Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1), Adrian Tchaikovsky [13 ebook reader .txt] 📗

more starving Dragonfly child in a land that the Wasp armies had chewed their way through?

She remembered the war: the one that had so recently ended. Back then she had been a prince’s champion and her badge a source of pride. Sword to sword, she’d had no equal, and this in the Commonweal, where the art of the duel had been perfected centuries before. When the Wasp Empire brought their challenge she had laughed, they all had. Oh, certainly the Wasps had always been a hostile presence on the Commonweal’s eastern border, but they were savages, soon riled and soon slapped down.

Those few merchants and vagrants who warned that the Empire had changed in the last generation were ignored. The Monarch of the Commonweal commanded a nobility unparalleled with sword and lance and bow, and a levy of peasants vast enough to swallow the Empire a hundred times over. The outcome of the war was never in doubt.

Of all their predictions, only that last had been true.

A fugitive in her own country, she crouched and spied on these men who had come to take her. There was no mistaking them: not soldiers but some band of trackers sniffing after the bounty the Empire would pay for her head. There were more than a score of them, men who had been peasants, and then soldiers, and were now just survivors. She saw Dragonfly and Grasshopper-kinden amongst them, and a handful of Wasps who were probably deserters. It was their leader who caught Ineskae’s attention, though.

It wasn’t that you didn’t see Wasp-kinden women. They came with the army, but as slaves and kept women and whores. The Wasps had a firm idea of where women belonged in their Empire. And yet here was one of their delicate maidens out on her own, and in command of a pack of killers. This one had seen better times, it was true. She was lean and angular, and wore a knee-length brigandine that had been ill-used and stitched back together. Her fair hair was hacked short, and she carried herself with every bit as much belligerence as a man of her people. Across her back was the same style of Commonwealer sword that Ineskae herself carried.

What, then...? the old Mantis asked herself. What does this one want? And what do I do about it? The answer to that one came readily enough. I suppose I kill her. That’s how this usually goes.

Yet there was something disturbing about her, impossible to define, impossible to ignore. Ineskae reached out for her sword – not an act of the body, but of the mind – and yet her hand remained empty. Something was wrong.

She was too old and too sick of her own existence to know fear. More, there was nothing about this tatty-looking mercenary to strike awe into her. This was just some runaway with a Dragonfly blade, some hunter for hire. There was nothing.

But still her sword avoided her grasp and she slunk away. There would be a clean death in some other place. Better to die crossing swords with some ignorant brigand or fighting beasts in a Wasp pit. So many better ways to die.

Two nights later, and Ineskae could not even find herself a fight.

This was some wretched little village, barely a half-dozen wooden huts and some animal pens. She was not welcome. The locals feared her. She had been rattling at their doors demanding drink this last hour, but each family had closed and shuttered their homes, just as they would if the fierce winter wind were crying outside. Eshe had stood in the centre of the village, the still point she was orbiting around, watching her sadly.

She had no wish to be sober. Sobriety brought memory in its wake like a leprous beggar. Outside, under the keen and starless sky, Ineskae took her sword in both hands, but this was an enemy she could not fight.

Past midnight, feverish and trembling, the last veil of her drunkenness was stripped away and she could not stop herself remembering Aleth Rael.

Weaponsmasters were supposed to pass on their skills, but in all her long life she had trained only the one student: Aleth Rael, the swift, the laughing. She had loved him. She had ached to see him fight, or dance, or paint. When he had won his own badge, in the secret trials of their order, she had felt her heart swell until she thought it would break. He had been all the children, all the family she felt she would ever need.

And he had gone out into the world, and she had known that he was destined for great things. He was going to be a general, a diplomat, a man who could have forged a future.

And the Empire had come, and he had come home and gone to war, as all of them had gone to war. When she was drunk she could forget that he was dead.

That was what Eshe did not understand. He was so well meaning. He tried to keep the drink from her hands because he thought that would make things better. But when she had to remember that her student, her surrogate son, Aleth Rael was dead, it tore at her like no sword or claw ever had.

By morning the two of them were gone, she staggering off into the wilderness, Eshe silently dogging her steps, following the faded track to the next town. The cold would not take her, the wild beasts and the bandits avoided her. And so she ended up as she always ended up, seeking the oblivion of drink, because it was the only oblivion she could find.

Three days later she dragged her feet into some other no-name place with the rising sun, weary as death but still not dead. This time she did not even have the energy to beat on doors and make demands. She sat down in the cleared space that formed the centre of the village, kicking aside a detritus