Dangerous Offspring by Steph Swainston Page A

fish around my two-pronged fork. ‘It was terrible. I’m far too impatient to convalesce in hospital for day after day, with nothing to do but the occasional haemorrhage.’
    I had a collapsed lung and pneumonia–which injured Awians are prone to–and a bloody great hole in my side. Sepsis led to organ failure but Rayne knew to let me lie dormant until my body recovered itself. When I came round I screamed solidly, high and eerie like a sick infant until she pumped me full of painkillers. I was in shock; it cocooned and isolated me from reality. I knew I was very badly hurt but could only lie still and trust her. The thought I might never fly again constantly distressed me; if that broken wing had grounded me permanently I would have been vulnerable to Challengers so I made sure Rayne paid it careful attention. I also suffered from a great sense of failure because the mortals who looked to me to lead them had all been killed. I desperately needed to talk but I kept my silence. It was like being in a dark tunnel that very gradually widened and I began to realise what had actually happened to me. I relived it again and again and I grew to understand it. Then I began to talk about it and I healed more quickly.
    ‘He harried us for all the news,’ Lightning told Eleonora.
    ‘Four months were missing from my life!’ I said.
    Eleonora asked Lightning, ‘Where were you in that battle? Why weren’t you hurt like Jant?’
    He shrugged modestly.
    ‘Go on,’ she teased. ‘Tell me.’
    Lightning never needs much encouragement to recount a story. ‘In the preceding weeks,’ he began, ‘everyone seemed tired, overworked and irritable. Little things kept going wrong. We couldn’t know then that it was because something so momentous, so awful, was going to happen that it sent ripples back down the flow of time, to disturb us and disrupt our attention.
    ‘I was in the Sun Pavilion, writing. You know the story where an Eszai is Challenged, but he sends an assassin to murder the Challenger before they meet, so San throws him out of the Circle?’
    ‘No,’ said Eleonora.
    ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Lightning. ‘But this is proof that romantic novels can save your life. The ground began to shake and, one by one, the candles guttered out. I could see nothing, not the back of my hand, not the page in front of me. I couldn’t grasp what was happening.
    ‘I called the captain and together we walked along the line of tents summoning the archers, getting them kitted up and reassuring them. By the time we had one hundred men the rest had gone. They had fled. The ground was falling away under our feet so fast it brought down the palisade.’
    Lightning was staring intently, watching the memory. He subconsciously dropped a hand to his sword hilt. With eyes bright and the other hand spread, he leant over the table, talking directly to Eleonora. ‘You should never meet Insects on open ground. Use fortifications whenever possible. I knew that, but what did we have? Two companies of archers and a handful of arrows.
    ‘We retreated along the stockade until we came to the only corner where it was still upright. I ordered them to form up inside with the fence at their backs. They were breaking down with fear but I made them pull a fallen section in front of us and shoot for all they were worth. We shot straight out over the top, in relays, all night long.’
    ‘For the whole night?’ asked Eleonora.
    ‘If we slowed we would die, I knew that full well.’ He swept his hand out over the table. ‘Fss! Fss! Went the arrows. Every time we paused, stragglers were coming in, some no more than naked, and we lifted them over the defence. Insects scaled it and I had teams to chop them down as they reached the top. After the first hour men started giving up, falling from exhaustion and hypothermia. I dragged them to the back and I kept the rest going. We could see nothing. We knew we were hitting people out there, but they were already lost to