Thank god I was grown too old for their sexual advances.

Then on the first of July the Emperor came to Hacilith. Governor Donacobius accompanied him into the town square. Everyone poured out and crowded around their caparisoned horses. I left my washing soaking in lye, dropped the shirt I was squeezing around a wringing post, and dashed to the window to listen. The Emperor himself proclaimed the Games. He announced that every man and woman regardless of age or background was welcome to compete in organised tournaments. San would share his immortality with the winners providing they were prepared to act as leaders in the war.

Many students left to try their skill at the Games, but as far as I could tell, they all came back in the following weeks, and very chastened. Life at the guild went on as normal.

Until, that is, Heron disappeared. On my morning visit I found his rooms vacated and I panicked. His landlord told me he’d gone to the front. Heron had been in communication with the Messenger and had suggested that the Circle needed a doctor. San agreed and asked him to come to Rachiswater to be tested by treating the casualties of the ongoing massacre. Everything I had worked for vanished instantaneously-what good was a rich student’s famulus without the student? Devastated, I returned to darning socks.

Less than a month later a letter arrived from the front, from my ‘grandson’. Its ink had run where Heron’s tears had hit the page. He begged me to come and help him. He was completely out of his depth with the number of men slashed and disembowelled. We had never seen an Insect up close and the injuries they caused horrified him. He had never dirtied his hands in the operating theatre and hadn’t the first idea how to organise a hospital. The assistants were afraid, he had lost his authority over them, and the Messenger was too busy to listen to his excuses.

Heron had included enough money in the scroll for me to bribe a fyrd captain to ride pillion on his cart when the next draft left town. So I came to the grimy field hospitals of Rachiswater and I soon had them under control. I know when a floor hasn’t been cleaned properly and I was not above showing the assistants how to do it. I improved or made comfortable the majority of the patients, organised supply chains of medicine from the capital, and upbraided Heron as if I really was his grandmother.

San noticed the progress and visited the infirmary. Heron greeted him and showed him in, bowing low and explaining the enhancements he had made, whilst blocking San’s view of me. The Emperor looked past him and saw me bloodied up to the elbows, trying to stabilise the condition of a maimed soldier. He came to question me and quickly understood that the improvements had coincided with my arrival so, as I worked, he joined me to the Circle and made me one of the immortals. It was my dream, what I was made for! At last I was in the right place!

That night, I was shown to a pavilion that would temporarily serve as my scriptorium. I sat down to write. Heron burst in, stinking of brandy.

He disentangled himself from the tent ropes and slurred, ‘I know the rules, you old bag. I’ve always learned the rules so I can work the system.’

I said, ‘Yes, and that’s all you do.’

He sneered. ‘San wants the best specialists. I suggested the Circle have a Doctor, and you walked in. That’s not fair. Well, I’m the next best doctor, so if you were to die I’d take your place.’ He drew his dagger and dived at me. I tried to dodge but his fist on the hilt caught my eye such a crack that I fell off the stool, onto my back on the grass.

In a trice he was on me. He raised the dagger above my throat. I had a vivid image of myself as a cadaver on the dissecting table. Female, aged seventy-eight, note cause of death; a single deep puncture. Carotid cut, thyroid and oesophagus pierced, sixth cervical vertebra shattered, spinal cord severed. I’d make a fine lesson! I braced myself to feel my blood spray.

The point arced down. A shout made Heron flinch. His dagger deflected and tore through my hood.

‘Fuck!’ he said, and glanced behind him. Then he turned as pale as if he’d been bleached.

The Castle’s Archer was standing at the entrance, bow flexed and an arrow unerringly trained on Heron. He said, ‘I only have to let go. And believe me, nothing would give me greater pleasure.’

Heron collapsed into a kneeling position.

Seeing his face, the Archer looked surprised, but only for a second. ‘Heron Foin?’

‘I’m sorry, my lord prince, I’m sorry.’ To my astonishment Heron began to grovel at the Archer’s feet. He changed to High Awian and wept apologies into the grass.

The Archer lowered his bow. ‘I know of you, Heron Foin. I know your father. Go home to the backwater little manorship you crawled from. If you harm our genius surgeon or even show your face here again, my brothers and I will take your hall apart until it is nothing but a field with stones in. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes! Yes!’

‘Get yourself out of my tent.’

Heron kissed the ground, jumped up and sped out. I never saw him again. I unpinned myself from the grass and dabbed my black eye with a handkerchief. I had never before heard a voice with such natural authority; it made even the professors sound strained. The Archer helped me to my feet, then bowed low and kissed my hand. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I would be honoured if you would call me Saker. What is your name?’

So, Cyan, you see how much I owe your father. Imagine how overwhelming life must have been for him in the early days of the Circle. Before the Games, the First Circle were no more than boastful mortal warriors leading a mass of untrained fyrd with swords and spears. The First Circle had lasted for two hundred and five years since San first drew them from three countries, but they gradually gave ground to the Insects all that time and left northern Awia to the Paperlands.

There was no effective way of fighting Insects then. The nobility and peasant levies simply fed the hordes and although the First Circle fought, manor after manor fell. We thought we were doomed. Your tutor may have taught you this, but don’t forget it really happened, and Lightning was there. A million corpses is not some story you tell children at bedtime!

The blizzard winter of six nineteen put an end to the First Circle. Those who weren’t eaten died of starvation, disease and exposure in snow holes by the Rachis river. Deep drifts covered the ruins of Murrelet.

San realised that the First Circle’s brave but stupid warriors weren’t enough. He needed the best to train fyrds. He needed an infrastructure to keep supplies flowing-cooks and doctors; and to keep knowledge from being lost-agriculturalists and armourers. He needed an administration to take decisions on his behalf on many battlefields simultaneously. In short, he needed people who could think in the long term, as he did.

When San revealed he could make other people immortal, everyone suddenly saw him in a new light. Before, he had relied on the goodwill of the governors to raise and lead fyrds; now everyone clamoured to join the Circle.

San also knew that the celebrations and ceremony of the Games would raise our hopes. He let us see our own capabilities. Our fighting spirit soared.

San kept his personal symbol, the Imperial Sunburst, and extrapolated it to invent all our Eszai names. With the First Circle gone, the Castle’s Breckan and Simurgh Wings stood empty, waiting for the victors of the Games. It was an exhilarating time. It threw us together, people from every stratum of society across the world and some with naught but the clothes they stood up in. I heard that Lightning arrived with a retinue of eight carriages of belongings and attendants, to discover that the rooms he was allocated by ballot were tiny compared with those he was used to. He divided his treasures among the new Eszai and filled all their rooms.