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Contents

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If I should fall in far-off battle,

Cannons roar and rifles rattle,

Thoughts fly homeward – words unspoken,

Valiant hearts are oftimes broken,

Love farewell.

– Love Farewell, John Tams/traditional

1.

I killed my first man today . . .

The air was hot, muggy with moisture, filled with flies. Emily had not known hot before she came to these swamps. Hot had once been pleasant summer days with the corn ripening gold in the fields. Hot had been the good sun and the rich earth, and the labourers scaring crows or bringing a harvest in; a picnic on the Wolds, with a blue, blue sky cloudless above. Hot was a fierce fire burning in the study when the world outside was chill. There must be another word for this all-encompassing heat.

Slowly she advanced, foot over foot through ankle-deep water. There was no sky here; the warp-trunked trees that clawed their way out of the muck on their knotted roots were jealous of the air above. Their overreaching branches intertwined like misers’ fingers until the light battered its way down to her through green on green. She was in the belly of the forest and it was eating her piece by piece with the lancets of mosquitoes and the questing suckers of great black lampreys that squirmed about her boots.

It was a wet, unrelieving heat that plastered her with sweat and then left the sweat in place there, un-drying and unable to leach out into air that was already saturated. It plastered her blouse to her skin, griming its crisp regulation white into grey. It pooled in the armpits of her red jacket with the gold stripes around the cuffs. How proud she had been when she was first given the uniform! Now she wanted nothing more than to lose it. It stifled her. It restricted the movement of her arms. The breeches clung to her legs. Water squelched in her boots with an unholy mingling of the swamp and her own perspiration.

Her fringe, cut short by those butchers that posed as military barbers, clung damp across her forehead, and still managed to be long enough to get into her eyes. She stopped and brushed it aside while balancing her gun awkwardly in one hand.

Abruptly she could not hear the others. She looked around, wild-eyed. To be lost out here, in this hell . . . she would never find her way back alone. Where Mallen should have been, there was no one. The dense, cloudy air of the swamp had swallowed him up, thick enough to shroud the trees only a few yards away. Where Mallen had been was now only the low-buzzing blur of a dragonfly with wings three feet across. It sparkled briefly, some fugitive ray of sun fracturing on its jewelled carapace, then went darting off between the trees.

To the other side . . . she saw Elise there, and felt such a rush of relief that she wanted to cry. The younger woman was fiddling with the strap of her helmet, trying to get the thing to stop sliding down over her eyebrows. Her gun was clasped between her knees. Elise looked up with the same panic Emily had just felt, spotted her and relaxed. She grinned, her teeth startlingly white in the green air, and began to make her way over.

Emily watched, knowing that she should disapprove, because this wasn’t the way they were supposed to do things. In truth she couldn’t care; no amount of training and procedure could brief you for these terrible swamps. Especially not Emily Marshwic, gentlewoman, who had never done a day’s work in her life.

Until now. Now she was rather making up for that.

‘Missing your fancy house, Marshwic?’ Elise asked in a husky stage whisper.

‘That’s Ensign Marshwic to you, soldier.’ But she couldn’t stop herself from grinning back. Right now she needed a bit of camaraderie far more than any privilege of rank.

‘Well, aren’t we full of ourselves.’ Elise was most of the way over to her, wading through the oily water, when they heard Mallen’s whistle.

Contact with the enemy.

Emily felt her heart seize up. What now? She could distantly see the line move forward, beyond Elise, who was now desperately fiddling with her helmet strap again, the crested steel wobbling as she tugged at it. Emily gestured for her to Come on, and began wading forward to keep her place in the line. She heard Elise splashing along behind her.

The air was so thick that the very geometry of the swamps, the pools and twisted trees, the ridgeways of roots, the rotten stumps, all loomed at random from the gloom around her. Her footing was uncertain: things squirmed beneath her tread, or the ground slid aside and gave way. Her progress was a series of stumbles that must be announcing her presence to every Denlander in the swamps. Elise, behind her, was even louder.

