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By Root 1688 0

would be whether it turned to corruption or not. She swabbed swiftly and aggressively at Tynisa’s face, cleaning away the blood and trying not to look at the twisted line of the scar, and then did her best with what Mordrec had left of the major wound on her hip. Tynisa looked paler than Che had ever seen another human being, or at least one who was still alive. The loss of blood might still kill her, or the shock, or any number of other things. Impulsively, Che took her hand, and was startled by the faint squeeze back. Tynisa was still conscious, and not through any of it had she let go, perhaps fearing that a temporary darkness could become permanent all too easily.

In Che’s mind was a great deal of dread, a terror of a future that did not have this woman in it. We came so far, and it cannot just have been to lose you now.

And: in the midst of her whirl of panicked thoughts, I will not have it.

She blinked. For a moment she had seemed to feel the world shudder, just a little, around her – the air and the earth trembling minutely, out of step with each other. She found herself meeting Tynisa’s gaze.

‘We have to move,’ Che whispered urgently. ‘I’m sorry . . .’

Tynisa squeezed her hand again, stronger this time, and then Thalric stepped in without being asked and picked her up. Straightening with a grunt, he glanced towards the sky, where a flurry of white was blowing between the branches. The last echo of the Commonweal winter had picked this time to enter its death throes.

Soul Je suddenly arrived, a shape leaping and bounding between trees. In one hand he held his bow, an arrow clasped across it.

‘All kinds of shouting,’ he reported. ‘Princess is telling them to get moving. They don’t like it.’

‘It won’t last,’ Dal decided. ‘Some of them will be keen enough to retain her favour. It won’t be all of them, but frankly it won’t need many.’

Thalric began walking away, almost at random, and a moment later they were all on the move.

Dal squinted up at the white-grey sky. ‘The snow’s a curse when it’s light. We can’t hide our tracks. If it’s heavy, though, there’ll be no tracks. We might hide in it all the way to the border.’

‘If it’s heavy, the cold will kill her,’ Che chided him.

‘Then find a way to stop the snow,’ he replied with a shrug. When Che just halted, he carried on.

She looked up at a lattice of branches with the flakes flurrying through.

‘Maure.’

The magician glanced back. ‘Che, no.’

‘Then what good is it, any of it? Or is that the great secret of magic, that it’s dwindled to uselessness, and that’s why the armies of the Apt run roughshod over the world? Have I come so far just to join the losing side?’

‘Che, you’ve power, but you’ve no direction, no training, and the power you have, it’s . . . not native to you. It was never intended for a Beetle-kinden to use.’

Che shrugged. ‘One thing about Beetles is that we adapt.’ And with that, she thrust her arms out into the chill air, directed back the way they had come, towards the invisible Salmae. For a moment nothing happened, and she could conceive of no possible way that she could affect the world. Magic was a fiction, of course, and all her early years of study confirmed that. Then she sensed the faintest catch, as though her fingers had brushed some kind of trailing veil, invisible in the air.

‘Masters of Khanaphes, you crowned me,’ Che murmured, less to herself than to the world at large. ‘You made me something new, me and the Empress – you gave us some mark or mantle of yours, made us your champions, however it works. After a thousand years of exile beneath the earth, you have recognized us. Does that mean nothing? Does that mean that when I speak to the wind, it just whisks my words away? What good is it all, then? What is the point of it all?’

She heard Thalric calling to her distantly, but the wind was picking up now, and she caught none of his meaning.

‘I am caught between two worlds,’ she considered, as Maure shifted from foot to foot beside her, keen to get away. ‘Child of the new, but scion of the old. Nobody could have intended that,