Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

It impressed her most, in that moment, that he did not instantly discount her. After all, she was a young female Beetle-kinden, a little overweight, an expression of shock almost certainly on her face, caught halfway through unsheathing her sword. He must have been a warrior taking part in their raid and he could have the blood of her own kind all over his hands. Still, he watched her cautiously and, in his eyes, she was a fighter and something to be wary of.

He was small, she saw, as Moths often were, and slight of build. He held himself with a rigid concentration, and she decided he was going to be very fast when he moved. She saw his lips twitch, wondered if this was it.

His pale tunic was stained. His offhand was slick where it held his side. She understood, then, why he was here.

There was a heavy thump on the door behind her. In that moment she and the Moth very nearly killed each other as the tension snapped back like a cut cord. In that brief moment he was two paces closer to her, dagger held up. Her sword had meanwhile cleared its sheath. He locked eyes with her.

‘What?’ she called out. Her voice, to herself, sounded understandably strained.

‘We’re checking the whole place in case any of those bastards got in, miss,’ came the voice of one of the guards. The Moth’s eyes widened.

‘I. .’ She started. He was staring at her, and abruptly she found it hard to answer. There was something in her head, plucking at her, trying to turn her mind. ‘I don’t. .’

She stared into those white, depthless eyes and felt the pressure of his will upon her, desperately trying to stop her speaking. His teeth bared slowly as the strain told on him. It was an Art of the Moths, she realized, some Ancestor Art of theirs.

She summoned what resolution she could manage. She could feel his grip slipping. He was weakened by injury, or she was stronger than he thought, but she shook her head abruptly and she was free of his mind.

‘Miss?’ asked the guard doubtfully from outside, and she opened her mouth to answer. The Moth’s face was very composed and he settled onto his back foot, dagger held out. She realized that he was going to fight, and that she would see him die the moment the guards came in.

She thought of Salma.

‘Well, there’s certainly nobody in here,’ she said, sounding terribly false in her own ears. ‘Now let me wash, will you?’

The voice came back: ‘Right, miss,’ incredibly, and there was the scuff of their feet as the guards tracked off.

In all that time her eyes had not left those of her adversary. There was no gratitude there, but perhaps curiosity.

‘If you want to fight, fight me,’ she told him quietly. ‘Otherwise. .’ And her words tailed off, because she could not think of one.

‘Otherwise what?’ he asked. His voice was soft, with precise consonants.

She stared at him. Her sword was beginning to weigh in her hand.

He took a deep breath, and she saw that it pained him. He tucked the dagger back in his belt. ‘It would seem that I am your prisoner.’ His look was challenging, uncompromising. ‘What do you intend to do, Beetle-girl?’

She disposed of her own blade, wondering what precisely she was supposed to do now. She found that she was more frightened of him now than when he had his knife out. He was something that had stepped in from another world, from some story of past times. ‘I. . never really met a Moth before.’

His look was bleak. ‘Now you have.’

‘Do you want me to look at that for you?’ She uttered the words almost automatically, sprung from some reflexive humanitarianism that the College had taught her. He was instantly suspicious, hand reaching back for his knife, but she told him, ‘Look, if I wanted to hurt you, I’d have called the guards in.’ A stray thought gave her some justification, for herself or even for him. ‘A Moth doctor at Collegium once helped my uncle Stenwold. Let’s put it against that, shall we?’

He sat down heavily on a bale of straw, taking his left hand from his side. It came away glistening with strands of blood, and she swallowed hard. She had learned medicine at the College, at least a little. She took up her bucket, still half-full, and knelt beside him.

It was a crossbow bolt that had caught him, but he had been lucky. It had grazed his side close to the skin and the heavy missile, designed to ram through armour, had left two gashes that tracked the diagonal course of a missile shot from the ground up into the air. The wounds left were ragged with the path of the chitin flight. She felt him wince as she dabbed off the blood, seeming almost black against his grey skin.

‘I can. .’ Her hands shook at the very thought. ‘I can try to stitch this. . if you want. And I can get some alcohol to clean it.’

‘A fire. Hot water,’ he rasped. And then, ‘Please.’

He clasped his hand to the wound again and she stood.

I should not be doing this. Elias Monger would be so very angry .

But Uncle Stenwold would approve.

‘You hide here,’ she told him. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

It was easier than Che had expected. The two house servants were overworked, and still jittery after last night’s events. She absconded with a needle, some gut thread, a bottle of Elias’s best brandy and an iron pot of hot water.

She thought he had fled when she first got back into the stables, then that he had been caught, but he reappeared, stepping out of the shadows when he was sure it was her. She considered the strange, fragile trust that they had built between them.

He sat down and she cleaned the needle and thread in the scalding water, then doused them in the brandy.

‘Why are you doing this for me?’ he asked suddenly. She started at the sound of his voice, so close.

‘I already told you-’

‘Don’t tell me about your uncle Stenwold,’ he said. ‘The truth.’

She hurriedly got on with the stitching then, to avoid his probing. She felt him stiffen as the needle first went in, his hand burning paler as it gripped.

‘I am a student at the Great College,’ she said, as she oh so carefully closed up his wound. ‘And at the College they teach us that words, not violent acts, are the best way to settle any dispute. To settle through swords is to settle only until tomorrow, but to settle through reasoned debate is forever. Or at least that’s what they tell us.’ She began tying off the thread at the first wound, not exactly a neat job but it would serve. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’ It was not entirely true. ‘You are not my enemy.’ She was quicker with the wound over his ribs, where he must have twisted as the bolt seared across him. She felt more practised now and he sat in silence as she worked, as she bandaged him inexpertly with strips torn from the sleeve of her own robe. I’ll have to say I just snagged it on something. Only when she finished did she realize he had been gazing down at her, his grey face expressionless.

‘I have never met a Beetle before,’ he began. Still kneeling by him, she suddenly felt very uncertain, awkward. ‘I hope they are not all like you.’

‘Why?’ she asked, but he had turned to the cooling water and dropped something into it, some sharp-smelling herbs. He had his dagger to hand, she noticed, and for a second her heart froze, but he was just using it to stir the pot.

He could have killed me at any time. The moment she had finished, he could have thrust the knife into her neck. She felt furious with herself for not thinking of it, and pitifully relieved that he had not struck her.

‘Because I have fought your kind, I have killed your kind, but I would not wish to kill someone like you.’ His voice was level, emotionless. He tore a swatch of cloth from his already tattered tunic and dipped it in the pungent water before pressing it to his wound, saturating the bandages.