Emily reached a wall of arching roots that rose almost to her waist and took her bearings. Some kind of amphibian, slick and black, slid its four-foot length away from her into the water, and was gone.

There was a shot.

Elise, behind her, stopped still at last. The muted echo of the report died into the dank air.

Mallen whistled again. Attack!

‘Attack? Attack what? Attack the water? Attack the flies?’ Elise demanded.

‘Just attack!’ Emily knew the drill, and she hauled herself one-handed over the roots and splashed forward, hoping that she was still going the right way, that she had not been somehow turned around.

Another shot rang out, closer, and then a third in return fire. Aside from Elise, gamely blundering on behind her, there were no human beings in sight. It was a war between ghosts, a war in the next room. She wanted to shout at those unseen combatants: Where the hell are you?

Another two reports came from within the mist. Somehow she picked up her pace, despite the water and the mud, despite the weight of gun and pack and helm. Suddenly she was desperate to see this fighting, desperate not to be the one left out. Her comrades were shooting and dying somewhere amid this murk, but somehow she had broken the line. Now she had a loaded gun and the fighting was somewhere else.

She lurched on, tripping and stumbling and slipping, wrestling with footing that was constantly trying to betray her. There was a silver flare within the mist: she heard, through the dense air, the shrill searing scream of one of the Warlocks attacking, the hissing explosion of water turned instantly to steam. That moment’s incinerating light served as her beacon, for the enemy had no wizards of their own. She pushed on, fell to one knee – holding her musket up to keep it dry, just as she had been taught – and forced herself back onto her feet through sheer willpower. Simply moving was becoming an intolerable burden to her, each breath of the muggy air harder to inhale, every motion sapping the strength from her limbs.

She finally burst out into a cleared space where the ground was baked hard, where the crooked trees had been seared black all around her, the convolutions of their trunks and branches turned into rigid death agonies. A Warlock had been here only moments before, unleashing his incendiary magic. The fog was just now oozing back in, the water welling up to reassert its dominion. She put a hand near the fire-split wood of the nearest tree, feeling the heat radiating from it like an oven’s open door.

At the edge of that fire-scorched clearing where one of the King’s wizards had stood, she saw a twisted shape. The mist had begun shrouding it already; it might have been a contorted human body or simply a fallen tree – either way it was half ash now.

There was another flash and report from deeper within the swamps, and she lurched on into the fog, desperate to regain her own people and not be abandoned in this green purgatory. The swamp closed about her like a bad dream, clogging her throat and squeezing her heart with its thick gluey air. Attack, the whistle had insisted, but she had been pressing forward and then forward again, and had seen no enemies other than those conjured by her own fears from the mist.

And then she stopped, because she had taken seven steps, now, since she had last heard a shot, and she had no idea where she was. The walls of the swamp rose up on all sides. She was utterly alone. Even Elise was gone, left behind somewhere in that impenetrable murk.

The world seemed to spin all around her and, whichever way it spun, it was the same: the darkened air, coloured by the leaves that the light forced its way through; the twisted agony of the trees; the hundred thousand insects with their whine and buzz.

She took one slow step forward, already knowing that it was pointless for, no matter what direction she moved in, she was still lost.

Then she saw him. Between two trees and beyond a stand of fern, no further away than ten yards: the Denlander. A small bareheaded man with a bowl-cut of dark hair, he was serious-faced, almost neatly turned out in his grey tunic and breeches. He had his gun to his shoulder, squinting into the gloom, sighting along it at something.

Sighting at one of her comrades. It had to be.

She raised her own musket and looked along the barrel, focusing in and in on her target until it almost seemed she could poke him in the eye with it. She took another step, settling into a bent-kneed crouch for stability.

He registered her.

Just out of the corner of his eye first, and then he was looking straight at her, as she stood there with her gun pointing at his head, and he knew that he had been outmanoeuvred.

