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.
25
A century ago, when the King kept a company of a hundred Warlocks at the capital at all times, such differences of opinion were not uncommon. But not since then. So many died heroically in the Hellic wars, and even before Denland’s attack their numbers