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subtle for her palate, the flavours seeming bland or else more bitter than she was used to, the variety broad, the quantities mean. Everything came from his own garden behind the embassy. He appeared to be entirely self-sufficient.
    ‘What about the people of Suon Ren?’ Tynisa pressed him. ‘Surely they don’t just ignore you?’
    ‘Oh, they’re very good,’ he protested. ‘The prince invites me to his castle sometimes. There are recitals, music, theatricals . . . Hunts and dances also, although I am somewhat unsuited to such diversions. It’s just,’ the old Beetle smiled wistfully, ‘I can never be one of them. It is not that they keep me out . . . only, I cannot fly with them, cannot think with them. I have become as much a Commonwealer as any son of Collegium, but it is not enough sometimes. And then there are their beliefs . . . Of all things, it saddens me most that, being Apt, I cannot understand them.’
    His words baffled Tynisa. ‘Surely you don’t believe in ghosts and magic,’ she stated. Inwardly, something twisted awkwardly at the thought. Tisamon, her father, had believed in such things, and in his company she had occasionally witnessed too much: sights that still hung on her mind the next morning, ones that sunlight could not dispel. She had been brought up and tutored by the practical people of Collegium, though, who believed in nothing that artifice and philosophy could not confirm with experimental proof. She had learned every year in College that there was no such thing as magic, for all that the old Inapt kin-den might claim otherwise. Magic was a crutch, a convenient excuse to cover all manner of crimes: A magician made me do it.
    Gramo gave her a weak smile. ‘Of course, of course, and yet . . . I see the Dragonfly-kinden live every day of their lives as though magic was a real force, as potent and wild as the weather. I have come to terms with it. I do not pretend to understand it, but at the same time I will not mock them for it. And I have found that I cannot explain the way . . . everything works here, the chances and the odd coincidences, that they call fate and predestination. It seems to serve them well enough.’
    Or it did until the Wasp armies reached them , was Tynisa’s thought, but she left it unspoken.
    ‘Who can say what may be true, so far away from Collegium’s white walls?’ the old Beetle murmured softly, and in his voice there was a young man’s longing, for far vistas and lost secrets, and for the world to be something grander than it was.
    At the evening’s end, when Gramo had tidied away the supper bowls, he stopped her just as she was retiring to bed.
    ‘You’re not here on official business, are you?’ he said sadly.
    She shook her head. ‘I mean neither you nor any other here any harm, I swear, but I do need to speak to the prince.’ Because I have burned all my other bridges, and this tenuous link with Salma is the only thing I have left.
    ‘May I ask what has brought you here, perhaps?’
    She was at first not going to answer, but the shadows seemed to be building in the room around him as the fire guttered, and there were silhouettes there, clawing their way out of the grave of her mind. ‘Three dead men,’ she told Galltree shortly, then retreated to her hammock.

Three
     
    By objective standards, her father Tisamon had failed at almost everything in his life.
    He had failed as a Mantis, giving his heart to one of the Spider-kinden they so despised. Later, he had failed his second lover, the Dragonfly Felise Mienn, by abandoning her. He had failed his oldest friend Stenwold Maker by leaving his side in his hour of greatest need.
    At the last, brought to bay in the Imperial arena, he had failed to kill the Wasp Emperor. It was his greatest deed, already immortalized in song and celebrated on stage: the Mantis that brought down an empire. Except that the Empire was already doing a good job of climbing right back up. Except that the Emperor had