Gaved gave her a glance without expression. ‘I reckon they might have chosen something worse, so I’ll settle for it.’ A moment later he was scrabbling to his feet, as both of the grand and gold-chased doors swung open.
A woman stormed through them, outpacing her retinue of attendants. She was tall, for a Dragonfly, and more imperious than a regiment of Wasp-kinden. Her heart-shaped face was perfect and, although she was clearly a peer of Felipe Shah, her cold beauty admitted nothing of her age. She wore high-shouldered formal robes in red and pale blue and spotless white, starched and edged with gold plates, and Tynisa caught her breath, because she had seen Salme Dien wearing just such a garment in Collegium.
‘Turncoat!’ the woman snapped. ‘Where is my son?’
Gaved was down on one knee, but Tynisa hesitated for a moment, pride battling with propriety, before grudgingly doing the same.
‘He had set out on his Lycene for Leose before me,’ Gaved reported, staring down.
‘Feckless boy,’ the woman exclaimed, obviously not caring who heard her. ‘Probably having the run of every bandit camp and village from here to Tela Nocte. Idiot child.’
Tynisa stole a glance at her, seeing her regarding Gaved with distaste. By now her retinue had caught up with her, somewhat raggedly. There were a dozen or so finely dressed Dragonflies, either privileged servants or attendant lords, but Tynisa’s eye was drawn away from them towards one particular figure. For a moment, as his presence impinged upon her, Tynisa took him for yet another hallucination, mimicking her father’s intensely focused poise at the noblewoman’s shoulder. Then Tynisa’s gaze lifted further, and she realized that this was a different man, a living man. It is getting hard to tell, she recognized unhappily. First Salme Alain and now this newcomer. There would come a time when she would no longer be able to trust her eyes, and then where would she be?
The man was dressed in an arming jacket and breeches of pale grey leather, obviously far from new, and his boots were of a similar vintage, well crafted and just as well worn. Looking up furtively from her low vantage point, what caught her attention first was his utter stillness, for she had seen that particular brand of motionless calm before and she felt that this man was like a bow drawn back and ready to strike at any moment. She had known him for Mantis-kinden from the first glance. He was paler than the Dragonflies, and older than Tisamon had been when he died. This Mantis had hair gone completely white, and a hook-nosed face creased with lines of bitter experience. For all his years, Tynisa shivered when she saw him. A moment later her eyes picked out the brooch over his breast. The style of it was different, but she recognized the sword and the circle and knew him for one of the same order that she herself had been initiated into, and that Tisamon had been a master of.
‘My Princess, I have important news of the bandit communities to the south,’ Gaved added hopefully.
The woman, Salma’s mother, dismissed that comment with a wave of her hand. ‘Tell it to my seneschal and my champion,’ she told him. ‘If you’ve no more news of my son, I am done with you.’
‘Alas, no, Princess,’ Gaved replied, but the woman had already turned and was about to walk away.
Tynisa found herself on her feet so abruptly that the Mantis took a step in, to put himself between her and the princess.
‘My lady. Princess.’
The Dragonfly woman turned and regarding Tynisa blankly. ‘What is this?’
Gaved grimaced, and took a moment too long in deciding how to answer, and Tynisa declared. ‘My lady, I am come from the Lowlands.’
From the Dragonfly’s expression, she might never have heard of such a place. ‘On what business?’
‘I was a friend of Prince Salme Dien,’ Tynisa declared, pronouncing his full name carefully.
Salma’s mother stared at her for a long moment. ‘You are seeking employment – like this one?’ She threw Gaved the smallest nod imaginable.
‘No, my lady, I only wished…’ For some reason, though her mission to Felipe Shah had seemed utterly natural, before the cold gaze of this woman she faltered. ‘I aided your son Salme Alain at Siriell’s Town, and had hoped to meet him here. And I would speak with you of your elder son, if I could.’
The princess’s expression, already cold, froze entirely. ‘As you have heard, Prince Alain is not here. As for Dien, no doubt there were many Lowlanders he was… familiar with.’ Then she had turned and, with her robe flowing behind her, was gliding back through the gold-chased doors, her retinue following her hastily. Tynisa had her mouth open, wanting to call the woman back, but was suddenly aware of the line of etiquette that would transgress. The Grasshopper seneschal’s stern frown did not encourage her to push her luck.
Then the doors were closing again, and only Lisan Dea and the Mantis-kinden remained with them.
‘We passed through what they’re calling Siriell’s Town…’ Gaved started, but the Mantis was paying him no attention.
Tynisa took a step back, to allow herself fighting room. Since she first saw the man she had been waiting for this. Mantis-kinden and Spiders did not get on, and it would make matters considerably worse if he found out she was not a pure-blood Spider at all. His face did not betray the kind of fierce loathing she had encountered in the Felyal Mantis-kinden, when she had travelled there with Tisamon, but nonetheless he regarded her sternly, and his eyes were like steel.
‘Show me your blade,’ he instructed her, and it was as though Gaved and the Grasshopper were simply not there.
At first she misunderstood, taking the weapon half from its sheath, wondering whether this was some trick to disarm her, or whether he was a smith or a collector – or whether he just wished to satisfy himself that here was a Spider bearing a Mantis-crafted rapier, before he attempted to kill her. But something in his stance belatedly communicated itself to her, and she realized that his words were a ritual challenge.
She dropped back into a defensive stance, blade out and levelled at his heart, along the straight reach of her arm, weight poised on the back foot. He had a leather and steel gauntlet on his left hand, she noticed, with a short, slightly curved blade jutting from between his fingers, but folded back along his arm for now. That was a weapon she knew well. She waited for him to take up his own stance, the last formality before the inevitable duel, but instead he just regarded her.
‘Good,’ he said, at last, with a nod of approval reminding her of nothing so much as her old sword-master, Kymon of Kes, dead these several years past. ‘I see the Lowlands contains some virtue in it yet.’
She blinked, surprised enough to straighten up from her guard. If he had struck at her then, she might not have been fast enough to parry him.
Without warning she was abruptly conscious of her own badge. For all that it was hidden out of sight, the Mantis had marked it in some way. Weaponsmasters acknowledged their own, she now discovered, and she would have spoken further with him then, save that he had already turned to Gaved.
‘Report,’ the Mantis ordered, and Gaved gave a concise account of Siriell’s Town and its circumstances, numbers, factions, in a dizzying blur of information; names such as Pirett, Seodan, Ang We, Dal Arche; rivalries and alliances, and little of it meaning anything to Tynisa.
‘Nothing may come of it,’ the Wasp finished up. ‘Siriell wouldn’t manage to mobilize one in three of the fighting population there, and there will be a dozen contenders ready to take what she has away from her. If we were to strike there, it might cut off the centipede’s claws – or it might just stir them all up.’
Lisan Dea nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘It will be the princess’s decision, of course,’ she said, but unhappily.
‘She will listen to her advisers, I am sure,’ Gaved remarked.