nothing. At any time, we can feel the eyes on us, and we never know whether some dumb beast stares, or the invisible indigenes, or the Denlanders. The place is full of ghosts.
The mist was thickening, which was the first piece of luck that had come their way. Somewhere to the east the tide was running in, flooding the pools and the shallows, climbing up along the arching tree roots. Bay fish and other sea beasts were nosing their way up with the rising water, and above the tide the curling mist rode in, spreading its tendrils between the trees as far as the battered squad of Stag Rampant troopers.
They had made a slow and careful progress so far. Emily was taking them on a curving course, as best she could judge, hoping to reach the camp by a roundabout way. She guessed the Denlanders would seek to ambush them by the most direct paths, assuming the enemy had the faintest idea where they were. She supposed that even Denlanders could get lost.
Strung out behind her was the score of soldiers-at-arms who had been fortunate enough to survive this far. She could feel the twanging tension in them, from never knowing when the next shot would come at them. She never had a sense that they were free and clear of the Denlander net, not since they parted from Angelline. Whenever she motioned for a halt, the character of the swamp gave the enemy away; there was movement and motion out there that was not native to the mud and the mist. The Denlanders were pacing them, never quite finding them in the fog but knowing that they were close.
At the end of the line was Caxton, and Emily hoped she was bearing up. It was a hell of a first assignment as an officer. If the woman was an ounce less dependable than she had reckoned, Emily would discover it soon enough.
And meanwhile, she was lost.
Not a certainty yet: she might come across some stone landmark or running channel that would confirm or dispel her suspicions, but she was starting to believe that the Denlanders were managing to keep south of them, cutting them off from the camp.
She could not see them or hear them, but she knew for sure they were there. This was a sense she was developing that could not be accounted for in any normal way. Now she felt a noose drawing close.
She signalled them to pick up the pace, clambering faster over the rising root buttresses, heading for denser and denser vegetation. The enemy have new guns. She had reported it to the colonel, and he had not believed her, but she knew it. The Denlanders could fire over a distance with great accuracy, in a way that Sergeant Demaine at Gravenfield had never dreamt of. New guns or new training, but the Denlanders were changing.
‘Sergeant!’ Caxton shouted out and, for her to break silence, Emily knew the new ensign must have spotted the enemy. All of a sudden Emily was running as fast as she could over the awkward ground.
‘Go! Go!’ she was shouting, feeling rather than hearing the squad take to its heels after her. There were four discrete snaps, from muskets barking out, but she could not take the time even to glance back to see how many still followed her.
She hurled herself onwards, running along roots with desperately uncertain balance, rebounding from tree trunks, forcing her way into the densest foliage she could find, anything to obstruct the Denlanders’ line of sight. There were more shots behind, but none close to her. She hoped to God none of her squad had stopped to return fire, or they would be lost.
She sank up to one knee in mud, cursing like a real soldier. Two or three of her squad ran past her before someone stopped to help her out. A shot struck the water near her, throwing up a fan of spray.
Suddenly the woman next to her was Caxton, and Emily had to assume the ensign was still last in line, so that she herself was now at the rear, lumbering and scrabbling between the trees with the Denlanders closing in. There were twisted boughs on every side now: a maze of tortured limbs clawing at one another in their slow fight over the sunlight. Emily concentrated on keeping the backs of the fleeing soldiers before her in sight, feeling her sides ache from all the running, from the weight of