Heirs of the Blade Read Online Free PDF Page A

prowess. Any moment, she expected winged challengers to drop from the skies to arrest her.
    Instead, she walked through the scattered buildings of Suon Ren as though in a dream, and nobody so much as looked at her – rather, they ignored her pointedly. She was not part of their world. The Dragonfly-kinden peasants toiling in the fields, the lookouts atop tall platforms, the citizens of Suon Ren as they strolled between its buildings, or spoke together in low voices, they none of them admitted to her existence.
    She found the Collegiate ambassador outside the embassy. Stenwold had mentioned this man, one Gramo Galltree, an academic long forgotten in his home city and now on a one-man diplomatic mission. He was an old Beetle-kinden, his hair white and wispy, his dark face creased by time and the sun. He could have been any elderly merchant or College lecturer, save that he stood with the ease of a younger man, and he wore a yellow knee-length tunic with a dark green sleeveless robe over it, clothes in the Dragonfly style. After she had stood, for some minutes, watching him tend a little vegetable garden, he looked up and bobbed his head at her, seeming unsurprised to find her there.
    ‘Master Galltree?’ she asked, and saw him instantly revise his opinion as he heard her accent.
    ‘Ah, official business, then?’ He carefully leant his rake against the embassy wall. ‘I apologize. There are a few communes of Spider-kinden here in the Commonweal, so I’d thought you were local. Please, please, I’m a terrible host. Won’t you come in? You have letters for me perhaps?’
    Before she could stem the flow of his words, he was bustling inside, forcing her to either follow him or abandon him.
    ‘So, what matters has the Assembly sent you to me about?’ His voice drifted from some other room as she entered. The interior of the embassy had once been dominated by a few items of Collegiate furniture, making her wonder just how grand Galltree’s enterprise had originally been, when he arrived here decades before. Everything had now been shoved back against the wall, though, and mostly shunted together into one corner, so as to leave as much open space as possible. The windows were thrown open to try and counterbalance the heaviness of the stone walls, and those walls were hidden behind light hangings in tans and faded reds. The overall impression was that Galltree seldom thought much about his original home.
    He bustled back in, even then, carefully holding a steaming pot and a little tripod, and set them up in the centre of the floor, as though he was going camping. He sat down, with remarkable ease for a man of his years, and gestured for her to join him. Everything about him, and about her surroundings, was subtly off, with nothing working as she expected, and she felt obscurely threatened, keeping a hand on her rapier hilt for comfort. In the corner of her eye was the suggestion of spectres waiting for their moment: her doubts and fears in a grey robe, with a blank-eyed, accusing face.
    ‘My name is Tynisa Maker,’ she told him. ‘I’m Stenwold’s ward.’
    He nodded amiably, as if he had expected no less. ‘I knew that Master Maker would not forget Collegium’s most far-flung outpost. He sends word?’
    Galltree’s expression was painfully earnest, and Tynisa took a moment to reorder her words. She was no emissary, yet surely she would secure an audience more swiftly if everyone assumed she was. She would never have to claim it as a fact, when Galltree already seemed to have made the assumption. ‘I wish an audience with Prince Shah,’ she told him.
    He looked a little disappointed that he was not being let in on her supposed official business, but he nodded amiably enough, filling a couple of shallow cups from the pot, and then let a little wrapped package steep in each of them. ‘I cannot say whether Prince Felipe is in residence at the moment. He has been in and out, as we say, in the last month or so, visiting