Forty-Four

After that it had simply remained for them to choose who should deliver the challenge.

In the grey light of a mist-laden dawn, Thalric emerged from the tumbled tower, passing Dal Arche, who had watched out the last hours of the night.

‘Good luck,’ the Dragonfly wished him.

Thalric gave the man a sour look. This was, he was fully aware, a stupid idea, and he had no faith in it, whatever the late Varmen might have said. Still, it was marginally less stupid than sitting in the tower until the Salmae finally cracked their defences.

All I need to do is get Che out, he decided. Win or lose, he would manufacture the opportunity somehow.

And they take this seriously? This clash of champions? Now that it had been mentioned, he did find an old memory surfacing from the earliest years of the war. Imperial generals being called out, gorgeously armoured Dragonfly-kinden Weaponsmasters standing before the automotives and the massed infantry, and then pointing a levelled sword, trying to face down the future.

He frowned. There was a great deal of idealism in the Commonweal back in those days – amongst the nobility, at least, who didn’t need to worry about where their next meal was coming from. Storybook lives, princes and castles, dances and hunts and mock tourneys. Then the Empire had come and burned away centuries of accumulated romance inside the engines of its war machine. So where did that leave Salme Elass? Was she still the honour-bound idealist?

Emperor’s balls she is, Thalric decided. He would rely on two things: that there would be empty-headed idle nobles among her retinue by whom this nonsense would be taken seriously and that Salme Elass knew what she herself wanted.

He spotted their picket line even as he entered the trees, mostly because it recoiled from him at a distance of twenty feet, the scouts flitting back towards the safety of the camp. He guessed that they had spread themselves thin, a cordon about the tower with plenty of airborne keeping watch for attempts at an escape to the sky. But, then, they know Tynisa, therefore they know she cannot fly.

‘I am an emissary with a message for your princess,’ he called out. ‘You will take me to her.’

After a pause, a handful of them approached him, clustered together for shared courage, as though they were stepping between the jaws of a beast. Thalric regarded them coldly, facing down the spearheads trained on him. They were a handful of peasant levy, he realized, and terrified of him. Varmen did some good work, then.

‘I come under truce,’ he informed them, raising one hand. A red flag was apparently the truce sign in the Commonweal – another gap in the Empire’s knowledge, as far as he was aware, though he guessed that wouldn’t have made much difference to the course of the war. Oddly, none of the brigands had been carrying one, back there in the tower, but eventually it had been discovered that Avaris was wearing three shirts, one of which was something close to russet. It had then been pressed into service, tied about Thalric’s wrist so as to leave both hands free.

One of the soldiers, a Grasshopper-kinden with short greying hair, stepped forward and took a deep breath. When Thalric failed to strike him dead, he bowed slightly. ‘Come with me,’ he beckoned.

Word had clearly outstripped his arrival because some semblance of a court had already assembled, with Salme Elass, partly armoured, at its heart. Thalric regarded the Dragonfly matriarch speculatively: whatever rage she harboured for the death of her son was kept deep within her. Her glance towards him was merely imperious. Even so, there were a great many spears directed his way, some arrows too, and he saw plenty of sidelong glances and people shuffling a few inches back as he passed by. It was as though death by Empire was something that could be caught merely by proximity.

If I cried ‘Boo!’ now, I’d make half of them crap themselves. And I’d get shot, too, about nineteen times, so over all not worth it.

‘Emissary!’ He held up the rag tied to his wrist. ‘Sent from Dal Arche of Rhael to Salme Elass of Leose.’ He only hoped he had the province names the right way round. And no wonder his people had renamed most of the places they conquered. The place was easy enough to get lost in, as it was, without all their baffling and oddly pronounced towns and villages.

‘“Dal Arche of Rhael”?’ echoed Salme Elass archly. ‘The villain styles himself thus, does he?’

‘I’d assumed this was the heart of your disagreement,’ Thalric replied easily, as though he was not the focus of such utter fear and hatred. ‘You’ll forgive me, but these Commonweal customs are unfamiliar to me. I merely bring you the message.’

She gave him a calculating look. ‘So this is not the Empire’s fight, then?’ and it was plain that the subtraction of one Wasp-kinden from the equation was greatly to be desired, most especially if that Wasp might then just walk away. ‘What is your name, emissary?’

