‘Bartrer and Amnon? Like a shot.’
‘And Stenwold Maker?’
He made to speak, failed twice, then forced out the word, ‘Yes.’
A flame kindled in the palm of her hand, her Art guttering and dancing there, lighting up her face so that his breath caught. He was choked with memories of their time together travelling with the Spider-kinden baggage train, or trying to run for Collegium ahead of the advancing Wasps. ‘You are a master’s piece of work,’ he murmured, even as he became aware she was sabotaging her own chances of escape, showing every Sarnesh sentry exactly where she was.
‘And you are a fool, and you’d be as lost as I, with Sarn and Collegium both hunting us. And who would we sell ourselves to then? Who’s left?’ When he tried to speak her hand fell on his lips, the flame gone and her skin startlingly cool. ‘I know what I’m doing. Milus isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and he won’t pin me down. No ties, remember.’ She was all confidence until her eyes left his to glance into the darkness. ‘And I have work to do here, before I get clear. But I could use a lift, maybe, when you go to report to your man Maker about his niece. Just a lift, maybe. It’s really not that important.’
‘Why not now?’ he demanded.
‘Because I’m not ready to. Because Milus is almost where I want him, and then I’ll know him, know the heart of him. And I’ll have something to sell, then: something to put me back in the game. Because, as long as I can creep away like this, he hasn’t won. And because it would hurt you.’
It was Laszlo’s turn to be silent.
‘I read you so well. I know every page. How you ever thought you’d be an agent for anyone taxes the mind.’ But her tone was cautiously fond. ‘I don’t want you carrying the weight of betraying this Stenwold Maker of yours. I won’t be struck with the blame for that. You promise too much in return for too little. I want you free of guilt.’
‘And you’re breaking with the Sarnesh?’
‘If I do, your man Maker had better be able to protect me. Or I swear I’ll go back to the Wasps. Just be ready for me, when the time comes for you to fly back to Collegium. Watch out for me.’ She leant in to him abruptly, lips brushing his cheek light as air, and then she was off, with the same jerky, stop-start flight, for all that they must have detected her by now.
Tonight was one for farewells.
The Etheryen had not responded to Che’s request to enter their domain. According to the Roach, Syale, the Loquae who led them were debating it even now, but the Mantids had only the loosest organization within the wood, and a response could come either tonight or in a tenday.
I would prefer not to go in uninvited. That would be classed as suicide by more resilient survivors than she, and she would be entrusting her life, and the lives of her fellows, to the nebulous strength of her own magical authority, a branch she did not want to put her full weight on just yet.
She would be walking in with the dawn, though, if the Mantids had sent no message meanwhile. The Empress would not hesitate, after all.
And what is it, that’s in there? What is she after?
Che was uncomfortably aware that Empress Seda already knew of her presence. Each of them was like a needle in the mind of the other, impossible to ignore. Her best guess was that she had sensed the Empress first, or at worst they had recoiled from each other at the same moment. But, if Seda had become much more accomplished in her divinations, it was possible that she had set a trap for Che here.
In fact, it was possible that the entire business here was a trap. It sounded like hubris to think so, but Che remembered her last encounter with the woman, the unbridled hatred revealed just because Che found herself sharing in the woman’s strange legacy.
Sharing was not something that the Empress was well suited for, Che had discovered. In that linked moment, Seda had nearly destroyed her mind out of reflexive fury, and that rage was still alive and well. Che could feel the heat of it.
But she could not afford to believe this was just a trap, because if the Empress unlocked some great power here, the entire world would suffer.
Thalric had laid a fire, and they were camping up near the trees, waiting for any word at all. The Sarnesh were keeping clear, but Balkus and his Roach girl had come to join them. Che had expected more remonstrations about her uncle, but the Ant stayed silent on that point. He himself was departing in the morning to take word to Princep.
‘I remember you in Helleron,’ she observed. ‘You weren’t half as serious, back then.’
His expression was a little hurt, a little sad. ‘War does that,’ he said solemnly, and then spoiled it by failing to suppress a smile. ‘No, forget that. Finding somewhere you care enough to want to protect, that’s what does it. I mean, anywhere that’s mad enough to have me basically running its defence, that place deserves keeping around just for the laughs, doesn’t it?’ His sigh was wistful, a moment’s requiem for the older, more carefree days. ‘I’ll pass word to Sperra for you: she always liked you. And Syale. .?’
‘I’m for the forest again,’ the Roach girl replied.
Balkus grimaced, but made no attempt to talk her out of it.
‘How?’ Tynisa said, abruptly. ‘I don’t understand. You’re. . what are you, to the Mantids? Why don’t they just kill you?’ The words probably came out sounding more hostile than she intended.
‘With the Mantis-kinden, there is only ever one reason,’ Syale told her, rising to the challenge enough to look Tynisa in the eye. ‘Why do they obey the Moths? Why do they hate your kinden so? History. Even if they don’t remember the reason, they remember that it was thus in the Days of Lore, and so it cannot be any other way now. They have only their traditions left. Everything else has been stripped from them by time. If you don’t understand that. .’ ‘Then you’ll die in there,’ was plainly on the tip of her tongue, but the words never came, the girl’s eyes flicking to Tynisa’s brooch: the sword and circle of the Weaponsmasters. ‘You do understand that, even if you don’t know it,’ she said instead, frowning at Tynisa now. ‘Enough to know that we were their friends and kin, long ago, and even if they’ve forgotten how or why, they have not forgotten that it was so.’
‘We do not forget,’ a new voice agreed, ‘but nor do we submit. Even the Moths must learn that lesson sometimes.’ A Mantis woman was suddenly there beside their fire, springing startled oaths from Balkus and Thalric. She studied them, the Ant’s drawn sword and the Wasp’s out-thrust palm, and dismissed them as irrelevant. She was a lean, hard figure clad in dun and russet leathers, with a cuirass of chitin scales. Her pale hair was bound back tautly against her skull, and her features could have been carved from white wood, so immobile were they even when she spoke. Her yellow eyes moved constantly between the people about her as though looking for a victim, and the intelligence burning there seemed to belong to something other than human. ‘You would be wise, Roach girl, to remember that our history recounts its share of those outsiders who went too far.’
Syale shrugged, doing her best to seem calm, but Che noticed her swallow.
Time to see what their price is, I suppose. She hauled herself up to face the Mantis woman across the fire. ‘You’ve been sent to me?’
That cold, yellow gaze flicked towards her, then away. ‘No.’ The slender length of a rapier blade gleamed in her hand, and Che could not have said whether it was there a moment before. ‘To her.’
She did not even need to indicate whom she meant, for Tynisa was already levering herself to her feet.
‘Your people sought this already,’ Che insisted. ‘I forbade it then and I forbid it now.’
The Mantis spared her barely a moment’s regard. ‘We do not know what you are. We do not know from where your authority stems. I say to you what I said to the Roach. You, too, can go too far. Enter the woods with this one at your side, untested, and you will never be safe from us, nor will we ever be your allies. We call her out for bearing that badge and wearing that face.’