He sighed. ‘Forgive our poor hospitality. When our seneschal brought word of your arrival, perhaps it was natural to assume that Stenwold Maker was attempting to further his campaign against the Empire by some other means. We have not treated you as befits a guest, and certainly not as befits one on such a gracious and solemn errand. Please, tell me of Salme Dien.’
She stared at him, trying to recast him as something other than simply a Dragonfly man, not young and yet ageless, wearing clothes that were surely less fine than Lioste’s had been, but then, of course, he had been travelling, and these were clothes meant for the road.
‘Master – my lord – Your Majesty,’ she stammered, making him a College magnate and a Spider Aristos and finally an emperor.
‘Prince Felipe,’ he said quietly, ‘or “My Prince”, if you were a retainer. Or Shah, if you prefer. But please’ – and his voice shook just a little despite his iron control of it – ‘tell me of my kin, of my boy. Tell me of Salme Dien.’
And so she did. As he sat on the floor like a child, she told him how Salma had formed his own army, his own nomadic principality of the lost and the fugitive. She spoke of how the errant prince had won the respect of the Sarnesh Ants, and how he had led the assault on the Imperial Seventh Army, breaking their lines and destroying their siege engines, so that the Ant-kinden could make their assault.
She told him how Salma had died in that battle, but sensed that those were not the details he wished to hear. Instead she passed on to the city that Salma’s followers were building west of Sarn, to which they had given the name Princep Salma in his memory.
Of the Butterfly-kinden woman who had been Salma’s lover, she said nothing.
Felipe Shah listened in silence to every word, nothing of his thoughts showing in his expression, and his gaze remained clear when she had finished. ‘He met his destiny well. Would that we were all so lucky. My Salme Dien became a true prince of the Commonweal before he died, and that is something that many of us who bear the empty title never achieve. What would you have of me, Tynisa?’
The question caught her unprepared. ‘I’m not here to ask for anything.’
‘Nonetheless, I am in your debt. If you will not barter for my favour now, then return to seek it, or send word. You have done me a courtesy fit for princes, one that I would not have expected to come from the Lowlands, where such things are not understood. You have brought Salme Dien back to me.’
She felt embarrassed at the praise, not knowing what to do with it.
‘Prince Felipe, I seek nothing…’ I have nothing. She now realized that she had come to the end of her road. And what now? Walk on to Capitas and attack the Empress? Is all my life shrunk to this moment? She thought of asking to stay in Suon Ren, but the idea of living as a recluse in the midst of all of these elegant, alien people, with nobody but Gramo and perhaps the prince to talk to… She would become a shadow, a nothing, waning and dwindling in the vacuum of their turned backs. ‘I…’ she began, but there were no more words.
‘I am a prince-major of the Commonweal, whose only master is the Monarch,’ Felipe Shah told her. ‘And I am in your debt, so you have but to ask.’ He stood up to go, and she tried to speak, tried to beg him for… but there was nothing, a void where the future had been.
He bowed, and took his leave.
That same evening found the seneschal, Lioste Coren, back at the embassy door, brushing aside Gramo Galltree and seeking out Tynisa.
‘The prince has spoken,’ he declared. ‘He advises you to leave.’
Tynisa stared at him open-mouthed, even though she herself had decided she could not stay. ‘He said he owed a debt… He wants me to go?’
A battle fought its way briefly across Lioste’s face. ‘Do not.. .’ he started, and then his dislike of her finally gave way before his duty to defend his prince. ‘He does not banish you. He does not cast you off. My prince has some small talent with the future, however. He sees only grief for you here. We are well aware that the Lowlander merchant is at Siriell’s Town. My prince advises you to leave his domain – to leave the Commonweal, to return home. He says you will be happier there. It is because he owes you a debt that he gives you this advice.’ The effort of being civil to her was plainly stretching him. ‘ Please.’
‘What shall you do?’ Galltree asked her later, after she had listlessly picked at the late supper he had prepared.
‘Would you let me stay here even if the prince wanted me gone?’
Galltree twisted the silk of his robe wretchedly, and she held a hand up to forestall his crisis of conscience. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She took a deep breath. ‘This Siriell’s Town, it’s a rough place?’
‘Lawless.’ Galltree nodded emphatically. ‘Rhael Province – the family that ruled there under Felipe’s, they’re all gone, long gone, I think. In such places, others creep in, fugitives from the order of the Commonweal. These days, there are many such provinces, especially since the war.’
Her hand was on her sword hilt again, and she could sense the ghosts gathering close, waiting to hear her decision. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. Home or die, and how convenient that both are to be found in the same direction. I don’t even have to choose right now. She found that she had no intention of rejoining Allanbridge, if indeed he was not already on his way back to Collegium. Home held nothing but sharp edges for her now. She could not look Stenwold or Che in the face without seeing dead Achaeos reflected in their eyes – and how she felt him close and gloating with that admission – and she was being forced out of Suon Ren so very politely. How good of the world to provide a sink like Siriell’s Town to drown herself in.
She took out Allanbridge’s rough map, and looked Galltree straight in the eye. ‘Anything to add to this?’ she asked.
The road to Siriell’s Town was a matter of heading north-east as best she could: bridging the canals, and then heading over increasingly hilly country until she had made the subtle transition from land that still knew the hoe today all the way down through a gradient of neglect, to land that had not been sowed in a decade or more. She saw a few villages on the way, and avoided them by choice. There were no other travellers, no merchants or messengers, no flying machines overhead. The sense of the land was one of quiet desolation. She knew she would feel different if the Commonweal had accepted her in any way, but aside from Felipe Shah’s brief moment of openness, she felt more a stranger here than she had done when she arrived – and even the prince thought it would be best if she left.
Each morning, and sporadically throughout the day, she checked her bearings as best she could by Allanbridge’s landmarks, thinking, So I can’t miss the place can I, Jons? As if I believe that.
But when she came within sight of Siriell’s Town – having veered west some distance from her intended course – she found that Allanbridge had been telling nothing but the truth. It was indeed a town, or something resembling one, but at its heart was a castle upon a hill, and Tynisa saw instantly that it looked something like the exemplar of Felipe’s own. Complete, it had constituted a six- or seven-floored hexagonal tower, narrowing towards a point at the top. The walls were lanced with arrowslit windows, so that no attacker on the ground or in the air would have been safe from the defenders’ missiles. Tynisa, having observed the sturdy walls of Collegium and the Sarnesh fortifications, could see only absences here: nowhere to place artillery, not that the Dragonfly-kinden would know what to do with it; no reinforcing of the walls, so that catapult or leadshotter assault would hammer them down all the sooner. This was a castle that had been designed to hold off men from another age.