Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘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 felt 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—’
‘
Mr
Northway,’ she said, ‘would you explain precisely what you have been doing these nine days?’
‘Emily, my work keeps me extremely busy—’
‘Mr Northway—’
‘Very well then,
Miss Marshwic
, I shall tell you. I have stalled. I have delayed. I have lost papers and misheard orders. I have done all in my power.’
‘Have you, indeed? And is he saved, then?’
He did not answer, but his eyes flicked down to the paper in his hands, and she snatched it from him. This encounter had become unreal, too close to that other time when he had held in his hands
the news of Rodric’s death.
Her eyes skimmed across the details, scantly phrased and no more than she had expected. The Denlanders were terse and economical with words when drafting death warrants.
‘So,’ she said.
‘Emily please—’
‘This is where your best has led us, is it?’ she asked him.
‘I do not have the authority—’
‘Mr Northway, I suspect your motives,’ she told him, and he sat back and stared at her.
‘Do you, indeed, Miss Marshwic?’
‘Is this the man who could get anything he wanted? Who worked his way from bootblack up to governor in so short a time, and to hell with any who got in his way? Is this him who has ridden
the tide of invasion and bobbed back into place like a buoy? And can he not have one man released from his own cells by sleight of hand or legislation or bribery?’
He looked up at her with no hint of any of their shared past in his expression. ‘And is this what you think of me, Miss Marshwic?’
‘Show me what else I can think, from what I have now seen,’ she told him.
He stood, and was round the desk quickly, reaching to capture her wrist in his grip. ‘I have done so much, so much, and this is all I have from you to show for it?’ he burst out.
‘I see you have regained your righteousness. I had thought it a casualty of the war.’
With more ease than she would have believed, she prised his fingers away from her skin. ‘Does he still live, Mr Northway?’
‘He lives. The Denlanders have not seen this yet.’
‘And when will they? How long do I have to say goodbye?’
She had thought that he would storm down there at once and present it to them, but something softened in him. ‘In three days, Emily, they will want to know why they have not heard, and
they will send a courier by rail to deliver the orders in person. Three days is all I can give you.’
She could not thank him. She could not muster the words for it, the taste of gall was too strong in her mouth.
As she walked away from his office, she thought, though, of all the hard, hard work he had done to scrub away the stain on his character that had once estranged him from her, and here was the
next stain to discolour him, as though these things worked to some exacting cosmic schedule.
In the cells, she could not tell Scavian he was due to die. The guards must not realize the order had come. She held him, though, and kissed him on the lips, and said nothing
at all, and she knew that, from that gesture, he understood what knowledge had reached her.
*
She rode back to Grammaine with a dead heart. Brocky and Tubal would have to know. Perhaps the three of them could cobble some last-minute action together. Or die in the
attempt. The latter seemed more likely.
She decided that she would be game for it if they were.
She let Grant take her horse, noticing another in the stables that she did not recognize.
‘Is there a visitor, Grant?’
‘Yes, miss. No man I know, but it’s you he’s here to see. Miss Alice is with him now.’
‘Well, I’m sure she can keep him entertained. I’m in no mood for seeing anyone.’
She entered the house and caught an echo of the voices from the drawing room, Alice’s voice, and the man’s lower tones. She knew as soon as she heard it that it was familiar from
somewhere: a young man’s voice, a deep voice.
‘But you must have been very brave, to lead the fighting like that,’ Alice was saying. ‘I’ve always thought that I should like to meet a soldier who has actually
fought.’
‘There’s no shortage of those, nowadays,’ replied the visitor, and Emily went cold all over. The accent was subtle, hidden, but she knew it too well to mistake it. A voice from
Denland.
She had her hand on her pistol butt as she pushed her way into the drawing room, seeing Alice spring up from the arm of the man’s chair. He rose a little more slowly and at first she did
not recognize him, dressed as he was in civilian clothes.