freezing his features. After a moment he spat into the waters.
‘Brother-in-law,’ he said. ‘God and Heaven. What sort of a country lets its women fight? What sort of a woman wants to?’
She bit back the words that came first to her. They do not know about the draft. She had suspected as much previously. The Denlanders thought the women soldiers of Lascanne were volunteers.
‘Are we not allowed to defend what is ours?’ she asked.
He cursed wearily. ‘It’s going to be a long war,’ he said, and she knew he was thinking of some hypothetical future when the Levant and Couchant fronts were broken, and the armies of Denland went on to take Lascanne itself. A future where they were opposed by every man, woman and child left in that country, all fighting like maniacs to the very last. The weight of it, the thought of that fight, lay heavy on him. So much the better. Let them think it is so. She had no sympathy. It was her home that they wanted to invade, and she knew that if either front broke, then Denland would find no opposition beyond.
There was an all-too-brief pause for a mouthful of hard biscuit and a few swallows of water, and it heartened her, it strengthened her to see that they were reduced to that. Supplies must be hard to come by, she supposed, if they moved about so much.
Time was a slippery thing to judge, here under the canopy, but she guessed it was two hours after noon when they stopped for good and made camp again. Surrounded by her ring of armed guards, she watched as bands of Denlanders melted in and out of the shadows. The actual camp was a loose network of squads that must extend for some distance all around. She seemed to be in the very centre.
They reassembled the frame in front of her, not out of cruelty but practicality leaning it up against a knotted tree broad enough to support it.
‘Is there no other option?’ she asked the provost.
‘If we left you a muscle to move, would you not use it to escape?’ he asked.
‘I can’t fly. I can’t work miracles. I’m surrounded by your soldiers.’
‘And all Lascans are mad, blood-mad. Who is to say that you would not free yourself and kill Doctor Lammegeier, or spoil our provisions? I cannot trust you in anything. You are my enemy. You are duty bound to escape and to oppose us, just as I would be if I were your prisoner.’
She had no answer to that, and there were enough of them laying hands on her that she did not struggle when they roped her back into the frame. She felt as though she was getting to know the ropes that they knotted and unknotted. They waste nothing. It means they have little. But they use it well.
‘How are things back home, Provost?’ she asked.
‘War drains a country,’ he said. ‘Three years so far, and I’m sure both our nations run short. Food, materials, people.’ He shrugged.
‘Well said, Provost.’ She recognized Doctor Lam’s genial tones as the old man stepped up alongside. To her surprise, he had kept up with them through all the swamp-slogging. They had not carried him, or even helped him along. The old man was clearly tougher than she had guessed.
Perhaps I could not have managed to kill him, had I even got my hands on him.
She looked into his slightly smiling, slightly melancholy face and asked herself if she would kill him, given the chance. He was the enemy, after all. He was the infamous Doctor Lam, but he was an old man, a philosophical, humorous creature full of odd talk. Someone’s father, someone’s grandfather even.
Let him torture me, then I shall have no qualms.
With that thought, she shrank back as he approached.
‘What now?’ she asked him. ‘Will the doctor operate?’
‘As I explained to you, Sergeant, I am an engineer, not a physician, but if it becomes necessary, then I have those who will make the cut on my behalf.’ There was only sadness in his voice as he spoke, no threat at all. It was all the more intimidating for that. ‘Perhaps we should speak a little first. Perhaps you will tell me what little you can.’
As easy as that . . . to avoid the knife and the fire. ‘I am no traitor, Doctor,’ and only the tiniest flinch in her voice.
‘No doubt.’ He seated himself at the foot of her cane frame.