They considered that, and Brocky nodded glumly. ‘You’ve got a point, Marshwic.’
‘However, they are careful and they are pragmatic,’ Emily continued. ‘And they will do anything, if they feel it must be done.’ In her heart weighed a cold stone from thinking about the future of Giles Scavian.
*
There were enough soldiers in Chalcaster to cause all of them alarm. Emily counted at least two squads, of a score of men apiece, formed up in the marketplace, and the same number in individuals and pairs, on corners and walking down streets. There were a half-dozen outside the governor’s offices, instead of the usual two, and they looked decidedly askance at the three visitors, noting how they stood, their scars and signs of battle.
One made a move to stand in Emily’s way as they ascended the steps, and she glared at him imperiously. ‘I am here to see the Mayor-Governor,’ she told him. ‘Have you any reason to stop me?’
He looked beyond her at Tubal and Brocky ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Are you going to give me one?’
‘Emily, you go in, see what you can do,’ Tubal suggested. ‘We’ll stay with the buggy.’
‘Does that meet with your approval?’ she asked of the soldier and, after a glance at his colleagues, he shrugged and let her pass.
She went straight to the man’s office, ignoring any soldiers and clerks who cast worried looks at her, and when she got there she found Mr Northway waiting for her. He had his hands splayed across the papers in front of him, and there was something in his look that she did not like.
‘Giles Scavian,’ he said, in a crisp, clear tone, and she felt her world contract to just this: to this office, this man, her beating heart. Oh, I have been playing a dangerous game, and never known it until now.
‘Cristan . . .’
‘Giles Scavian,’ he repeated. ‘Warlock and servant of the King. Veteran of the Levant. I don’t recall you mentioning the name.’
She licked her lips, waiting, but inside she knew that she had met a kind of justice. She had somehow believed that she had escaped undetected in her divided affections. Some part of her had thought itself very clever, while the rest had simply not thought at all.
‘Of course, I realize there was a sort of gloss that you put on your memoirs,’ he went on crisply. ‘A sense of something unspoken that, seen from the right angle, looked uncommonly like a man. A man you were taking some pains not to talk about. But a man left behind in the Levant, along with the war. Not a man here, now.’ His eyes were fixed on hers like the gaze of a serpent, pinning her in place. ‘Which was what I assured myself, when you spoke. For I would have had to be . . .’ his hands twitched ever so slightly . . . blind, not to see that there had been someone else. And that was your prerogative, in the heat of battle. Or maybe that someone was a someone whom you had already met, at Deerlings let’s say, even before the Women’s Draft. I am very good at remembering names. I recall the dashing young Giles Scavian.’
‘Cristan, listen to me.’ In the face of this interrogation, her words seemed ridiculous now. Still, what else had she? ‘I need your help.’
‘And who do I find amongst my papers,’ he continued, as though she had not spoken, ‘but Giles Scavian, Warlock and veteran, whom the Denlanders put in my cells after dark last night, and over whom they deliberate even as we speak.’
He stood up and hunched his way over to the back of the room, giving the plasterwork a cursory examination. When he turned back to her, his face was wiped clean of emotion. ‘And now you need my help?’
‘Yes, Cristan . . . Please.’
‘On behalf of Giles Scavian.’
You always did make me play your damned games. ‘Yes, Cristan.’
‘Whom you . . . knew well at the Levant.’
‘He is a close friend of mine, a good friend of mine. I owe him my help.’ She could not tell whether his face was going to freeze in place or cave in. He held it masterfully somewhere between the two.
‘Truth,’ he said simply. ‘Our association, Miss Marshwic, is built on it. I say this too often, I’m sure, but I have never lied to you. Perhaps it’s because there is none other with whom I could be so truthful.’ He came back to his desk, hands gripping tight to its edge without his apparent knowledge. ‘So then, why don’t you tell me about your friend Giles Scavian?’ He had tensed himself, ready for whatever she said, and she knew that to tell the truth would wound him, to lie to him would wound him more.
