watching him from beneath one eyelid as he passed on, stepping softly through water and mud.
She risked a glance towards Mallen – or rather Mallen’s breath – and she saw nothing.
And then he moved. He was hanging upside down from the branches of the tree behind her frame. He was stripped to the waist, his chest and back and arms daubed with darkness, either paint or dirt, to mimic the patterns of his facial tattoos. Lost in the shadows of his face, his eyes met hers.
‘We cannot get out. They are everywhere,’ she said, her mouth to his ear, and all the while wondering: How did he get in?
He took a deep breath, and put his hands under her arms. A jerk of his chin made her look upwards.
But . . . There was no time. Abruptly he was lifting her, thrusting her upwards towards the twisted boughs above. She heard him grunt with the effort, his legs locked about a branch, and she reached up into the darkness desperately, terrified that whatever she caught hold of would snap off.
One sound is all it will take. There are hundreds of guns, hundreds of men.
Her hand latched about a branch and she flailed with the other one until that, too, found a secure place. The wood bent alarmingly as her weight dragged on it, but it held. In a moment, Mallen had jackknifed upwards, taken hold and ascended into the tree as bonelessly as a serpent. His hand caught hold of her arm as she struggled to raise herself further. Between their joint efforts, she gained the canopy.
It was cramped, and she lay at a crooked angle, trying to catch her breath. The splayed branches of the tree came out every which way, turning, writhing, seeking their way upwards through the maze of their brothers in their quest for light. The darkness was complete: not a spark made its way in from above or below. The sounds of the swamp, of the tree’s own myriad inhabitants, covered any from Mallen, so she had to take it on trust that he was still with her.
And where to go from here? Are we to wait until the Denlanders move on, and hope they do not guess where we have gone?
‘Rested?’ came Mallen’s soft-voiced query. ‘Ready?’
‘For what?’ she breathed. He must be very close, crouching spider-like amidst the boughs. She was beginning to wonder whether he was entirely human, whether he had not some indigene in his blood, to let him do the things he could.
‘To move, understand? Can’t stay here.’ She felt him shift slightly, the movement gently swaying all the branches of the tree.
It was an effort for her to keep her voice low. ‘Where?’ she demanded.
‘Follow.’ In the pitchy dark his hand found her wrist without trouble, and then he tugged her: upwards, upwards and away.
She had no more questions to usefully ask, so she went with him, feeling like a blind thing, like an insect fumbling through grass-blades, handhold to handhold, one foothold to the next. The first few movements made her weak, the beating and her time hanging on the frame bringing a weakness to each limb. She wanted to stop; to rest; to give up. She did not allow herself the luxury, pushing her body remorselessly, barking parade-ground orders at herself inside her head to keep herself moving. Every so often she would become convinced that Mallen had escaped her, in her snail’s progress, and then she would catch hold of his hand or his bare ankle, as she continued moving painstakingly between the branches.
But soon they must run out of tree, she guessed. Surely we cannot go like this, branch over branch, all the way to the edge of the swamps. I will go blind.
Light suddenly assailed her: a white lantern flooding her world with pale, washed-out illumination. She shielded her face, rocked backwards and nearly lost her grip. Not bright, but . . .
She stared at it for a long moment before she would admit to herself that it was the moon. The moon in a sky scudding with solitary and secret clouds, and freckled with the stars she had known forever. She found she could not move; she could not speak. The sight of it, after all she had been through, clutched at her heart.
And, eventually, she turned to look at Mallen hunched in the treetops beside her, as savage a creature as ever claimed Lascanne as its home. The wan moonlight danced unevenly across