own; perhaps they no longer knew a single soul here. Perhaps they had been the lucky ones, out of all their comrades.
Captain Goss approached Stag Rampant slowly. After the company he had been keeping, the first thing Emily noticed about him was that he still had two arms and two legs.
He was not a young man, but his injury had changed his face in a way that made his exact age impossible to judge. The lines she saw there could have been drawn by hurt or by time. He was broad-shouldered and as tall as Tubal, though: a heavy, powerful man now hollowed out, his uniform hanging loose on him. His hair was bronze streaked with grey, above an expression two shades short of tragedy. Captain Goss surveyed his company with a look usually reserved by prisoners for their jailers.
‘Stag Rampant company all present and accounted for, Captain.’ Tubal saluted him with desperate pride, but for the moment the captain looked straight through him, past him, at the ranks on ranks of soldiers drawn up there.
When he finally spoke, Emily was just close enough to hear his words.
‘I am not afraid.’
‘Sir?’ Tubal cast half a backwards glance at the company.
‘Don’t mind what you’ve heard, Lieutenant,’ Goss said.
‘No man here thinks it, Captain,’ Tubal assured him, slightly thrown.
Goss narrowed his eyes as though against a bright light. ‘What’s our fighting strength, Lieutenant?’
‘Eight hundred and thirty-eight soldiers-at-arms, seventeen ensigns, four sergeants, one master sergeant, me and you, sir.’
‘And what’s going on here, Lieutenant?’ Goss looked bleakly across the camp, to where the other two companies were unpacking supplies and ammunition, and checking their guns.
Tubal swallowed. ‘We attack tomorrow, sir. The Big Push, they’re calling it. We’re going to drive them back, sir.’
Goss’s damaged gaze slid off him again, and pierced the ranks of his soldiers until it met the impenetrable wall of the swamp.
‘Tomorrow.’ The word dropped off his tongue like lead.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Goss repeated. Emily wanted to go to him in that moment, for all that she had never met him before. She remembered the colonel’s bland blather of Give him a chance to get his hand back in. It was unfair; it was too unfair. His first day, his very first minute, and he had encountered the worst he could have imagined.
‘Sir,’ Tubal said, hushed. ‘No man will think the worse of you if—’
‘No,’ Goss cut him off sharply, even as Emily was thinking, But they will. Oh, but they will. ‘I am not afraid, Lieutenant. I shall lead them out, as I have done before.’ A shudder went through him. Perhaps most of the soldiers would not have noticed, but Emily was just close enough to see. ‘Just . . . give me a junior who knows what’s going on. I will lead.’
She knew it was coming before Tubal craned back to send her a silent, imploring look. He would not force this on her, but he had nobody else.
Nobody would know, except him, if she declined this duty. It was over and above an ensign’s role. But she had made an oath to serve her country, not merely to do her duty to the letter. And he was family, and he needed her. This time it was as Mary’s man that he asked, and as Mary’s sister that she gave a curt, reluctant nod.
‘Ensign Marshwic will junior for you,’ Tubal said, gesturing her forward. Goss stared blankly at her as she approached.
‘You must be new, Ensign. We’ve had reinforcements in, I take it, Lieutenant?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Tubal confirmed.
Goss frowned at her. ‘Ensign . . .’ In a tone of utter incomprehension: ‘You’re a woman.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
Goss looked from her to the ranks of his company, stopping at every third face, seeing the women past the mannish clothes, the shorn hair.
He said nothing. What could he say? The world had fallen crooked while he had been recovering from his wounds.
‘Ensign Marshwic, will you take the captain through the colonel’s plan?’
What little there is of it. The image of that cluttered, useless little map was another weight adding to the stack of dread in her stomach. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘May I dismiss the men, sir, or would you like to address them?’
Goss’s stare had been drawn inexorably back to the swamps, both in actuality and in his mind’s eye. He had nothing useful to say to help his men. His lips shaped the words: ‘I’m not afraid . . .’
‘Sir?’
‘Dismiss them, Lieutenant. Ensign, you’re with me.’