Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [225]
And she had got it exactly right, not overstated, but her point clearly made and understood, and everyone there looked to Salme Elass, knowing that Che was correct, but they said nothing.
‘It matters not,’ said the princess, at long last. Her tone was very quiet, but the silence was its match, and everyone there heard her. ‘It matters not whether she was mad or sane or haunted. She killed my son. I do not want justice. I do not want a trial. If she may go mad and murder who she will, so shall I. I will ransack the whole world in order to have my vengeance on that bastard Lowlands girl. You say I had two sons? Do you think I care what happened to that traitor boy who ran off to Felipe Shah’s court and abandoned me? Alain was all that was left to me, and I will have your sister executed in front of me. If the justice of the Monarch or the Lowlands or the bloody-handed Empress herself stands in my way, I shall batter it down.’ Her fierce glare cowed them all, her subjects and her followers, making them accomplices in all that she said. ‘I shall have vengeance for my son’s death, written in the blood of Tynisa Maker. And as for you . . .’ Abruptly there were guards holding Che’s arms once more. ‘We shall see how mad she is that she will not give herself to me to save her sister.’
Forty
The silence that had fallen around the fire was total: with the startled brigands-turned-fugitives staring at her in its guttering light. They had dug in to make camp, excavating a hollow between the roots of a great tree with practised skill and turfing out years’ worth of dead leaf mulch until the arching ribs of its roots had become the vaults of their low ceiling, and thus their fire would be hidden from any nocturnal hunters the Salmae might have sent out.
Or no longer the Salmae, for Salme Elass was the last of them now.
‘You killed the prince,’ Dal Arche said slowly. ‘I knew you’d make a play for my role sooner or later, but I think you might have overdone proving your qualifications, girl.’
‘I have no wish to be an outlaw,’ Tynisa snapped back.
‘Whoever does?’ remarked Avaris the Spider. ‘It’s more an honour that someone else pins to your chest, Bella Tynisa.’
‘The road leading to where we sit now is the same for us all,’ Dal stated, ‘although some of us apparently choose to ride it at a gallop. We’ve all been where you’ve been, girl; it’s just you’ve decided to achieve in grand style, and all at once, what most of us have made the work of a lifetime.’
‘Next you’ll be telling me that it’s a noble calling, to be a brigand. Or are you claiming to be a revolutionary, set on casting down the nobility?’ She tried to sound disdainful, but there was a curious note of need in her voice, despite herself. Can that be it? Can these ragged wretches have been right all along? Because that would mean I could justify what I’ve done . . .
‘A bandit, a man-hunter, a lawbreaker, a bow for hire,’ Dal replied. ‘I never wanted any grand cause. If it looks like I’m fighting tyrants, it’s only because the world’s so damned full of them that you can’t draw a sword without crossing some of their laws.’ He sighed, staring at the embers of the fire. ‘Easy as easy, it is, to become an outlaw. Come the war, they drafted me for their levy – emptied my village, and got pretty much everyone I knew from there killed. When the war was done, well, there was nothing to go back for, and nothing to eat. Twelve years of fighting and the farms had been turned into battlefields, or just left fallow because the labour was all off trailing the pike. And what food there was, half of it went to the Empire, can you believe? Terms of the Treaty of Pearl said that the food out of our mouths went to feed their soldiers. The other half went to the nobles, and you can bet they didn’t starve. Or maybe I’m too harsh. Maybe some of them stinted themselves and fed their people, but I never saw sign of it. They were our lords and masters after all, our betters, so there