She stared into his tortured face and then she put her arms around him and buried her face in his grimy shirt, the tide of her fought-down feelings rising at last, and for a long time they held each other in remembrance of her dead friend and his dead lover.
*
They buried her where all the other dead were buried, though, at Brocky’s intractable insistence, they gave her a grave all to herself. Shortage of ground had meant that most of the fallen had been piled in four to a hole, and Father Burnloft had not even attempted to climb the vast mountain of dead names that they had walked away from. The dead Denlanders they buried too, in a mass gravepit, all tumbled together, officers and men, a great hole full of broken dreams, sundered families and wasted lives. It gave Emily no heart, nor any of them, to see that there were twice as many dead men in grey than there were dead men and women in red.
*
It took them all by surprise, eight days later, when the reinforcements actually arrived. That, relieved of the stresses of the front, Captain Mallarkey would actually carry out his duty, had not occurred to anyone.
They approached slowly from the south, mud-caked and exhausted from the trek. Mallen and Emily went out to take a closer look, and counted one hundred and thirty-one of them.
‘Green,’ Mallen observed. ‘Boys and camp followers.’
He was right. These were spare staff from the Locke support detachment: military clerks, cooks and broom-pushers pressed into service. About half had seen uniform before; the rest had to be shown which end of a musket was pointed at the enemy. They did not even have the benefit of the truncated training Emily herself had received. She found herself feeling keenly sorry for them that, in their inexperience, their first taste of war would be here where the hammer would fall hardest.
Not that the hammer hadn’t fallen close by a few times already. Since their savage and costly assault on the camp, only turned away by the courage and sacrifice of Pordevere and Marie Angelline, the Denlanders had made two further forays against the Lascanne defences.
The first time they had come out at dusk once more, and fired five or six rounds into the camp from beyond the useful range of the Lascanne guns, and everyone had been ranged at the patched barricades, waiting for them to charge. They had not, though. They had merely stood there until nightfall made them invisible, and then melted back into the trees. Emily had no idea whether it was some ploy to catch the defenders off guard, or whether the enemy’s nerve had simply failed. She knew that, after all the fathers, sons and brothers cast away in the first assault, she would not want to be in their position now. Still less did she want to be in her own position. Given a choice, she would rather be anywhere else.
The second attack, only a day before the reinforcements arrived, had been a different affair entirely. They had tried loosing a few rounds at their customary range, but then had come right in, firing all the while, determined to make another fight of it. The Lascanne line had held together under the direction of Emily and Mallen, two of the most unlikely battlefield officers imaginable. The Denlanders had taken serious losses on their way in, and then discovered further ill news. John Brocky had spent days decanting sharp stones and shaved metal into glass jars, which he then stocked with gunpowder and stopped with wax and oiled fuses. Now Lascanne, too, had its makeshift grenades, and it was these that met the charging Denlanders, before they could use their own. Emily remembered watching the flashes and the ground-churning explosions as the Denlander grenadiers had their own weapons set off in their hands and inside their packs.
That attack had not reached the barricade. The Denlanders had fled, leaving yet more of their mystically superior guns for the Lascanne forces. They had been seized on, those guns, by men who thought to exploit their magic, but each man who tried one found only that the little leather-sewn lead balls that were Denlander ammunition took longer to ram down the guns’ muzzles.
How strange and silent the night had seemed, after the Denlanders had fled and the wounded were taken to the infirmary. Emily had stood at the barricade, and the knowledge that she would likely meet another