blouse red, Elise was abruptly falling away. Emily ran to catch her, clutching for the woman’s hand. There was a dead weight on the end of it and the dead weight was Elise.
‘Come on!’ she shouted at the stricken woman. ‘Come on!’ Their roles cruelly reversed.
The whistle to retreat sounded again, now closer and more urgent.
‘Elise, come on!’
The Denlander sniper must be reloading, in the quiet moments between reports.
The lifeless hand slipped from her fingers. Emily looked about herself, desperately seeking the enemy, but there was no one, nothing but the swamp.
‘Marshwic! Move your arse!’ Mallen bounded past, bent almost double, his tied-back hair streaming.
‘But Elise . . .’
He paused for a brief instant, but Master Sergeant Mallen had seen death before. ‘Just come on!’ He was gone then, but he had left her some of his energy, his speed. Her skin crawled, and she went floundering after him, to get away from the two dead things in the swamp.
For some time later, Emily could set down nothing in her letter but I killed my first man today. Not because nothing else had registered, but because whenever she remembered holding that hand in hers, or the astonished expression on Elise’s face as the woman’s words were murdered in her mouth, her fingers began shaking, and she could not hold the pen.
2
And when I returned to camp, I was, for a moment, so grateful that I would have given away everything I had, if I could but find who had rescued me from that dreadful place. I was so very grateful that the ordeal was over and that I had been spared.
Then the understanding came to me that, of course, it was not over: tomorrow or the next day they would desire of me to go and fight once more. I would be required to hunt the enemy amongst those terrible trees. When this realization came to me, I fear I began to cry, and could not stop.
The world had gone mad three years before, when revolution came to Denland. Casting off their loyalties, heedless of man’s law or God’s, a band of greedy, power-hungry men had risen up against poor half-witted King Dietricht. The streets of the capital were soon thronged with agitators, criminals and looters. Half the city had burned, and what had risen from the ashes called itself a parliament that needed no kings.
Denland had always played host to those philosophers, atheists and political dissidents who maintained that all men were fit to rule; and that, while the magic of the blood royal was undeniable, still a king’s head held no greater privilege of leadership than that of any other. The Denlander crown had ever been tolerant of such rantings and pamphletings. Let them talk, had been the policy. Talk does no harm.
But in just one night, that talk had honed itself to a headsman’s edge. In one night, the howling pack of malcontents and anarchists had stormed the palace, let in by traitors from the King’s own guard. Simple-minded Dietricht was shot down, his queen thrown from the highest window of the palace, his newborn son murdered in his cradle.
For the people of Lascanne, Denland’s southern neighbour, that bloody morning was like waking into a nightmare. For centuries the two nations had been siblings – sometimes rivals but always allies against the world. Now Denland, formerly so solid and reliable and plodding, had become a rabid dog.
Emily remembered reading it all in the newspapers. There had been a cartoon depicting the Denlander Parliament as a convocation of ravening beasts squatting amidst ruined walls. She remembered walking in Chalcaster, with everyone asking everyone else what would happen next. There had been no great patriotic bombast at the start. Nobody had quite believed it, as though an entire newspaper full of regicide and revolution could be laid at the door of a typesetting error or a printer’s poor sense of humour. But eventually the murmur had coalesced into two questions.
What are we going to do?
What are they going to do?
Because word had come creeping in. It was never quite something directly written in the papers, never something tacked up in the market square or announced by the Mayor-Governor, yet everyone became aware of it. Travellers muttered it on their way through town. Royal messengers let it slip as they paid for their inn rooms. Drinkers repeated it to each other over mugs of small beer.
The Denlanders were not content with remaking their own nation. The Denlanders would not stop