The swamp held its breath. She could hear nothing, not the flies, nor the sound of firing. The world had gone silent for her in that one moment.

Onto his face there came a lost expression, one of terrible peace and acceptance, and he looked her in the eye and she knew she could not do it.

She had never killed before. She knew it was not in her nature.

But her finger had been trained to pull a trigger, and it did so, independent of doubt or questions.

There was that dreadful heartbeat as the arc-lock spun and sparked and fire met the powder inside the chamber.

In the silence inside her head, the gun was louder than it should possibly be. The stock bucked hard against her shoulder. Smoke belched from the muzzle and chamber to mingle with the filthy air.

And he was gone.

In the blindness of the moment, she did not see his body pitch back into the water, the gun falling from his hands. Compared to the roar of her arc-lock musket, his death was a study in silence.

The gun, smoking hot, was so loose in her hands it was nearly lost in the water. She took a tentative step forward, and then another, her world narrowing, and narrowing further, until there were no overarching branches, no warped tree trunks, nothing but grey cloth stained with a darkness that could have been mud or blood, or anything really. He was there, half submerged, arms flung wide as though seeking some final balance. He had fallen into the dark, though. He was dead.

There came half a dozen shots, hard on each other’s heels, but she did not look away or reload her gun or check for the enemy – all the things they had taught her to do. Her eyes were hooked by the body of the Denlander. Head thrown back into the water, it was impossible to tell anything about him. Had he been old? Young? Handsome? Ugly? The roar and the smoke had erased his face from her memory, and now there was just this thing: this meat.

She dragged her eyes away from him by main force but there was only the clogged, claustrophobic vista of the swamp to take them to. The brooding trees had seen death a hundred times before, and the lapping water was greedy to receive the dead man’s blood. More shots, muffled, in the distance. A battle of the invisible; a war in the next room.

She bent over, reaching out to him as though he could be saved.

The whistle sounded again, Mallen’s whistle.

Retreat.

Emily straightened up instantly, but she thought she had misheard. Retreat? Surely not. We’re winning, aren’t we? Here, in this blighted square yard of the swamp, they were winning. She was alive and the Denlander was dead. How could it be time to retreat?

‘Emily! Marshwic!’

She turned to see Elise ten yards away and closing.

‘Come on, we’re retreating. They’ve made a counterattack!’ the other woman shouted at her as she waded closer.

How do you know? Emily pushed the thought aside and turned towards Elise, forcing her boots through water that seemed thicker than ever. Behind her, no doubt, the carrion eaters of the swamp were already gathering.

‘We have to go!’ Elise insisted, gesturing frantically and nearly fumbling her gun.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Emily was out of breath, or breathing badly. A horror was now clutching at her, though she had not felt it arrive. There was a dead man on her conscience, which had once been so clear.

However has it come to this?

‘I swear—’ Elise began, then something red flowered on her pale shirt, stopping her in her tracks. The sound of the shot was an afterthought, a nothing. Elise stared at Emily with open mouth.

‘Oh . . .’

‘Elise!’

‘Oh, God, I . . .’ Her face white now, her 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 until they had reworked the entire world in their own republican image.

There was a constant flow of news from across the border. Noble families were being disenfranchised or forced to swear allegiance to that hellish parliament of murderers. Every common man of Denland considered himself a king now. They had abandoned all their trades and labour, and were clamouring for more blood and more rebellion. They were joining the army, or else being drafted. Reports were contradictory, frightening, impossible, save that it was all happening just over the border.

And then everyone knew, almost on the same day, that the Denlanders were coming. Their Parliament, having cast off the God-given guidance of kings, knew that its artificial and tenuous rule could not last so long as Lascanne continued to hold out the example of a benevolent monarchy. For this new, cruel Denland to survive, they must shutter the lanterns of monarchy among their neighbours, lest that light show them the blood on their own hands. So said the papers.

