At last he let his anger out in a long sigh. ‘Take her back to the pens,’ he instructed, not looking at his men. The shadow of that other emotion was still there on his face.

Stenwold walked carefully into the firelight, and let her see him coming. Totho was still clattering about beneath the automotive, and the Moth’s eyes were closed in what Stenwold hoped was sleep. He sat down, not across from her, not next to her, but at an angle, a no-man’s land. She stared at him sullenly.

‘I think it’s time,’ he said, ‘that I told you some things. About yourself.’

‘You obviously know nothing about me,’ she told him coldly, ‘or you would have realized that I would follow you – you and… and him – when you went away to talk.’

The world seemed to die around him in that moment, like autumn arriving all in one day.

‘You followed?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you heard?’

‘Everything.’

‘This isn’t how I wanted it, Tynisa.’

‘I’m not sure you even know how you wanted it,’ she told him harshly. ‘Why, Stenwold? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to find out this way? Why not ten years ago? Why not five years ago? Or even two?’

He felt terribly old now. ‘Tynisa, I didn’t tell you because I had not yet told Tisamon.’

‘But you…’ Her face twisted. ‘So you’d rather… So I…’

He held his hand up, and to her credit she let him speak. ‘If I had told you at twelve or fifteen that your father was a Mantis-kinden hired sword working out of Helleron, then I know you would have wanted to meet him, even if it was just to see the man who abandoned your mother. I would have forbidden it, but I do know you, and I know you would have found a way. And if you had confronted him, looking like you do, so like her, he would have killed you. That is nothing more than the truth.’ He rubbed at his forehead. ‘And so I made the resolution to say nothing. I might have broken that resolve, but… but you never asked. Never. You never asked who your parents were.’

Her expression showed pure betrayal. ‘I didn’t need to ask who they were. I thought…’ Her voice was starting to shake. ‘I thought that you…’

‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘you couldn’t have thought that.’ Because, of course, that was the gossip when he had arrived at Collegium with a motherless child in his arms: that she was the fruit of some indiscretion of his. It had been a minor scandal. The child’s pale skin had told its tale, though, and when the child grew, it became obvious to all that nothing so heavy and down-to-earth as Beetle blood was flowing in her, and the questions multiplied but the speculation died away, and he had thought that particular rumour must have been put in its grave long before now. But here it was again, and he was confronted with it from its very source.

‘What was I supposed to think?’ she demanded. ‘You raised me. You looked after me.’ The firelight showed tears of pain and frustration tracking down her cheeks. ‘You’re my father. Until last night, that was who you were, to me. I never thought…’ A sob, choked back. ‘Or if I did, I stopped myself thinking. And now you’re just… I’m just…’

‘I did everything I could for you,’ he told her sadly. ‘I did bring you up as if you were my own. It was my promise to Atryssa. I gave you the best start in life that I could think of, in Collegium. I even found a sister for you, so that you would always have company. I did everything but tell you the truth.’

She was silent, it seemed to him, forever, staring into the fire. He felt like a man walking a tightrope, Tisamon to one side and Tynisa to the other. I was never meant for such juggling.

‘Tell me about her,’ she said at last. ‘How did it happen? What could have possibly gone wrong, to put me in the world?’

‘Please-’

‘Tell me.’

He settled back. ‘It’s a story you should recognize. We met in Collegium – at the College itself. I know it seems absurd that he,’ a nod towards the solitary Tisamon, ‘could ever have been a student, but he came to Collegium hunting I know not what, something he could not find at home. We were the strangest group. We fought in the Prowess. They were all so good and I was a liability, but they carried me with them.’ The memory hurt more than he would have thought: the sweetness of those innocent days stuck in his throat.

‘What was she like?’ That question, coming from the very mirror of Atryssa? This night did not feel real to him any more.

‘She stepped off a boat into Collegium with nothing but the clothes she wore. Everybody loved her and the city never knew what had hit it. She got everything she asked for. I think she was from one of the great Spider houses, the Aristoi they call them. But they had fallen on hard times, lost their footing in the dance. She didn’t speak much about it, never looked back. She was Spider-kinden, after all. She could do all the things that they do, intrigue with the best of them, but… she had a heart, and she was a friend, and I think we all loved her, just a little. Your mother.’ The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day. Debates in the chambers, duels at the Prowess, learning artifice from the masters. As a young man, with the world ahead of him and no worries, none.

‘As for Tisamon, he came from Felyal, where the real fanatics live. He hated her race. He hated her, at first. Even then he was the best fighter anyone had ever seen, but she herself was close on the second. They would duel together in the Prowess Forum all the time. Each one could find no other to challenge their skills. She gave him something no other could, and he came to love her even as they fought. Mantis-kinden! And when they love and hate, it is with all their being. And he hated himself, at first, because he thought he was betraying his own race. Oh it was a difficult business. And yet your mother worked on him, and broke his defences down.’ He reached around for his pack, opened it up. ‘I’ve something I should show you, I think, at this point. It’s been a long time waiting for you to see it. I’ve carried it to many places. Coming to Helleron, I thought… well, there was always a chance.’ He withdrew a flat leather wallet and opened it to reveal a canvas perhaps a foot across. With great care he folded it out so that she could see.

Two decades ago the fashion in painting groups was to have them surprised in some domestic scene. So it was that the five figures here were in a taverna somewhere, turning to look at the viewer as though suddenly interrupted in some drinking discussion. The paint had scuffed, in places, flaked and chipped, but the picture was still clear. Tynisa stared.

Seated left of centre was a young Beetle who could have been Stenwold’s son, save that he had never had one. Still stocky, slightly round at the waist. She looked from that cheerful, smiling face to the solemn one the fire now danced on, trying to bridge the chasm time had made.

Standing behind his chair was Tisamon: there was no doubt of that. The artist had caught him perfectly, down to the hostile expression on his sharp features, a threat to the intruder. His right hand, almost out of sight behind Stenwold’s chair, wore the metal gauntlet of his folding claw. In the far left of the picture, a bald, knuckle-faced Fly leant back in his chair, a bowl of wine tilted in one hand, seemingly on the very point of overbalancing. Across from him was a darkly serious Ant-kinden man, his back turned three-quarters to the viewer, the links of his chain-mail hauberk picked out in minute detail.

In the centre of the picture, sitting on the table with her legs dangling, was a girl whose face Tynisa had herself watched grow from a child’s to a woman’s, in daily mirrored increments. At that point – in the frozen piece of time the artist had preserved – it was as though it was she herself amongst those strangers.