Heirs of the Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky Page A

blanket, and still sensed the biting frost as though it was an enemy stalking outside the walls of the house, rattling the shutters and hunting for a way in.
    It was hard for her to live thus in that double-walled house. Lying in the inner compartment at night, the outer house was busy with the sound of creaking wood and the battering of the wind. As the nights grew even colder, her mind grew tired of simply presenting her with shadow puppets of the dead, and diversified instead into footsteps – so that she could lie there awake, with Gaved and Sef and their servant all asleep, and listen to Achaeos’s shuffling tread, his nails scraping on the wall as though his figment was searching for a way in, out of the cold. But he has already gone to that final cold – and, if he found his way in, he would bring it with him.
    And she knew he was not with her, but was dead by her hand, and that she was slowly losing her mind over it, but she felt fear stealing up on her even so.
    One morning she awoke and knew that something must be wrong. There was a peculiarity to the light that pried through the edges of the house. She slipped from her hammock, a motion she was now practised enough to be confident with, and ventured into the outer section of the house, wrapped in a blanket.
    There was a strange pale glare showing at the edge of the shutters, and limning each panel of the walls, as though the light of the sun had swooped very close to the world, but without bringing any of its heat. Bewildered, Tynisa wrestled with one of the wall-panels, until she could move it aside.
    She stared, caught utterly unawares by the sight. The world outside had died, and some vast hand had draped it in a shroud. Everywhere the contours of the land had been smoothed by a universal covering of white, flurrying whenever the wind picked up. The lake had shrunk: clear water still lapped at its centre, but a shelf of solid ice had reached out from the shore as far as Tynisa could make out. She stared at it all, awestruck in a way that she had not been since her childhood.
    She realized that she was shivering, and withdrew into the house, where she found the servant eating some oatmeal for breakfast.
    ‘Is that snow ?’ she demanded.
    The girl looked at her as if she was mad.
    ‘You’ve never seen snow before?’ Gaved stepped out, pulling on a tunic as he did so. ‘This won’t last. Two, three days and it will melt, is my guess. Still, when winter really gets into its stride there’ll be more.’
    ‘Oh.’ She found the prospect disappointing. The sight outside had seemed so utterly unprecedented to her that she had needed it to be universally significant, as though it was a sign of the end of the world. The blanched landscape had seemed to speak to her: I am changed, so shall you be. Something different is about to find you. Your life will not be the same. That was a message that she had badly needed to hear.
    Sef came out too, then, wrapping a thick robe about herself, and Tynisa realized sourly that she and the Wasp had been busy in her absence. It was a bitter thought that the happiness of others should have become as hard to bear as freezing. Living with two people who were apparently content with one another was becoming untenable: they were forcing her either to feel her own solitude too greatly, or to find some excuse to look down on them for their lack of ambition and dearth of spirit.
    A change did come, though, as if some part of her had turned magician and foreseen it. Past noon, with no sign of a thaw, and Sef spotted a rider approaching, around the rim of the lake.
    The three of them gathered to watch as that single dark shape against an argent field resolved itself into a Dragonfly youth swathed in a russet cloak. There was a shortbow and quiver at his saddle, and the line of his cape was wrinkled by a short sword at his belt, but he approached them openly, his horse high-stepping in the snow, and when he drew nearer they saw that