Dragonfly Falling

He had been sent to Collegium to study and learn, but he had gone there to escape. The war, the misery, the very thought of that gold and black blot spreading like poison across the map.

The memories began to come more quickly now.

He was duelling with a Spider-kinden girl with fair hair and a sharp tongue, and he beat her because he had been fighting since he was eight, but he knew she was the better-

He was lying awake beside the sleeping daughter of a rich merchant, listening to her father’s key turn unexpectedly in the lock-

He was seeing the march of the athletes before the Games with the imperial banner raised high at the rear-

He was watching the great grey bulk of the Sky Without, trying to work out why it didn’t just fall-

He was leaping from a flying machine to fight the Wasps, and someone nearly putting a crossbow bolt between his shoulder blades by mistake-

He was running through Helleron after a betrayal, trying to keep hold of a Beetle girl with dyed white hair-

Faster and faster the memories came. He was shaking. They poured into him like acid.

More betrayal — he was fighting Wasp soldiers, while her cousin looked on-

He was taken. He was chained-

Her — and she danced for them, for the slaves and the slavers — and they were all free in that moment-

He was breaking free from the cell — the faces of his friends-

His name-

He was Salme Dien, Prince Minor of the Dragonfly Commonweal, but in the Lowlands they called him Salma, because they were all barbarians and could not speak properly.

But the memories were not done with him.

He was coming to Tark with Skrill and Totho, all their names suddenly coming to him at last.

He was making fierce love to Basila in the close and almost windowless room of the tower.

The bloody devastation of the siege, and he was duelling with a Wasp officer while the city burned and the wall fell.

He was attacking the Wasp camp. He was grappling with a Wasp soldier. The blade went into his stomach, all the way up to the hilt.

All the way up to the hilt.

And the pain of it came back to him, and he relived that moment, the searing, burning agony, and the knowledge, the sure knowledge that it had killed him. All the way up to the hilt, and the point emerging through his back. His own blade driving into the man, almost as an afterthought because, what did it matter when his world had stopped? The pain of it flooded through him, and he gasped and arched back, and then he really was living it again because the wound across his belly tore open stitch after stitch, and he screamed-

And the void rushed up for him again, the void that had only been waiting in the shadows all this time. The hungry void reached out for him.

Someone plunged their hands into his wound and for a second the pain, which could never get worse, was much, much worse.

And then it was gone. There was something searing and burning through him, but it was distant, like thunder over far hills. And there was light.

He opened his eyes again, but it was still too bright after so long in darkness. He could not look at it.

The same hands were held to his wound, their warmth leaching into him, and he felt — it could be nothing else — the edges of the wound knit again, the blood cease to spill across his skin, and he felt the ruptured organs find peace and start to heal once more.

It was Ancestor Art, but he had never known anything like it before. He forced his eyes open, forced them to stare into the heart of the sun.

He thought he had gone blind, but it was just the sight of her. She stood over him like stained glass and crystal and glowed with her own pure light, and stared into his face with featureless, unreadable white eyes.

He was weeping, but he did not know it, looking up into the face of the woman who had once been Grief in Chains, and then Aagen’s Joy, and so many others in her time.

After they had lain together, they slept awhile. Partway through the night, she had woken and made to go, and Totho had caught her arm and held her there. For a moment he did not speak and she waited patiently, sitting on the edge of the folding bed they had given him in exchange for his straw mattress: the two artificers in darkness, the halfbreed and the Bee.

He had known, when she had come to him, that it was wrong, but she had been so forthright, so open. No wiles, no subtlety, merely an artificer’s practical seduction. Kaszaat, in stained coveralls, with smears of oil still on her hands, unbuckling her toolstrip belt in this partitioned space of tent they had given him.

And no woman before had ever offered herself to him. Seeing her there, inexplicably there, he had cursed his memories. He had cursed Cheerwell Maker for running off with Achaeos, and then he reached out for what he could have.

Now, too dark for him to see her deep brown skin, the curves of her body that was lean and compact with the workaday strength of her trade, he asked her, ‘Did Drephos make you do this?’

‘I am no slave,’ she said. ‘Drephos does not make me.’

‘But you are a soldier. You have a rank. He is your. superior, or whatever it is you would say.’ He did not hold his breath against her answer. He had no illusions.

‘He made a suggestion,’ she said after a pause, ‘but that was not the first time the thought came to me. When one placed above you asks of you something, to go to a man you are interested in already, it is by command? Or it is of free will?’ She made to leave again but he held her still.

‘Wait,’ he said, and then, ‘Please.’ She settled again, and then he felt her hand brush its way up his arm, trace his shoulder and then rest against his cheek.

He wanted to ask Why? but he could not disentangle his motive for the question. Self-pity — or was he seeking a compliment? The latter was another thing his life had been mostly empty of. Totho the halfbreed! Who would have thought it would take capture and imprisonment to bring this fulfilment to him?

He had not realized, until he grappled with her, that he was no longer the awkward, slightly gangling boy he had been at the College. He had not noticed how he had filled out, broad across the shoulders and strong. His Ant blood had made him strong, just as his Beetle-kinden side had allowed him to endure. Kaszaat had seemed small within his arms.

She settled down beside him again and he felt the warmth of her back pressing into his chest and belly. It struck him, and the thought surprised him, that she must feel even more alone than he did. Her city was so far, she had said, and she did not expect she would see it again. She must have been alone now for a long time, with only Wasps and Drephos for company. Perhaps in coming to him she was reaching out for the only contact that might not be a betrayal.

And if Totho accepted Drephos’s hand, that proffered gauntlet, would this become a betrayal for her, as if he was no more than a Wasp in truth?

He put an arm about her, his breath catching as it brushed beneath her breasts.

‘Once woken, I cannot sleep,’ she informed him, although she mumbled it sleepily enough. ‘You must talk to me, amuse me.’

So he talked to her. He told her of Collegium, and the Great College. He told her of the workshops there, and the Masters in their white robes. He spoke of the Prowess Forum, and he even spoke of Stenwold Maker, Tynisa and the Mantis Weaponsmaster, Tisamon. Of Cheerwell Maker he spoke not one word.

She left him before dawn, dressing herself in darkness. She explained that she had duties to attend to but he suspected that she did not want their liaison to be common knowledge. She feared the Wasps, more than anything, and she did not want them to think that she was free for the taking.

He dressed himself as the sun rose, in his artificer’s leathers, only hesitating as he began to buckle on the toolstrip that Drephos had returned to him. He was no artificer here, not yet. He was a prisoner of the Empire. If he emerged from this tent with his tools ready for use, would that suggest he had committed himself to the betrayal