something. Mallen was shuffling a deck of cards, his pipe jammed between his teeth.
‘Serg— Mallen, you . . . seem comfortable with civilized niceties,’ she noted.
He shot her a humorous look. ‘Just a jungle savage, me. You want to play a hand, rob me blind?’
The other men hooted with laughter at that. ‘You didn’t fall for that native-guide act of his, did you?’ Tubal asked her.
She frowned. ‘But he said – you said you were here before the war came,’ she accused Mallen.
‘I was.’
Brocky snorted on his brandy. ‘Oh, he was here all right. But only because the University of Colemansworth gave him a stipend.’
‘University . . . ?’
‘Our friend Mr Mallen is a scholar,’ Scavian clarified. ‘I suppose the pre-eminent scholar on the swamps here. In truth, there wasn’t much competition. We’re lucky to have him. Things would be a lot worse otherwise.’
‘Enough of the compliments.’ Mallen dealt five hands with the air of long practice. He caught her stare, still accusing, and shrugged. ‘So what? My father, his father, they came here and met the indigenes. Family trade, you understand? Nothing wrong with an education.’
‘He’s written books,’ Brocky chuckled. ‘Papers, lectures, you name it! You’re right, though, at heart he’s just a dumb swamp-boy brought up by the dingies, aren’t you, Mallen?’
‘That’s me.’ He put on a surly and savage expression, then proceeded to win three out of four hands of cards. Emily was quietly pleased to win the fourth, to Brocky’s curses.
After the cards, they emptied a second bottle of the brandy between them, and the men sat back and filled the air with the sweet scent of pipe smoke. She imagined her past self, the woman who had not known Gravenfield or the swamp or the rattle of muskets. That other Emily could have imagined nothing stranger than this: sitting with the menfolk in a man’s ill-fitting clothes, talking to them as one of them. But, then, how innocent that lost Emily had been. The brandy put a pleasant fogginess into her head.
‘The King and his Ravens,’ toasted Brocky which seemed to annoy Scavian.
‘Herons, surely.’ Emily was thinking of the royal coat of arms. ‘I didn’t know he had ravens.’
‘Denlanders call our wizards that,’ Mallen explained. ‘When they aren’t running away from them.’
‘What do we call theirs?’
‘We’ve never needed to decide. They don’t have any.’ Tubal made an expansive gesture with his brandy glass that somehow managed to spill nothing. ‘Their king is dead, his royal line vanished, so who’s to make wizards in Denland now? Those they had, they became naught but normal men the moment their king was murdered.’
‘That’s why they take such exception to us Warlocks,’ Scavian noted. ‘Though Justin gives them other reasons, in truth.’ He stared down into his liquor and then drained the cup in one. ‘I have been with the colonel today, gentlemen. Counting Miss Marshwic as an honorary gentleman, of course.’
‘Of course,’ she allowed.
‘What’s he come up with now?’ Tubal asked.
‘Only if you absolve me from putting shillings in the jar. This would bankrupt me, else.’ He maintained his smile with some effort. The shillings, Emily had gathered, were the penalty for ‘serious talk’.
There was a moment’s hesitation before Brocky nodded, wordlessly indicating that Scavian should continue. The Warlock toyed with his emptied glass, the cheer sloughing off him. He had no rank, formally, but the touch of the King meant he was the King’s own presence out here. Emily understood that he was as good a man as a company captain, whilst the senior Justin Lascari was on a par with Colonel Resnic himself.
‘The colonel intends,’ Scavian said at last, ‘for there to be what he calls a “Big Push”.’
‘A Big Push,’ Brocky murmured uneasily. ‘Sounds positively obscene, Scavvers, old chap.’
‘You know . . . we all know, I hope, that this war is not like any other,’ Scavian went on. ‘This is no land war, aiming to seize and hold an acre at a time, until the enemy are forced away. No man, saving yourself, Mallen, could stay so long in the swamps and hold a position. If anything it’s more like a naval action, with rival fleets trying to find each other in a sea fog.’
‘They would have done well to send us an admiral,’ Tubal agreed.
‘But they sent us Resnic, who has thirty years’ experience of textbook war,’ Scavian acknowledged. ‘He does not know how to fight Dr Lam’s forces. So, now that the women are here, now they are tested a little, he