Eujen did not look at him, staring at his own feet, but Averic glowered, twisting in the grip of the soldiers who held him.
Cherten favoured him with a cold smile. ‘Yes, the greater of the two traitors first. Put the pikes in him now.’
He turned back to regard the dark bulk of the College and opened his mouth to shout something at his audience there, and an arrow pierced his throat, through to the fletching.
And on the College wall, Straessa cursed and demanded, ‘What did you do?’
Castre Gorenn stared at her. ‘Wasn’t that. . Wait, what did you mean for me to do?’
There was a moment when that single arrow became a full-scale attack in the minds of most of the Wasps there, and Averic seized on it.
He tried to put an elbow in the throat of the man holding him, but slammed it painfully into the soldier’s chest instead. It was enough, sending his captor reeling away from him, and then Averic’s hands flashed, knocking down the man with the pike who stood right next to him, still staring dumbly at Cherten’s body. The barbed spear ended up in Averic’s hands, and he lashed it across the face of the man holding Eujen.
‘Go!’ he shouted, and because Eujen plainly had no idea how or where to go, he grabbed the Beetle student tight and threw them both off the roof towards the splintered architecture of the barricade.
His wings flashed, but Eujen was heavy, and the two of them barely cleared the barricade at all, before tumbling to the ground. There were shouts from behind and above — at least some of them directed at the escaping prisoners and-
Averic’s heart soared. Eujen was on his feet and already beginning to lumber towards the College, stumbling at first, but gaining momentum as he went. And Averic flew after him, turning in the air to spit a scatter of stingshot at those he knew must be following.
‘Get the doors open!’ Straessa yelled. ‘Get. .’ and then she had simply vaulted the edge of the wall, hanging by her hands for a moment and then dropping. Gorenn was with her, and a couple of Fly-kinden, and she heard the rattle and groan as the doors were unbarred and opening behind her.
Her feet pounded the flagstones, and she was already trying to level her snapbow, but it was a futile effort. Ahead she saw bright flashes that must be Averic’s sting — and they were answered in kind, for the Wasps were in the air and descending fast on the fugitives. The distance between them — from Straessa to the escapees — seemed immense and ever-growing however fast she ran, like in some terrible dream.
Beside her, Gorenn was loosing another arrow, yet barely slowing.
She saw Averic turn again, kicking into the air, hands on fire with golden light. Then he had lurched sideways, and she realized he had been struck. There were snapbowmen still on the roof, and they had a clear shot. Averic was down on one knee, and she saw Eujen falter, slowing as if to turn — slowing to be caught.
‘Run!’ came Averic’s high, clear voice. He had not even looked back, but his hands flashed and flamed, burning up his life in crackling Art.
He was down. It was so sudden Straessa did not even see the transition, but her Wasp friend was a motionless heap on the ground when her eyes found him again. . and Eujen was still labouring towards her. He had spotted her now, and his expression was like a drowning man’s.
There were Wasps behind him, practically hovering over his shoulders. One spun away with an arrow punched through his mail. The other dropped down to the ground, snapbow levelled.
‘Eujen!’ Straessa shouted. ‘Go left!’
He lurched — it was nothing more than that — but she was already bringing her own weapon up, pulling the trigger, her hands so steady they should have belonged to someone else. The Wasp soldier stood up suddenly, then fell back down, and Eujen. .
Eujen was picking himself up unsteadily, weaving oddly. His lurch had not been in response to her call. He had been shot.
She tried to run faster to reach him, to compensate for the fact that he was no longer running at all. The next two bolts that struck him, she saw only in the shuddering of his body before he collapsed.
She was screaming, and there were other Wasps ahead, but she had brought a boiling mass of students in her wake, and now the snapbow bolts were flying in both directions and the Wasps had not been ready for a Collegiate sally.
She reached Eujen’s body, saw him still moving, still clawing to stand up, and she took his hand, took his arm, but the sound he made when she tried to get him to his feet curdled her insides, and she let go.
‘Gereth!’ she called out, and of course the Woodlouse was there, without even a snapbow in hand. But he had come after her, and now he was gathering up Eujen, lifting the Beetle’s bulk as though it was nothing, while soldiers of the Student Company flanked him and loosed their bolts at the Wasps to keep them back.
Straessa spared one look for Averic, but he was too far away, and lying too still. . and she knew that to go after his corpse would be to run into a killing ground.
‘Fall back,’ she spat. ‘Back for the College.’
The surgeons had been and gone before she was allowed to see him, coming and going behind closed doors as if they were merely ghosts or rumours. When Straessa finally forced her way in, after she had exhausted the protests of the staff, she found the same two Fly-kinden tending him as had watched over Stenwold Maker earlier. Sperra, the woman from Princep, and of course Sartaea te Mosca, her friend. Eujen’s friend.
There was such grief on the little woman’s face that Straessa thought he must have died.
When she crouched beside him, though, kneeling on the floor by his mattress, she could just hear his breathing, picking it out from the laboured breath of the other casualties there because she recognized it, even diminished as it was.
‘Tell me,’ she whispered.
Te Mosca shook her head slightly. ‘We can’t know, dear one, I’m sorry. There’s hope. .’ Her tone belied her words.
‘They said if he hadn’t been a Beetle, he’d not have made it as far as the walls,’ Sperra explained, briskly businesslike because Eujen was just one more injured Collegiate to her. ‘They’ve dosed him up with Instar but sometimes it doesn’t take, and sometimes it makes things worse.’
‘It seems that medical science has come full circle, until it’s as vague as my magic,’ te Mosca murmured.
Sperra bent over Eujen’s chest and listened carefully, before noting something down on a scroll. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Just let him lie there. . and let whatever happens happen. Make a nuisance of yourself, and it’ll make him worse.’ She stood up for a moment, swaying slightly, and Straessa wondered when this woman had last slept.
Te Mosca squeezed the other Fly’s arm — small support but all she could wring from the situation — and Sperra nodded and moved on to the next bed, where her big Ant friend was sitting halfway up and sipping gingerly at a jug of water.
Eujen’s dead weight lay beside Straessa, and she would have needed the instruments of the Apt to register his chest rising and falling. His colour was a ghastly greyish hue, as though the blood had congealed inside him. His exposed skin bore at least a score of lacerations, many still weeping.
She took his good hand, finding it clammy and too cold, and she sat there beside his bed for as long as she could stand it, listening to the weakening falter of his breath. Nobody was counting, but she reckoned that she lasted less than twenty minutes before she wanted to scream out her anger and frustration at the vaulted ceiling.
She stood up without warning, and te Mosca looked up at her, concerned.
‘Straessa?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t just. . I can’t just sit here and wait.’
The Fly took in her expression. ‘Please, he needs you.’
‘I can’t. Not for him, not for you.’ She was shaking a little, with a chill that had come from his cool hand.