‘Thalric,’ he stated simply, for the momentary luxury of having an audience to whom it would mean nothing. Then, because he had a reputation to keep up as a figure of terror and nightmare, ‘Major Thalric.’

Salme Elass affected to look bored. ‘Every Wasp lordling from across the border is a colonel at least.’

‘Whereas I come from the Empire itself, and not your lost principalities, and so am only a major,’ he replied equably. ‘But you’re right: this isn’t the Empire’s fight, nor mine.’ He had to bite his tongue to keep it at that, because the idea of the Empire even noticing this petty little brawl was ludicrous. This was not war. It was barely civil disobedience.

And yet people have died, and will die. It remains to ensure that Che and I are not amongst them.

‘What is your message, emissary?’ Elass snapped.

‘I am sent to invoke an old Commonweal practice, as I understand it. We challenge you.’

An expanding ripple of silence followed his words. When Salme Elass’s only response was to stare at him, he added, ‘Dal Arche challenges Salme Elass or, as tradition will have it, his champion shall meet yours.’

‘And what victory does your bandit-prince offer me, should I lower myself to accept this challenge?’ she hissed.

‘Himself and his followers, with no further loss of life amongst your servants,’ Thalric elaborated. ‘If he wins, he and his are pardoned, absolved, let loose to leave your lands unmolested. I think that’s what they have in mind.’

‘He and his half-dozen are now trapped inside a pile of stones, just waiting for my spears to pry him out, like a snail from its shell,’ she pointed out with a slight smile. ‘Is this the only way he could think of improving his odds? He is no prince, therefore I need accept no challenge. Why should I?’

Even as she said it, Thalric sensed a shifting and a frowning from some quarters, most especially those he had identified as nobles. Dal Arche was indeed beneath a princess’s notice, unfit to clean her boots, let alone challenge her, but, even so, the refusal did not sit well. Perhaps there are simply those who value their followers’ lives more than she does.

‘Why should you?’ Thalric echoed. ‘I’d thought you wanted to see Tynisa’s blood, Princess. How better than if your own Weaponsmaster whittles her down for you? I understand he knows his trade.’ He looked around, spotting the pale-haired old Mantis not far off, and instantly recognizable. ‘Having her spear-riddled corpse dragged before you over a carpet of your own dead soldiers would be less satisfying to you? It would be to me, certainly.’

‘A strange way to speak of your champion,’ she remarked drily.

‘Mine?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘As I said, this is not my fight.’ He felt the tide of honesty rising, and let it take him where it would. ‘I care only for myself and for the Beetle girl I arrived with, Princess. For the others, the brigands, I care nothing. I have no doubt that you feel you’ve just cause to put them on the pikes, or string them up, or however else you like your executions around here. But as for Tynisa, well . . .’ His grin was harsh. ‘You have no idea how much simpler my life would be without her. If she got carved up by your man, why, I’d be dancing with joy inside. We’ve tried to kill each other enough times in the past, and whenever she had me at her mercy she made me regret it, every punch and kick she did, and even when I did her a good turn, she cast it back in my face with a curse. To have Tynisa dead would be the world’s own gift to me, Princess. Let her come and let her die, and then I shall depart with Cheerwell Maker, and the rest are for your justice. Why would you say no? Why would you wish victory any other way?’

Finishing his speech, he examined his feelings on the matter. And how much of that did I mean, and how much was just for show? He found that he had absolutely no idea. The vein of bitterness he had tapped surprised even himself.

‘Let her come then,’ Elass said, just loud enough for him to hear. ‘I grant this Dal Arche the honour of my agreement to his challenge. Let the murdering bitch come, and my champion will be waiting for her.’

Thalric nodded, then raked his black and gold gaze across the assembled court, seeing plenty of them flinch or drop their eyes rather than meet his.

‘In one hour?’ he suggested.

‘An hour,’ agreed Salme Elass, whereupon Thalric sketched a brief, almost disdainful bow to her, and went to spread the good news.

Gaved the Turncoat darted across the sky, the patchy forest rushing beneath him. For a Wasp he was a fair flier, which made him at best adequate and workmanlike by local standards, and normally he would not have tried to travel these distances trusting to nothing but his Art. He needed his high vantage point from which to search the land ahead, though. A great deal was resting on him just then.

