so much as an inch, accepting the rebuke of his mistress.
She ran him through, ramming the straight blade beneath his ribs, hard enough to lift him on to his toes. With a scream, Salme Elass wrenched her blade free from his body, and he dropped to his knees in the snow and keeled over. Tynisa needed only a glance to know that Isendter was dead.
Then Elass’s blade was in motion again, scything in a flat arc towards Tynisa.
She turned it with her own and, though the impact seemed to shock half of the remaining life from her, her form was perfect and the smallest motion of her wrist deflected the heavy blow by just enough. In the back of her mind, where her father’s ghost had once lurked, she felt a long chain receding into the past, master and student in an unbroken line of tradition: Weaponsmasters, just as Isendter had been, who had deserved a better end than that. The chain that bound her to that antique order was purchase enough to hold her on her feet – just as it had sufficed to bring Isandter to her aid – although the pain of her wounds had its teeth in her and would not let go.
Elass stared at her, then at the rapier in her hand. Where it had been until now, after they had so carefully removed it from Isendter’s body, Tynisa could not say, only that it had come to her when she called. Isendter’s last breath had changed something in her. She had given up on a passive, easy death. She was a Weaponsmaster, of Spider and of Mantis blood, and neither of her parents would have stood and waited for the headsman’s axe.
Then Elass struck at her again, putting all her strength into the blow, to batter through Tynisa’s guard. The cut would have been impossible to stop, but Tynisa felt her arm and sword move along paths made easy by her training, not blocking but simply deflecting, so that in the aftermath of the ringing clash, Salme Elass had struck her rapier from her hand, but the noblewoman’s own blade had been thrown wide by the narrowest of margins.
There was renewed shouting, now, from the other Salmae riders, the movement around them intensifying, the thunder of more hoofs, but Tynisa and Salme Elass were in a vicious little world made for two.
Elass’s eyes flicked to the rapier, lying in the snow and out of reach, but in the heartbeat it took her to draw her blade back, the slender weapon was in Tynisa’s hand again. A Weaponsmaster was never to be parted from her sword. Just as she had awoken with the ancient Mantis weapon in hand, so long ago in Collegium, now it stayed with her no matter what.
The sight seemed to enrage Elass even more than the death of her son, as if the rapier and not the injured girl was her enemy. She struck again – at the sword itself, as if she were a rank novice, knocking it from Tynisa’s slack grip, and yet there it was again, directed at her, even before it had time to hit the ground. Had Tynisa possessed an ounce of strength, she could have ended the fight then, a riposte past the other woman’s blade and a clean and instant kill, but she could do nothing but hold her trembling stance.
And then there were more horses flashing past on every side, their riders’ armour gleaming even through the snow, cloaks rippling behind them, and Tynisa realized that it was now too late.
She still waited for the next strike because, even if she was doomed now, even if a spear or sword was about to plant itself in her back, it was not in her nature to surrender. Let the bitch work for her blood!
There was a confusion of horses all around, a score of riders perhaps, circling, breaking fights apart, archers training arrows on everyone they found, and one cried out, standing up in the saddle with his wings flaring, ‘Mercre Monachis!’
Salme Elass was no longer attacking. Her sword hung like a dead weight in one hand as she stared about at the newcomers. These were not her own followers. Allowed a moment to herself, Tynisa took a better look at them. Their armour looked both plainer and more functional than Salme Elass’s people’s, and their horses were a hand taller at least. These were lean, fierce, men and women, guiding their mounts with the casual synchronization of a shoal of fish. She saw both Elass’s people and the brigands, all of them separated now, staring about at the strangers who had cut between them and now surrounded them. To Tynisa’s left, Thalric was helping Che to her feet, and the halfbreed magician was sitting up, grimacing at the shaft in her arm. On the far side, Soul Je stood over Mordrec, the Wasp propped up on one elbow, with his metal-lined armour cut open and a bloody wound in his scalp.
One of the newcomers was sharing his steed, Tynisa noticed. Sitting ahead of an armoured woman, his wrists tied behind his back to the saddle pommel, was the Spider-kinden Avaris, with his face bruised, looking wretched and miserable. It was plain the newcomers had been busy.
Ten yards away from Tynisa, Dal Arche still had an arrow nocked and half drawn back as though waiting for a target to present itself. Perhaps it now did, although Dal wisely chose not to loose the shot. Two new mounts were picking their way between the trees, the riders cloaked against the gusting snow that only now seemed to be letting up. Tynisa knew them both, even before they were close, and so did Salme Elass.
The man lagging behind slightly was Lowre Cean, looking older than ever, as if physically pained to be drawn from his recluse’s life for this belated adventure. The man he followed was his fellow Prince-Major, Felipe Shah.
Prince Felipe approached Princess Salme slowly, his face expressionless. ‘I see you have caught your bandits,’ he noted.
The look that briefly flashed in the princess’s eyes was pure venom, but her voice remained controlled as she said, ‘A shame the Monarch’s response is too late.’
‘Or just in time,’ Felipe remarked mildly. ‘How many years have you been cautioning us against the great uprising from Rhael, I wonder?’
‘And I was right!’ she snapped. ‘The traitors have defied the law of the Monarch and raised an army, burned villages, murdered…’
Felipe guided his horse on a little further until it was beside her. ‘And here you have bearded their great chief, I believe,’ he said mildly. ‘Am I right?’
Another figure stepped from the trees, though keeping a careful distance from Salme Elass. ‘You are, my lord. Dal Arche, they called him at Siriell’s Town,’ explained Gaved, looking as though he would take to the air at the first hint of trouble.
Elass’s hand clenched on her sword hilt, but she simply looked aside, as if disdaining to notice the Wasp.
Tynisa had no such compulsion. ‘You live more lives than most, Gaved,’ she called out to him. ‘Changing your stripes already, is it?’
The look the Wasp gave her was a study in equivocation. ‘You’d be surprised, when a man sets out to have no master, how often he collects two, or even more,’ he replied philosophically.
‘Dal Arche,’ Felipe Shah called.
The brigand chief tensed, arrow still in place, but the newly arrived riders had several shafts already trained on him, and he simply held his shot, the string slightly tensioned, as though he had forgotten it was there. ‘These are the real thing, then, are they? Mercers?’ he enquired. ‘Servants of the Monarch’s throne, not just lackeys to some provincial princess-minor?’