Lascanne’s only possible response was to meet them at the broken ground of the border, and throw them back.

And then there had been the day when the army marched through. Emily remembered it well: all those gallant men in their red coats heading north for the border, to meet the rabble of the Denlanders. Who could not have believed that a few clashes would have finished it? Lascanne’s army had never been large, but they were brave, and they had right on their side. Emily could see even now the gleaming helms, the long column of cavalry, horses as proud as the men themselves. She could see the great dark lengths of the cannon, the marching pride of Lascanne’s infantry. Some had been local men, whose families had cheered and waved. Others had simply been youthful and courageous and smiling, and young girls had put garlands around them and embraced them. Alice – Emily’s younger sister and a constant trial to propriety – had even kissed one.

Emily had remonstrated with her, but not too hard. It was all patriotism, after all. So she had watched, along with her sisters Alice and Mary – and Mary already growing large with child then. She had watched with Mary’s husband Tubal, and with young Rodric who had talked so excitedly about one day himself taking the Gold and the Red: the King’s coin and the King’s uniform.

And that gallant host had marched away and gone north to win the war. And the papers had reported their brave deeds, the battles and the heroics. They had carried the war deep into Denland, during those early months, and everyone had assumed that would be it. When the wounded came home – when the increasing numbers of wounded came home – they were still predicting it would be over by the end of the year.

And the year came and went, and the papers grew less specific regarding precisely where the fight had been taken to, and the wounded grew more numerous, until there were new hospitals being built to take them – in isolated places where people wouldn’t have to see. And the following spring the recruiting sergeants were passing from town to town, talking of the joys of a life in the army, and how the war was almost won anyway. They had gone amongst the men of Chalcaster and everywhere else. They had commissions to sell for those with money, and honest soldiers’ uniforms for those without. They were not short of volunteers in those early days, and again the family had turned out to cheer, waving a flag or two for the lads who were bold enough to carry a gun in service of the King.

Mary had borne her child by then, and she had held little Francis to her breast as they cheered heartily away, secure in the knowledge that none of their family was going.

But soon enough after that had come a proclamation. It seemed that the patriotic goodwill evidenced in Chalcaster could not have been shared across the nation because, despite the best efforts of the recruiting sergeants, the tally had come up short. The King was deeply sorry to ask more from his beleaguered people, but the war had reached a critical stage. They could not give the world over to the murderers of Denland simply for want of a few more muskets. Regretfully, the King’s writ therefore demanded each household give up one of its menfolk to swell the ranks of the Red.

That was when the arguments started between Mary and Tubal.

Emily could barely remember the details now of what had been said. Looking back, all those words seemed just to have been grease on the wheels that had taken Tubal away from them. She had never thought of him as a grand patriot: a religious man, yes, and an industrious worker at his printer’s business in town. A soldier, though? Dark, wry Tubal Salander? Surely some mistake. And indeed, he had not seemed possessed of that fire to sign up that young Rodric had shown, who had tried twice to take the King’s coin despite being a year too young.

There had been something else eating Tubal right then. He had always been the man who seemed to know what was coming: when the weather would change, when prices would rise and fall. He heard things; he spoke to travellers and had odd sources of information.

And so Tubal took much of the money he had so diligently saved, and he sank it into a lieutenant’s badge. And he wept when the time came to leave his wife and son, but he marched off anyway. And everyone cheered as the new recruits and their bought-and-sold officers marched away to the training camps. Alice cheered, and Rodric cheered, though he complained bitterly that the war would be over before he was old enough to join up. But Emily and Mary did not cheer, and little Francis cried in Mary’s arms, a thin, high wail that cut across all the jubilation and enthusiasm of the rest.

Never mind, people had said to the hollow-eyed Mary. The war will be done soon. For all the rumour that the Lascanne army had been pushed back to near the border, these new recruits would tip the balance. How could those opportunistic brigands of Denland stand against the true men of Lascanne?