Could she deny her feelings for Scavian with a straight face? Could she make him nothing but a comrade-in-arms? Could she lie to Cristan Northway, so that he would not know it?
God forgive me. For, after all this time, she knew that she owed this man the truth. She had been living her two separate lives, thinking that a single shot would end both of them soon enough, and now they had come together, tangled like old ribbon. Giles, forgive me.
‘More than a friend,’ she whispered.
He swallowed, and she thought he swayed slightly, still clutching at the desk that was his livelihood and support. He repeated her words soundlessly to himself and then said, ‘And you come to me when the worst kind of chance has put him in my cells, under my roof, and you ask that I defy the Denlanders and set the man free?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And this Scavian, he is so much more than a friend that my hopes for you are dashed, Emily? So much more that, even before I asked, I had no hope or chance of you? I must know.’ Quite matter-of-fact, his voice now, but she could see him holding shut a great floodgate of emotion with all the strength he possessed.
‘Cristan, I don’t know. I can’t see my way to the end of it. I need more time. Please.’
‘You offer me that bait, at least, as an incentive to free him?’
‘Cristan!’ she snapped, catching his attention. ‘I will not lie to you, nor have I.’
He nodded wearily. ‘I cannot release him.’
‘Cristan!’
‘Emily, I can’t. He’s not mine to release. The Denlanders have him, and I’ve no authority over them. They have three soldiers down there in the cells with him, night and day, guns trained on his every move. The first flash of fire from him and he’s a dead man. They’re terrified of him. You already know what they do to things they’re scared of. They’re hunting down every surviving wizard. While the King’s at large, they’re too much of a risk, too dangerous, too much of a flag to rally to. I cannot order him released. I do not even have the keys to his cell under my control.’
‘What will they do to him?’
‘Why, they will kill him, of course,’ said Northway simply. ‘What did you think?’
‘You know that for certain?’
He made an airy gesture. ‘They don’t know it themselves yet but, when they’ve held their Parliament and their councils, they’ll come to that decision. You cannot take a wizard prisoner – not for long. It has always been so. With wizards, you must kill them or avoid them; there is no middle ground.’
‘Cristan, you’re talking about my friend!’ she yelled at him. ‘I can’t let them kill him! I won’t! I’ll damn well shoot my way in and rescue him myself – and let them kill me if they dare!’
‘Which they would, without a thought,’ he confirmed. ‘Shall I say I’m sorry? I’m sorry. It would have been a fine wooing gift to free your lover for you, but I cannot make it happen.’
‘Will you do what you can? You have influence. I know you, Cristan. You always have ways of getting what you want.’
His lips twitched. ‘We have learned to compromise, have we not, you and I?’
‘For God’s sake!’ she exploded. ‘What do you want from me? What must I say to make you do this for me?’
He stared at her, and there was a lean hunger in his eyes that brought her up short.
‘Is that it?’ she said. ‘Are you holding him to ransom now. Is that what you want, for me to pledge myself to you in return for his safety?’
He made as if to speak, and she knew that
he wanted that very much, more than anything. He wanted to have the coin to buy her, to make her his own. He bared his teeth like an animal at the thought, feeling the desire rise inside him. In the end, though, the words that hissed out through his teeth were, ‘No. I will not take you at such a price, for how long would I keep you, then? If you are to come to me, then come freely or not at all.’
‘Then you will not help me?’
‘I will help you.’ The fire had gone out of him, like a candle snuffed. ‘I will pull such strings as I have, bend such ears as are mine to bend, mislay papers and invoke the demons of bureaucracy. But, Emily, it will not suffice.’
‘I have faith in you,’ she told him, wondering if those words were perhaps the cruellest of them all; wondering if she were not lying to him, after all.
As she turned to go, he caught her out again by asking, in a normal everyday tone, ‘Did you truly give yourself to him?’
