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me?”
    A gasp. A wheeze. “Summons to the Basilica.” Another gasp. An attempt to smooth the sodden fur. A huff and a puff. “By request of Husathirn Mueri, court-captain of the day.”
    “To the Basilica? Why, have I done something wrong, then? Is that what his lordship Husathirn Mueri believes? Am I going to be put on trial?”
    The bailiff didn’t reply. He was peering open-mouthed past her shoulder into her room. Stark as a prisoner’s cell: scarcely any furniture at all, just a tiny cot, a little stack of books on the floor, and a single ornament, a star-shaped amulet of woven grass that Nialli Apuilana had brought back from the hjjks, hanging on the whitewashed wall directly opposite the door like a conquest-sign placed there by the insect-folk themselves.
    “I said, have I done something wrong?”
    “Nothing, lady. Nothing.”
    “Then why am I summoned?”
    “Because—because—”
    “What are you staring at? Haven’t you ever seen a hjjk star before?”
    The bailiff looked guiltily away. He began to groom himself with quick uneasy strokes. “His lordship the court-captain wishes your help, that’s all,” he blurted. “As a translator. A stranger has been brought to the Basilica—a young man, who seems to speak only the language of the hjjks—”
    There was a sudden roaring in Nialli Apuilana’s soul. Her heart raced painfully, frighteningly.
    So stupid. Waiting this long to let her know.
    She seized the bailiff by a sash. “Why didn’t you say so right away?”
    “I had no chance, lady. You—”
    “He must be a returning captive. You should have told me.”
    Images rose from the depths of her mind. Powerful memories, visions of that shattering day that had changed her life.
    She saw her younger self, already longlegged and woman-sleek but with her breasts only barely sprouting yet, innocently gathering blue chilly-flowers in the hills beyond the city walls on the day after her first twining. Black-and-yellow six-limbed figures, weird and terrifying, taller than any man of the city, taller even than Thu-Kimnibol, emerging without warning from a deep cleft in the tawny rock. Terror. Disbelief. A sense of the world she had known for thirteen years crumbling to fragments about her. Monstrous sharp-beaked heads, huge many-faceted eyes, jointed arms tipped with horrid claws. The chittering noises of them, the clickings and buzzings. This is not happening to me, she tells herself. Not to me. Do you know whose daughter I am? The words won’t leave her lips. They probably do know, anyway. All the better, getting someone like her. The pack of them surrounding her, seizing her, touching her. Then the terror unexpectedly disappearing. An eerie dreamlike calmness somehow taking possession of her soul. The hjjks carrying her away, then. A long march, an endless march, through unknown country. And then—the moist hot darkness of the Nest—the strangeness of that other life, which was like some different world, though it was right here on Earth—the power of the Queen impinging, surrounding, engulfing, transforming—
    And ever since, the loneliness, the bitter sense that there was no one else at all like her anywhere in the world. But now, at last, another who had experienced what she had experienced. At last. Another who knew .
    “Where is he?” she demanded. “I have to see him! Quick! Quick!”
    “He is at the Basilica, lady. In the throne-chamber, with his lordship Husathirn Mueri.”
    “Quick, then! Let’s go!”
    She rushed from her room, not even bothering with her sash. Her nakedness mattered nothing to her. Let them stare, she thought. The bailiff came running along desperately behind her, huffing and wheezing, as she raced down the stairs of the House of Nakhaba. Astonished acolytes in priestly helmets, scattering before her onslaught, turned to glare and mutter, but she paid no attention to them.
    On this day in late spring the sun was still high in the western sky, though the afternoon