In the year after that there was a host of men’s jobs and tasks which went undone unless the women and the boys set to them. There were shortages, because the sea had become a hunting ground of warships, and the merchantmen could not get through. There were panics about spies and revolutionaries. In the capital, men were executed for plotting against the King. At the border itself, the war dug in, with neither side able to break the other’s lines, but both constantly trying.

And towards the end of summer the notices had gone up in Chalcaster market square, and all across the land. They were couched in many comforting words: yes, the war was being won; yes, victory was on the very horizon, only just out of reach. And, because of that, the King needed more from his loyal subjects. The King reluctantly, and because the Denlanders must be defeated if anyone was to sleep safely, required all men to give themselves into his service. Boys from the age of fifteen, men to the age of fifty, they were all required to present themselves to do the King’s will. Those with valuable skills would work and craft, forge and fit, to furnish materiel for the war. But most would simply march, because the Denlanders fought with the desperation of cornered animals and the weeds of their revolution must be uprooted entirely, lest they sprout anew.

Rodric had not been fifteen, not then, although men from amongst Emily’s servants had been taken. Rodric had fretted and kicked his heels and daydreamed of muskets and uniforms for the scant last months of his fourteenth year, while Emily had prayed for the end of the war.

And then Rodric had turned fifteen, and the sergeants had come again to find those boys whom time had delivered into their hands. And Emily had done all she could to prevent it, but she was just one woman, and the war was vast and fierce and it would not stop for her.

*

She was very young in her dream: barely more than a child. It was a false-waking dream, as it always was. She had started from sleep and looked around the bedroom she had shared with Alice back then. A noise had woken her, but only her.

Memories banished from everyday life were keen and clear in this dream. She remembered the hard, bitter feel around the house that centred on their father. He had spent a long time struggling with the world – born a gentleman with a grand old family name to support, and eaten away at by a succession of gnawing failures. Lost opportunities, lost respect, lost reputation, and the family money dwindling, each doomed venture swallowing it like the sea, and giving nothing in return. He had gone from a kind and loving man to a source only of harsh words and silences. He was desperate. Even so young, Emily had known that. She had understood that her father’s rivalry with just one man had brought him to a pass where he became almost a stranger to his own family.

And now she crept from her bed, because there had been a noise, a strange noise, like a knock at the door at an hour too late for visitors. And she stole downstairs, bare feet on the chill steps, listening for a repetition of the sound she had only heard as it startled her out of sleep. In all the house she was the only soul awake.

And there was a strange new smell, as she reached the foot of the stairs. It had been faint there, but her nose wrinkled at it. She followed it through the silent, cavernous rooms of the house – so much grander in dreams than in reality – until she encountered the closed door of her father’s study.

And by then, her adult mind had caught up with where this dream was taking her, and some part of her was trying to hold her back. Once was enough, but the child in the dream did not know what was about to come. Even though the weight of horror attached to that door was palpable, still her hand reached for the handle.

‘Father?’ she heard her own voice, and when the door swung open, that scent flooded her nostrils. It was a harsh, almost sweet smell, a burning smell, but nothing akin to woodsmoke or tobacco. It branded itself in her mind even as it drifted in grey curls from the muzzle of the pistol still clutched in her father’s hand.

Seeing his face, she woke, and it was not the hole in his temple that jackknifed her up, sweating and shivering, but the final expression he had turned towards her and all the world. Fixed on his face was an unutterable look of betrayal that he was at last brought to bay like this.

The dream had come upon her as the capstone to a confused turmoil of a night full of wild imaginings. She had been lying awake since long before Poldry ever knocked at the door of her chamber, which came two hours before dawn.

‘Ma’am,’ he murmured. ‘It’s time, ma’am.’

‘I know.’ Her voice came out just as a croak, and she forced the words out louder before the old man had to repeat himself.

