Alison watched them as Julian gesticulated, talking a little too loudly because, somewhere in his head, Stig was a foreigner, and he needed to help the poor caveman along. He was talking, with surprising frankness, about MI5 operations against the Cousins. Recalling that moment when he and Alison had started to put everything together. For his part Stig just sat, mostly impassive. But his shoulders shifted up and down, and his hands were never quite still. There was a whole bag of Cousin body language that she didn’t quite get.

Julian looked up now and smiled, same old Spiker, and she sat beside him chastely enough. Stig slapped the hard, ridgy floor with one palm and said, “Been in your branch, maybe eight years. Forget what it’s like to be home, sometimes. Helping study, at the start. With Auruthmer, at first. Don’t like it much. Except Finland. Finland was quiet.”

“Why do you do it, then?” Alison asked.

“Someone’s got to.” Stig met her eyes briefly, mouth downturned in an exaggerated frown. “Me, I’m good at surviving you people, all the many of you. Know your languages, seven or eight. Keep the scholars safe too, hm?”

“Seven or eight languages?” Julian sounded doubtful.

Stig made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “Your languages, pff. Ours are more different. I know twelve, and twenty…” He made a clutching motion, the epitome of someone grasping for a word.

“Dialects?” Alison supplied.

“Just that. But you don’t do language like we do. Every child learns three, four. For every part of life, mostly, one language is common—like you had Latin, once, for your science. So you learn birth tongue, neighbour tongues, learning tongues for higher study—then also work tongues, two or three. Me, I was diplomat. I went for my…town? Went and talked to other places about what they needed, what we need.”

“You’re a diplomat?” Julian’s doubt had visibly increased.

Stig sighed at the burden of explanation, but Alison suspected that his “reluctant bruiser” act was just that. He probably found pretending to be simple meant humans wrote him off more easily.

“We don’t live like you do. Fifty is a big group, hundred is too much. We like to be spread out. Back in history, when we got together like you, bad things happen. Madness, wrong decisions. But to make big things happen we need more hands than we have. So people like me go to the neighbours, speak their language, say what we need: so they can come and help or give us what they have. Then next time, they come to us and say, and we give what we can.”