'No fool would make you amba.s.sador,' he told her. 'Wait this is where the airship visits. Did Maker send you here?'

When she neither confirmed nor denied it, he bared his teeth. 'Just do what you came for and go back to the Lowlands,' he told her. 'I don't want trouble. Just go.'

That was too much for her. 'And how do you imagine I can just go back after what happened?' she hissed, bunching herself to spring. His hand was slightly lower now, the talk taking him off his guard. In a moment, she would have him.

'Oh,' he said, almost to himself, 'the Moth boy died, then.'

It froze her even as she was about lunge for him. The Moth boy died, then. For, of course he had. Not when she herself had run him through; nor even later in the Collegium infirmary. While Tynisa had been off chasing her father, the Moth had levered himself up from his sickbed to try and save his own people from the Empire and there, in the remote mountain fastnesses of Tharn, he had died. The delay had been just enough, after her terrible deed, to fool Tynisa into believing that she might not, after all, be the woman who had killed her half-sister's lover.

'Is that what this is about?' Gaved asked Tynisa, seeing the struggle inside her. 'You're running away?'

Every instinct howled for him then, but her own guilt was like a grey anchor that held her back, so that she twitched for action but did not lunge, sending him two steps back with his palm directed squarely towards her forehead. She wanted so very badly to kill him, but something within her continued withering and shrinking away from her own thoughts.

'Look,' the Wasp was saying, 'I'm doing all right here. I'm clear of the black and gold for the first time in my life. We've settled down. They don't . . . know how it was, with me.'

His own past was surely sufficiently larded with b.l.o.o.d.y-handed deeds that the Commonwealers would want to be rid of him, if they knew. Probably he had turned his hunting talents upon them during the Empire's war, and even Siriell's renegades were unlikely to forgive that. Just as his reaction to her had mirrored hers to him, so might he have kindred reasons for seeking her silence.

Besides, he had said 'We', and that meant he was still with the strange Spider girl, Sef, he had taken from Jerez, and surely Tynisa bore that wretched woman no ill will.

I should have just killed him.

Suddenly there were repercussions and uncertainties, no matter how honest he was being with her, and an uncomfortable part of herself said that was because life was never as simple as she was trying to paint it.

But she had come this far, and she knew that, after killing him, she would be able to paint again, to interpret the result however she wished. What other witnesses were there to gainsay her? She realized that she was on the brink of a precipice within her mind, and to go one step further would be to lose some fraying but fundamental connection with the world.

She felt her body flow into line, taking up her fighting stance within herself, even though nothing showed outwardly, so that, when the attack came, she would be sublimely ready for it.

Gaved must have sensed something, too, for he exploded into motion that was a counterbalance for her poised stillness. His wings took him back, ten feet away from the fire, his hands outstretched, one before him, the other pointing upwards.

Already the Dragonfly-kinden were dropping down towards them. A half-dozen came sleeting down around the fire like random arrows, while Tynisa could hear at least a dozen more approaching from all round. In their bickering, she and Gaved had let them get perilously close.

That they were Siriell's Town natives was clear enough: there was nothing of Prince Felipe's court about them. All wore a mismatch of armour, from leather and chitin to fragments of glittering n.o.ble plate and discarded Imperial war leavings. Several carried bows but, as their grounded infantry approached cautiously, she saw the bulk of them had spears, along with the occasional long-hafted sword. Some were lean and lanky Gra.s.shoppers, but the bulk were Dragonflies, and she looked in their faces, feeling such a sense of waste. They were poised and elegant, but where they should have been beautiful, their harsh lives and harsher deeds had marked them with scars and filth and ugly expressions.

'Now then,' Gaved said quietly. He had his hands each directed at one of the archers, and in return most of the arrows were angled his way. Tynisa had attracted her share of the spears, but they were misreading her calm quiet and seeing her as the lesser threat.

'You've got an invitation, Gaved,' said one of the few swordsmen, thus helpfully identifying himself to Tynisa as the leader of this little rabble. 'Siriell has a few more questions for you, about just what your business here is.'

