Dragonfly Falling

hear him speak, that they would be gathering tonight, and that he was eagerly expected.

She would announce it to him flawlessly. She would play her role without any catch in her voice or a single moment of doubt, even under the loathing stare of the Mantis. Whatever she might feel on the inside was quite irrelevant.

When Stenwold appeared, her story came out evenly, convincingly, over breakfast. He nodded at her animatedly, smiling widely at the prospect. He thinks he’s getting somewhere, she thought. But it was at her that he smiled most. It cut her more deeply than she would have thought, how much encouragement he took from the mere fact of her. Oh Stenwold, for all your learning, you are a fool.

‘Tonight then,’ he said. ‘And perhaps the Assembly will finally get the message. The longer they leave it, the more a meeting with them will become irrelevant. I’ll have the whole city up in arms soon enough, if they hold off.’ He grinned at Tisamon, who gave him a brief nod that contained all anyone could ever want of ready violence.

And you are right, Stenwold, Arianna thought, which is why we must do this to you. I’m sorry.

It was almost time to leave, with dusk stealing about the Collegium streets. Stenwold had his academic robes swathed about him, but wore his sword as well. The students liked to see him bearing it. It showed he was serious — not just some typical all-talk-no-action Assembler. He paused to examine himself in his mirror, a full- length Spider glass that had cost a fortune, and had once adorned Tynisa’s room.

Every inch the hero? he thought, Or are there simply too many inches to me? There was a barely contained excitement in him, for he had been wrestling with the city’s inertia for a tenday and now he was winning. The word had come, during the day, that the Assembly would deign to see him after all. That meant his loyal students would truly have something to celebrate.

He then reminded himself of the grim realities. This was no game he was playing, and all those who listened to his words might be signing their own death warrants once the Wasps came. Still, Stenwold felt light-hearted, too much so to brood on things. A new lease of life, is what I have.

He came downstairs to find Tisamon waiting at his hall table, less than a metre from the spot where his daughter Tynisa had killed her first man — an assassin sent by the Wasp officer called Thalric.

‘Where’s Tynisa?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘She said she would meet us there,’ the Mantis confirmed. He was eyeing Stenwold slightly oddly, so the Beetle paused a moment to make sure his robe was hanging straight, the sword not caught in it. A growing feeling that he ought to explain something overtook him and eventually, after some moments of awkward silence, he did.

‘Ah. Tisamon. last night. it’s only that. ’ He was caught by that Mantis stare, not knowing what the man had seen, what he knew of the lines he had crossed with Arianna.

‘I was wondering whether you would mention it,’ said Tisamon. ‘I know, Sten.’

‘You do? Ah, well. ’ Stenwold could not decide whether to smile or not. ‘And do you. what do you think.?’

‘Whatever I think, it is not as it was with Atryssa and myself,’ the Mantis said, conjuring up his long-ago liaison with Tynisa’s Spider-kinden mother.

Meaning that this is not true love, just some old man’s foolishness. Stenwold’s heart sank at the implied judgement. But of course, he’s right. He opened his mouth for the admission, but a hand rose to stop him.

‘Whatever wrong you have done is nothing,’ said Tisamon flatly. ‘In clasping to Atryssa, in siring a halfbreed between our two peoples, I broke with my kinden and betrayed them.’

‘Tisamon, you did nothing wrong-’

‘It is between myself and my conscience.’ A wan smile. ‘It is a Mantis thing, Sten. You wouldn’t understand. But we were talking about you.’

‘You think I’ve been a fool?’

‘Of course I do, but we’re at war.’

Stenwold frowned, sitting down heavily opposite him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You could easily die tonight,’ Tisamon told him. ‘Or in a tenday. In a month, we all could be dead — you, Tynisa, your niece and her lover. myself. My end could come, though I am better equipped to avoid it. War, Sten, and war such as the Lowlands has not seen since the Days of Lore.’

‘I still don’t see. ’

‘So live,’ Tisamon shrugged, ‘while you can, while your heart still beats. This is no handfast, no building of the future together. So bed the girl and who should care?’

‘I. didn’t expect you to see things like that,’ Stenwold admitted.

Tisamon nodded. ‘My people, they would not understand. We also live as though we might all die the next day, but in our case it is so they may say, in our memory: he was skilled and honourable. Nobody says that this skilled and honourable dead man might have had a hundred other things he wished to do. I have been too long away from my own, Sten, and seen altogether too much of the world. Why do you think we keep to ourselves so much, we Mantids, save that there is so much outside that would tempt us? I envy you, Stenwold.’

It was an uncharacteristic speech, coming from regions in himself that Tisamon usually kept shut and barred. ‘You’ve been thinking about her,’ Stenwold guessed.

‘I have, yes. Last night, after I knew what you had done. I think I cannot be blamed for seeing Atryssa in my mind. And Tynisa is. so much her image. A mercy, I think, as I would not wish her to carry these features of mine. I envied you, last night, for having someone. anyone.’

‘You could-’

‘Never another, Sten. It’s the Mantis way. When we clasp hands, it is for life. We do nothing lightly, and least of all taking a mate.’

Stenwold had never quite thought of such things. Even now, it was hard to contemplate. ‘But. seventeen years. ’

Tisamon shook his head. ‘For life,’ he repeated. ‘And who could there ever be to stand in her place? But you saved us in the end, Sten. You preserved our daughter. And once I would have killed you for it. I’m sorry for that.’

It was embarrassing to see the man so maudlin. ‘She was beautiful,’ Stenwold recalled. ‘I remember, at the time, how the envy was all mine. Mine and everyone else’s. We were all in love with her, a little. Even Marius, whose true love was his city. But it was you she saved her love for.’

For a long while Tisamon stared at the tabletop, while Stenwold looked blankly at his own hands, and they both remembered friends gone and times past, all the moments that time’s river carries away, never valued until their absence is discovered.

‘We are,’ murmured Tisamon at last, ‘a pair of old men. Ten years older, surely, than our true ages. Just listen to us, gumming over the past.’ He stood up abruptly. ‘And tonight you have young minds to corrupt.’

Stenwold levered himself up, making the table groan a little. ‘I have indeed. And an Empire to foil. Shall we go?’

‘We shall.’

Arianna joined them at the door and Tisamon dropped back tactfully, at least nominally out of earshot. As they traversed Collegium streets towards the quay quarter and the docks, there was little enough said between them. She named those students she hoped would be appearing, and she spoke of slogans scrawled on the College walls that were strongly in his support — all the rigmarole of falsehood that was expected of her, until she became aware that he was saying nothing.

And at last, after many covert glances, Stenwold said to her, ‘About last night, Arianna. ’

She cocked an eyebrow and walked on in silence, waiting.

‘I should not have done what. I mean, I had no right-’

But she was smiling now. There was an edge to that smile, of course, because, knowing what she did, the incongruity of the situation made it impossible to restrain. A smile, nonetheless, and she said, ‘Stenwold, what I did last night was by my will, no more and no less.’ At that she saw relief on his face and, yes, pleasure. A candle lit just for him that was about to be so brutally snuffed.

‘After all,’ she could not help adding, knowing that it would not be taken for the warning that it was, ‘I am