Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [5]
Ma Leyd’s expression became as stony as her home. ‘I saw all too much of the Commonweal, dear, when I travelled across it to find where the Empire had left my husband’s corpse.’
‘So you’ve seen the occupied principalities. That’s not the real Commonweal at all,’ Tynisa shot back, quite happy to take this woman on in whatever field of combat she preferred. She discovered that she was standing, though she had no memory of rising to her feet. Even so, she was forced to look up in order to lock eyes with the sitting Mole Cricket. Her hand itched.
In measured stages, the enormous woman also stood. ‘You’d best not tell me what I know, dear.’ She was surely strong enough to tear Tynisa limb from limb, but the rapier’s whisper told her that speed would defeat strength always, so she tensed . . .
‘Enough!’ Allanbridge burst out, leaping to his feet as well. ‘You,’ he said, jabbing a finger at Tynisa, ‘you want to be on my ship tomorrow, you go outside and cursed well keep your mouth to yourself.’
Tynisa stared mutinously at him, grappling with the frustrated anger within her, but already she was regretting her outburst. Her temper seemed to be a thing apart these days, something she had less and less control of. Her hand twitched again, belated and unbidden, near her rapier hilt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she forced out, and left Ma Leyd’s cave hurriedly, to find that a misting of rain was feathering down outside. It fitted her mood.
Months ago the plan had been made, back in a city that had been home to her for so long. Now Collegium had changed, and she had changed. She was marked with blood, every bit as much as the Mosquito-kinden magician who had enslaved her in Capitas.
She had been shipped back home like a slave, a calculated peace offering made by a Wasp named Thalric, who had been spymaster and turncoat in his time, and was now luxuriating in the title of Regent Consort, or some such – or so Tynisa was given to understand. Of all of them in that war, he had slipped through almost unscathed, to claim power and glory at the end of it. She loathed him, and perhaps she loathed him still more for thinking to bring her back. She had departed the Empire with only some slave’s shabby clothes and a pair of matching gold brooches, one hers, the other her dead father’s. Not even with the rapier: she had lost that when the Mosquito caught her. Its return would come later, inexplicable as dreams.
Stenwold, who had raised her as his own daughter, had been waiting for her when she alighted from Thalric’s flying machine. His face had been all relief at seeing her alive, but deep in his eyes she had seen a condemnation of her failure. She had not done enough. She had gone to rescue a man, and brought back only an eyewitness account of his bloody end.
Tisamon.
And then the news had kept coming: the fallen leaves of war; the blood on her own hands become indelible. Each day some new word had come to trouble her, peeling away what little armour she had retained against the privations of the world, until she could not stay in Collegium longer, nor could she remain amongst those that she had failed, for all they told her it did not matter. She could not stay, yet she had nowhere to go.
There had been one night when she had awakened, screaming, from her dreams . . . arm red with blood to the elbow – his blade running with it, the Wasp soldiers stabbing and hacking as though what they struck was a piece of butchered meat and not a man . . . his smile, always his smile, the last to fade . . . She had awoken from that dream and known that she had reached the end of her time in Collegium. Either she must flee or she must bring matters to a close. In the darkness of midnight, her hand had reached out, unbidden, to close about the hilt of her rapier.
How had it come to be there, when it had last been consigned to adorn some Imperial collector’s wall or treasure vault? Had some agent provocateur read her mind, and placed