Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [266]
One of the newcomers was sharing his steed, Tynisa noticed. Sitting ahead of an armoured woman, his wrists tied behind his back to the saddle pommel, was the Spider-kinden Avaris, with his face bruised, looking wretched and miserable. It was plain the newcomers had been busy.
Ten yards away from Tynisa, Dal Arche still had an arrow nocked and half drawn back as though waiting for a target to present itself. Perhaps it now did, although Dal wisely chose not to loose the shot. Two new mounts were picking their way between the trees, the riders cloaked against the gusting snow that only now seemed to be letting up. Tynisa knew them both, even before they were close, and so did Salme Elass.
The man lagging behind slightly was Lowre Cean, looking older than ever, as if physically pained to be drawn from his recluse’s life for this belated adventure. The man he followed was his fellow Prince-Major, Felipe Shah.
Prince Felipe approached Princess Salme slowly, his face expressionless. ‘I see you have caught your bandits,’ he noted.
The look that briefly flashed in the princess’s eyes was pure venom, but her voice remained controlled as she said, ‘A shame the Monarch’s response is too late.’
‘Or just in time,’ Felipe remarked mildly. ‘How many years have you been cautioning us against the great uprising from Rhael, I wonder?’
‘And I was right!’ she snapped. ‘The traitors have defied the law of the Monarch and raised an army, burned villages, murdered . . .’
Felipe guided his horse on a little further until it was beside her. ‘And here you have bearded their great chief, I believe,’ he said mildly. ‘Am I right?’
Another figure stepped from the trees, though keeping a careful distance from Salme Elass. ‘You are, my lord. Dal Arche, they called him at Siriell’s Town,’ explained Gaved, looking as though he would take to the air at the first hint of trouble.
Elass’s hand clenched on her sword hilt, but she simply looked aside, as if disdaining to notice the Wasp.
Tynisa had no such compulsion. ‘You live more lives than most, Gaved,’ she called out to him. ‘Changing your stripes already, is it?’
The look the Wasp gave her was a study in equivocation. ‘You’d be surprised, when a man sets out to have no master, how often he collects two, or even more,’ he replied philosophically.
‘Dal Arche,’ Felipe Shah called.
The brigand chief tensed, arrow still in place, but the newly arrived riders had several shafts already trained on him, and he simply held his shot, the string slightly tensioned, as though he had forgotten it was there. ‘These are the real thing, then, are they? Mercers?’ he enquired. ‘Servants of the Monarch’s throne, not just lackeys to some provincial princess-minor?’
Again Elass quivered with suppressed rage, but she held her tongue.
‘Indeed, and I’m lucky I was able to gather them so quickly. They – we – are spread wide these days, fewer of us each year, and the Commonweal as vast as ever,’ Felipe’s tone was conversational. ‘I’ve heard much of your exploits, Dal Arche.’
The bandit chief glanced first at Soul Je and Mordrec, then at Avaris, and Tynisa read the man’s thoughts in his eyes. He’s wondering if he can spare them somehow, wondering if his confession or his surrender might do it. But the Dragonfly brigand’s face then hardened. He knows there is no way out.
‘This is the man who has rebelled against my rightful authority,’ Elass declared, her voice pure winter. ‘This is the Monarch’s enemy. If you are her Mercers, then do your duty, and I only wish that you had heeded me sooner, and that we had purged Rhael of this filth before they grew so bold.’
To Tynisa’s ears she was overacting, playing the outraged voice of law and justice to cover the terrible, personal hatreds