He was as good as his word, though Tynisa never found out exactly what was in the pouch he left beside the ashes of their campfire. The rising sun made inroads into the mist, but never quite dispelled it, and it was easy to see the tall, thin shadows looming on every side as something more sinister. And probably there are no Stick-kinden, Tynisa told herself, for whoever heard of stick insects having a kinden? But she was far from home now, and many unthinkable things might turn out to be true.
Towards evening when they were, according to Gaved, nearing the cane forest’s edge, she thought she saw one of the shadows shift and fall back between its brethren, giving her a momentary impression of a fantastically tall and attenuated figure carrying a staff that might have been a bow, and trailing a grey cobweb cloak off into the mist. Later she was sure that she had imagined this, as she imagined so much else, but by then they were clear of the cane and crossing the border into the next province.
Leose was the princely seat of the Salmae, Gaved explained. Unlike Felipe’s family, they had not lost their stronghold to the Empire. The war had come close, chewing at the edge of Felipe’s great domain and gnawing away odd provinces, but in the end the Treaty of Pearl had put the Wasp-kinden territorial ambitions on hold.
The Wasp spoke of his own people with a studied detachment, neither condoning nor apologizing for them. He was working hard at being someone in no position to have an opinion on Imperial affairs.
They had now passed a number of smallholdings, isolated stretches of farmland where the hillsides had been amenable to step agriculture, with clusters of low buildings with sloping roofs on the hilltop above. The land here was both more rugged and more heavily forested than Prince Felipe’s southern holdings, and Gaved’s chosen path meandered wherever the clearest land went, avoiding the deep woodland. Those trees extended easily over the border of Leose province, he explained, and then into the lawless lands to the south which they had just escaped from. Those thick woods were known as ‘bandits’ roads’ by the local peasants. Sometimes, when the brigands were bold, they played deadly hide-and-seek games between the trees with the Salmae’s Mercers. At other times the woods were left for the peasants to herd their aphids through, or for the hunting excursions of nobles.
They were obviously nearing the province’s heart, but they had seen few others travelling, and none following the same route as they did. There was none of the traffic Tynisa would expect, when approaching a town. ‘So how far to this Leose?’ she pressed.
‘Depends what you mean by Leose,’ Gaved replied. ‘Every part of Elas Mar within a few miles of the castle is Leose. There’s no town as such, just villages dotted about the place. Remember, Suon Ren’s almost the closest to a proper city the Commonweal has – after the capital. Most of the Commonwealers live spread out like this, making the best use of the land. What you’re looking for is Leose castle, and we’ll see that by tomorrow. That’s where the Salmae live, but their people are spread all over.’
The castle, when they had sight of it, did not disappoint. They had been following the course of a canal for some hours before the edifice came into view, and Tynisa saw that it had been placed to command the watercourse where it had cut a deep valley between two hills. It was a broad, squat mass of stone surmounted by tapering battlements, held in place against the land by a half-dozen spidery buttresses, seeming as though it might at any moment pick itself up and walk away. Two of the arching buttresses spanned the river itself, forming narrow bridges leading from the far side to the castle’s very door.
‘So that’s where you live, is it? Very grand,’ Tynisa remarked.
‘Me?’ Gaved shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t let me past the door, believe me, but I’m useful enough that they found Sef and me a little abandoned place not too far away, and we do all right there. There’s a little lake you can see from the door. That’s important…’ He made an awkward face.
‘So what now…?’
‘Now I report to my betters,’ Gaved explained. ‘I’ll tell them how Siriell’s in a restless mood, anyway. Then perhaps some peace and quiet over winter? That would be nice.’
The castle seemed to grow and grow as they approached, so that what had seemed a mere fort, at a distance, became a great architectural sprawl. Even the slender buttresses were revealed as a marvel, suspended impossibly against the universal pull of the ground. This arching stonework seemed to spring from utterly different hands to the light wooden walls of Suon Ren
The great double doors were barred, and apparently unguarded, but there must have been watchers above, for Tynisa had a glimpse of flurried movement within, at a higher storey. Then again there was nothing, and little enough sign that the place was occupied at all.
‘So who lives here?’ she asked.
‘The Salmae and their retainers and, yes, they rattle about in there like dried peas when some other noble hasn’t come to guest with them. These castles, all of them, they’re built like they’re for people nine feet tall with a thousand servants each. Very few of them are even half used: the same way as half the land in the Commonweal seems like it’s given over to outlaws or beasts because there aren’t enough law-abiding folk to till the soil. Place isn’t what it was.’
The doors opened then, before Gaved could expand on his theory. A pair of Dragonfly-kinden warriors, in full scintillating armour, scrutinized them uncharitably, before a slender, grey-clad Grasshopper woman hurried out to greet the newcomers. Behind her, Tynisa could see a courtyard of some kind, that was crossed by strange shadows.
‘Ah, Turncoat,’ she observed, ‘you come with news?’ At his nod, the Grasshopper inclined her narrow head. She was tall and sallow, like most of her kin, and her long hair was pulled back into a tail. Tynisa guessed that she was on the far side of middle age, but she had a straightness of bearing and lightness of step that belied it.
‘You’d better come in then, you and your… woman,’ the woman suggested frostily.
The iron gaze of the guards still did not trust these arrivals in the least.
Behind the gates, Tynisa saw that the courtyard had a roof of sorts, but one that was no more than a lattice of sturdy timbers that would keep out neither enemy nor weather. She presumed that some manner of covers or hatches could be put in place if there was ever an assault on Castle Leose, or perhaps the courtyard was intended to be abandoned to the foe, who could then be penned in and shot at from the castle proper. In the end she was forced to admit that her grasp of siege warfare was lacking, and that whoever had gifted the Commonwealers with these edifices had been of a strange turn of mind.
There were servants, though: Dragonflies and Grasshoppers who led their badly used horse off for feeding and grooming in stalls that were set into the castle walls to the left and right. Before them was another grand portal, this one inlaid with symmetrical patterns of brass, or perhaps gold. A smaller portal was set into a corner of one of the grand doors, and the grey-robed woman now sent a youth of her own kinden hurrying through it.
‘The princess has been sent for,’ she explained. ‘She will come in her own time, as I’m sure you know, Turncoat.’
Gaved nodded. ‘We can wait.’
A jug of good honeydew was brought to them by another servant, whereupon Gaved simply seated himself on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, on a blanket he had already scavenged from his saddle.
‘You know her, I take it,’ Tynisa noted, nodding towards the Grasshopper woman, who was currently chastising one of the grooms over some point of detail. ‘She seems a barrel of laughs.’
‘She’s not so bad,’ Gaved said mildly. ‘Her name’s Lisan Dea, and she’s been seneschal to the Salmae since before the old man died.’
Tynisa realized, with a vertiginous lurch, that ‘the old man’ meant Salma’s father, of course. Feeling suddenly off balance, abruptly too close, too soon, to the heart of things, she changed the topic with, ‘I’d get tired being called “Turncoat” all the time.’