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The pale-haired Mantis paused a moment at Salme Elass’s side, gazing down at his mistress. His gauntlet was buckled on, its blade jutting out between his middle fingers, and he flexed it in and out as he watched her: now forwards like a punch-dagger, now folding back along his arm. For a moment Tynisa sensed uncertainty in him, and she wondered whether he might have some reason to fear her, after all. Then he came striding to meet her, and the silence seemed to grow and grow around them both. The light touched brightly on his brooch too, the match for her own.

‘You have lost a companion, I think,’ he told her, when close enough to be heard without raising his voice. For a moment she thought he meant Varmen, but then she realized that he must have sensed the change, the absence of the ghost.

‘I sent him away, in the end,’ she declared. ‘The price was too high.’

He regarded her levelly. ‘Some might say that it was now that you would most need such aid.’

She forced a smile. ‘I’ll beat you on my own. I need no crutch, Master Whitehand.’

His nod was brief but approving. ‘You are worthy to wear the badge, then,’ he said simply, but the words seemed to strike her deeper than she could account for, drawing out parts of her that had withered in Tisamon’s shadow.

I am a Weaponsmaster, after all. Live or die.

‘And the justice of your cause?’ he asked, nodding towards the little pack of brigands.

‘And the justice of yours?’ Because his words had practically invited the comparison. ‘The fight is all.’

‘We understand one another.’ In a single step, he had put a very precise distance between them, a fighting distance, and her sword was in her hand without her needing to reach for it.

Even as he cut for her, she heard in her mind the beat of the Martiette, back in the ballroom of Leose. She already knew him, knew his skill and his style, the pattern of how he fought, taught to her in that dance. He perhaps thought he knew her just as well, but she had been playing host to Tisamon since then, and been twisted in his grip. She was no longer the same dance partner as before.

The first series of cuts came as though she and he had arranged them by prior agreement, as he made to step within her reach and bring his shorter, more agile blade to bear, twisting his wrist to lash at her from all angles, and she stepped back and round, circling, letting him drive her, and adjusting her stance for the sloping ground but catching each blow as it darted towards her, turning it aside with her blade and, once, with her quillons. Then, without warning, she had taken two steps to his one, widening the gap between them and putting him at her sword’s point, and she lunged without giving him a chance to react. It was unfair, perhaps, that it was a move he would not see coming, not part of their previous course of dealings, but her sword led her into it, and she took the opening as soon as she had made it.

He did not even step back. Instead, his metal claw cut across his body, her sword’s tip almost trapped between it and the spines of his arm. Then he moved further in, for a moment almost body to body, then past her, turning as neatly as any dancer – even as she spun on the ball of her foot, drawing her blade free, backing up to allow space again.

Two sharp lines of pain were clamouring in her mind, torn through her arming jacket below her right shoulder, dug there by the spikes of his off-hand arm.

His face bore a slight smile, and his eyes were encouraging, almost genial. He was enjoying himself, but not at her expense. She was impressing him, even though it was her blood glistening on his spines.

Then he drove straight at her, destroying all the distance she had tried to create. His swift blade flicked past her face, only her last-moment sway saving an eye from it, and then it was back to cut across her body, too close to be parried. She let her left leg fold, shoulder almost touching her knee, letting the strike pass her by. A heavier weapon would have left him open but, when she tried to