She had her hand on the door and, were she still the lady of leisure she had been before, she would have been justified in storming out at the indelicacy of his question. Neither she nor he were the people they had been once upon a time, though.
She turned back to him and saw he was waiting: for the lie or the truth, the truth or the lie; waiting to see if he could tell the one from the other.
‘I did,’ she told him, and his lips tightened and he blinked rapidly, as he always did, but whether out of habit or to cover something else, she could not say.
It was only as she was halfway out of the door that he added, ‘I suppose you’ll want to see him.’
The cells lay underneath the governor’s offices, a hall’s length of squalid little rooms normally packed, three or four to a cell, with pickpockets, drunks, brawlers and vagabonds. Now they were empty of such petty concerns. Wherever Northway and the Denlanders were now keeping the regular offenders, this place had been set aside for a more serious purpose.
There were five soldiers there, as she descended, with Northway at her heels. One glanced back as they approached, while the others had their attention, and their rifles, fixed on a single man. The door of his cell was wide open, but manacles held him spreadeagled against the wall, with barely two inches of play for each wrist. It reminded Emily of nothing so much as her own captivity at the hands of the enemy, strapped out across the cane frame. They took no chances with dangerous prisoners, these Denlanders, and none was more dangerous than Giles Scavian, Warlock to the King.
He wore nothing more than soldier’s breeches and a grimy shirt torn open down his chest, revealing the livid handprint of the King in all its indelible glory. She remembered, so vividly, the day he received that mark. Who could have foretold that it would land him here in the end?
‘Emily!’ he cried, and she saw the soldiers twitch but hold their fire. She glanced at Mr Northway, who was watching without expression.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go to him. Why should you not? We have no secrets, you and I.’
She had no further time for his games and went dashing past the soldiers until she was face to face with Scavian. He was bruised and cut; they had not been gentle with him, a brutality built on fear. Even this close, she could feel the heat of his calling.
‘Oh, Giles,’ she said. ‘Giles, how did it come to this?’
‘Brocky made good, then.’ Scavian managed a smile. ‘I’d all but lost hope. That man has no sense of direction. Mallen would despair of him.’ He was desperate to show her that the Denlanders did not frighten him. ‘Emily, I’m sorry to bring this on your head. I had no one else to turn to.’
No, no,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll . . . get you out. I’ll have you freed, somehow.’
His smile was wistful. ‘Do you know, I have never seen you lose heart, ever. Even in the blackest of it, even when they broke through the barricades, that night. When you say you will free me, in truth I almost believe it.’
‘I don’t care what it takes, Giles, I will,’ she promised, and rounded on the nearest soldier. ‘This is barbaric. You can’t keep a man strung up by his wrists like this. Can’t you at least cut him down, give him some freedom?’
‘We cannot,’ said another of the guards, wearing a provost’s insignia. ‘You know what he is, ma’am. He’d burn us all to cinders if it pleased him. Why else is he here?’
‘What if he . . . gives his word. I’ll vouch for him. He’s a man of honour.’
‘No, ma’am. Orders are orders,’ said the provost and, from Emily’s shoulder, Scavian added, ‘And I could not promise to give that word.’
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘Emily, the country is on a knife-edge. The King is still free and gathering supporters. There will be rebellion, revolution.’
‘More blood, more death,’ she said bitterly.
He nodded. ‘I am sworn to the King, Emily. If he calls, I can do nothing but answer.’
‘But we’ve lost. What will an uprising do except kill hundreds more men, women and children, on both sides? You can’t want that.’
He grimaced. ‘Ask me that a season ago and I’d have told you yes, better to die fighting in order to be free, than to live in a shadow.’
‘And now?’
‘And now . . . now I think about Colonel Resnic, and Pordevere, and Marie Angelline, and I wonder who else will join the roll of the dead when the guns are taken up again. If I had the bugle and the choice of whether to sound rebellion or not, then I cannot say whether I would blow it – but I do not. If the King asks, I must answer. I made an oath, Emily.’
