Guns of the Dawn (50 page)

What would he have done, had I not returned?
Such a calm man, such a clever man. Had she not seen this letter she might have believed he would turn his affections elsewhere, and gone on
with the cold precision of his life. Now . . .

There was a fire inside him. He was not master of it, or of himself, any more.

If I die . . .

If she wrote back now, acknowledged his love, accepted his love, and then some Denland sharpshooter made an end of her the next day . . . She would have given him the world and then snatched it
back in one swoop. She recalled – so vividly! – his face when she had gone to him, and her brother’s death had stood between them. How much worse for him to have her and to lose
her forever, all at once. She herself would not place such a value on her own person, but every line of his letter, every character that he sketched out, spoke of his mind.

Previously, the thought that he might mourn for her had comforted her. Now it distressed her. The man she would once have gladly killed was now someone whose throat she unwillingly held a knife
to. The world was upside down and it had all gone wrong.

Perhaps I should not write again.

Perhaps I should disabuse him of his affection, just to save him when the . . . end comes.

*

She had expected to be moved out of the infirmary by now, but there were no fresh wounded to take her place, and the colonel had impressed on Doctor Carling’s wife the
importance of Emily’s well-being enough that she had yet to be discharged. The walking wounded had been returned to duty, the most hopeless cases sent to Locke, to come back when the surgeons
decreed. Or not, like Captain Goss, who had finally let go, accepting death as the lesser evil. So it was that she found herself spending another night there with the sickbeds all to herself, as
though she was royalty who could demand a seclusion not granted to lesser mortals.

If there had been others there recuperating with her, it might never have happened.

Doctor Carling’s wife bedded down in the back room, while Emily slept surrounded by the emptied beds of the dead, the ghosts of old wounds. For a long while now she had not dreamt. The
havoc of the days, her fearful imaginings, had quite drained that part of her that looked into the future or examined the past. Now, though, some little part of it was again set free.

In her dream she was at Grammaine, and it was a good dream for once. She came downstairs to speak to Cook, talked of all the usual things with Alice, watched Mary feed little Francis. There was
no war in that dream. Not even the spectre of it hung about them and when Tubal came indoors to embrace his wife, he had two feet to carry him.

But she
knew.
Watching them, she knew, and she was waiting for the stain of the swamp to discolour the walls, the heat to begin wilting her, the crack of muskets to break the peace.

And on and on trudged the dream, the happy little scenes. Shopping at Chalcaster, evenings by the fire, visits to friends, and always in the back of her mind she was looking for the greycoats of
Denland to come creeping in, as she knew they must.

And then there was a dance, held not at Deerlings but at some friend’s townhouse in Chalcaster, and the band struck up a merry tune and she looked around for a dance partner. But of
course, there was one man cutting through the crowd towards her, and she could dance with no other because he was her mate, her lawful husband. She knew, if she but looked up a little, she could
see his face clearly, resolve him as one or the other of them, but in the dream she did not dare.

Then she was startled awake, clutching at her sheets and listening to her own breathing – and to the sound of someone else in the room.

‘Who’s there?’ she asked. She heard a man moving with quiet patience between the beds, not making much noise, but not trying overmuch to be silent.
Was it the Denlanders
come to finish her? An
assassin would have had her by now, or would have frozen to stillness once she spoke. A friend, then; a nocturnal visitor?

Her heart skipped and she whispered, ‘Giles? Mr Scavian?’

The intruder stopped and let out a long sigh. ‘Always the same, is it not? What do you see, between us, that makes you take me for him, or is it just that it is always he you really wish
to see?’

‘Mr
Lascari
?’ she hissed. A light was kindled in the dark, guttering low about his fingers, revealing his hawklike features to her. His eyes flared, reflecting back the
flame as they fixed on her.

‘What are you doing here, Mr Lascari?’ she asked him. ‘Why are you here?’

‘For you.’ He approached her bed with stalking strides. His face was devoid of expression save for a need that burned deep within it.

