‘You think I should go?’
‘I’d go myself, if he asked for me, only I imagine he’s seen enough Wasp-kinden to last him for the rest of his life. I don’t imagine he wants to murder you or force you into marriage, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I don’t know what I’m worried about,’ she told him, but at the same time something had stirred inside her. She realized she agreed with Gaved, that this did not look like trouble, and she realized also that danger was what she would have preferred. Even this, though, would be something. She had a new purpose, a new direction. It might keep her going for only a tenday, perhaps, but it was better than nothing.
The road to Lowre’s home, his manse as the messenger described it, was longer than Gaved had told her to expect, although that was probably due to the encumbrance of the snow. Caught frozen in white, the Commonweal seemed like a dream place, or some make-believe land that some scholar might write a fanciful book about, a land unfinished, half shapeless and awaiting detail from some great moulding hand. They encountered precisely one other human being, a herdsman’s daughter trudging through the snow as she followed the tracks of an errant aphid that had somehow escaped its pen and blundered off into the cold.
The world was white as a fresh page, Tynisa thought, and each living thing left a scrawl of writing that told all who cared precisely what manner of creature had passed, and where it had gone. She herself had left a similar travelogue that stretched all the way back to Gaved’s door, and would do so until it snowed again, or a thaw came.
At last, after several nights so cold that she and the messenger practically slept on top of each other inside his small tent, necessity easily overcoming propriety, the home of Lowre Cean presented itself. That day the sky was clear, and the snow around them starting to dissolve back into the earth, or so it seemed to Tynisa. The ground, which had been hard, now became muddy with it, and they had to pick their way carefully down towards the little walled village which Tynisa understood to be the exiled prince’s home.
The scene within the walls was reminiscent of the aftermath of a siege. In the centre of the compound, a band of ferocious-looking warriors had built up a grand fire and were now singing raucously and handing round a skin of some potent liquor. They were long-haired and bearded, and wore furs and brightly dyed homespun, and Tynisa had no idea what kinden they might be, save a very noisy one indeed. Around them, a fair number of Dragonfly peasants hurried about, carrying bundles and buckets, lifting, cleaning, clearing and obviously doing their best to ignore their barbarous guests.
There were a dozen buildings within Lowre’s little domain, and Tynisa was surprised to see that many of them were of stone, and not the ancient stone of the Commonwealer castles, but something more like the civilized architecture she was used to. One such was plainly a forge, from the ring of hammers issuing from it, but there were a couple of larger buildings of unclear purpose, although back home she would have labelled one as a workshop.
The prince’s own home must be the largest structure there, its lower storey stone-built and the upper two constructed sturdily of wood. The general shape was borrowed from the local castles – as Felipe’s had been – but unlike that fragile construction, Lowre had obviously retired here to somewhere that could be defended. Tynisa read in this that he was, in some way, still fighting the war.
The messenger, who had never volunteered his name, had a boy come and lead her horse away, then informed her that he would go find his master and announce her arrival. He left Tynisa standing somewhat bemusedly in the centre of the compound, with all the business of a noble’s estate bustling away on all sides. One of the uncouth-looking warriors called out some unintelligible suggestion to her, and she glared at the lot of them, to their great amusement. Then there came a Roach-kinden man leading a string of horses, whom she was forced to stand aside for, which in turn put her in the path of a peasant woman, two buckets yoked over her shoulders, on her way to fill the water-troughs. One of the savages had meanwhile started up some ferocious howling noise which she realized belatedly was intended as a song, and from the far side of the buildings she heard a fierce chirring, as a pack of house crickets began stridulating in protest.
And then the messenger appeared at her elbow once again. ‘My master will see you now.’
Lowre Cean was neither enthroned like a prince nor practising at arms like a warrior noble. Instead she found him in a strange room lined with little wooden hutches, each fronted with latticed wire, so that she assumed this man kept crickets or jewel beetles, both of them common pets back home. He was a tall old figure, his hair white and thinning, and his long face was creased by the echoes of a hundred strong emotions. He wore a long grey smock, looking nothing like a prince or a war hero. There was a sharp, sour smell about the whole room that was utterly unfamiliar.
‘Maker Tynise, my Prince,’ the messenger announced, then stepped back and away to leave the two of them alone.
Tynisa could only wonder at the way these Commonwealers seemed to have no fear of strangers bearing ill intent. Were there no assassins in Dragonfly-kinden history?
She was indeed no threat, or so she hoped. That cold rage had not touched her again since Siriell’s Town. Perhaps this equally cold winter had put it to sleep.
‘My lord.’ She tried something like their type of formal bowing, got it wrong, but Lowre Cean was not watching. Instead, he was cupping something in his hands with infinite concentration. She took a step forward to get a look at the things in the cages, and recoiled back to the doorway with a yelp. She had never seen anything like them.
They were tiny enough to fit into the palm of his hand, and they were manic, leaping and darting inside their little boxes as though furious at their captivity. They had two stick-thin legs ending in little clawed hands, and ragged paddles for arms – no, for wings, she realized, although they hardly seemed the right shape for taking to the air. Their little round heads had madly staring little round eyes and a beak like a tiny blunt dagger-blade, and their skin was furred with something a little like the scales of a moth’s wing. They had been quiet, but her approach had set them off into a twittering, piercing cacophony of sound, a random and tuneless assault on the ear.
The lean old Dragonfly in their midst turned and gave her a wry smile. He was actually holding one of the vile creatures in his hands, a thought that made Tynisa’s skin crawl. ‘Forgive me,’ she heard him say, over the racket. ‘I had forgotten how my little pets are an acquired taste. My family has always bred these little singers, and since the war I have begun to devote more of my time to our old fancy here.’ With infinite care he replaced his charge in one of the boxes and closed the grill, whereupon the little creature began yammering and twitching like all the others.
‘You are Prince-Major Lowre Cean?’ Tynisa began uncertainly. She had seen Felipe Shah eventually behaving like a prince, and Salma’s mother most certainly like a particularly arch princess. This man was not conforming to her expectations.
‘That is the curse I bear,’ he confirmed, washing his hands before removing his smock. Beneath it he wore a plain, pale robe, something even a servant would look drab in. ‘And you are the Lowlander? Fascinating.’
‘Please, master, why did you send for me?’ she asked. ‘How did you even know about me?’
‘Why magic, of course. Your coming was foretold centuries ago.’
She goggled at him in astonishment, and it was only after he had stepped out of the menagerie that she saw how a mischievous twinkle had entered his tired eyes.