That he was selling out one ally for another was a depressing weight in his stomach. He had tried, sincerely tried, to be an honest man, but nobody in the Commonweal wanted an honest Wasp. He seemed to have spied on everyone for everybody else, told each that they were the only one, like a faithless lover. He had lost track some time ago of precisely where his loyalties were supposed to lie.

The thought that he and Thalric had all this in common was a miserable one.

The weather was taking a turn, he felt – the air become crisp, snow on the way most likely. Just another way for the world to make his life harder just then. Let it snow when Sef and I are out of here. Let it snow all it likes.

And where the pits are they?

He pulled higher in the air, feeling the wind buffet him, taking his bearings, even checking his compass against the landmarks on offer. The Commonweal was so cursed big, and so much of it looked just like this, especially in Elas Mar Province. That was assuming he was still in Elas Mar Province, of course. The bandits’ flight had taken them some way east, and if Gaved had got his compass points wrong he could even be over the border by now.

But there: he saw them now – the riders. They had been a further distraction to the Salmae scouts, or so the word had come to him: a party of riders plainly not under Salmae command, an armed force with unknown intent. When the scouts had gone seriously hunting them, though, no trace had been found. Gaved could only envy the woodcraft.

He dropped down, hoping fervently that nobody was going to shoot him. Bad first impressions were likely to be fatal in this sort of situation. He had his arms out, fists closed, but who knew whether these people remembered civilized conventions like that, any more.

There were a dozen riders there, and the contrast to the Salmae’s people was plain: these were military, or at least the next best thing. There was a quiet discipline to them that put all the posturing of the local nobles to shame. Their armour was more functional than fancy, and they had a feel to them of men who had killed, and would kill again, and were utterly dedicated to their cause.

Gaved did not meet their gaze, because he was most certainly someone they would not hesitate to slay, given the order. Instead he hurried towards their leaders, two men he was at least on speaking terms with, even if those words were just orders that they gave him.

In the face of their stern looks, he had to fight the urge to salute.

‘I must report,’ he told them. ‘Please, hear me. There is a great deal I have to tell you.’

Tynisa stood there in the morning sunlight, feeling the easy weight of her rapier, like clutching the hand of an old friend. The Salmae’s people had started gathering at the trees’ edge, some venturing up the slope a little. There was no sign of Elass or of Isendter yet.

She sheathed the blade, its point finding the scabbard’s narrow mouth automatically, and took out her badge. The sword-and-circle glinted in the sun, looking polished as new. With care, she pinned it over her right breast.

The brigands had ventured out behind her, with plenty of nervous glances up at the sky. They held their weapons ready, and Tynisa realized that nobody cared about their supposed pledge to surrender themselves if she lost. When the tide of Salme Elass’s followers descended on them with spear, sword and bow, they would soon be scattered and killed. Some might make it back to the tower, or halfway back up the hill, but that would avail them little.

She glanced back, her eyes seeking Che. Her sister sat resting her leg, with Thalric standing guard over her, and the halfbreed Maure nearby. The magician was looking guilty, and Che had pointedly turned away from her, but Tynisa could feel philosophical. She was right, after all, this is the best way. I have done many bad things, and made many bad decisions, and I cannot blame them all on Tisamon’s ghost.

Even as she had this thought, the echo of his presence returned to her, almost like a plea to be allowed back in. I shall make you win. You will carve your way through them, spill the blood of your enemies. What else is there?

But she shook her head. If I die, it will not be undeserved. That was the bare truth of it. The Commonweal of Salme Dien, with its moral certainties, enlightened nobles and happy serfs, was already a lost world, and she had believed in it for too long, to her detriment. Perhaps men such as Felipe Shah and Lowre Cean did their best, but human nature was the same the world over. There was nothing magically pure about the nobles of the Commonweal. She had simply been lucky enough to know Salma, and he had been something special.

There was a murmur in the ranks, and she saw Salme Elass had arrived. Alain’s mother. Dien’s mother. The woman stared at her, the hard sun glinting and shimmering on her armour, then a servant brought forth a chair for her and she sat down, for all the world like the guest of honour at some theatrical presentation. Into the silence that followed stepped Isendter Whitehand.

