Free Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky

the tone of voice which implied Stenwold alone had seen a storm on that distant horizon, and nobody around him would go home for their coats.
    Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. But it was like trying to will herself to sleep. Instead of lulling herself into a deep contemplation she was wide awake and excruciatingly aware of everything around her, with the word ‘concentrate’ branded on the inside of her skull.
    ‘I’ve got to get this right ,’ she told herself in a desperate little whisper. The Art, the Ancestor Art, was all important, and she didn’t know anyone who was as hopeless with it as she was. There were youths of twelve who had acquired a better mastery.
    The Art was common to all the kinden, yet unique to each. It grew the spines on Mantis arms and gave the Mantids their prodigious speed and skill. It was the silent voice with which the Ant-kinden spoke to each other, mind to mind, to coordinate their battles. It made some strong, others resilient. It could cloud enemy minds, or climb enemy walls. It could make the earth-bound fly . . . Oh, she would so like to fly. Alas, Beetle-kinden were proverbially bad at it, clumsy and thunderous, but to be able to fly , to just soar into the air without a machine or a mount to carry her. Fly-kinden and Moths and the others might sneer at her, but she would not care how ungainly, how slow.
    I think too much , she decided. I’m too much of a rationalist . Not that the Art was irrational, not like the old spurious magics the Moths still clung to. It was just poorly understood and utterly beyond her grasp.
    She sighed. It was hopeless. It was all still getting away from her. She had no need, right now, to feel any more of a failure.
    She wondered if it might have changed things if she had won her bout against Falger. She had made the first strike, too, a stinging rap to Falger’s ungloved hand, and it had then seemed a foregone conclusion. He was as inexperienced as she was, and he seemed frightened of being hurt, and he had his fat uncle in the background growling and unsettling him, and she had him. He was hers for the taking.
    And then she had started thinking . It was always such thinking that tripped her up. If she had been a dull girl, as Falger was a dull boy, then none of this would be a problem. Instead of concentrating solely on her next move, she had started thinking, and he had clipped her shoulder with a narrow blow. And then she had been thinking even more about how to stop him doing it again, and so he had done it again. His blade, with a horribly clumsy lunge, had poked her in the stomach, and so he had won. And his fellows had won, and his uncle had won, and she had lost, not only for herself, but everyone else. They had tried to tell her it didn’t matter, but she knew in her heart that it did, and that she had let them all down. Again.
    When, two years ago, Stenwold had opened his latest duelling school, he had started it around Tynisa and then set about looking for recruits. How Cheerwell had badgered him, morning, noon and night, practising ostentatiously outside his study window, breaking a vase in the hall with her practice parries, nagging at him and distracting him until he had let her join. And now his initial caution had proved to be so well founded.
    That must be why , she thought. That must be why he isn’t taking me, too. Because she knew his plans now. Something was happening far off that he wanted to see for himself, something in Helleron away to the east. He was departing in just a few days, and he was taking Tynisa and Salma to act as his agents there.
    He was leaving her behind.
    She stood up. Clearly meditation was not the order of the day. He could not begin to know how much he had hurt her, when he had come in to ask Tynisa to join him and said nothing to Che, even though she was right there in the same room. Some way or other she would make him take her too because staying here at home with the rejection would hurt her far