Again Elass quivered with suppressed rage, but she held her tongue.
‘Indeed, and I’m lucky I was able to gather them so quickly. They – we – are spread wide these days, fewer of us each year, and the Commonweal as vast as ever,’ Felipe’s tone was conversational. ‘I’ve heard much of your exploits, Dal Arche.’
The bandit chief glanced first at Soul Je and Mordrec, then at Avaris, and Tynisa read the man’s thoughts in his eyes. He’s wondering if he can spare them somehow, wondering if his confession or his surrender might do it. But the Dragonfly brigand’s face then hardened. He knows there is no way out.
‘This is the man who has rebelled against my rightful authority,’ Elass declared, her voice pure winter. ‘This is the Monarch’s enemy. If you are her Mercers, then do your duty, and I only wish that you had heeded me sooner, and that we had purged Rhael of this filth before they grew so bold.’
To Tynisa’s ears she was overacting, playing the outraged voice of law and justice to cover the terrible, personal hatreds seething under the surface.
‘And this one is a murderess! She turned her blade on my own son! On my son, Prince Felipe!’
Felipe looked at Tynisa with a sad smile. ‘I have already mourned one of your sons, Princess Salme. You yourself must mourn the other.’
‘Is that all you have to say? What will you do? ’
‘I will ask why Siriell died, and why the stores at her town were burned.’
Elass stared at him blankly, utterly thrown.
‘Did you think your concerns were ignored, Princess? And did you forget that I served the Monarch as spymaster during the war? As my agents spied out the Wasps then, so they were in Siriell’s Town, evaluating your concerns. They told me that the wild and savage people of Rhael Province were at last working their way to something approaching civilization. And then your son and followers came, and killed the woman who had wrought such progress, and destroyed their foodstocks, and ensured that some, at least, would strike back at you, and thus give you your excuse to take Rhael for your own – as I had forbidden you time and time again.’
‘But they were outlaws!’ Elass snapped, not even attempting to deny a word of it. ‘They had turned away from the Monarch’s grace. They had defied our rule! That land had been left fallow for too long. I had a duty-!’
‘Your duty was to obey your Prince-Major, and no more. You do not owe fealty to the Monarch, but to me, and it is I who judge how best you should serve. For example, this girl…’ He nodded at Tynisa. ‘She is under my protection. She has rendered a rare service to me, and I am in her debt. Thus I absolve her of all acts committed in this, my principality.’
Elass gaped at him, aghast. ‘But my son-’
‘Has benefited from just such leniency on many an occasion, under your own justice. He chose to live by that sword. If you will maintain an arbitrary rule, learn to be ruled arbitrarily in turn.’ He held her incandescent gaze for some time, with no further sound but the echo of his voice in every ear. At last he turned those keen eyes on the brigand chief. ‘Dal Arche, you fought in the war, I’d guess.’
The brigand chief nodded curtly, his expression not inviting further questioning, and Felipe went on, ‘Your home is under the black and gold now, perhaps? Or maybe you’re no longer the same man that called such a place home. I hear much of you from my agents, and some from your own men.’ He nodded at Avaris. ‘But Salme Elass is correct in one thing: Rhael cannot be allowed to slide back into anarchy. I had hoped Siriell would tame it, but alas… Now I shall be cruel to you, Dal Arche, more so than you might expect. You would have your followers live beyond today?’
Again that terse nod.
‘Then you must do something for me, O leader of outlaws. You must swear fealty to me, body and mind, abject and without condition. For I will have you made Prince of Rhael.’
Somewhere nearby Salme Elass let out a screech of protest, but in that moment Tynisa was wholly taken up with the greying brigand’s face, and the battle there between hate for the aristocracy and fear for his fellows. She saw his hand twitch twice on the bowstring, making as if to pull it taut, but somehow he held himself back.
‘It’s that, is it? Is that the choice I get?’ he grated.
Felipe smiled bleakly. ‘Do you like my Mercers? I wonder what they represent to you. Do they populate your nightmares, these the Monarch’s most skilled servants, thief-takers and bringers of justice? And would it surprise you to know that the greatest duty of the Mercers is to keep watch on the nobility and punish those lords and ladies who use for selfish ends the power the Monarch grants? As I say, they are few, and the times are wicked, but they are enemies of more than just brigands. Your answer, Dal Arche?’
‘You’re a madman,’ Dal told him.
‘I’d not be the first prince-major to be so,’ Felipe replied implacably, and then demanded again, ‘Your answer.’
Tynisa genuinely believed the brigand was going to refuse, his loathing of the nobility stronger even than his love of his friends, but then his shoulders sagged. ‘Let it be so, though it’s a mad world.’ He looked more like a man condemned to death than a candidate for the nobility.
The movement, when it came, was so swift that Tynisa nearly missed it, and she was caught by a weird sense that she had been here before: only then she had been the victim, and another’s blade had stood in the way. Salme Elass had taken more than she could bear, and Tynisa would never know whether it had been the loss of her son or of her ambitions that snapped her.
Her blade whistled up towards Felipe Shah, who had not even drawn his own. The world seemed to stand still.
Tynisa found that her own blade was already moving to intervene, but the angle was wrong to simply flick the woman’s blow aside. To beat it away from herself would only be to speed it on its way. Instead she snaked her narrow sword between Felipe and the blow and put all the strength she could into her parry, so that Elass’s sword swung round at her, narrowly missing her torn face as she fell backwards. Elass was screaming, blade raised to impale her, heedless of rank and station, and Tynisa lifted her own weapon with trembling arms, knowing she was not strong enough even to roll aside.
The arrow struck Salme Elass in the jaw and drove in halfway to the fletchings, snapping the princess’s head sideways at an unnatural angle, a brief, bloody choking sound the only exclamation she could muster. The sword fell from her fingers, end over end, on to the snowy ground, then she collapsed.
Dal Arche lowered his bow, his hand automatically reaching for his quiver, but finding no more arrows there. If he was satisfied that he had, at least, been permitted one last act of rebellion, his face showed none of it. Indeed there was a tense silence that overcame everyone there, each face frozen as they waited for the prince’s response. The only true mourner of Salme Elass, judging from his expression, was Felipe Shah himself.
‘Another dynasty ended, then,’ he murmured, so that only Tynisa could hear him. ‘Another prince to find.’
His private thoughts seemed to exercise a magical power over the watchers for, although Felipe’s head remained bowed, all other eyes were drawn to Lowre Cean.
‘No, no.’ The old man shook his head. ‘Not that. Not again. Don’t ask me, Shah.’
‘There must be someone, or Elas Mar will become a new Rhael within a year. Find me an alternative. Give me their name, their pedigree. I must work with the tools that I have, Cean. You must rule from Leose, or what have we gained, out of all this?’
The slump of Lowre Cean’s shoulders indicated a despondency every bit as profound as Dal Arche’s.
‘Gather up, all of you,’ Felipe Shah called out, his voice again reaching all ears. ‘Followers of the Salmae, know that at the end your mistress betrayed her Monarch and her prince. You serve the Lowrae now, and may that bring you more honour than your service to the Salmae.’ The words were merely formal, for Tynisa knew well that Cean was the last of the Lowre bloodline, just as Elass had been the end of hers.