‘take your division. You’re going to have to clear them out. There can’t be more than forty still on their feet.’
The Bear Sejant ensign nodded. There was a stunned look on his face: the look of a man who had walked his way into hell and couldn’t find the way out.
‘Come on, Em.’ Tubal finished reloading and stood up in a half-crouch. ‘Pordevere needs support. He’ll wipe out the whole company if he has the chance.’
The Bear ensign visibly counted to three, and his squads ran forward to new firing positions. Three men were picked off even as they moved.
‘Now,’ decided Tubal. ‘Let’s spend as little time in the clearing as we can.’
And then he was up and running, and they all ran with him, even as new Denlander snipers started on them, shots whizzing out of the foliage without warning.
The harsh sun of the clearing dazzled her. Her feet pounded through the mud, vaulting the gnarled roots of the swamp giant whose rotting death had made this place, and vaulting the fallen redjackets too. She kept moving, refused to look at them in case she recognized the faces.
The man ahead stumbled, a flower of darker red suddenly in the centre of his back. She jumped that body too, knowing that to hesitate would see her lost.
Then she was into the dense air, the blessed gloom and cover of the treeline. There were Bear Sejant soldiers ahead of them. She could hear Angelline giving the order to fire, hear the massed discharge of the guns. And to her left there was a flare, a sudden flash of light and heat that must be from one of the Warlocks: Lascari or Scavian. No time to tell which.
In a brief moment she took it in: a retreating line of Denlanders stopping to fire, falling back, then stopping again to reload. More crouched in the trees: sharpshooters pot-shotting at the advancing red.
If we’re advancing, does that mean we’re winning?
She had not heard Mallen’s whistle in a long time.
No sign of Mallarkey or the Leopard, either.
‘Forward!’ Captain Pordevere’s triumphant cry. ‘They’re on the run, men! Forward! For the King! For the King!’
And her legs responded, her hands too busy with the gun, her mind too numbed. Forward she went with the others of the Stag and the Bear. Ahead, the Denlanders began to retreat faster, no longer firing. They were breaking, she realized. Breaking! At last! She picked up her pace, as the others did.
She saw a Denlander stop and fall, clutching his stomach, trying to keep up over the ragged ground. The insistent thought nagged her like a fly: I’ve seen them break before and it was not like this. There was still order to the Denland line as it fell back into thicker cover. Tubal was ahead of her, sword catching stray light as he drew it from its scabbard. The air rang to Pordevere’s insistent ‘For the King! For the King!’
Not breaking. Pulling us in.
‘Ambush!’ she shouted, wishing for all the world for a voice like Angelline’s. ‘Slow down! Pull back! Ambush!’
A few of the soldiers nearest looked her way, started to drop back. Tubal was still ahead of her and she desperately increased her stride, all the while yelling ludicrously, ‘Pull back! Slow down!’
He glanced back, and she pointed past him. ‘Ambush, Tubal! God’s sake! Ambush!’
Realization dawned on his face, a look of utter horror. He skidded in the mud, trying to stop.
She saw the Denlander line ahead stop running, turn and kneel. Behind them, more guns glinted in the shadows between the trees.
‘Down!’ she shouted, and at last let herself fall forward, knocking her knee on a root but bringing her gun up to fire.
She must have pulled her trigger at the exact same time as the Denlanders, because they fired together, she and they. Of her shot, she could not say, but their combined fire was blow enough to stop the Lascanne advance dead, ripping through flesh and bone, hurling soldiers back, doubling them over, casting them to the ground.
She saw Tubal hit, his legs swept from under him, the musket flying from his hands.
*
That morning before the attack, she was watching the troops assemble in their companies, fewer now than for the Big Push of recent memory. There she was, watching the redcoats muster, searching for her courage and finding little enough of it.
The day had been a bright one, the summer sun no more than a shadow of the heat under the trees, but a healthy