The pale-haired Mantis paused a moment at Salme Elass’s side, gazing down at his mistress. His gauntlet was buckled on, its blade jutting out between his middle fingers, and he flexed it in and out as he watched her: now forwards like a punch-dagger, now folding back along his arm. For a moment Tynisa sensed uncertainty in him, and she wondered whether he might have some reason to fear her, after all. Then he came striding to meet her, and the silence seemed to grow and grow around them both. The light touched brightly on his brooch too, the match for her own.

‘You have lost a companion, I think,’ he told her, when close enough to be heard without raising his voice. For a moment she thought he meant Varmen, but then she realized that he must have sensed the change, the absence of the ghost.

‘I sent him away, in the end,’ she declared. ‘The price was too high.’

He regarded her levelly. ‘Some might say that it was now that you would most need such aid.’

She forced a smile. ‘I’ll beat you on my own. I need no crutch, Master Whitehand.’

His nod was brief but approving. ‘You are worthy to wear the badge, then,’ he said simply, but the words seemed to strike her deeper than she could account for, drawing out parts of her that had withered in Tisamon’s shadow.

I am a Weaponsmaster, after all. Live or die.

‘And the justice of your cause?’ he asked, nodding towards the little pack of brigands.

‘And the justice of yours?’ Because his words had practically invited the comparison. ‘The fight is all.’

‘We understand one another.’ In a single step, he had put a very precise distance between them, a fighting distance, and her sword was in her hand without her needing to reach for it.

Even as he cut for her, she heard in her mind the beat of the Martiette, back in the ballroom of Leose. She already knew him, knew his skill and his style, the pattern of how he fought, taught to her in that dance. He perhaps thought he knew her just as well, but she had been playing host to Tisamon since then, and been twisted in his grip. She was no longer the same dance partner as before.

The first series of cuts came as though she and he had arranged them by prior agreement, as he made to step within her reach and bring his shorter, more agile blade to bear, twisting his wrist to lash at her from all angles, and she stepped back and round, circling, letting him drive her, and adjusting her stance for the sloping ground but catching each blow as it darted towards her, turning it aside with her blade and, once, with her quillons. Then, without warning, she had taken two steps to his one, widening the gap between them and putting him at her sword’s point, and she lunged without giving him a chance to react. It was unfair, perhaps, that it was a move he would not see coming, not part of their previous course of dealings, but her sword led her into it, and she took the opening as soon as she had made it.

He did not even step back. Instead, his metal claw cut across his body, her sword’s tip almost trapped between it and the spines of his arm. Then he moved further in, for a moment almost body to body, then past her, turning as neatly as any dancer – even as she spun on the ball of her foot, drawing her blade free, backing up to allow space again.

Two sharp lines of pain were clamouring in her mind, torn through her arming jacket below her right shoulder, dug there by the spikes of his off-hand arm.

His face bore a slight smile, and his eyes were encouraging, almost genial. He was enjoying himself, but not at her expense. She was impressing him, even though it was her blood glistening on his spines.

Then he drove straight at her, destroying all the distance she had tried to create. His swift blade flicked past her face, only her last-moment sway saving an eye from it, and then it was back to cut across her body, too close to be parried. She let her left leg fold, shoulder almost touching her knee, letting the strike pass her by. A heavier weapon would have left him open but, when she tried to jab at him with her sword, twisting her wrist and arm inwards to bring the needle tip to him, his weapon was in place to scrape down the length of her own blade, nicking her elbow to draw a single bead of blood.

She slapped him with her off-hand. She had no needles or spines of Art there, but it was a move both unbecoming and unheralded, and she felt the inside of her fingers connect with his chin, hooking his head aside. She used this tenuous purchase to swing her back foot round and retreat, then kick off and move forward again, even as he started to close once more.

She should have had him then. Her technique had been faultless: not a spare twitch or quiver to warn him that he would be driving himself on to her blade. His body was abruptly sideways, though, feet skipping him aside so that the slender lance of her rapier scoured a gouge in the grey leather of his jacket but drew no blood, and then he drove his clawed gauntlet down at her like a scythe-blade.

The first jolt passed through her, though in that moment she could not have recognized what it was. She pressed forward, ducking almost under his armpit, feeling the descending blade rake through her flurrying hair as she put on a rush of speed, clearing ten, twelve paces before she turned with sword outstretched and ready for him. She found him standing, as before, without having deigned to follow her. His expression was patiently encouraging, maddening because there was a meaning there that she could not quite grasp.