'Not a problem,' the Wasp replied, his easy tone belied by his stance. 'I'll drop in on her when I'm next pa.s.sing through. I always have time for Siriell.'

'Now, Gaved,' the leader demanded. 'Tonight.'

Their numbers should have been overwhelming, of course, but they hung back. They don't want to hurt him? Want to keep him alive for Siriell? Tynisa wondered, but she noticed how they swayed back a little, whenever Gaved moved. It's because he's a Wasp, she realized. These cowards think he's got the Light Airborne hidden in his pocket or something.

'Take him,' the leader snapped, with the confidence of a man who isn't the one having to do so. Two spearmen stepped forward unhappily, weapons held aside as they reached as hesitantly for the Wasp as for a nettle. They stepped into the aim of the archers as they did so.

'Enough of this,' Tynisa decided, and let fly all the pent-up anger and frustration she had been nursing since before she ever reached Siriell's Town.

She ignored the leader, in that first moment, hoping he would prove a challenge later. There were two archers within reach and she impaled one through the eye after slashing the throat of a Gra.s.shopper spear-carrier to get there and whipped her blade back to sever the other's taut bowstring. Her momentum carried her past the archer even as the cut string lashed the woman's face then she was standing between two spearmen who desperately tried to drag their weapons towards her, but too c.u.mbersome and too close. She let the razor-sharp edge of her blade open one up, feeling her steel keen through layered leather as though it was not there a move that served to draw back her arm so that she could ram the point into the other spearman's chest. She watched her blade hardly bend as it punched through chitin plate and then between ribs, before sliding out again like water.

She heard Gaved's stings crack and sizzle and knew, without looking, that his targets would be the other archers, the greatest threats towards him, who would now be turning to look for Tynisa in the spot where she had been standing just a moment before.

Then she had spears all about her, their wielders fighting to keep distance, the long, narrow points trying to fence her in, so that for a few tense moments she almost lost the rhythm, batting them aside with blade and offhand, vaulting and stepping aside to keep out of their lancing approaches. She kept lunging at every gap, making individual brigands draw back, but without breaking the cage that enclosed her. Then an arrow flowered in the shoulder of one, providing the key that unlocked it all, and she was out from their midst two Gra.s.shoppers spinning bloodily away, to mark her exit.

She felt it was time to engage the leader, who had been backing away since things had gone so very badly wrong. That she would be confronting four or five of his followers at the same time was just grist to her mill. Gaved's sting spat again, and she caught its flash in the corner of her eye. Another arrow picked off the last archer, striking him low in the gut and doubling the wretch over.

The spearheads flurried for her like fish, but she turned sideways to them, her sword point-down as she advanced, parting their little hedge of spines until she was right amongst them. Even then, they nearly had her, moving faster as individuals and more cohesive as a group than she'd expected. Two closed with her, their spear-shafts walling her in, whilst another two stepped back to gain distance. She felt one spear point graze past her cheek and another cut her biceps as she twisted away, putting a knee to someone's groin to her left, and her sword's jagged guard into a face over to her right. The trap opened up again, and she cleared the air about her with her sword, forcing them to retreat or fall.

Close, too close. But wasn't this just the sort of death that she was looking for, after all?

For a bitter moment she thought their leader was going to fly off, but then he screamed in her face and went for her, bringing his long sword down in a vicious strike that would have cut her in two had it only landed. He was fast, though, wielding the sword two-handed with a nimbleness she had not expected, turning each attack into the next without overextending, so that he drove her before him in a mad blaze of steel.

She watched, and learned his patterns and his limitations, and understood that what she saw was all there was: speed and fury but no precision, no flexibility. When she moved with his strike, letting the sword chop to her left as she moved right, so that he was past her before he realized, he could not recover in time. She almost held off, in the fond hope he might have something more, but the rapier itself had decided to end it, and she pierced him under the armpit, where his armour left off, and dropped him in mid-yell.

That was enough for the survivors, who went flying, running and leaping away into the night, leaving a litter of bodies behind them. At least one more dropped, with an arrow in his back.

