Part 21 (1/2)

'The girl has changed since she was last here,' Isendter observed, as the echoes of Lisan's footsteps faded.

'In what way?'

The Mantis was silent for a long moment before he spoke. 'It is hard to tell. She may seem a Spider, but there was always something of my people about her, perhaps granted to her by the badge she bears. Now that part has become greater. I look on her now and my mind says Mantis, whatever my eyes tell me.'

'She has thoughts still for Alain, however she's changed, I am sure,' Ela.s.s decided. 'Will she join the fight?'

'Yes,' came the immediate and firm response. 'You may have no fear of that.'

Tynisa had expected a change of weather heralding the spring, but instead the skies had opened up with fresh snow, which lay in foot-thick drifts as far as the horizon. Lowre Cean had told her this was perfectly normal.

'I understand it is different in your Lowlands,' he had mused, 'but here the winter does not let go without a fight.'

And something had twitched with approval inside of her, and she had smiled without meaning to.

'I must practise now,' she had told him, and departed for the courtyard where, before an audience of Roach-kinden travellers and a gang of Bee-kinden Auxillian deserters, she had thrown herself through all the paces that her father had ever taught her, every trick of footwork and bladework, as the snow filtered down around her.

She did not recall coming back here after the hunt. Her mind had been so seared by that impossible image of her father standing there before the Mantis icon, gleaming and translucent, holding one spined hand out to her. She remembered nothing else. They told her that she had collapsed.

When she had awoken, the n.o.bles were long gone, but one of their party had remained by her bedside. She had opened her eyes to see the severe features of Isendter Whitehand.

'It has been two days, almost,' he had informed her, before she could ask him.

She had stared into his face. I saw . . . but what would it mean to him? Instead, what had emerged from her lips was, 'Alain . . .'

'Is in Leose by now.'

'But he asked you to stay with me,' she had pressed, hoping.

'I would have stayed of my own will, unless ordered away,' he had told her but, after a pause in which she felt sour disappointment creeping in, added, 'You are correct though. Prince Alain wishes to know when you are well again.'

She had swung her legs out of bed, staring at the floor just to hide her smile from him. 'And now?'

'I shall return to his side and report.' Yet he had made no move, and she glanced up at him. His expression had been measuring, almost wary. 'You have been . . . touched by something. I am no magician, but I sensed it there, at the shrine.'

'Yes,' she had confirmed, giving him no other details.

'Be wary of such contact, Maker Tynise. The world of the living does not easily walk hand in hand with the world of either spirits or the dead.'

'I have no fear of it. What else can I trust, if not this?' she had replied blithely. His troubled expression had remained as he bowed and left her.

While dressing, she had looked about for some sign of her father, but he was not to be seen. Instead she heard an echo within her head, words remembered from long ago. You must practise. How else will you honour your gifts?

It was true that, since Tisamon's death, she had not kept to the rigorous training he had prescribed for her. In the depth of her loss that had not seemed important, but now she suddenly felt that she had betrayed his memory by her laxness. She had a duty to the badge she wore, to a thousand years of heritage.

With the thought, she felt a distant surge of approval.

She did not believe in ghosts, but suddenly there was something new for her, a hand on her tiller to steer her course true. She could not have seen her father, of course, but even so, she felt him near her.

You must face the world without fear. Life is struggle.

Of course it is, she told herself. That was the Mantis way, after all: meet the world with a drawn blade, to either conquer or die.

What do you want? had come the question, the one she asked inside her own head, couched in that cold, far-off voice.

'Salme Alain,' she murmured in response, savouring his name.

Then you must stalk him and win him, she told herself, in that same voice. And I shall show you how.

Some days later she had left Lowre's compound, in thick snow, and headed for Leose. The Commonweal weather, which had previously seemed something almost supernatural, was put in its place as just one more way for a Weaponsmaster to test herself.

She did not stop at Gaved and Sef's hut. A Wasp and a Spider, what were they to her?

On waking up after the hunt, the world had seemed more simple, its colours brighter, the divisions between light and dark that much more clear. The endless round that her mind had kept treading all those paths of guilt and worry had fallen away from her. That her father and Salma were dead did not sting: they had died as warriors after all. That Achaeos was dead . . . She explored the thought like touching a rotten tooth. Regret is for the weak, came her inner voice. Do not hide from what your blade has done. If you slew him, then surely he was your enemy.

She had not yet let go of regret, but her grip was loosening. How attractive it would be to rewrite her personal history so that her stabbing of Achaeos became not a crime but a justified exercise of her superiority.

Her trek to Leose was almost completely solitary, with the vast expanse of the frozen Commonweal like a canvas about her: a world picked out in white and grey and dark shadow. She might have been the last living thing in the world.

Each day she would travel until noon, then pause to eat and to train, finding once again her perfect balance with the blade, all the old moves and pa.s.ses that she had allowed to rust while she indulged her sense of guilt. Each session of bladework cleansed her of another layer of useless distractions, honing her to a point.

She had a purpose now, or rather, the purpose that she had been standing on the brink of for some time had now coalesced.

I want Salme Alain. And the answer came, And you shall have him, but you must perfect yourself until he cannot deny you.

So it was that she found herself at the gates of Castle Leose, under the wary eyes of the guards in s.h.i.+mmering armour.

They sent for Lisan Dea, of course, and the Gra.s.shopper seneschal came out, eventually, to regard Tynisa wearily.

'You have some message from Lowre Cean?' she asked grimly.

'You know why I am here,' Tynisa told her evenly. Do not make me prove myself to you. A part of her weighed up the woman and found her wanting. She was nothing but a grand clerk, after all.

The Gra.s.shopper stared at her, stepping close enough for Tynisa to impale her just by drawing her rapier from its scabbard, one fluid motion so swift that the guards would barely see it before it was done. The thought played itself out in her mind, and she had to fight against simply letting her body follow suit.

'Go home,' said Lisan Dea softly, giving her another of those hidden looks. 'Lowlander, go home.'

Tynisa smiled keenly. 'I have no home in the Lowlands. That is why I've come here.'

The seneschal opened her mouth to utter some further dismissal, but then a s.h.i.+fting amongst the guards heralded a new arrival. Without fanfare, the princess herself was with them.

'I thought I recognized the Lowlander girl from my window,' she remarked. 'Tell me, why have you taken it upon yourself to turn away our guests?'

Lisan Dea stood very straight, looking ahead and not daring to glance at her mistress. She made no reply.

'You are a capable enough servant for peacetime, Lisan, but perhaps not fit to act as my seneschal in war. Return inside and contemplate that,' the princess ordered. Tynisa expected a glare from the Gra.s.shopper as she obeyed, but instead caught an unguarded expression: she read sadness on the face of Lisan Dea, and not as a response to her mistress's anger.