to deal with whatever menace presents itself, and so I do by whatever means I possess.’
Still she was silent.
‘I would not have yielded Grammaine to him,’ Northway added.
‘Do you imagine,’ she said, ‘that I would be happy at having my safety bought with another’s blood?’
‘I don’t imagine you would, but you would never have known.’ Northway sighed. ‘However, the Ghyer was no more reasonable than you, in the end, and between the pair of you, the decent thing appears to have been done. The brigands are put to flight, the man who had unified them is slain, the town is saved.’
‘How disappointed you sound,’ she mocked, for his smile was now gone.
‘What do you propose I do, Miss Marshwic, when another dozen brigands drift in and start their predations? Do I go to make terms with them? And why should they listen, after I broke my word with the Ghyer?’
‘Do you blame me for—’ she started hotly.
‘No,’ he cut her off. ‘How can I? But do not cast so much blame my way, Miss Marshwic, for I do what I can. What would you do if all you could accomplish were little evils to ward off worse?’
‘You have not scrupled at little evils previously, I think,’ she said, but her tone was not as harsh as before.
‘But those were for my own good,’ he told her, and a ghost of his smile returned. ‘Now I am soiling my soul for others, and it does not sit half so well with me.’
‘You are candid, Mr Northway.’
‘I have always spoken the truth with you, Miss Marshwic,’ he said. ‘Possibly because I so enjoy your expressions of outrage.’
She nodded, and it was not outrage that touched her. Instead she felt numb inside. The roar of the gunfire was still coursing back and forth inside her head, and her clothes – and her hands and everything around her – stank of it.
She did not mind the noise, she found. It was like thunder, and soon over, but in her mind there was again a room with shuttered windows, filled with the smell of gun-smoke. There was a door she had opened, thirteen years before, while looking for her father.
By his own hand. He had cheated the Ghyer of a revenge, cheated Northway of any challenge to his ambition, cheated his family of a father, of an explanation.
She glanced at Northway again, the man whose machinations had put the gun in her father’s hand that fateful night. She searched for the wellspring of hatred that had simmered inside her for so long.
She could not find it amidst the numbness, only the thought that if Northway’s schemes had forced her father into that room, forced him to take up that pistol, it had still been her father who had decided to pull the trigger.
The thought shocked her, but it would not go away.
6
. . . and I breathe it like the air, now. The smell of the guns is become to me like water to a fish: a thing I take for granted. At first it was simply something that I did not notice any more. Now it is a part of my life I cannot live without. There is power in pulling a trigger: power over the world, in that split moment of sound and fury.
Alice had recovered from her ordeal within days, and already she was capitalizing on it when she visited Chalcaster. She was the abducted princess, to hear her tell it. She had been wrested from her chamber in dead of night by a band of swarthy Denlanders and hied away with into the forests. They had been plotting to use her noble blood and gentle birth to destroy the monarchy, although Alice was never specific about how this might be accomplished. Before their evil plots could be enacted, however, her rescuer and his gallant few crashed out of the woods and saved her. Only the identity of that rescuer remained unspoken, with the heavy implication that it was some agent of the King desirous of remaining anonymous. Her gushing gratitude to Mr Northway had soured even before she returned to Grammaine, and she had decided that her loathing of the man continued unabated.
‘But wasn’t the Ghyer involved?’ asked some of her listeners.
‘He was,’ Alice replied, unperturbed. ‘The treacherous villain was in league with the Denlanders.’
‘But Denlanders aren’t swarthy,’ Emily once put in, though Alice ignored her entirely. Just as she had ignored Emily’s role in her rescue, for that matter.