‘Stenwold, you want Thalric, don’t you?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Get soldiers, as many as you can,’ she hissed. ‘If you want him, you’ll have to fight for him. Now, or it will be too late!’

Soldiers? When I have Tisamon. ‘With me,’ he growled, rushing back up the steps, and Tisamon was instantly in step with him, claw hinging out. He heard Tynisa and Arianna behind, knew that his ward would have her rapier clear. He felt much safer with these escorts than with a score of Parops’s Ant-kinden.

‘What is it? Tell me?’ he demanded, as they clattered through the corridors of the Amphiophos.

‘I saw her!’ Arianna was saying. ‘She’s here for him!’

‘Who?’ Stenwold demanded, out of breath already.

‘The Dragonfly! Tisamon knows!’

And she was suddenly ahead of them, standing before the guards of Thalric’s suite, a Dragonfly woman, her cloak thrown back to reveal scintillating armour. The Beetle-kinden guards clearly did not know what to make of her, seeing her possibly as one of Teornis’s foreign troops. They had their shields half-up, frowning, and abruptly there was a long, straight sword in the woman’s hands. The curtain to Thalric’s chamber was drawn half-back, as though Felise had first tried to simply walk between them.

‘Let me pass,’ she demanded, in the tone of a final warning.

Stenwold shouted, ‘Stop!’ skidding to a halt beyond reach, or so he hoped, of that oddly-styled blade. Instantly she had shifted stance, the arc of her sword now covering the guards and Stenwold both, and for a second there was silence as the tension in the woman coiled up to a crisis.

‘Lady Felise.’ Tisamon had come to Stenwold’s shoulder, claw at the ready, but there was a strange expression on his face.

The Dragonfly stared at him, something changing behind her features.

‘Lady Felise,’ Tisamon said slowly, ‘we have met. Do you remember?’

‘Did we fight?’ she asked, almost in the voice of a child.

‘You gave me that honour,’ said the Mantis, giving the words special meaning only for him and for her.

Something shifted behind her face again, something trying to be heard, but then again it was that perfect mask, beautiful and terrible all at once, and the guards clutched at their maces and raised their shields. ‘I have found my prize,’ she said coldly. ‘He is within this room. I will not let anything keep me from him. Not even you, Mantis.’

Tisamon’s voice was a whisper. ‘What… what’s in the room, Sten?’

‘Tisamon, please-’

‘Because I know who she’s hunting, Sten.’

There are better and easier ways to break this news to Tisamon, Stenwold reflected. The dreadful tension of the Dragonfly woman was like a shrill sound at the very edge of his hearing. Bloodshed was imminent.

‘He’s here,’ he confirmed. ‘Thalric is here. He gave himself up. He claims the Empire has cast him out and tried to kill him.’

‘Does he indeed?’ said Tisamon, without sympathy. ‘This woman wants Thalric dead, Sten. She wants to cut his throat and probably dance in his ashes. I have no issue with that, myself.’

‘We… need him,’ Stenwold whispered. He could see the Dragonfly, Felise, standing perfectly still, focusing inwards and inwards. I have seen that look before, in Tisamon. There was another there as well, hanging back further down the hall, a long-haired Spider with a wry smile. Stenwold could see how they had gained access: the two of them, travelling together on this day, would seem like just more of the rescuers from across the seas.

‘What is this?’ Felise demanded, taking a better grip on her blade. ‘Fight me or stand away from me. I will have his blood. I will have the blood of any that stand in my way.’

It was a gesture that always seemed a good idea at the time but never quite worked out so. Stenwold stepped forward and walked towards her. Past the two guards he caught a glimpse of Thalric inside his room. Something had gone out of the man, some hope of a last chance.

‘Stenwold,’ the Wasp said, half warning, half imploring, ‘remember Cheerwell-’

Without warning the woman’s sword was at Stenwold’s neck. He looked into Felise’s eyes and saw madness gathering there like stormclouds.

This was not a good idea. ‘I am Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium. This man’ – his nerve almost failed – ‘is in my care. Why do you wish to kill him?’

The blade jumped, the edge cutting an inch of shallow blood. ‘Ask him,’ she hissed. ‘Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium. If it is not enough that his people have raped my homeland and slain my people in their thousands, ask him what it is that he has done against me.’

Remember Che, the thought came. Thalric might be his only chance of seeing the girl again. ‘Thalric?’ he asked faintly.

‘Stenwold, you need me.’

‘Only if I can trust you for the truth,’ Stenwold said flatly, and he saw something pass across Thalric’s face. Here was a man in a trap of his own making. The Wasp knew what would now happen even before he spoke, and in that fatal moment Stenwold finally recognized some virtue there, beyond all the principles the Empire had built in him, because despite what would follow he said, ‘I killed her children, Master Maker. The Empire wanted a certain noble Commonweal bloodline extinguished, and so I went into her castle and killed all her children. She had no sword then, when we surprised her. She was taken for a slave. I suppose she escaped.’ Thalric’s voice sounded flat, sick.

Stenwold pictured Che, either dead now or incarcerated in a Wasp cell, or at the mercies of their artificers, and he looked into Felise’s face and reassessed her. This was the face, he decided, of a mother who had loved her children and who now wanted solely to avenge them.

I have no right, he knew, and he gestured to the guards, who stepped back in evident relief. Felise spared him one more brief glance before passing through the doorway.

A

Forty-One

Her captors had found a little cluster of farm buildings nearby, stone-built and solid, with a big storage cellar that they had cleared out, throwing away everything not immediately edible or useful. Che hoped that the farming family who had once lived here had been given the chance to flee before the black and gold storm.

In the cellar their artificers had been busy even before the battle, and wooden beams from a dismantled house had been used as bars to mark out a pen that would hold a dozen prisoners at most. A few dried stains of reddish-brown suggested she was not the first.

She was the only one now, though – the only prisoner they had taken out of those that had failed and fallen in the Battle of the Rails.

When she had tumbled from the stalled automotive, she had her blade ready in her hand, certain that death was moments away. She had imagined herself then as a Tisamon or a Salma, ready to die striking a blow and enjoy a soldier’s honourable end.

But all around her the Wasps were swarming along the rails, blackening the sky above. These men, who had been fleeing so recently, were back, with a vengeance that could be sated only with blood. Everywhere, Wasp soldiers were stooping on the survivors to slaughter them. They hacked down the Sarnesh field surgeons whether or not they lifted blades against them. They killed the wounded, swiftly and brutally, just as their comrades were doing over all the battlefield.

She had felt the sword slip from her fingers, her mind filled with the horror of it, and she realized, then, that she had been lying to herself for a long time. This was the real face of war, and she could never be a true soldier.

Che had stood there motionless, unnoticed and unthreatened, with the Wasps massing back and forth all about her. It had been that total stillness that saved her, though her head had spun. The stillness, and her empty hands, until at last a Wasp had dropped before her, seeing a wide-eyed, unarmed Beetle girl, assuming her a slave, perhaps. He had called two of his comrades to wrestle her away, and she had not resisted them. A moment before, she had wanted to die as brave warriors died, but when she saw what that looked like, repeated over and over all around, she very much wanted to live.