though. It was the thrashing of his mind. Once, when I was a child, an ant had crawled into my ear. For two days all my squirming and poking had not been able to dislodge the ant, and I’d felt it moving, its every twitch amplified within my head. Being near to Xander was like that, for me.
At noon the next day, Sally shouted Piper’s name. She and Xander, sharing a horse, were riding just behind us, a guard at each side. At her shouts we wheeled our horses and rode back to her, but there was no sign of ambush or disaster—only Xander’s usual faraway expression, and Sally clutching both of his shoulders from behind.
“Say it again,” she said to Xander. He opened his mouth but no words emerged. Their horse shifted from side to side, as though Xander’s unease trickled down to him, too.
“Say it again,” repeated Sally. “Tell Piper what you said to me.”
When Xander still said nothing, Sally turned to Piper.
“Which ships did you send out to search for Elsewhere?” she said.
“The Evelyn and The Rosalind,” Zoe and Piper said in unison.
Sally smiled, contorting her wrinkles into elaborate new configurations. “That’s what he said. Rosalind.” She grabbed Xander’s shoulders once more. “Tell Piper,” she said. “Say it again.”
Xander looked impatient, but spoke. “I already said it. Rosalind. Rosalind’s coming back.”
He couldn’t be persuaded to say any more, but those words were enough to spur us onward for the long day’s ride. Simon was noncommittal, only muttering that he’d reconsider sending more troops to the west, in search of the ships, if we managed to free New Hobart. I understood his reluctance. A few stuttered words from Xander didn’t seem much, in the face of the ships’ long silence, and the winter storms that would be thrashing the sea.
Nonetheless, through all that day’s hours of riding, and the next, I held Xander’s words, cupping them in my mind like a bird’s egg. Rosalind’s coming back.
Ω
The cold was worse when we reached the swamps. If we’d been traveling at a leisurely pace we might have had the luxury of avoiding the worst of the mires, but we had no time to waste and sometimes spent half a day or more leading our horses through the knee-deep water. Sally never complained, but at night, as we huddled around a fire of half-damp reeds, I could see how she struggled to hold her rations in her hands, which the cold had tied into intractable knots. I saw, too, how Piper’s jaw muscles were tensed against his shivering, and how Zoe pulled her sleeves down over her blue-tinged hands.
When we were six miles east of New Hobart, deep in the marshes, Simon ordered the troops to make camp. The swamp was stubborn here, a mess of pits and marsh, held together only by threads and islands of higher land. The water, already iced at the edges, was too deep to wade through, and the reeds grew taller even than Piper. Where trees sprouted in the higher ground, they were contorted by the wind, their branches twisted and arthritic. Smaller trees clung at the edge of the swamp pools, their roots dangling straight into the water. It took us a day of seeking to find the best spot, an acre or two of tussocked island amid the fetid water. A single, circuitous path led there through the miles of swamp. The horses had to be led slowly through the path, testing each hoof as they placed it, and when we were in the camp, they clustered by the reeds and whinnied their suspicion. But the noise was no concern—this wasn’t territory for passers-by. Any wanderers were more likely to drown in the murky, ice-rimmed water than to stumble across our camp, deep in the reeds.
Messengers and scouts had already been sent out, to muster the surviving members of the resistance. But it would take days, if not weeks, for them to join us. In Simon’s tent, we gathered around a map of the region. Rendered down to pen strokes on paper, the town itself was shown, rising on a hill on the plain, now ringed by the Council’s wall. A mile or more to the south lay the forest that Kip and I had burned. To the north and west, the plains were broken only by occasional gullies and copses. And to the east, the swamps where our camp perched, islands of mud among half-frozen water and reeds that climbed half as