her sabre down to bite into the upraised arm of a man; still dragging madly on her pistol’s trigger, empty as it was. A soldier in grey went scrambling back before her, musket forgotten, and she lunged for him with her blade, ripping it out of its first victim. Even as she overextended, she saw a patch of grey cloth explode into red over his breast, so that what she fell over was a dead man. Beside her, Mallen leapt atop the man with the wounded arm and buried a knife beside his collarbone, before looking up and about him.
‘Into the trees!’ he bellowed. ‘Don’t stop at the treeline! Get into the trees! Into cover!’
Emily staggered up and onto her feet, her body obeying his order automatically. The sledgehammer of the heat, she now hardly noticed. Instead she was looking for more Denlanders to menace with her blade.
Moments later she was crouching alongside a jumbled assortment of Stag Rampant soldiers, the mist showing her perhaps a hundred of them. Of the Denlanders there was no sign, and she could only hope that they were still in flight. There were a few staggered shots, she could not judge from where, and then the only sounds around them were from the swamp, its eternal round of animal life and death.
She watched a thumb-length fly settle on her arm and pad the jacket sleeve with its feet. Looking up, she saw the wide frightened stares of her comrades-in-arms. What happens now?
‘Is there a sergeant here?’ she asked.
‘Here.’ The answering voice sounded hoarse and rusty. When she scrambled over the roots and men and women to reach him, she found a man with his right sleeve dark with blood, another soldier tying an inexpert bandage about it.
‘Sergeant . . .’ What happens now? ‘Are you . . . can you go on?’
He looked up at her with a faced creased in pain. ‘Don’t think so. Sorry, Ensign. Where’s the captain?’
She jerked her head back towards the deadly slip-field, and he swore. Meeting his eyes, she saw her own question in them. Someone tell me: what happens now?
Right. She looked around at the soldiers again – her company – and names welled up in her mind, or at least some of them. ‘Wells, take two others and escort Sergeant . . . escort the sergeant back to camp. Pick up any other wounded you find back in the field.’ And what if there are more wounded than three able bodies can take? The question went unasked. It was out of her hands.
She watched with detached amazement as Soldier Wells and the two nearest him helped the sergeant stand up. He gave her a look, before they left: it might have been wishing her luck or it might have been expressing no confidence in her. She let the thought go.
What happens now? ‘You, Gallster and Pachleby, go back to the field. Fetch a dozen muskets. I can’t be the only one to have lost mine.’ And as if by magic, the two named soldiers were already retreating back towards the slip-field. That was the easy part.
‘Where’s Mallen?’
‘Gone ahead, Ensign.’
‘Stockton,’ she said, addressing a young woman she thought looked sound. The girl’s expression suggested that she was not Stockton, but Emily ploughed on regardless. ‘And you,’ she decided, letting her finger indicate the next. ‘Go scout ahead. I need to know where we are, and what’s going on.’
The woman who wasn’t Stockton stood up, looking pale and less sound than she had a moment before, but she saluted and she and her nameless companion stepped away into the mist and the trees, and were lost and gone in ten paces. Emily was uncomfortably aware that she could have sent two soldiers to their deaths without knowing the name of either. I will improve, if I get the chance. ‘Someone make me a count,’ she instructed them. ‘How many of us are left?’
She used the meantime to lean back against a tree and work out what she would do next, what news she might expect to hear.
The count of two hundred and twenty-one came in, perhaps including Gallster and Pachleby, as they came back with their cargo of replacement guns.
Seventy-odd dead in the field. So few moments to account for so many.
And now two hundred and twenty-one men and women looked at her and waited for her to tell them what to do.
The knot in her stomach, tight enough during all these days, clenched fully at last. Don’t