Her heart and innards felt taut and out of balance. He had bloodied her twice, and he was improvising. She had the measure of him, yet had barely touched him.

Some small, clear voice in the back of her mind explained it to her patiently: This is fear.

He approached again, his steps confident but without arrogance, a man who has seen the history of his duel written out like a play, and intends to perform his role without melodrama.

She seized the initiative, a three-step lunge from a standing start before he had even neared her, her sword lashing down on him, demanding an answering parry as he tried to catch her blade in the crook of his. Instead she drew her weapon back, whipped it at his face so he swayed aside, then was already drawing it back across her to pierce between his right-side ribs. His blade shadowed hers, his parry waiting for the strike to land as if it were a fly. Instead she wrenched her lunge up and stabbed straight at his face again, a strike meant to take him through the eye, but dropping for his throat even as he brought his blade up, hoping to slip under his guard.

Something rang across her skull, scattering her vision with sparks and lights, and she felt a solid impact on her sword-guard, a complaint of steel, and a pain in her side that seemed to spring from nowhere. For a second she could not see, but instinct brought her blade about to fend his off even as she stumbled back, and he let her go again, a second break, providing punctuation in the meticulous rhythm of the duel in his head, that he was carefully teaching to her.

That was what his expression meant, she realized miserably. It was the look of a hard teacher whose student is proving capable, if not exemplary.

He had punched her with his gauntlet even as he had the blade hinged down to catch her blow. Somehow she had warded off his first riposte, but the next had gashed her just above the waist. There was a trickle of blood down the side of her face where he had broken the skin.

The cold, ill feeling within her had crystallized. I am not as good as he is. The gap between them was certainly smaller than should be expected, given the difference in their years, but Isendter had been a master since before she was born.

He was stepping forward again, ready with his next lesson, and she felt a tremble inside. Save me – he’s going to kill me. She had never acknowledged such before. When she had fought Tisamon, so long ago, she had been too young and foolish to quite understand what losing a duel meant. Since then, she had fought many times, but no single opponent had really challenged her, not like this.

She tried another attack, putting her sword through a half-dozen feints and lunges, keeping him at its far end, and herself out of his reach. In her arm, her side, her face, the pain seemed to grow and grow. His metal claw had become a thing of horror, a torture implement. I don’t want to be hurt. I don’t want to die.

He let her stave him off for a little while, demonstrating a parrying style that moved his arm faster than she could flick the tip of her blade.

I am going to lose. The small voice was growing louder within her.

Dal Arche watched, and he knew enough to see how the fight was going. Everyone else was watching, too – all save one. Someone tugged at his elbow urgently.

‘Dal, we have to go.’

He dragged his eyes away from the contest to see the Spider, Avaris, hopping anxiously from one foot to another.

‘Dal, it’s the plan, remember. We leg it now, maybe some of us get clear, come on!’

He glanced back at the duel, saw the pair separate again, another flash of red on the girl’s body. I owe her nothing, not even enough to watch her die. She’s not one of mine.

But he realized, with sour reluctance, that somehow she was, even though it was she who had got them into this mess. She was his champion, after all. He was a peasant woodsman gone to the bad, but in this moment he owed her something of that feudal loyalty that princes never quite seemed to grant to their underlings.

‘We’re going nowhere,’ he growled.

‘What? Dal!’ Avaris hissed, and then, when the brigand chief rounded on him, he bared his teeth in a rictus of desperation. ‘I want to live, Dal. Don’t do this.’

However that loyalty to his followers cut both ways, and Dal sagged and nodded, feeling off balance, and unfamiliar to himself. ‘Those that want to, go now, creep off, but no sudden moves. The Beetle girl and her Wasp are staying, no doubt, and so am I. Maybe they won’t notice those that leave, if some of us stick around.’

He turned his eyes back to the fight, hands clenching and unclenching on his bow, hearing the careful, wretched sounds of his people taking their chances. Someone stepped up to his elbow, though, and he glanced sideways to find Soul Je nodding to him.

‘Go and take your chances,’ Dal advised, but the Grasshopper shook his head.

‘Mordrec, then?’ Dal asked.

