dropping down as their fellows stood to take another shot. Emily felt her insides squirm. When she stepped out to the trees’ edge, into good range of them, it would be with two hundred and twenty-one soldiers, all of whose lives depended on her choices.
She wanted to wait and wait for some golden opportunity, some great moment when all knots might be undone with just one pull of the string.
There will never be a good time for this. She clutched her musket closer to her. On three, she decided. She counted: one, two three. She still did not want to go in.
She went anyway, charging out into the open and collapsing before a toppled barrel that would protect her hardly at all, raising the gun to her shoulder. The trigger jerked, the arc-lock spun.
It misfired. No smoke, no sound, but the lack of it was swallowed up in the great thunder of her division’s guns, the choking pall of rank smoke once they found their places and fired. Ragged pot-shotting, nothing like the mechanical order of the Denlanders, but still, guns were guns. She saw twenty or more of the closest enemy punched off their feet, or slumping across their barricades, and she realized to her horror that if she wanted to press her advantage, she would need to close the range. We need to move forward again.
And if the Denlanders have more men concealed in the trees they can do to us what we have done to them.
Dragging her sabre from its scabbard, she pushed herself to her feet. ‘Go! Charge! Go!’ she screamed at the top of her voice, and dashed forward, sword first.
Denlanders were turning to confront her division now. Something plucked at the sleeve of her jacket and she felt a sting as that of an insect. The man beside her stopped dead, doubling over and falling out of her sight.
She screamed, eyes almost shut, sword held high. No words, but just a yell of rage and defiance and fear.
She was within the line of their barricade. Shots sang past her, heading both ways. The nearest Denlander dropped, blood spouting from his throat like a stage actor’s feigned expiry. The next was still facing out at Bear Sejant, about to make his shot. She rammed the sabre into his body, losing it between his ribs as he howled in agony. She pulled the doubtful pistol out and held it at arm’s length, looking for a target.
Her division began to overtake her. Stockton, or whoever she was, dropped to her knees beside Emily, aiming and firing with clenched teeth, eyes wide.
The Denlanders were breaking apart, backing off. Tubal and Captain Pordevere had led their men charging out, a great tide of red that spilled over the clearing into the final round of fire from the Denlander line. From within the Lascanne ranks a great sheet of fire swept over the barricades, setting Denlanders alight like torches as Justin Lascari made his presence known.
In her mind she heard Mallen’s voice: Into the trees! Don’t stop at the treeline. Don’t let them regroup.
‘After them! Follow them!’ she shouted, her voice hoarse and raw. She hauled once more at her sword, but the dead man held it securely, so with pistol only she charged. ‘Bad Rabbit! Bad Rabbit!’
Into the trees. The whole action so far had been a string of beads, alternating light space and dark swamp. There were Denlanders fleeing ahead of her, pelting and jumping over the treacherous ground. One fell, too close for her to strike, and she leapt over him, trusting to her soldiers to finish him off.
Into the mist, into the trees, splashing madly through the shifting waters, and always knowing that she was being followed, whilst the quarry was vanishing swiftly out of sight ahead. It was like some strange nightmare where she constantly pursued, but never caught. The pistol, a weight on her arm, lower and lower.
Where am I?
She stopped running. There was water before her. For a mad moment she thought she had reached the sea.
A lake? A vast lake that receded into the drifting fog. She stood at its very edge, on a finger of higher land that jutted out into it, gnarly with trees sprouting in single file.
Somewhere out there, cloaked in the murk, some great beast splashed and howled.
She turned numbly back the way she had come. None of her soldiers had followed her this far. It seemed they had the good sense to follow the enemy instead, as