So whose arrows are those then?

Even as she thought it, the archer was approaching, stepping into the firelight while Gaved was brushing down his cloak and looking about him at the bodies. Tynisa turned to the newcomer and her world stopped dead.

Her hallucinations had always been corner-of-the-eye things, melting before her direct stare as if unable to bear the weight of her attention. But here he was in plain view, the bow in his hand, as though he had never been killed by the Wasps after all. As though it had simply been some raconteur's exaggeration to say that Salme Dien was dead.

She couldn't breathe. She felt that her heart had ceased to beat. Her fingers twitched nervelessly, though her sword still clung within her grip.

'Salma?' she managed.

And the man before her, the Dragonfly-kinden with that oh-so-familiar, c.o.c.ky smile, said, 'Yes?'

Five.

Heedless of her expression Salma walked over to the dead men and studied them. 'So, this is what lurks in Siriell's Town,' he remarked. 'Ugly characters, certainly.' He glanced up suddenly. 'Turncoat?'

Tynisa jumped at the word, but it was Gaved who stepped forward.

'My Prince?' The Wasp was now studiously ignoring her.

'Losing your touch with the vermin?' Salma eyed him. 'You're lucky I was coming to meet you.'

Gaved's face remained studiously neutral. 'You're here alone, my Prince?'

'A little reconnoitring for Mother,' Salma said, self-mocking, and still everything about him was maddeningly as she remembered it: his expression, his tone. When he flashed a smile her way, she felt her heart would break. She was not sure, standing there in the moonlight, whether she had simply gone mad behind her own back, her mind snapped and flying free. The impossible situation refused to resolve itself. Salma? It was Salma.

The Dragonfly prince had taken hold of an arrow, setting one foot on a corpse's head to yank at it, but the shaft remained securely embedded. 'I'm too skilled a shot for my own good, it seems,' he murmured philosophically.

'Salma . . .' Tynisa said involuntarily.

The Dragonfly glanced up, and his smile was painful. 'Another one of yours, Turncoat? You're collecting Spider-kinden?' He was grinning through it, though, and sketched her an elegant bow with much flourishing of hands. She had seen him do just the same once, at the College, to impress a magnate's daughter.

'Don't you . . .?' Don't you know me? was the plaintive cry within her, but of course he could not know her. He was Salma: he was Salma to the very last detail as she had known him at College, three years ago. But this was a man who had never come south to learn the ways of the Lowlanders, never signed on with Stenwold Maker, never come too close to death while fighting the Wasps at Tark. This was a man who had never been enchanted and seduced by a stray b.u.t.terfly-kinden, or given his life in a desperate, heroic bid to defeat the Empire.

'She's none of mine,' said Gaved forcefully.

'Too clean by far to be Siriell's get,' Salma finished for him. 'And she fights. You've hired yourself a bodyguard, Turncoat?'

'An old acquaintance,' the Wasp got out between gritted teeth, and sudden panic overtook Tynisa, the forgotten weight of Gaved's knowledge slumping back on her like a landslide. One word now from Gaved and this miraculous dream would shatter. She's a murderer, was all the Wasp needed to say.

But she caught Gaved's eye, and saw her own thoughts reflected in his face: a tightly contained panic that at any moment she might give him away. He was a rogue and a thief, she knew, but what lies had he told to find himself a place here in the Commonweal? One word from me . . .

In that moment, within their conjoined silence, a guilty pact was made between them. Omission for omission, they would cover for one another and bury their pasts.

'Tynisa Maker of Collegium,' said Gaved wearily, 'I present Prince-Minor Salme Alain of Elas Mar Province.'

Tynisa stared, caught off guard, because somehow she had never even considered the idea that Salma would have had family here beyond his mentor Felipe Shah. And she had already thought that the Salma that this Alain resembled so much was more that youth who had first come to Collegium, not the later man she had last seen planning battles against the Empire. A younger brother, but such a likeness nonetheless.

'Why, then, what chance has brought you to grace our lands, Tynise?' The flowery words were all mischief, but then he had always been like that.

