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As the first flame glowed, uncertain and shy but gaining confidence, she risked a smile and found it answered.

‘You, though, you are clearly a great lady of the Lowlands, where they have no Mercers. Where did you learn such a skill?’

‘My father taught me what little I know,’ she replied, and the words came out without the hesitation attending any earlier mention of Tisamon since his death. And why not, since I’m sharing a fire with Salma – or his very image? Why should I be troubled about raising the dead? With Salma at her side, she felt she could face anything, and her fire was now taking very nicely indeed. As she leant forward to blow gently on the flames, it seemed entirely natural for him to brush her hair back out of their way. ‘My father, he was . . .’ she started, then found herself on the brink of an abyss. How could she describe what Tisamon had been, before the end?

‘Weaponsmaster?’ Alain said abruptly, starting back from her. For a moment she froze, expecting the bloodstained Mantis shade to manifest itself, but the prince’s eyes were now fixed on her neck, where she had strung the badge of her order. The sword-and-circle emblem swung free there, slipping from its hiding place beneath her tunic. There was a silent moment of re-evaluation between them in which certain possibilities demanded the correct distance, a blade’s length.

‘I never yet heard of a Spider Weaponsmaster,’ Alain admitted at last.

Tynisa had almost replied, automatically, He wasn’t a Spider, but from the way he had edged back from her after noticing the badge, how much further might he run if he discovered she was a halfbreed too?

‘He was a remarkable man,’ she stated, and he did not question further. The fire was going merrily by then, but it was just a fire, and they slept with it between them.

Tynisa remained awake for a long time after Alain’s eyes had closed, watching his face in the dancing light. Salma, she could see only Salma there. Salma sleeping close enough to touch, as she had never seen him before. They had almost . . . hadn’t they? She had not imagined that closeness? Why should he not be startled, be cautious, when something as weighty as a Weaponsmaster’s brooch was abruptly dropped into the mix? But he would see past that, she knew, for the Commonweal had its share of them, after all, and it was no pariah’s mark. She felt a great, confused knot of emotions surging within her.

Overhead, Lycene’s great glittering eyes, which never closed, watched them both.

Castle Leose was in sight, poised on its buttress legs above the canal cutting through its valley. The snow had been descending in flurries for a while now, and Lycene’s flight suffered from it, the creature fighting against the wind, dipping lower and lower. But now Alain dug his heels in, and the dragonfly fought its way higher into the air, shooting in at a sharp angle to clear the wall. A moment later, Lycene was clinging to the wooden lattice that enclosed the courtyard, the purpose of which now became clear.

It was an easier dismount than out in the cane forest. Alain simply dropped through the lattice with a flick of his wings, and Tynisa followed after him, hanging on by her arms for a moment before letting herself fall.

He had already commandeered a groom, who climbed up to lead Lycene off to wherever such animals were kept. Other servants had rushed inside the castle to announce the heir’s arrival, for Leose’s seneschal was with them in barely more than a minute. The tall, gaunt Grasshopper-kinden named Lisan Dea came hurrying out to greet them, but stopped with a disapproving stare when she saw Tynisa.

‘I see,’ she said primly. ‘And what do you think your mother will say about this, my prince?’

‘She may say what she likes,’ Alain replied carelessly. ‘We are to have a celebration of my victories over the brigands? Then I may invite who I wish to be my guest. If I wished to bring two Wasp generals and a convicted murderer, then you would find them rooms and show them all due hospitality. Or are you not a steward?’

Tynisa reacted to the word ‘murderer