Empire in Black and Gold

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.

‘Killed my kind. .?’

He looked at her sharply. ‘Those who would have killed me,’ he said simply. ‘You must have guessed it.’ Whatever he had put in the water obviously stung his wound sharply and he winced as he removed the cloth. ‘Do you have a name, Beetlechild?’

‘Cheerwell,’ she said. ‘Cheerwell Maker.’ He arched an eyebrow at that. ‘It’s a perfectly good name,’ she continued, giving him a frown. ‘People call me Che.’

He paused a long moment, the reply slow in coming. ‘I am Achaeos and you have my thanks. The omens warned me that our work of last night would not end as I expected. I am grateful that you have found a way to fulfil that.’

‘Omens. .?’ she said helplessly. ‘You took part in that raid because of omens?’

‘No, despite them.’ He slung the cloth back into the water. ‘What will you do now?’

‘Go back into the house and try to forget this ever happened,’ she said firmly, though she knew that she would remember Achaeos for a very long time. She realized that she was on her knees, which were starting to hurt. She began to shift, and he put a hand out to help her up.

Standing, she held on to it for a second longer. It was calloused in strange places, and she guessed it was an archer’s hand.

‘I cannot fly, not until I have rested further. I will leave here tonight, I think, if I can.’

She nodded. ‘I. . I think that would be best.’

As she left the stables she paused a moment to lean against the closed door. She felt strangely detached from the real world, as though it had all been some dream. How could something so unusual happen to someone like me? Still, the tingle of his hand in hers remained to vouch for it.

She could see a party of men from Helleron, either on their way to the house or the mines. More soldiers for tonight’s defence. She hoped that Elias would have finished his business here by then. She did not want another night of bloodshed on her conscience, not now she had met the enemy.

‘You really do surprise me sometimes,’ was Salma’s response to the whole business.

‘You mean you think I was wrong?’

‘I didn’t say that. I’m just surprised. What happened to all that march-of-progress rhetoric of yours?’

‘I. .’ If he was going to be so mocking about it, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know it had been his own views that had swayed her. ‘I just felt it was the right thing to do and. .’

He raised an eyebrow, waiting.

‘He’s still out there, waiting for dusk,’ she explained. ‘It’s. . strange, knowing that.’

‘Well now.’ His smile was merciless.

‘It’s not like that. It’s just. . strange,’ she said heatedly. And it wasn’t like that. It isn’t! But Achaeos still lingered in her memory: strange, dangerous, ephemeral. From another world.

And then she thought back to the revolution of the Apt, five centuries gone, when her people had thrown off the yoke. A Spider historian had once described it as the ‘revolution of the ugly’: the solid-built, strong-shouldered