She sat up as quickly as she could, despite her bruises. ‘Mr Lascari, what do you mean?’ she asked more urgently. The doctor’s wife slept in the next room and a single shout
would fetch her.

To her surprise, he sat down at the foot of her bed, hunching there like some carrion bird, a raven indeed. ‘Look,’ he said, and rolled up one sleeve, illuminating it with the fire
from his other hand.

She saw a long, shiny scar there, raw and ill-healed: a graze from a musket ball that had come close, but not close enough.

‘My first,’ he explained hollowly. ‘How long I have fought in this war – three long years and no scratch until now. I have seen Warlocks die out here, Marshwic –
die and rot, extinguished in the waters of the swamp.’

He frightened her. It was nothing in the way he sat or the way he spoke, but there was a sense about him that scared her deeply. The fire inside him was loose and blazing, as though he were a
house and it was consuming the furniture, peeking out through the windows. If she shouted for help now, the whole edifice might become an inferno.

‘I will die here,’ he told her. ‘It has come to me at last, this realization. We keep it at arm’s length, do we not? But at the last we know it. The path of our lives
will take us no further than here.’

She could only nod.

‘I have been remiss in my duty, Marshwic. I must remedy it while I can.’

Is he apologizing? Confessing?
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘I am my father’s only son. I was made Warlock at nineteen – younger than your Giles Scavian, that is! I have always prided myself on my devotion. I have been the King’s
good servant.’

The unsaid ‘
but
’ hung in the air between them.

‘Continuity,’ he explained. ‘In that only have I failed my king. I have no family. I have not continued the Lascari line. No son lives now to carry on the bloodline, to serve
the King in turn.’

‘Mr Lascari . . .’

‘Marshwic!’ he hissed, and clutched at her through the sheet, seizing hold of her thigh. She yelped in surprise and pain, for his fingers were bony as a dead man’s.

‘Marshwic, you are a good servant of the King,’ he pressed on. ‘You came here. You did not have to.’

‘The draft—’

‘Damn the draft!’ he snapped. ‘The draft doesn’t count for people like us. We serve or we do not serve. We are not
forced
to. Of all the camp, Marshwic, no woman
here but you has any blood of note. Servants, farmers’ daughters and tradesmen’s wives. No gentlefolk, no nobility. They all stayed at home and sent the maid, the cook, the housekeeper
– never their own precious blood, no. But you! You knew your duty, Marshwic. You came here to serve your king.’

‘Mr Lascari—’

He leant over her, pinning her tightly to the bed with that one skeletal hand. ‘You must do your duty, girl. A woman’s duty, not this soldier’s game you play at. I have a duty
for you. It’s my last hope, Marshwic. My last hope for a child.’

And she bucked him off with all her strength, rolled out of bed and onto the floor away from him. He loomed over the mattress, fingers screwing up the sheet.

‘You keep away from me!’ she warned, scrambling to her feet, rolling over the next bed and putting space between them. Looking left and right, she saw nothing that might serve as a
weapon.

He stood up slowly. ‘This is your duty,’ he insisted.

‘No duty I ever signed up for,’ she spat at him.

‘We all must do distasteful things in war. Do not think that I will take pleasure in this business. It is a duty, nothing more.’

‘I will not let you touch me. It’s no duty of mine. Let the Lascaris die out this very night, if they must!’

Fire flared about him, outlining him, dancing in his eyes and mouth, lighting the whole room as he stalked across the floor towards her. He was between her and the door.

He cannot kill you. That would defeat his purpose.
That fire could not be turned on her.

She waited until he was closer, and then tried to make a break for it across the beds, clearing the closest in one giant leap, stumbling over the second but falling on the third. A hand like a
vice clasped her ankle and hauled her back, and she kicked frantically at his face. All around her the infirmary was flickering, light and dark, as his limning fires coursed high and low about
him.

