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mentioned it Wavey just laughed and said, “Your grandfather used to say that there is no end to war among the nomad empires. He always said, ‘The best you can hope for is a gap between one war and the next.’”
    Wavey was trying to befriend her daughter. She had been in exile when Fever was growing up, and although it had not exactly been her fault, she still felt guilty that she had missed her child’s childhood. She meant to make up for it now, but she had no idea how to be a mother, so she tried to treat Fever like the best friend she wished she had had when she was Fever’s age (instead of all the catty, treacherous Scriven princesses who had been her actual friends). She confided in Fever about her new-found happiness with Dr Crumb. “I know he seems boring, but after the life I’ve led a little boredom is quite a change. And have you noticed how, when we snuggle, he is just the right height for me to rest my chin upon his head? I think there is a lot to be said for a husband who can be used as a chin-rest.”
    Fever just winced with embarrassment.
    Wavey gave her presents; whole trunks of dresses ordered from her own dressmaker and from dressmakers in Paris and Hamsterdam too, so that Fever would cut a dash at the Winter Festival parties. Even Wavey had to admit that she was herself a little old to wear some of the latest fashions, but it pleased her to imagine Fever dressed in them; she knew just the colours that would bring out her daughter’s striking looks.
    But Fever would not go to parties, and she never opened her overstuffed wardrobes. Instead, each morning, she dressed in a grey shirt, black trousers, twenty-eyelet boots and a plain white Engineer’s coat. She agreed to an appointment with Wavey’s expensive hairdresser, but only let him trim her hair, then tied it back again in that hard, unflattering bun.
    So Wavey tried to interest her in the mysteries of her own past; the curious operation which Godshawk had performed on her when she was just a sickly baby. The technomancers whom Quercus had recruited from the north had brought an Electric Microscope with them. In its chamber at the Engineerium, while burly apprentices worked the treadmill which powered it, mother and daughter sat side by side and peered at a drop of Fever’s blood, magnified many hundreds of times. For the first time Fever glimpsed the tiny machines which twitched and fidgeted there.
    “Mechanimalculae,” murmured Wavey, entranced, leaning forward for a closer look. “I guessed as much. Stalkers have them, but I didn’t think Godshawk had ever found a way to keep them working in a living person. . . No wonder that gash on your face healed so beautifully when we were coming home from Mayda. All these busy little things inside you, mending damage, protecting you from germs. I don’t suppose you’ve had so much as a cold in your whole life, have you?”
    “I don’t remember,” said Fever, remembering times when everyone aboard the Lyceum had been sneezing and coughing and only she had escaped the infection. At Godshawk’s Head, too, in the flu season, she’d sometimes had to nurse Dr Crumb and the other Engineers, and never caught their illnesses herself.
    On the screen the mechanimalculae frisked and jiggled, each no bigger than a corpuscle. “How are they powered ?” she asked.
    “Molecular Clockwork,” said Wavey airily, as if she knew what that meant. “It doesn’t matter, Fever. Don’t trouble over details.”
    But the things were in her daughter’s blood, not hers. Fever could not help but be troubled.
     
    Down amid the gloom and snow the old year ended and a new one began. The weather did not get better, but it stopped getting worse. In springtime when the roads were open again the convoys bringing fuel and timber from the north brought good news too, from Quercus’s old comrade Rufus Raven, who commanded the army there. The war was won: the Great Carn of Arkhangelsk had made peace, and his forces