Read Online Heirs of the Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Free Book Online

knife-edge of reflex, his death within her gift, she could afford to talk, to make him understand, relishing his hatred and casting it right back at him.
    ‘No fool would make you ambassador,’ he told her. ‘Wait – this is where the airship visits. Did Maker send you here?’
    When she neither confirmed nor denied it, he bared his teeth. ‘Just do what you came for and go back to the Lowlands,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want trouble. Just go.’
    That was too much for her. ‘And how do you imagine I can just go back after what happened?’ she hissed, bunching herself to spring. His hand was slightly lower now, the talk taking him off his guard. In a moment, she would have him.
    ‘Oh,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘the Moth boy died, then.’
    It froze her even as she was about lunge for him. The Moth boy died, then. For, of course he had. Not when she herself had run him through; nor even later in the Collegium infirmary. While Tynisa had been off chasing her father, the Moth had levered himself up from his sickbed to try and save his own people from the Empire and there, in the remote mountain fastnesses of Tharn, he had died. The delay had been just enough, after her terrible deed, to fool Tynisa into believing that she might not, after all, be the woman who had killed her half-sister’s lover.
    ‘Is that what this is about?’ Gaved asked Tynisa, seeing the struggle inside her. ‘You’re running away?’
    Every instinct howled for him then, but her own guilt was like a grey anchor that held her back, so that she twitched for action but did not lunge, sending him two steps back with his palm directed squarely towards her forehead. She wanted so very badly to kill him, but something within her continued withering and shrinking away from her own thoughts.
    ‘Look,’ the Wasp was saying, ‘I’m doing all right here. I’m clear of the black and gold for the first time in my life. We’ve settled down. They don’t . . . know how it was, with me.’
    His own past was surely sufficiently larded with bloody-handed deeds that the Commonwealers would want to be rid of him, if they knew. Probably he had turned his hunting talents upon them during the Empire’s war, and even Siriell’s renegades were unlikely to forgive that. Just as his reaction to her had mirrored hers to him, so might he have kindred reasons for seeking her silence.
    Besides, he had said ‘We’, and that meant he was still with the strange Spider girl, Sef, he had taken from Jerez, and surely Tynisa bore that wretched woman no ill will.
    I should have just killed him.
    Suddenly there were repercussions and uncertainties, no matter how honest he was being with her, and an uncomfortable part of herself said that was because life was never as simple as she was trying to paint it.
    But she had come this far, and she knew that, after killing him, she would be able to paint again, to interpret the result however she wished. What other witnesses were there to gainsay her? She realized that she was on the brink of a precipice within her mind, and to go one step further would be to lose some fraying but fundamental connection with the world.
    She felt her body flow into line, taking up her fighting stance within herself, even though nothing showed outwardly, so that, when the attack came, she would be sublimely ready for it.
    Gaved must have sensed something, too, for he exploded into motion that was a counterbalance for her poised stillness. His wings took him back, ten feet away from the fire, his hands outstretched, one before him, the other pointing upwards.
    Already the Dragonfly-kinden were dropping down towards them. A half-dozen came sleeting down around the fire like random arrows, while Tynisa could hear at least a dozen more approaching from all round. In their bickering, she and Gaved had let them get perilously close.
    That they were Siriell’s Town natives was clear enough: there was nothing of Prince Felipe’s court about them.