She twisted in his grip. His face was slack, almost vacant, as he dragged her towards him. She kicked him a glancing blow to the chin, and she felt his grip on her ankle suddenly sear. She
screamed.

‘What is going on here?’ Doctor Carling’s wife appeared at the door to her chamber, wrapped in a sheet. Her face was white and utterly aghast.

‘Get out.’ Lascari spat the words at her. ‘I will not be troubled.’

‘You will leave here at once.’ The doctor’s wife advanced on him, and he sent a jet of fire across the room, singeing her hair and eyebrows, driving her back.

‘Out!’ Lascari shouted at her, giving another tug on Emily’s leg, and the doctor’s wife fled, leaving the stench of burnt hair behind her.

‘You can’t hope to get away with this!’ Emily raged at him. He jumped forward like a toad, one hand finding her throat, the other fumbling for her wrist.

No man rules me but the King. No man here has authority over me but the King,’ he panted out. ‘If I set my heart on a thing, not even the colonel can say me nay.’ He had
wrestled her halfway onto a bed, and she struck at him with hands, knees, elbows and feet, feeling him as hard as bone inside his robes.

‘Be still!’ he demanded, and then the fire coursed across her chin and neck and she screamed and clutched at his hand.

‘Be still,’ he said again. She stared up at him, feeling the welt beneath his clutching hand burn and sting. ‘Oh, you will live to bear my child, but – by God, woman!
– not so any man will ever wish to look upon, unless you are still.’

‘You cannot mean to do this.’

‘Duty,’ he ground out, and fumbled for his belt with his free hand.

‘I will not bear your child,’ she told him. ‘I will take herbs. I will miscarry it.’

‘Women say such things,’ he said dismissively.

‘I will
not
bear whatever spiderish thing you might grow in my womb!’ she threw at him. ‘I swear, as I am a soldier in this army, as I am a woman and as I am a servant
of the King, that I will strangle any child of yours, with my own damned hands if I am forced to bear it. I will dash the bastard creature’s brains out, Lascari, and end your damned dynasty
myself if
I have to.’

He had stopped moving. The dwindling fires that still outlined him showed her a face hanging open and empty as the mind behind it absorbed her words.

No woman could mean such a thing,’ he declared hollowly.

‘I have been fighting the King’s war long enough to have meant worse things than that,’ she said. ‘What would you have me swear by, Lascari? God? I so swear. The King? I
so swear! All my hopes, for now and the future? Consider it sworn.’

His hand slackened at her throat and he sat back, looking dazed, as though awaking from some strange dream.

‘I cannot believe it,’ he whispered.

‘Kill me now,’ she told him. ‘Kill me now or leave. I killed the last man who tried to force himself on me.’

And I had a pistol then, and he was no wizard.

But Lascari stood back, still staring wonderingly at her. ‘You unnatural creature,’ he said. ‘Have the Denlanders cut out those parts of you that made you female? What has been
done to you?’

That, coming from him, after what he had been about to perpetrate: she almost laughed at him. Something in his words stuck, though; some dart stayed lodged. The dream came to her of her old
life, and her not being able to live it.
Has something been taken from me really?

‘Go,’ she said, and he might indeed have gone, had not Giles Scavian thrown back the door of the infirmary with murder in his eyes and fire in his hands.

The pause stretched like a taut wire between Scavian and Lascari, crackling with coals and embers. The younger man, his hands crooked into claws, eyes surging and blazing with a
power he could barely keep inside; his senior hunched like a crow, sour as vinegar, bitter as gall. No words were said, and Emily felt the heat radiate from them both so that the air shimmered and
sparked all about them.

‘Get out of my way, boy,’ Lascari ordered flatly. Defeated, robbed of his desires by Emily’s sheer bloody-mindedness, he had no wish to stay in her presence any longer. He
stomped towards the door, but Scavian still blocked it.

‘Move, boy,’ Lascari commanded him.

‘I will not,’ Scavian said.

‘Giles,’ Emily said, scrabbling off the bed, ‘please, don’t do anything foolish.’