Heirs of the Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky Read Free Book Online

come.’ Laid out like that, it seemed a pitiful excuse for such a journey.
    The Dragonfly was staring at her so intensely that she thought she must have delivered a mortal insult somehow. His casual manner had evaporated entirely. ‘No one has come,’ he said softly. ‘The prince has waited, but no word has arrived from your Lowlands, for this duty of duties. No doubt your great men of the Lowlands have much to occupy them.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Tell me of him.’
    ‘Will your prince not hear me?’ she asked, frustrated all of a sudden. She imagined briefly an infinite sequence of servants, each one demanding every detail of her tale before passing her into the hands of the next one, until her words grew stale and hard as month-old bread. The next words escaped before she could stop them: ‘Please, I’ve come so far . . .’
    He sighed. ‘Forgive our poor hospitality. When our seneschal brought word of your arrival, perhaps it was natural to assume that Stenwold Maker was attempting to further his campaign against the Empire by some other means. We have not treated you as befits a guest, and certainly not as befits one on such a gracious and solemn errand. Please, tell me of Salme Dien.’
    She stared at him, trying to recast him as something other than simply a Dragonfly man, not young and yet ageless, wearing clothes that were surely less fine than Lioste’s had been, but then, of course, he had been travelling , and these were clothes meant for the road.
    ‘Master – my lord – Your Majesty,’ she stammered, making him a College magnate and a Spider Aristos and finally an emperor.
    ‘Prince Felipe,’ he said quietly, ‘or “My Prince”, if you were a retainer. Or Shah, if you prefer. But please’ – and his voice shook just a little despite his iron control of it – ‘tell me of my kin, of my boy. Tell me of Salme Dien.’
    And so she did. As he sat on the floor like a child, she told him how Salma had formed his own army, his own nomadic principality of the lost and the fugitive. She spoke of how the errant prince had won the respect of the Sarnesh Ants, and how he had led the assault on the Imperial Seventh Army, breaking their lines and destroying their siege engines, so that the Ant-kinden could make their assault.
    She told him how Salma had died in that battle, but sensed that those were not the details he wished to hear. Instead she passed on to the city that Salma’s followers were building west of Sarn, to which they had given the name Princep Salma in his memory.
    Of the Butterfly-kinden woman who had been Salma’s lover, she said nothing.
    Felipe Shah listened in silence to every word, nothing of his thoughts showing in his expression, and his gaze remained clear when she had finished. ‘He met his destiny well. Would that we were all so lucky. My Salme Dien became a true prince of the Commonweal before he died, and that is something that many of us who bear the empty title never achieve. What would you have of me, Tynisa?’
    The question caught her unprepared. ‘I’m not here to ask for anything.’
    ‘Nonetheless, I am in your debt. If you will not barter for my favour now, then return to seek it, or send word. You have done me a courtesy fit for princes, one that I would not have expected to come from the Lowlands, where such things are not understood. You have brought Salme Dien back to me.’
    She felt embarrassed at the praise, not knowing what to do with it.
    ‘Prince Felipe, I seek nothing . . .’ I have nothing. She now realized that she had come to the end of her road. And what now? Walk on to Capitas and attack the Empress? Is all my life shrunk to this moment? She thought of asking to stay in Suon Ren, but the idea of living as a recluse in the midst of all of these elegant, alien people, with nobody but Gramo and perhaps the prince to talk to . . . She would become a shadow, a nothing, waning and dwindling in the vacuum of their turned backs. ‘I . . .’ she