Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [17]
‘What shall you do?’ Galltree asked her later, after she had listlessly picked at the late supper he had prepared.
‘Would you let me stay here even if the prince wanted me gone?’
Galltree twisted the silk of his robe wretchedly, and she held a hand up to forestall his crisis of conscience. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She took a deep breath. ‘This Siriell’s Town, it’s a rough place?’
‘Lawless.’ Galltree nodded emphatically. ‘Rhael Province – the family that ruled there under Felipe’s, they’re all gone, long gone, I think. In such places, others creep in, fugitives from the order of the Commonweal. These days, there are many such provinces, especially since the war.’
Her hand was on her sword hilt again, and she could sense the ghosts gathering close, waiting to hear her decision. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. Home or die, and how convenient that both are to be found in the same direction. I don’t even have to choose right now. She found that she had no intention of rejoining Allanbridge, if indeed he was not already on his way back to Collegium. Home held nothing but sharp edges for her now. She could not look Stenwold or Che in the face without seeing dead Achaeos reflected in their eyes – and how she felt him close and gloating with that admission – and she was being forced out of Suon Ren so very politely. How good of the world to provide a sink like Siriell’s Town to drown herself in.
She took out Allanbridge’s rough map, and looked Galltree straight in the eye. ‘Anything to add to this?’ she asked.
The road to Siriell’s Town was a matter of heading north-east as best she could: bridging the canals, and then heading over increasingly hilly country until she had made the subtle transition from land that still knew the hoe today all the way down through a gradient of neglect, to land that had not been sowed in a decade or more. She saw a few villages on the way, and avoided them by choice. There were no other travellers, no merchants or messengers, no flying machines overhead. The sense of the land was one of quiet desolation. She knew she would feel different if the Commonweal had accepted her in any way, but aside from Felipe Shah’s brief moment of openness, she felt more a stranger here than she had done when she arrived – and even the prince thought it would be best if she left.
Each morning, and sporadically throughout the day, she checked her bearings as best she could by Allanbridge’s landmarks, thinking, So I can’t miss the place can I, Jons? As if I believe that.
But when she came within sight of Siriell’s Town – having veered west some distance from her intended course – she found that Allanbridge had been telling nothing but the truth. It was indeed a town, or something resembling one, but at its heart was a castle upon a hill, and Tynisa saw instantly that it looked something like the exemplar of Felipe’s own. Complete, it had constituted a six- or seven-floored hexagonal tower, narrowing towards a point at the top. The walls were lanced with arrowslit windows, so that no attacker on the ground or in the air would have been safe from the defenders’ missiles. Tynisa, having observed the sturdy walls of Collegium and the Sarnesh fortifications, could see only absences here: nowhere to place artillery, not that the Dragonfly-kinden would know what to do with it; no reinforcing of the walls, so that catapult or leadshotter assault would hammer them down all the sooner. This was a castle that had been designed to hold off men from another age.
It would not even serve for that purpose,