It placed her out here, staring at a darkness in which anything could hide, waiting for an enemy that could be gathering all around. The few lamps and candles yet alight did nothing but draw vast swarms of milling insects that whirled and whipped about them. The winged multitudes dizzied themselves stupid, and then fell to rest on anything nearby, including Emily. She felt sometimes as though the entire swamp had emptied of flying things. Moths the size of books, great whirring beetles as solid as stones, huge blundering lacewings, roaches, even thunderous nocturnal bees that rattled through the air like locomotives. Every vile buzzing thing that God had made – and made extra large – came out from under the forest canopy to pester her.
Tubal had slipped her a flask of brandy earlier on, but she left it untouched. The warmth of the swamp radiated outwards, doubled and redoubled now that summer was upon them. Despite the clear sky above, there was no hint of cold.
She hated these night watches because they forced her to think, and she had become all too uncomfortable with thinking recently.
Thinking about Mr Northway, for example. His last letter had been concise, abrupt almost. He had enquired about her health, her continued survival. She had read his mockery in it all; that stand-offish, superior attitude which she was starting to recognize as his armour against the world. What gave more food for thought was Penny Belchere’s account of him. A glass of port had seen the messenger girl sniggering over how Northway had slammed all the doors closed and kept to himself for four days after Emily’s last brief missive. Belchere had described how the bureaucracy of Chalcaster had been left to rot while he brooded; how Northway had looked when he finally summoned her in again. There had been the dark rings of sleepless nights about his eyes, and a look of fire in them.
‘Go,’ he had instructed, ‘as fast as you can!’ And Belchere had gone, picking her way from station to station in search of a train still going north and carrying passengers.
Emily crumpled his letter – his cool and distant letter – in her hands, and through it she thought she felt the heat of all the things he did not allow himself to say.
How did I come to matter so much to a man such as Cristan Northway?
But power makes for a lonely man, and who else would dare intrude on him, day or night, whenever she had a complaint to raise?
She searched within herself now, in those small and thoughtful hours of the night, and tried to find there what she felt about him. The hatred had long drained away; the load of grief her father had left her with, the bitter rivalry one generation dead, it was all gone, but what had replaced it?
She summoned his image to mind, shrouded in black and smiling that damnable smile. His dealings with the world had been so cursed and venal that he had put up barrier after barrier, just to shield himself from it. And yet she smiled to think of him. He brought a feeling to her that warmed her more than the swamp ever could, and yet she would not name it – not yet. No more would he, she knew.
And then there was Giles Scavian, wizard and nobleman, kind and gentle. Another man who had not found the right terms to describe his emotions, but he would have a dictionary full of them before Mr Northway found any. There was nothing closed or hidden about Mr Scavian.
And, as she thought it, she heard a step behind her, and turned to see a figure, cloaked and robed against the night, coming close by her.
‘Mr Scavian?’ she asked tentatively.
‘Again you ask for Scavian. A man might become suspicious.’ The voice betrayed his identity, more than the vague shadow in the darkness. Lascari was the wrong wizard for her thoughts.
‘How can I help you, Mr Lascari?’
‘Many ways, no doubt.’ He was heavy with sarcasm tonight. He bundled himself too close to her, almost touching. Lamplight struck sparks from the flints of his eyes. ‘One always wonders what a woman thinks of, alone at night.’
‘Does one?’ she riposted, too quickly. He never failed to unnerve her, did Lascari. The King’s wizards could not read minds, but he had a way of seeing into hers and laying out its contents like an autopsy.
‘Distant sweethearts, perhaps?’ He endowed the words with a