‘Right behind you, Dala. Don’t feel up to running, anyway.’

At that he did glance around. As he had known, the Beetle girl and her escort had remained, and their magician too, though she seemed perilously close to flight.

‘A man can die in worse company, it’s true,’ he decided, clapping Soul Je on the shoulder, and settled down to watch the conclusion of the duel.

He saw the Beetle girl shift, coming half to her feet before the Wasp dragged her back down.

‘Look at them,’ Thalric snapped, his eyes not on the fight but on the Salmae’s followers. ‘See how many of them? And if you break the rules and interfere, why not them?’ And then, perhaps in answer to some stubborn expression on the girl’s face, ‘And if you interfere by . . . other means, do you think they’d not know? They must have some two-stripe conjuror amongst them, if I’m to credit any of it.’

And Che sagged in his grip, but her eyes had never left the antagonists.

Tynisa backed and backed again, keeping Isendter away from her, but he simply walked into her reach, unhurried, careful and inexorable. When she tried to use this against him, to pin him at the far extent of her sword’s length, he slipped by her guard like water, and his claw was already ready for more blood. Her little wounds were beginning to work at her as a pack, snagging at her every time she moved, trying to drag her down. Inside she was fighting a similarly losing battle with her fear. She had never realized just how bitterly she wanted to keep on living, for a tenday, a single day, an hour more. How terrible it was to have already seen her last dawn.

She worked up some alchemy to transmute that fear to anger, and her next strike almost caught him off balance, breaking the rhythm that she had let herself succumb to. For a precious few steps she was driving him before her, the air suddenly filled with the dull clatter of steel. He parried and parried, his gauntlet making circles in the air as he took her sword’s point aside, over and over, but her blade was as insistent as a fly over food, and she nearly blooded his arm, nearly gashed his ribs, then flicked a drop of blood from his ear. Now you fear!

But he was calm, weathering the storm until she overreached, and was then ready to take the initiative from her as easily as if she had held it out for him to grasp. That last strike went too far, he had taken only a half step, and her sword’s point went past his head. The claw was ready, its metal darkness driving for her throat as he snapped his arm out. She kicked back, trying to regain her distance, too slowly, but from somewhere she got her off-hand up, slapping for the side of the blade.

She felt the keen, cold razor of it slide across her fingers, stumbled back on to one knee and then forced her legs to lift her up again. Her left hand was awash with blood, the wound so sharp and clean that she barely felt the actual pain, though it was waiting for her just a little way distant.

He let her back off, yet again, and she now felt that she knew him better than she had known any opponent save her own father. This fight was an intimacy she had shared with nobody else. She had learned respect for Isendter Whitehand the hard way. She could not hate him, or even dislike him. Her Mantis nature, however much she might wish to deny it, recognized the rightness of this moment. There was no shame in a duellist’s death at the hands of a master.

He was coming again. From his expression, he judged her an encouraging student, whose education he would rather complete than cut short, but such was life. Learn, his look seemed to say to her. Improve. She backed off, intently watching his face, his eyes.

The justice of your cause? he had asked her. Simply by being here she had vouched for the thieves and thugs behind her, and his regard for her had not suffered. When she had turned the question back on him, however, as he must have known she would, she had seen the pain in his eyes. He was a man worth more than his service here, and she could only think how even the seneschal Lisan Dea had seemed to turn on her mistress, there at the end. How much more, then, would a creature of honour like Isendter wish to walk away? Understanding that, she deciphered his expression at last.

So help me, he wants me to win, she realized with a shock. He had no faith in the noblewoman he was championing. He would far rather lose the duel and see justice done. But he could never fight to lose. To do so would slur his honour far more than would fighting for a bad cause. He was willing Tynisa to improve, to match him blow for blow and let him lose with dignity.

She was not equal to it, however. She risked repeated assaults on his perfect defence, and came back wounded and bleeding each time, like someone trying to reach into a thorn bush, suffering a thousand cuts. She had not let him land a fatal stroke on her, not yet, but even her best defence could not keep him from whittling her away.

She put some additional distance between them, because that thought had led to another, darker one. She remembered old Kymon drilling her and the other College students in the Prowess Forum. What is the most important aim of the duellist? And always some fool would pipe up, To hit the enemy, Master Kymon. And the old Ant would snap back, By no means! It is to avoid being hit!

