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Dal looked from face to face. ‘The Salmae have already shown us that they won’t accept us as neighbours. They wrote that message clear enough. Now we’ve sent them our reply, in proper noble language.’

‘We’ve declared war,’ Mordrec translated.

‘That’s what I said,’ agreed Dal, seeing Soul Je, who seldom spoke, nodding in agreement.

Dal turned to view his followers, casting his gaze over all of them. The new faces, those who had formerly been the peasants of Sara Tela, were staring at the dead Mercers with a world of possibilities in their eyes.

Twenty-Four

Salme Elass, Princess of Leose, felt herself poised on the brink of a great height, and the time had come to cast herself from it.

She sat in the chamber she governed from: not for her a garden, like Felipe Shah, but a high-ceilinged room where lofty windows let in coloured shafts of light that crossed each other like sword blades. There was a warrior statue on either side of her, the kind that the ancient magicians of her people had supposedly been able to imbue with life in order to defend their royal charges. All lost, she thought. Yet another thing lost, and nobody will do anything to stop these sands running through our fingers.

There were some, she knew, who had already grown sick with that loss, so that they turned away from the destiny that princes lived for. Felipe Shah had grown weak after the war, cut so deep by his losses that he feared to take any action, lest some further calamity befall him. Lowre Cean was another, although Elass still had a use for him.

And the Monarch is a third. A strong Monarch would make a strong Commonweal, but there was only silence from Shon Fhor. The land might as well now be leaderless.

It is time for someone of will and ambition to take a stand and recover what we have lost. The Commonweal can rise again, but those of us who are not grown palsied by doubt must act.

On either side of the two statues stood her chief servants: Isendter Whitehand, her champion, and Lisan Dea, her seneschal, both of them bound to her by the iron chains of loyalty. Both also thinking they knew best, but they were not prince or princess. They were not even Dragonfly-kinden, merely servants.

The brigands to the south were growing bold, no doubt expecting the usual Mercer patrols in response, just enough manpower diverted in their direction to make their raids difficult and costly and persuade them to look elsewhere for their loot. Thus the Commonweal had been dealing with its internal problems for years, either letting the villains run riot in abandoned provinces, or passing them on to a neighbour, who passed the problem on in turn, all motivated by some hope that time itself would smooth over the growing cracks.

No more. Elass had already sent out summonses to those minor nobles who she knew would heed her, and would therefore act. They were few enough, a half-dozen tiny families with a handful of house guards and a minuscule levy available to them. There were others, though, who had the resources but lacked the will. She needed a standard to inspire them, for the name of the Salmae was not yet great enough in its own right.

Ungrateful wretches, she thought bitterly. Her husband had died in the war, and her eldest son, too, and then her middle son had been taken by Felipe and sent to die in the Lowlands. And still they will not rise up at my bidding.

It would be different, she knew, if it were Lowre Cean sounding the horn and leading the charge. The old man’s name still carried weight, one of the few Commonweal leaders who had won any significant victories against the Empire. The effort of it had worn Lowre out, though, since he had lost his lands, his wife, his adored son. Even though he lived on Salmae soil, and by her graces, he would not draw his sword for her.

Until now, I hope, for something had changed. The girl had come, the one who had been trailing Alain’s footsteps so much. Elass was unsure of the Lowlander’s significance, but apparently Felipe Shah had been much