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‘By upbringing if not by blood, Your Highness,’ Che confirmed. ‘Your officer told me that she has freed your prisoners.’

She sensed at once that she had got it wrong, yet that was a feeling she was familiar with, and it no longer stung her like it used to. Instead she concentrated her gaze on Salme Elass, noting the seething fire behind her eyes, the raw emotions the woman held on a fraying leash behind that icy expression.

What has Tynisa done? But she did not ask. Any words from Che, without full knowledge, would only harm her position, and she could see truth rising up behind Elass’s expression like a fish out of deep water, towards an inevitable breaching of the surface.

And Elass was on her feet, in a single, almost brutal motion, with fists clenched. Despite this, her voice was stony calm when she declared, ‘She has killed my son.’

Che held that furious, knife-edged gaze, and registered no surprise in herself at all. The fact, now it was spoken, seemed as though inevitable from the first moment Che had seen the two of them together. Tynisa had killed Salme Alain, and any misdeed regarding the prisoners was a poor second.

‘I see,’ was all she said. Che was waiting for a rush of feeling, the guilt, the sense of grief, the apologies, all the usual baggage that seemed so inseparable from her normal dealings with the world: taking responsibility for all sorts of of aspects of it she could do nothing about. The reaction remained conspicuous in its absence and, for once in her life Che remained wholly calm. Thalric would be proud of me.

‘We will hunt her down and execute her like the base criminal she is,’ Elass hissed, stepping closer. ‘And you will help us, Beetle-kinden.’

Che sighed deeply, mostly in regret for what she was going to say, because she was now about to make Uncle Sten proud of her, too, in a curious way. She felt his presence close to her, remembering his bold speeches delivered in the Collegium Assembly, his lack of compromise, his locking horns with his adversaries and casting them down, through rhetoric and logic and simple truth.

‘Princess, you have lost two sons,’ she stated.

The very words brought Elass up short, and there was a world of things to be read on her face for a moment, and none of them pleasant.

‘I knew Salme Dien. He was a good friend of mine, and a hero of the Lowlander war with the Wasp-kinden. They named a city after him, back home. He was a good man, and he knew a great deal about justice and responsibility. I think Tynisa and I, coming here, therefore expected a land of law and justice.’

The gathering remained utterly silent, waiting for Elass’s next words: likely a death sentence hanging in the air, and awaiting only her order to see it carried out. The princess just stared, though, as if struck dumb by the temerity of this short and ungainly foreigner.

‘You have taken me prisoner. Am I a criminal? If so, what is my crime? I have done nothing against you, or against your people. I came here of my own free will to see what could be done to resolve matters concerning my sister. That is all. Imprison me, harm me, and you have no justice.’

‘And how do you plan to resolve matters, as you put it?’ Elass demanded.

Che met her venomous gaze without flinching, remembering another Dragonfly-kinden she had known: Felise Mienn, who had died alongside Tisamon. Stenwold had brought that woman back to the Commonweal, shortly beforehand, and Che recalled very well how Commonwealer justice had then treated Mienn, the kinslayer.

‘My sister has killed your son,’ she stated. ‘She has freed your prisoners, all of them criminals. Why do you think she has done these things?’

‘It hardly matters,’ Elass snapped.

‘She has done it because she is not in her right mind. Because madness has touched her.’ And she felt a sudden freedom that she could say what she was about to say, and not one of them there would dismiss her as mad herself. ‘The ghost of her father, who died in violence and fury, has come to haunt her, and leads her astray. She is not responsible