Dragonfly Falling

‘Because when I look at you, I recognize something. I see someone who’s lost everything, and yet lost nothing.’ He was not telling her why, she could see. It was just words.

She found her hand now on her sword’s hilt, her heart speeding all of a sudden, and something clamoured away at the back of her mind.

‘I used to be someone of consequence, down south,’ Destrachis continued, watching her face intently. ‘Not Aristoi, but not far off, but now look at me: some Beetle gangster’s errand boy and quacksalver, betraying one brute for another at the drop of a kerchief. I lost it all, you see. You, at least, have retained a purpose.’

She stared at him. She could not discern his meaning.

‘I can get you to Collegium the fastest way, and that way, you might actually catch this fellow of yours, instead of just walking his trail.’ His eyes flicked over hers, reading her carefully — or at least what was left of her that was legible.

‘What do you want from me?’ she asked him outright.

‘I don’t know,’ he told her, ‘but probably I’ll think of something. Perhaps there’s someone I want dead. Perhaps it’s just money.’

‘I will not give myself to you,’ she told him.

His eyebrows twitched. ‘Never entered my mind.’ He said it so smoothly that she knew it was a lie.

He claimed he could speed her progress, he could take her to Thalric. Then she could finish this hunt. The thought sent a shiver through her, oddly discomfiting, but the offer seemed too good to ignore.

And she could always kill him if she had to.

She nodded curtly, and the deal was done.

Doors had been opening recently to Stenwold that he had not guessed at. In all his years of lecturing at the College, of hand-picking some few students each year who might be able to serve his cause, he had never believed that he was being listened to.

Now he was a cause in his own right. His name had been passed from student to student, year to year. The more the Assembly and the other Masters looked down on him, the more he had become something like a folk hero.

These last few days he had found that he need not simply wait on the indulgence of the Assembly. If they would still not hear him he need not let his voice go rusty.

Arianna, of course, was the architect of it all. He had not imagined it possible, otherwise, that so many of those bored faces he recalled from his years of teaching could have actually paid so much attention.

In these last few days he had twice gone with Arianna to some low dive — a taverna’s back room once, and then an old warehouse near the docks — where he had met them. A dozen the first time, and then in the warehouse three score of them. They believed him because they had heard of the siege of Tark that was even then under way. They had heard disturbing news from Helleron. They had heard other rumours, news even to him. Some were Spider-kinden and had watched the imperial shadow encroach south-west towards their borders. Some even had some snippets of the Twelve-Year War the Wasps had waged against the Commonweal.

They watched with shining eyes as he told them the truth, the scale of the imperial threat: unity or slavery.

That became the slogan and they left with it on their lips. Yes, they were mere students, young men and women whose idealism had not yet been calloused by the everyday world. They were merchants’ sons and daughters, youngsters from the Ant city-states, Flies of good family from Merro, paupers on scholarships from Collegium’s orphanages and poorhouses. But they were not powerless: they could watch for him and spread word for him.

And they would fight for him, if worst came to worst. He knew he did not want them to do so, but many of them had held a blade before, the Ant-kinden certainly. Some were duellists of the Prowess Forum, some were artificers and all of them had volunteered to put what they had at his disposal.

Tisamon’s words of not so long ago came back to him. Stenwold had become what he hated, the Mantis had said. He had become a spymaster sending the young to die for him. Times had changed even since those words were spoken. The first blood had been shed by an imperial army in the Lowlands. Unity or slavery. These young men and women might be the first stones to precipitate an avalanche.

In his dreams, he saw flames erupting in the Collegium streets he knew so well, young men and women with blades and crossbows. Stenwold awoke with the sound of clashing steel fading in his mind.

The Wasps knew that Collegium must fall, for it was the key to the soul of the Lowlands. They had tried once. They would try again. Stenwold stared at the dark ceiling of his room, seeing through the slats in the shutters that dawn was still distant.

They would try again soon. Sands in the hourglass had become a constant hissing and hissing of lost time. It was an hourglass in a dark room, though, so he could not see how much sand was left.

He moved to turn over and realized that she was beside him. The last hours of the previous night fell back on him and he opened his eyes wide.

There had been cheering for him, at the warehouse: all those bright-eyed faces. Unity or slavery! He had left for his own rooms feeling ten years younger, buoyed up in spite of himself. He was not alone now, and neither was Collegium.

Back at his house there had been wine. Tisamon and Tynisa had not stayed long. They had been on their way elsewhere, some Mantis training session. He had found himself alone with Arianna, drinking wine and talking about old times. An old man’s failing, yes, although he still did not actually think of himself as old — though perhaps no longer young. An old man’s failing nonetheless, and yet she had listened. He had talked about his own College days, his travels; about Nero the artist, of whom she had heard; then, darkly, of the fall of Myna; the Wasp plans he had seen; his own personal experience of their ambitions.

How she had listened, and it had seemed to him that her eyes had shone more brightly than any of the other students’, and at the last he had convinced himself that there was more than simple zeal behind their gleam.

It had been a while since he had last slept with anyone — not that it was an excuse to say so. When he was a student himself there had been the usual ill-conceived liaisons, and after that a few tentative, short-lived ventures. Later there had been the occasional affection purchased on a commercial basis from a professional. His raising of Tynisa and Cheerwell and his crusade against the Empire had taken up all his time and his energy, until the latter endeavour had somehow led him to this place.

Well, there goes my place at the College. Or perhaps not, because he would not be the first by any means. He had always reserved his greatest contempt for Masters who preyed on their students in such a way, and now a clear pane of glass through which he could shine his judgement had become a mirror for himself.

But it wasn’t like that. But of course it was like that. He was a College Master and she a student. He had plied her with wine, until her judgement had been sufficiently afloat that a night with him had seemed irresistible, or at least grimly inevitable. True, that was not what his blurry memories of the previous evening were saying, but it must have been what happened, by any objective standard.

She shifted slightly, the curve of her back pressing against him, moving her feet, surprisingly cold, to curl about his ankle. Despite all he had just thought, he felt himself stirring. Oh, it was the dream, though, wasn’t it? The dream all young Beetle lads had, when coming to the College. For they were the sons of tradesmen and merchants and artificers, and they would go home to wed a respectable Beetle wife, most likely. It was ever the dream, to sleep with a Spider-kinden woman before you die.

And I could die any day now, he told himself. Some part of Stenwold that was still the custodian of his schoolboy ego was crowing, distantly, for all the immorality of it.

She moved again and then turned restlessly, as though she knew what he was thinking, throwing an arm across his broad chest, and hooking a smooth leg across his. He closed his eyes but the responses of his body were beyond his ability to master. He gently freed his arm and fed it around her shoulders, and she nestled closer to him. He was able to put off thinking about what her reaction might be when she fully woke.

Waking past midnight, with the bulk of Stenwold sleeping beside her, her thoughts had been bittersweet. She had now done what the job required of her. He had moved and groaned on top of her, and she had considered him analytically, like a whore not yet wholly jaded.

Beetle men! she had thought and, though he was strange for a Beetle, seeing further, thinking more, in this way he was just like the rest of them.