There was a void in her heart where the answer to that question should have been and, as she opened her mouth to answer, she knew that she had no words. She had come here to the Commonweal because being anywhere else had become intolerable. She had come to Siriell's Town because she wanted to find a Mantis death, and no amount of equivocation would hide that, now that she looked on her motives again. Looking into his face, though, and reaching for a response, the void was abruptly filled with one word: You. Salma had brought her here and here he was, both in image and in manner. She felt the world was yawning open beneath her, the brink of a chasm at her very feet.

'I . . . am travelling to your family,' she finally got out, the words stopping and starting, and utterly beyond her ability to predict. 'Salma . . . my Prince, I knew your brother. He was my friend. I bring word . . .' She could say no more, but Salma was already looking towards Gaved.

'Seems Dien made quite an impression,' the Dragonfly said philosophically, but then the warmth of his smile was focused back on her, and she met his gaze boldly. 'Well, such things have been known, and you make a better messenger than a turncoat Wasp. Will you come to Leose, then?'

She had no idea what Leose was, but she nodded nonetheless. Let me go with you, she thought. She was terrified that, if he left her sight for an instant, she might lose him for ever.

But already he was waving a hand at Gaved. 'Bring her with you, Turncoat. I must report to Mother, of course, but no doubt we'll meet at the castle.'

She wanted to ask why they could not all travel together, but Alain put his fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. A moment later she heard a low drone that quickly built up into a buzzing roar of wings, as something descended on them from the skies above. The downdraught of its wings battered her, and Gaved's little fire leapt and danced madly to the point of extinction. The dragonfly glittered like silver in the light, surely twenty feet from its stubby antennae to tapering tail. It hovered for a moment and then found a perch on one side of the defile, claws digging deep for purchase.

Seeing her expression, Alain was all smiles. 'Lycene,' he named the animal. 'Only the Salmae breed dragonflies that can fly so well at night. You have your report, Turncoat?'

With a start, Gaved dug in his tunic to produce a messy fistful of paper. 'There's more. I've learned today-'

Alain waved it off. 'Then it can wait until you get to Leose. You have a horse nearby?'

The Wasp nodded glumly.

'Good, make best speed, and bring our new guest with you.' Again the flash of teeth. 'I will look for you in more civilized surroundings,' he told Tynisa, 'and I'd wish duty didn't lay its hand on me so hard, but I must go.'

She tried to say something but her throat had dried up, and a single flick of his wings lifted him into Lycene's saddle, where he holstered his bow. Then the insect was aloft again, its wings thrashing up a gale, and seconds later he was gone, swept across the vault of the sky far enough that even her eyes could no longer pick him out, as the sound of Lycene's wings became a diminishing hum.

Horseback riding was not something Tynisa had been called upon much to do, and she would have found it uncomfortable and awkward even if not sharing a horse with a Wasp-kinden. After the fight, Gaved had broken camp and relocated to another sheltered place, but neither of them had slept much, constantly jabbed awake by mutual suspicion.

Before dawn he had tracked down his errant mount and they had begun their journey in silence. The land around them was inhabited once, for they pa.s.sed a patch of lumpy, mounded earth and rotting sticks that had clearly been a village. The rolling countryside had been cut into tiers for agriculture in the past, but many years of neglect were softening the contours. Gra.s.s, nettles and thistles grew tall, even at the approach of winter, and the land was broken up by knots of densely growing trees.

'Did the war do this?' she asked, the first words uttered for more than two hours. Even as she asked, she was thinking that the abandonment looked far older. 'Was there a plague here or something?'

'More than a generation ago, the family of little princelings who ruled this province ran out of heirs, I think,' was Gaved's response. 'And by the time some other petty n.o.bles came round to claim the place, after decades of duelling genealogies, the locals weren't exactly ready for someone lording it over them.' He did not sound particularly disapproving, but then that prospect was probably inviting to him. 'All over the Commonweal, there are whole provinces gone fallow. More so since the war, obviously, but it's been going on for ever, from what I can make out. Place is falling apart. If it's not bandits setting themselves up as princes, it's princes going bad and turning bandit. Raids across princ.i.p.ality borders, villages burned, or village headmen declaring independence, thieves on the roads and in the forests, peasants deciding they'd rather be free, or lords taxing the shirts off their backs. The Monarch's a long way away, and the Mercers do what they can the proper ones and the provincial sort like we've got but how many Mercers can there be?'

