Then the cold came, dispelling Tynisa’s former assumption that it was already upon them. One evening she was in the outer room, practising her footwork as Tisamon had shown her. While she moved, she barely noticed the change, but as soon as she stopped, she saw that her breath was pluming pale in the suddenly chilling air. Outside, the darkening sky was crystal-clear, the stars like pinheads set in velvet. She was shivering even as she backed away from the small window, and a moment later Gaved slipped past her to fasten a shutter over it.
They retreated to the inner rooms and the hearth, closing themselves off from the surrounding space, letting the cold prowl between the walls until it succumbed to the slow advance of the fire’s heat. Even so, Tynisa slept in her hammock bundled up in two cloaks and a horse blanket, and still sensed the biting frost as though it was an enemy stalking outside the walls of the house, rattling the shutters and hunting for a way in.
It was hard for her to live thus in that double-walled house. Lying in the inner compartment at night, the outer house was busy with the sound of creaking wood and the battering of the wind. As the nights grew even colder, her mind grew tired of simply presenting her with shadow puppets of the dead, and diversified instead into footsteps – so that she could lie there awake, with Gaved and Sef and their servant all asleep, and listen to Achaeos’s shuffling tread, his nails scraping on the wall as though his figment was searching for a way in, out of the cold. But he has already gone to that final cold – and, if he found his way in, he would bring it with him.
And she knew he was not with her, but was dead by her hand, and that she was slowly losing her mind over it, but she felt fear stealing up on her even so.
One morning she awoke and knew that something must be wrong. There was a peculiarity to the light that pried through the edges of the house. She slipped from her hammock, a motion she was now practised enough to be confident with, and ventured into the outer section of the house, wrapped in a blanket.
There was a strange pale glare showing at the edge of the shutters, and limning each panel of the walls, as though the light of the sun had swooped very close to the world, but without bringing any of its heat. Bewildered, Tynisa wrestled with one of the wall-panels, until she could move it aside.
She stared, caught utterly unawares by the sight. The world outside had died, and some vast hand had draped it in a shroud. Everywhere the contours of the land had been smoothed by a universal covering of white, flurrying whenever the wind picked up. The lake had shrunk: clear water still lapped at its centre, but a shelf of solid ice had reached out from the shore as far as Tynisa could make out. She stared at it all, awestruck in a way that she had not been since her childhood.
She realized that she was shivering, and withdrew into the house, where she found the servant eating some oatmeal for breakfast.
‘Is that snow?’ she demanded.
The girl looked at her as if she was mad.
‘You’ve never seen snow before?’ Gaved stepped out, pulling on a tunic as he did so. ‘This won’t last. Two, three days and it will melt, is my guess. Still, when winter really gets into its stride there’ll be more.’
‘Oh.’ She found the prospect disappointing. The sight outside had seemed so utterly unprecedented to her that she had needed it to be universally significant, as though it was a sign of the end of the world. The blanched landscape had seemed to speak to her: I am changed, so shall you be. Something different is about to find you. Your life will not be the same. That was a message that she had badly needed to hear.
Sef came out too, then, wrapping a thick robe about herself, and Tynisa realized sourly that she and the Wasp had been busy in her absence. It was a bitter thought that the happiness of others should have become as hard to bear as freezing. Living with two people who were apparently content with one another was becoming untenable: they were forcing her either to feel her own solitude too greatly, or to find some excuse to look down on them for their lack of ambition and dearth of spirit.
A change did come, though, as if some part of her had turned magician and foreseen it. Past noon, with no sign of a thaw, and Sef spotted a rider approaching, around the rim of the lake.
The three of them gathered to watch as that single dark shape against an argent field resolved itself into a Dragonfly youth swathed in a russet cloak. There was a shortbow and quiver at his saddle, and the line of his cape was wrinkled by a short sword at his belt, but he approached them openly, his horse high-stepping in the snow, and when he drew nearer they saw that there was no bulge of armour beneath his cloak.
Tynisa’s rapier was in her hand, quivering in readiness, but the rider barely glanced at it, which seemed the clearest indication that he was no enemy. Instead, when he had reached what he clearly felt was the boundary of Gaved’s little fiefdom, he slung himself easily off the saddle, with just a flicker of wings, and waited there.
‘Come closer,’ Gaved called out to him. ‘All friends here.’
The visitor bowed elaborately, his hands moving in arabesques that Tynisa associated more with stage-conjurors than courtiers, but then both Salme Dien and Salme Alain had favoured the same kind of extravagance.
‘I seek Maker T’neese.’ Leaving his horse untethered and on trust, he stepped over towards them. He was very young, some years Tynisa’s junior.
It took her a moment to disentangle what he had done with her name. ‘That would be me,’ she said.
The youth smiled brightly. ‘My master has no wish to impugn the hospitality that you receive here, and places no obligation upon you, but if it be your pleasure, Lady Maker, you are invited to be the guest of Lowre Cean for whatsoever span of this winter you wish.’
The name meant nothing to Tynisa, but she saw its impact on her companions, and therefore concluded that this Lowre Cean was obviously important in some way.
‘May I confer with my host?’ she asked cautiously.
‘As much conference as you should wish,’ he allowed, ‘though I’d ask for some feed and water for my mount, if I may?’ This last, with raised eyebrows, was directed at Gaved and Sef. The Wasp turned back to the house, on the point of hailing their servant girl, but then some ghost of his old freelancer’s pride overtook him and he set to the task himself, leaving Tynisa to trail after him.
‘You’re honoured,’ Gaved told her, as he broke the ice on their water trough.
‘Why’s that? What’s this about?’
‘As to what it’s about, no idea. The man’s got a big old estate within Salmae lands, though, few days to the west of here. Couple of farming villages and his own compound, servants, soldiers, scholars, that sort of thing.’
‘He’s, what, a local chieftain? A bandit prince made good? What?’
Gaved uttered a strange sound. ‘Don’t – seriously don’t – ever say that to anyone around here. Prince-Major Lowre Cean is probably the greatest war hero the Commonweal has. He was just about their only general who had any luck against the Empire, and he’s also one of the Commonweal’s greater nobles, on a par with your friend Prince Felipe. So, no, he’s not a bandit prince made good, or if he is, the making good happened a few thousand years ago, when the Commonweal was putting itself together.’
‘Then what’s he doing living inside the Salmae borders?’ Tynisa asked him, somewhat put out at his obvious amusement. ‘How can he be all that important? Why’s he not even on his own lands?’
Gaved gave her a look, and she understood, feeling abruptly chagrined.
‘Right,’ he confirmed. ‘The war. All gone. At least Felipe survived with the majority of his principality intact. Cean lost his lands, all his people, children, grandchildren, everything. Now he’s basically living on the charity of Prince Felipe and Princess Salme, and pretty much waiting to die.’ His gaze appraised her. ‘But for some reason he’s taken an interest in you.’