had already fallen? Why did the King touch you, save there were no others in arm’s reach.’
‘Anointed for one day or a hundred years, I am a king’s wizard,’ said Scavian reasonably. ‘No man may take that from me, unless I am dead. Do you want to try your hand, Mr Lascari?’
‘Giles, he’ll kill you,’ Emily hissed at him.
He touched her hand briefly, his fingers hot and dry. ‘Do not fear for me. You know I must do this.’ She remembered the torturing of the Denlander scout, and Scavian’s distress as he tried to reconcile it with his duty, with his king. He had been a loaded gun from that moment, and Lascari’s assault on her was nothing more than the trigger being pulled.
Scavian’s eyes flicked to Lascari, glinting cold and regal as an emperor’s. ‘I have suffered you ever since I came here. I have borne your ill humours, your tortures and your cruelty, and passed over it, saying that you merely did your duty. Now I unmask you. You are unworthy of your office. You are a disgrace to our order. You put truth into the mouths of the Denlanders when they curse us.’
Lascari looked, in that moment, not at Scavian but at Emily, and she read in his face the long book of his losses, his bitter debtor’s account in life. Long years of misery, of enforced and hateful service. Sent here to die, thwarted in his last and most desperate scheme to secure continuity. And now this: insulted by a youngster before the entire camp.
‘What’s all this?’ demanded the colonel’s slightly befuddled voice, as he pushed through the crowd that had gathered. ‘What’s going on? Lights and shouting?’
‘A personal matter, Colonel,’ said Lascari, ‘between Scavian and myself. Go back to bed.’
‘Called you out, has he?’ the colonel said, rubbing at his eyes and not quite understanding. ‘Good heavens. Now, look, we can’t have that. Bad enough with the enemy trying to kill us. No, no, completely out of the question.’
Lascari eyed him coldly, and Emily saw how he had no respect for the old man whatsoever, any more than he did for anyone around him. How alone he is. ‘Keep away, Colonel. This is none of your concern.’
‘Now listen here, I forbid it!’ Colonel Resnic insisted. ‘Can’t have this. Bad for discipline, Lascari.’
‘Forgive me, sir, but you have no authority,’ Scavian reminded him. ‘In truth, we are ruled by the King only, and we cannot be stopped.’
It was that ‘in truth’ that brought a lump to Emily’s throat: that little quirk of his; his insistence on truth to cover his own uncertainty about the world. She had seen the set of Lascari’s face, and she was very afraid for her friend. Giles Scavian, who she surely loved, had roused a serpent.
‘Giles, please, I’m asking you not to do this,’ she said, knowing that he had set his course and would stay on it. He put a hand on her shoulder and his lips twitched as if to say something, but then he looked past her, at Justin Lascari.
The older man stood, surrounded by a circle of bare ground that none of the onlookers would encroach onto. ‘I would have avoided this,’ he declared, the words almost lost. ‘I would have walked away – as you could have walked away. But now I see that I have wanted this. I have wanted it since . . .’ He waved a hand idly and an errant spark of fire danced across him, making those closest jump back. ‘You will never know, Scavian, of what you have. You will never value what is freely given to you. As I am likely to die any day, I will die with one comfort left me, that never more will she mistake me for you. For one or other of us will be gone.’
Scavian would have said something more but Lascari thrust his hands out without warning, and with them came a vast boiling sheet of flame that lashed across the younger Warlock and half a dozen others. Emily felt the battering heat of it, but Scavian had thrown her to one side even as Lascari moved, and it only singed her hair and gown. Several other men were down, beating at their burning clothes, but Scavian – he stood where he had stood before, a faint steam rising from him, and unburnt, untouched. He splayed a hand out like a man fanning cards, and a claw of fire raked at Lascari,