Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [108]
She was Seda, youngest daughter of the Wasp Emperor, a child of eight years old.
The footsteps were in no hurry. There was shouting elsewhere in the palace, but the man, that death-handed man, idled down the corridor towards their door. She sat up in her bed. Distantly, someone was cursing. Distantly, there was weeping, fighting. Slave sounds usually, but somehow she knew that it was free men and women who now wept and fought, on this particular night.
She slipped out of her bed, shivering, her bare feet cold on the stone. It was always cold here, the sun’s fleeting warmth stolen away as quickly as it came, but there was a deeper cold now, and it came with those footsteps.
She knew who was approaching and what he intended. She knew what had happened: the terrible event that had hung in the balance for three days, and now was done.
Father? But he was dead, of course. His death had brought the footsteps.
Eight years old and intelligent enough to know what had occurred, and what must follow. For a moment she considered the window, but she had no Art to climb or fly with.
Stripped of any options, she hunched down at her own bedside, hearing the footsteps stop at the door of her room.
In the bed across from hers, her brother Tarvec stirred, but slept on.
She retreated and retreated, but the only place to go was beneath the bed. When she had been very young, she had believed, after a vivid nightmare, that a creature dwelt there – red-eyed and its mouthparts honed into a long, hollow stiletto – waiting for her to sleep so that it could drink her blood. Now the space beneath the bed became her refuge, for the monsters were already abroad.
The door opened. There had been guards posted outside. Perhaps they still stood there, but they made no attempt to hinder the footsteps coming into the room.
Tap, tap, tap. Army-issue boots approached the side of her bed, and she pictured him staring at the thrown-back blanket. She tried not to breathe, tried to summon up some of the hiding Art that some of the lesser kinden practised. Go away. There is nothing for you here.
Then he was crouching, and she could not but open her eyes and look into his face. It was not a bad face, in itself: a Wasp-kinden man with receding, greying hair. A soldier, like so many others. An officer. Her father’s friend.
But not today. She pressed herself back against the wall, as far from him as she could get, and jabbed an empty palm out towards him, as though she possessed the stinging Art that had made her people the greatest kinden in the world. She was only eight, though, and not so very precocious as all that. The intruder’s face merely twisted in dry humour.
She heard Tarvec stirring, sitting up, her brother asking, ‘Maxin, what—?’
Maxin’s face vanished from her view as he stood up, and she heard the sharp crackle of his sting, a truncated exclamation as Tarvec died.
Then Maxin was kneeling to peer at her again. Was he making a decision on his own, or recalling instructions given to him by that other brother, her eldest brother – the one about to assume the throne.
The Rekef officer stood up again and she heard his footsteps cross the room. She breathed a little easier, because now she remembered how the rest of the dream went. He would go and murder her other siblings, a second brother and two other sisters, so that, out of the Emperor Alvdan the First’s progeny, only the eldest boy and youngest girl would survive the night. Over the next tenday, eleven other Wasp-kinden – children or young men and women – would also die for the crime of having a mother whom the Emperor had found beguiling. Twenty-nine halfbreeds of various part-Wasp ancestries would follow them. Maxin was as thorough as the late Emperor had been lustful.
Then the third Emperor of the Wasps would take the throne,