‘They will kill you for that oath,’ she said bitterly.
‘They are considering it,’ he admitted.
‘Giles, I don’t want you to die.’
‘It has been in the cards this last half year, Emily. Here or at the Levant, how different can it be from some last stray shot of the war finding its mark? Perhaps that is all it is: some long-delayed gun of Denland doing what they had ample chance to do. I left two fingers on the battlefield. Perhaps they’ll send me back to look for them.’
‘Giles, stop.’ She felt that she would begin weeping soon, and she did not want to in front of the Denlanders, in front of Northway ‘Giles, I can’t bear it.’
‘Strength, Emily.’ His hand clinked in the chains, as though he would have touched her hair if he could. ‘I know you. You can bear anything.’
And she could hardly endure being there, now the world had turned sour again. Had she ever wished for him to seek her out after the end of the war? Had she dreamt of it? For Scavian had finally come for her, all the way from his lonely home, and they were going to take him from her forever.
*
The governor’s office loomed bleak and grey before her, but the guards had learned who she was now, her reputation and her war history. There was a hint of nervous respect as they let her past. She ignored them. She had no time for them.
Time, in fact, was running short and sparse.
She had come here every day, or if not her then Brocky or Tubal. Every day one of them had talked their way into the cells to see Scavian, as if by laying eyes on him each morning they prevented his execution until the next dawn. Emily, though, took a diversion to see the Mayor-Governor. She spoke with him, but only on one subject.
She demanded, she instructed, she requested, she begged him to release Giles Scavian.
And she received his assurances in return: he was doing all he could. He was working on it. He had a favour to call in. He had a contact he would contact. He could not simply order the man’s release, for the Denlanders were his masters and not the other way round. But he was working on it, he assured her.
And each day went by, and the Denland Parliament deliberated on the fate of Giles Scavian and the other Warlocks caught by their soldiers, and time was closing in like a noose.
Last night, for the first time since it ended, she had dreamt about the war. It had been night, in her dream, and the Denlanders were coming against the barricades. She saw the flash of the grenades and f
elt the ground shake beneath her feet, although there was no sound in her dream save something like a slow tide. Everything was slow: the movements of the soldiers, the spinning splinters of broken wood. The rifle shots coursed past her like tiny insects. She dreamt of firing musket and pistol into the charging Denlanders, and drawing her sabre, whilst white-gold fire seared out from the fingers of Giles Scavian.
And she dreamt that a musket ball, moving no faster than if it had been thrown by hand, pierced his armour of flames, and punched a hole in the imprint of the King’s hand. And he caught her eyes helplessly and fell backwards, his fire guttering out. Without his fire, the battlefield grew dark and darker still until there was nothing to be seen, nothing at all save the knowledge that he was dead.
And she awoke knowing that today was a bad day, and that all the following days would be bad days. She awoke knowing that Mr Northway’s best was not good enough, and knowing, too, that he had no intention of aiding her in this endeavour. Why should he? Perhaps it was true that he could not have Scavian released with a word, but what incentive did he have to work for Giles’s release, or even the Warlock’s simple preservation? Northway would let the deed be done, and then try to take up his wooing where it was left off, his rival put safely out of the way.
She burst into his office, and it struck her that she had come full circle with him. Their relationship, which had expanded to cover all the distance from Chalcaster to the Levant, had contracted back to her haranguing him across his desk.
He glanced up from the single sheet of paper he was reading and, when she slammed her palms on the desk, he flinched ever so slightly.
‘Have you made any progress?’ she demanded.
‘Emily, I am working on the problem,’ he said. ‘It is not so simple—’
‘Damn you and your working!’ she said to him. ‘How much time do you think he has? I know the Denlanders. They’re nothing if not efficient.’
‘Emily, please—’
Guns of the Dawn Page 50
