leaving only a worldly fondness settling into near-invisible lines of humour and experience.
‘If either of us were younger, we’d not stand here in the same tent without being at each other’s throats, Tynan. So surely we’re old enough to know when we want something, and not to stand tongue-tied as though we were children of fifteen?’
He laid hands on her. It was the only way he could conceive of it. She was a Spider Aristoi, and her servants were all around, and it was an assault, a declaration of war, to take her by the shoulders and draw her close. His soldier’s spirit was up, ready for the fight.
And yet the servants were all gone, slipped out somehow, vanished into the weave of the tent canvas, and it was only her and him, and there was no fight at all.
It was after dark, and Averic made his way cautiously back to his lodgings. Cautiously not through fear of the aerial raids that were an almost nightly occurrence, but because a Wasp alone in Collegium could expect all manner of interesting reactions from people he met, especially soldiers of the Merchant Companies. The Antspider had made sure that the Coldstone Company knew he was no enemy of the city, but the populace at large was proving resistant to the idea. It was always easy to write off an entire kinden as the enemy, after all. If you allowed one of them to become human, that might affect your judgement of the rest. It was a lesson the Wasps themselves had taken to heart generations ago, but Collegium was a city of learning, and hating Wasps was on the modern curriculum.
Ironically, a Beetle on the streets of Capitas would have been safer, at least if he could produce his papers on demand.
Eujen Leadswell had held a meeting at the College, which Averic was returning from. The Beetle student had called together two score or so of his fellows, young men and women of all kinden who had not signed up with the Companies. Some were scared, Averic reckoned, and to him it was a strange world where mere cowardice would suffice to keep you from the war. Others had objections of various kinds, often moral ones like Eujen’s own. Still more had work that they could not give up, whether it was assisting the artificers of the College, looking after relatives or helping with the family business in place of others who were already preparing to march out against the Imperial Second. Many of them would not have counted themselves as Eujen’s friends, and some had been his avowed critics before the hostilities had commenced. It was hard for them to heckle him now, though: they who had lacked the courage of their convictions and not taken on the sashes of the Companies.
None of them had known what Eujen was going to say. Many probably came expecting some distilled manner of treason, anti-Makerist propaganda at the worst possible time. Some of those who had stayed away had probably not wanted to be implicated in any such talk.
Instead, Eujen had pitched to them the idea of a Student Company.
‘Let us hope,’ Leadswell had said, ‘that the Second is beaten in the field. What I’m proposing is something that we’re all better off not needing. But if the Wasps come to the walls, as they did last time, the city will need to rely on all hands. Look at us who, for whatever reason, have not taken up the snapbow and the buff coat. I ask nobody why, I accept all reasons as valid, as I ask you to accept mine, but what will we do when they’re at the walls?’
There had been more than a few glances at Averic just then, as he lurked at the back of the room like a shadow of the future. Averic knew, of course, that this all stemmed from Eujen’s arguments with the Antspider, but thankfully nobody at Eujen’s meeting had known that this entire venture was essentially to impress a girl.
‘We find what arms we can beg or borrow or make,’ Eujen had propounded. ‘We take up our own sash. While our field army is out of the city, we drill — alongside Outwright’s men if we can, as they’re staying behind. If the Wasps should come…’ and his voice faltered slightly because of what that might mean, ‘then there will be need of us. And perhaps we can put our scholarship to use, as well. Perhaps the war may benefit from soldiers that do not think like soldiers.’
And of course, someone had stood up to voice the obvious criticism — why was Eujen suddenly advocating the fight, when his voice was normally heard speaking against it? What was going on?
‘Do you think,’ Eujen had remonstrated, ‘that I would not defend our city? Do you think I would not shed my blood for my people? I will take up arms against the Wasps, if they come here. I would do the same against the Vekken or the Spider-kinden or the Sarnesh.’ He left a precisely calculated pause. ‘I will fight just as hard against those within our city that have guided us towards this war, for I do not believe it was inevitable. I believe that, if we can forge a peace with Vek, then we could have done so with any nation in the world. But now we are at war, and I can’t change that. Let us instead work to bring this war to the swiftest close, and seek a true peace thereafter, not merely a period in which to brew up the next conflict.’
He’d had them then, not just by the words but the raw sincerity in his voice, and the first few had come forward to put their names down for his Student Company.
Averic had signed, too. He had not thought he would, and he knew he had done the wrong thing, but he had been carried along on the tide of Eujen’s voice. In that moment everything had made so much sense.
His lodgings were not located in the usual student area — at first because he had not known that when choosing them, but later because it was sometimes convenient to escape the attention of his peers. Instead, his neighbours were the poorer class of tradesmen, factory workers and the like, and many of them were out working most of the night and sleeping during the day, especially now, when every workshop was working around the clock. They did not like him, but he had grown adept at avoiding them. Entering the slightly leaning four-storey house, he heard no sound from any living thing, only silence, as if he was the last man in Collegium.
Except someone was there, quietly waiting for him, like a spider in its web. When he unlocked his door and pushed it open, a Beetle-halfbreed woman sitting on his bed regarded him with a hard smile.
Instantly he had a hand out, palm towards her, ready to demand some explanation, and in the back of his mind the knowledge that the door had been secured with the lock he himself had installed.
She met him with a similar gesture, and the words, ‘I wouldn’t.’
For a long time Averic stared at the palm she was training on him, then at her face, the dark skin, something of the features of a Beetle-kinden, but then they were a variable breed, and what other heritage could he discern there…?
He went cold all at once, for she was a Wasp. Not a Beetle at all, not even a little of one, but pure-blood Wasp. He would not have believed it possible. Some sort of dye had been used to colour her skin a deep, rich brown, painstakingly applied so that the palm she showed him was paler, but not as pale as a Wasp’s should be. She had padded out her cheeks a little, applied some manner of tape to flatten her nose. She must have walked past hundreds of Collegium citizens to get here, without one of them seeing her as he now did. Who looked closely at halfbreeds, after all?
Had she been a man, she could probably not have done it, but everyone knew that the only Wasps for export were men. The idea of a Wasp woman infiltrating the city went against all the carefully hoarded stereotypes that the Collegiate citizens were so fond of.
‘Averic, isn’t it?’ she noted. ‘You can call me Gesa. Glad to meet you. You’ve done a great job here, I’m sure.’
He could not stop staring at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Here you are, in the heart of Collegium, a student at their vaunted College. Have you any idea how hard it’s been to get agents entrenched in this city recently, with Stenwold Maker on the war path?’
He felt as though a hammer blow had struck him, inside. ‘I’m- I’m not an agent.’
‘Of course you are.’
She said the words with such assurance that he needed a moment to regroup his own certainties.
‘No.’ He was aware that she might kill him — her hand was still up, while his had fallen to his side — but he could not allow her to redefine him in such a way. He could not let her remake him so casually into the thing the Collegiates already muttered that he was.
She was now smiling broadly. ‘But, of course, you understand that a deep cover agent must live his cover, Averic. It works best of all if he does not know it himself. Why do you think you were sent here, if not for that?’
The hammer fell once again. ‘No, my parents…’ And the words were damning, treasonous, but he was under attack, with only the truth to defend himself with. ‘They sent me here because they believe we can learn from the Collegiates — and more in peace than in war.’
‘Is that what they told you?’ Her expression was pitying. ‘As I say, how better to place you in the bosom of
