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