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The great double doors were barred, and apparently unguarded, but there must have been watchers above, for Tynisa had a glimpse of flurried movement within, at a higher storey. Then again there was nothing, and little enough sign that the place was occupied at all.

‘So who lives here?’ she asked.

‘The Salmae and their retainers and, yes, they rattle about in there like dried peas when some other noble hasn’t come to guest with them. These castles, all of them, they’re built like they’re for people nine feet tall with a thousand servants each. Very few of them are even half used: the same way as half the land in the Commonweal seems like it’s given over to outlaws or beasts because there aren’t enough law-abiding folk to till the soil. Place isn’t what it was.’

The doors opened then, before Gaved could expand on his theory. A pair of Dragonfly-kinden warriors, in full scintillating armour, scrutinized them uncharitably, before a slender, grey-clad Grasshopper woman hurried out to greet the newcomers. Behind her, Tynisa could see a courtyard of some kind, that was crossed by strange shadows.

‘Ah, Turncoat,’ she observed, ‘you come with news?’ At his nod, the Grasshopper inclined her narrow head. She was tall and sallow, like most of her kin, and her long hair was pulled back into a tail. Tynisa guessed that she was on the far side of middle age, but she had a straightness of bearing and lightness of step that belied it.

‘You’d better come in then, you and your . . . woman,’ the woman suggested frostily.

The iron gaze of the guards still did not trust these arrivals in the least.

Behind the gates, Tynisa saw that the courtyard had a roof of sorts, but one that was no more than a lattice of sturdy timbers that would keep out neither enemy nor weather. She presumed that some manner of covers or hatches could be put in place if there was ever an assault on Castle Leose, or perhaps the courtyard was intended to be abandoned to the foe, who could then be penned in and shot at from the castle proper. In the end she was forced to admit that her grasp of siege warfare was lacking, and that whoever had gifted the Commonwealers with these edifices had been of a strange turn of mind.

There were servants, though: Dragonflies and Grasshoppers who led their badly used horse off for feeding and grooming in stalls that were set into the castle walls to the left and right. Before them was another grand portal, this one inlaid with symmetrical patterns of brass, or perhaps gold. A smaller portal was set into a corner of one of the grand doors, and the grey-robed woman now sent a youth of her own kinden hurrying through it.

‘The princess has been sent for,’ she explained. ‘She will come in her own time, as I’m sure you know, Turncoat.’

Gaved nodded. ‘We can wait.’

A jug of good honeydew was brought to them by another servant, whereupon Gaved simply seated himself on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, on a blanket he had already scavenged from his saddle.

‘You know her, I take it,’ Tynisa noted, nodding towards the Grasshopper woman, who was currently chastising one of the grooms over some point of detail. ‘She seems a barrel of laughs.’

‘She’s not so bad,’ Gaved said mildly. ‘Her name’s Lisan Dea, and she’s been seneschal to the Salmae since before the old man died.’

Tynisa realized, with a vertiginous lurch, that ‘the old man’ meant Salma’s father, of course. Feeling suddenly off balance, abruptly too close, too soon, to the heart of things, she changed the topic with, ‘I’d get tired being called “Turncoat” all the time.’

Gaved gave her a glance without expression. ‘I reckon they might have chosen something worse, so I’ll settle for it.’ A moment later he was scrabbling to his feet, as both of the grand and gold-chased doors swung open.

A woman stormed through them, outpacing her retinue of attendants. She was tall, for a Dragonfly, and more imperious than a regiment of Wasp-kinden. Her heart-shaped face was perfect