though, the words that hissed out through his teeth were, ‘No. I will not take you at such a price, for how long would I keep you, then? If you are to come to me, then come freely or not at all.’
‘Then you will not help me?’
‘I will help you.’ The fire had gone out of him, like a candle snuffed. ‘I will pull such strings as I have, bend such ears as are mine to bend, mislay papers and invoke the demons of bureaucracy. But, Emily, it will not suffice.’
‘I have faith in you,’ she told him, wondering if those words were perhaps the cruellest of them all; wondering if she were not lying to him, after all.
As she turned to go, he caught her out again by asking, in a normal everyday tone, ‘Did you truly give yourself to him?’
She had her hand on the door and, were she still the lady of leisure she had been before, she would have been justified in storming out at the indelicacy of his question. Neither she nor he were the people they had been once upon a time, though.
She turned back to him and saw he was waiting: for the lie or the truth, the truth or the lie; waiting to see if he could tell the one from the other.
‘I did,’ she told him, and his lips tightened and he blinked rapidly, as he always did, but whether out of habit or to cover something else, she could not say.
It was only as she was halfway out of the door that he added, ‘I suppose you’ll want to see him.’
The cells lay underneath the governor’s offices, a hall’s length of squalid little rooms normally packed, three or four to a cell, with pickpockets, drunks, brawlers and vagabonds. Now they were empty of such petty concerns. Wherever Northway and the Denlanders were now keeping the regular offenders, this place had been set aside for a more serious purpose.
There were five soldiers there, as she descended, with Northway at her heels. One glanced back as they approached, while the others had their attention, and their rifles, fixed on a single man. The door of his cell was wide open, but manacles held him spreadeagled against the wall, with barely two inches of play for each wrist. It reminded Emily of nothing so much as her own captivity at the hands of the enemy, strapped out across the cane frame. They took no chances with dangerous prisoners, these Denlanders, and none was more dangerous than Giles Scavian, Warlock to the King.
He wore nothing more than soldier’s breeches and a grimy shirt torn open down his chest, revealing the livid handprint of the King in all its indelible glory. She remembered, so vividly, the day he received that mark. Who could have foretold that it would land him here in the end?
‘Emily!’ he cried, and she saw the soldiers twitch but hold their fire. She glanced at Mr Northway, who was watching without expression.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go to him. Why should you not? We have no secrets, you and I.’
She had no further time for his games and went dashing past the soldiers until she was face to face with Scavian. He was bruised and cut; they had not been gentle with him, a brutality built on fear. Even this close, she could feel the heat of his calling.
‘Oh, Giles,’ she said. ‘Giles, how did it come to this?’
‘Brocky made good, then.’ Scavian managed a smile. ‘I’d all but lost hope. That man has no sense of direction. Mallen would despair of him.’ He was desperate to show her that the Denlanders did not frighten him. ‘Emily, I’m sorry to bring this on your head. I had no one else to turn to.’
No, no,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll . . . get you out. I’ll have you freed, somehow.’
His smile was wistful. ‘Do you know, I have never seen you lose heart, ever. Even in the blackest of it, even when they broke through the barricades, that night. When you say you will free me, in truth I almost believe it.’
‘I don’t care what it takes, Giles, I will,’ she promised, and rounded on the nearest soldier. ‘This is barbaric. You can’t keep a man strung up by his wrists like this. Can’t you at least cut him down, give him some freedom?’
‘We cannot,’ said another of the guards, wearing a provost’s insignia. ‘You know what he is, ma’am. He’d burn us all