the company all hold a candle for you, Master Sergeant.’
‘Only natural.’ His eyes tracked the ghostly white of an owl questing over the treetops.
‘You don’t hold them one back, as far as I’ve noticed.’
‘Propositioning, Marshwic? Scavian’ll not be pleased.’
‘Well, no,’ she said, briefly flustered before she cut through his mockery. ‘I’m just wondering – the mysterious Mallen, after all. Is there . . . ?’
‘There was, once.’ The grin faded into the darkness of his face. ‘Before the war. She left me, though. No choice, really. Beautiful, she was. Knew her business. First-class scholar. Near to a wife as I’ll ever have. Had to go, though.’
‘What happened? Did you . . . fall out?’
He let out a long, slow breath before he answered. ‘Denlander, you see,’ he said.
‘Oh . . . Oh, I see.’
‘Don’t have any women soldiers, the Denlanders. Yet. Any day, though. Things are near as bad over there as they are for us. Then, when I’m out killing their scouts in the dark, won’t I be thinking: What if the next one’s her?’
Neither of them spoke then. The moon was sinking by that point, but the light was still gathering on the eastern horizon. When she made to speak, Mallen held a hand up for quiet.
With infinite patience and majesty, the dawn was breaking. The western sky was still in darkness, indistinguishable from the soaring cliffs of the Couchant, but over in the east . . . The grey light mellowed, waxing paler and paler and then burning, the edge of the sea catching fire in all the colours that gold and red could allow, boiling and gleaming as the sun made its way through the dawn mists and into its rightful realm.
All around them, the forest was struck with a riot of colour: the shaded greens of the leaves and the shocking violets and scarlets of the flowers that dotted them. The earth itself was waking, and it seemed to Emily that it was not just mere light that revealed the colours, but that the colours roused themselves for day, glowing out through the greys and blacks and browns to shine in their own right. Never had she seen anything as magical, or as beautiful.
‘Thank you for showing me this,’ she said to Mallen. And then, when he made no response, ‘Thank you for rescuing me, for coming after me.’
The grin edged back then. ‘Pay my debts, understand? Be sure you do, too, when it’s your turn.’
24
I have walked closer than anyone would wish to come to death. I have spoken with the devils of Denland, and found them human, and I have owed my life to those that are not.
I do not know how I should face Mary and Alice again after seeing what I have seen. I am not sure that I could go home, or that I am even fit to do so. Perhaps it is as well that such a return seems increasingly unlikely.
Doctor Carling’s wife changed the dressings on her face and nodded in appreciation. ‘You are practically as new, Sergeant,’ she remarked. ‘You heal as fast as any I’ve known. Youth, I suppose.’
Emily did not feel young. She had last felt young eight days ago with the arrival of dawn. That night, that impossible night, the escape across the canopy. It had seemed that she could never tire, never die or grow old.
Now she felt about ninety, which was a good thirty years better than how she had felt the day before. It had all come home to roost, of course. As soon as she had stopped, with the camp in sight, she had found herself barely able to walk.
Doctor Carling’s wife had told her, with some satisfaction, that she had counted some forty-seven separate wounds, bruises or strained joints on Emily’s body. Any other soldier would still have been out on sentry duty within a day, she bitterly suspected, but no other soldier had come back so miraculously from the dead. No other soldier was being talked about by half the camp. She had become the colonel’s darling, and he was determined that she would be given the best of care, whether she wanted it or whether she most emphatically did not. So it was that Sergeant Marshwic was confined to the infirmary, and would be there until, at the very least, tomorrow.
She had told the doctor’s wife about Doctor Craulen and his medicine, and the woman had shrugged. It had meant nothing to her. She was not a