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When she had awoken, the nobles 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