'And yet you're working for Salma's family. I'd have thought you'd be on the other side,' she said darkly.

'Me? I'm making a living,' Gaved declared, glancing back at her briefly. That she could stick a knife in his back at any moment was something he was apparently managing to deal with phlegmatically. 'When I left Jerez and headed west, I only had one name to conjure with, and that was your friend's.'

'Salma? You got here through trading on his name?' she demanded.

'Once I heard his family mentioned, I made my way over and talked myself into a job. Maybe tomorrow Sef and I'll move on, turn brigand even, but for today I'm on the side of the Monarch. It's that kind of world. I keep my options open. Or I try to. There was no need for that bloodshed, last night.' His voice was careful and measured, and he must have felt the flash of anger going through her.

'They were going to kill you.'

'I could have talked my way out of it, with them, or with Siriell if need be. It's part of what I do. She was probably only going to make me an offer.'

'Oh, and that would suit you well, wouldn't it?' she accused him. 'Just waiting for the chance to jump flags to join the outlaws, after Salma's people took you in.'

'I like to keep my options open,' Gaved repeated. 'But killing people closes doors. Who knows when I might need to go back there, on whoever's business? Now I don't know if I can.'

'I'm not going to be anyone's prisoner,' Tynisa hissed through gritted teeth. She was starting to see flickers at the edge of her vision, one or other of her imaginary companions keeping pace with her. Achaeos, was it? Had he come to reproach her now for the blood she had spilled?

'It's not so simple-' Gaved began, but she hissed at him so fiercely that he stopped.

'I have been a prisoner once,' she snapped. 'You have no idea what that cost me and what parts of me I left behind, when I got out.'

The Wasp scowled at her over his shoulder. 'Well, it's done,' was all he could manage. 'But they'll have people in the air, searching for us. n.o.body kills that many of Siriell's people without being hunted.'

'So we'll fight them again.'

'No, we'll lose them,' Gaved decided. 'We'll keep riding as fast as the land permits and as long as the horse can keep the pace. We'll head uphill, too. I know a good road for us to throw them off.'

'There's a forest?' Tynisa asked, because tree cover was always the best way to hide from airborne spies.

'Of sorts,' Gaved confirmed, 'but I doubt it's what you're expecting.'

They settled into a steady pace, with the Wasp refusing to be drawn on where he was guiding them. The land about them was already looking more promising, their trail winding between stands of gnarled trees which grew only denser ahead of them.

They kept up a pressing pace for hours, with Tynisa spotting the occasional dark shape high above that might have been a man or a hunting insect. Gaved was now angling them along the broad flank of a hill that was creased into a series of slopes and valleys still heavily hung with morning mist. The scrubby trees had given way now, left behind on the hill's southern skirts. Here, down in the valleys, was a dense forest of another kind altogether. The mist contained a maze of tall, leafy canes, some as slender as a finger, some as thick as Tynisa's thigh, as though a regiment of giant archers had loosed a thousand shafts at the hillside itself. This bristling cane forest seemed to preserve the mist even past midday, so that their progress deteriorated into a groping through a constantly shifting landscape of vertical shadows. Gaved led with apparent confidence, but Tynisa spotted him consulting a little aviator's compa.s.s more than once. She was glad of that since, between the mist and the sameness of the landscape, she felt she would become lost almost instantly.

Some time later, Gaved let their weary mount plod to a halt, swinging from the saddle to feed and water it.

'Won't they catch us?' Tynisa asked him, her eyes seeking their airborne pursuers. The mist about them was so heavy that even the sun was just a brighter smear.

'They won't come here,' Gaved said. 'We've lost them.'

'Then what's wrong?' she pressed, because it was obvious that something was amiss.