redjackets caught her up and flung her at the enemy. She hacked with her sabre mechanically, seeing the Denlanders give a little, then make a stand. They were frightened. She saw it in their faces. They were frightened but they were fighting with musket butt and knife and hatchet. They would not be broken even as they fell before sword and makeshift club, and Lascanne soldiers were being felled too. From somewhere to her left came Scavian’s explosive fire as he leapt forward to prevent the Denlanders enveloping the defending soldiers. She caught the flare of his magic from the corner of her eye twice, three times more and then it stopped, and she was too engaged in her own survival to think any more of it.
The two masses of soldiers surged against each other, a forgotten form of war from a hundred years before, more suited to the relics hung on Lord Deerling’s walls than the weapons they had to hand. In the midst of it, Emily had barely room to wield her sword, but her left hand found the Denlander knife thrust through her belt and she pulled that out and starting jabbing it into the enemy without thought. A savagery had overtaken her, which wanted just one thing: escape from this dreadful, murdering crush of men. And, since it could not find such escape, it slashed and stabbed and laid about itself in a mad panic. She was so frenzied that the nearest Denlanders were not fighting her at all, just trying to push away from her through the solid mass of their fellows.
Then a thunderous shock went through them, and she knew that Pordevere’s plan had worked. With no clear transition, the fighting of the Denlanders changed from men fighting to move forward, to men fighting for their lives. Behind them, Pordevere’s picked combatants were driving into them, for how could the Denlanders have expected a counterattack to their own attack? How could the Lascans possibly have the extra men? The Denlanders did not know that, beyond the few who stood alongside Emily, the Lascanne camp was almost emptied of the living.
They clung on for another desperate minute of brutal, hate-filled slaughter on both sides, then something finally snapped within them, and the Denlanders began moving back, trying for an orderly withdrawal.
Most of those around Emily followed up, intent on driving the Denlanders wholesale from the camp, but she herself just slumped to her knees, feeling as though she had been racked. Every joint seemed on fire, and her head still resounded and pulsed with pain. She dropped her sabre, conscious of the rawness of the hand that had held it so long. She did not think she could ever fight again.
She prayed to God she would never have to, but the prayer was burdened by the knowledge that, today or tomorrow, the war would demand her presence again.
There was shouting, now, and orders. She somehow regained her feet, and found that the camp was almost cleared and the Denlanders were in full retreat back towards the swamps.
The bulk of the camp’s defenders had halted at the ravaged barricade, but others kept following the Denlanders out into the night. Those were Pordevere’s men following his plan to chase the enemy back, to catch them in the trees before they could re-form. But they were so few, so few.
Emily forced herself towards the barricade, because she had to stop them. The camp simply did not have the numbers or reserves of strength to carry out his plan. ‘Captain Pordevere!’ she was calling out, though he must be too far to hear her, even if he was able to hear at all.
Marie! Marie Angelline was amongst those men and women running off into the night. And she knew how the Denlanders would react. She could see it in her mind: the fleeing men pouring past a battle line re-forming within the trees, the guns lifted to their shoulders . . .
She heard a single explosion of gunfire, perfectly synchronized, and recognized it for the end. She did not even hear the cries of the men and women who had followed Pordevere, but felt them nonetheless. She found herself already outside the barricade, kneeling amongst grey-clad bodies and staring out at the night.
‘Marie!’ she called desperately, but the only voice capable of covering such a distance was Marie’s own.
No sound now from the direction of the swamps. No sound of gunfire or of fighting, and she knew that Pordevere