But she had failed at that. Her best skill had already gone into minimizing the damage that Isendter had caused her. She had no more resources to bolster her defences with. His siege of her swordcraft breached the walls further with every foray.

She wondered if she had read it in his eyes, but it was a terrible bleak thought, more fearful almost than his claw as it hunted her, twisting the hundred paths in the air between them, closer and closer with every motion.

A quick exchange of steel, a gash to the back of her hand, and she was clear again. The thought sat like a leaden weight within her, no, not that, even as she planned out how it might be achieved.

For a moment she thought he stumbled, the sloping ground treacherous beneath his feet, and she leapt for this opening instantly, faster than thought. Thought, catching up, cried, It’s a feint! but she had taken the bait already, lunging in even as he struck out at her whilst twisting aside from her blade.

There was barely an impact felt, but she heard a scream and thought it must be her own. Her sight was filled with red, and the slope of the ground seemed to roll under her feet, pitching her half a dozen reeling steps downhill, sword raised to ward him off, blindly covering one of a hundred approaches his blade might make.

It was Che who had screamed, she now realized. She herself kept silent as the tomb. There was blood in her eyes, and she drew a sleeve across them. That hurt, a burning pain shooting across her face where his blade had lashed her. My face—

One eye was still running with blood, but she had the other one clear, enough to see him approach again, steady and measured in his pace. The searing pain had not stopped, but she forced it away, locking it in the depths of her mind, perhaps in one of those chambers where Tisamon had so recently resided. Her mouth was full of blood, refilling each time she spat it out. He had cut her across her face . . . her face.

She had lived in two worlds, once. The Mantis child in her had fought, the Spider had smiled and plotted, painted herself in the mirror, charmed her enemies and made them fools. She had even smiled a path all the way to the Imperial palace at Capitas, because swords could not be relied on to win every fight.

She felt the Mantis path before her feet now, all others cut away. One-eyed, she met his gaze, and thought that he would understand. It was not true that every Mantis tragedy ended with a body on the floor. Some had two.

When he came for her next, she turned her body in a vain attempt to let his blade slide off her, while her own blade was already in motion. Her expected parry did not come, that he angled his blade to anticipate. Instead she dragged her hand back and up, the point of her rapier remaining almost motionless as she pivoted the rest of the sword around it in the air. The solid shock of contact came as his claw drove into her hip, driving a choking gasp out of her as she spat blood. His own left hand was lifting to catch her blade, but she drove it down anyway, calling on every ounce of strength to speed it on its way.

He had his hand almost in place, but the edge of her blade flayed his palm and cut the web of skin between thumb and forefinger down to the bone, and he could not put enough force into his gesture to deflect her.

Angled downwards and inwards, the point then dug into his pale leathers, just below his left collarbone, and it did not stop until the quillons were an inch from his ribs.

Through a film of new blood, she saw Isendter’s head cock back abruptly, his eyes closed. His expression was that of a man listening to musicians in some private, peaceful place. She felt his blade grind against bone and, for a moment, they were propping one another up.

She drew in a breath raggedly, and let go of her sword hilt, gifting him with the blade. When his own drew clear of her, from the bloody landscape it had left of her hip and thigh, she let out a brief, horrified bark of pain.

For a moment they just stared at one another. Blood had begun painting the grey of his arming jacket, welling slowly around the inch of steel she had left showing.

Something tugged at the corner of his mouth. It might even have been a smile. Then he let himself go, slumping down to one knee with a grating whoosh of breath. The whole world was silent.

She looked beyond Isendter and saw Salme Elass standing there, her face a picture of rage and denial. There came no instant command, though, no immediate breaking with the Commonweal’s ancient traditions. The princess was too shocked even for that.

Tynisa felt her legs tremble, and knew that if she also fell now, she would lose. She was the winner only so long as she stood. Salme Elass’s paralysis would not survive any show of weakness.

Tynisa turned, very carefully indeed, to see Che’s agonized face, Thalric’s grim one, and fewer bandits than she had remembered. They were standing uphill from her, of course, curse them.

The pain had become a constantly expanding fire in her, battering at her mind, demanding that she give in to it, tearing at her self-control. She remained upright only by application of pure will.

With the utmost precision she placed one foot in front of the other and began to walk.