‘Shall I send Jenna in to dress you, ma’am?’ came the respectful voice from the other side of the door.

‘I’m sure she’ll be busy with Alice. I’ll manage, Poldry.’

As she heard him retreat down the corridor, she forced herself muscle by muscle to get out of bed. A year ago she would have had a girl dress her as a matter of course, but the war had no patience with such excess. Most of the maidservants were working in the factories or the fields now, keeping warm the places of those absent men until they could come back. It was no great hardship that Emily must dress herself.

She chose a sombre, plain outfit that seemed to suit the occasion, and contorted herself like a fairground acrobat to do up at least some of the hooks at the back. Sloppy, perhaps, but she would have her cloak to wear against the pre-dawn chill, and it hid a multitude of sins.

Around and below her, Grammaine was coming alive. The old house – the Marshwic house for five generations – creaked as the fires began to warm it. She heard the feet of servants, the clatter of the kitchen. It all seemed so normal.

She went to her window and stared at the shutters a long time before she threw them back. That cured her of any idea of normality. The moon was down by now but the sun had not even begun to touch on the east, and the world outside her window was as dark as she had ever seen it. Across hills invisible in the blackness, she saw the sparkle of Chalcaster – the lamps and torches of a scatter of early risers and late-nighters, nightwatchmen and thieves. In the unrelieved dark that surrounded it, she could have plucked it from its setting and worn it as a tiara.

Distantly, echoing from hill to hill, she heard the sound of the locomotive as it pulled away from the Chalcaster platform and began its long progress to Allsmere, thirty miles away. An owl took up the call and carried it on soundless wings over the house.

There were lamps being lit in the rooms below now, and shutters being thrown back. The fire’s heat spilled out into a leaching fog that stole its warmth and light away at once. Emily was abruptly aware of the chill seeping into her room, touching her skin through the dress.

I am not ready for this. She did not want to go down and face what must happen but, if not her, then why would anyone else? She was about to turn away from the window when she saw, deep in the night fog’s haze, a scatter of lamps approaching along the Chalcaster road. She strained her ears but heard no sound of horse or man. Still, who else could it be? They were coming at last.

She closed the shutters carefully, as though prudence could put off the inevitable.

She paused with her hand on the door handle. The world with its cares and woes was waiting for her.

In the kitchen, Alice was scolding over how the maid had arranged her hair, a vexation welcome for its familiarity. There was the smell of the porridge oats over the fire, and she heard the rough, throaty voice of the miller’s wife murmuring about money. The stout, callused woman was at the door as Emily descended, coin in her hand and three loaves on the table drowning the cooking porridge with the scent of fresh bread.

‘Thank you!’ Emily called after her, but the woman was already bustling off into the night towards her cart and her other customers. It had been hard on her when her husband took the Gold and Red, but like all of them she managed.

‘Will you look at what this clumsy girl has done with my hair!’ Alice demanded. She had their father’s golden locks, while both her sisters had their mother’s darkly shining red, and she was altogether too aware of her striking looks. The war to Alice was merely an inconvenient rationing of suitors, as though the Parliament of Denland had set out purposefully to keep her from making a decent match.

‘Alice, leave the poor girl alone,’ Emily said.

Alice scowled at her. ‘Well, just look at me.’ She eyed her sister speculatively. ‘Better than you, though. At least my gown suits the occasion.’

‘Red? It’s not very tasteful,’ Emily said.

Alice stuck her tongue out. ‘Well, I think it’s patriotic, thank you very much. I want to impress the soldiers. When are they coming, anyway? They’d better not be late.’

‘They’re not coming because of you,’ Emily pointed out. ‘And they must be almost here. I saw their lights from upstairs. Cook, are you ready?’

‘I don’t know as I’ll ever be,’ replied their long-suffering cook, who did the work of three these days. ‘Which means, I s’pose, I’m ready as I’ll get.’

‘Where’s Mary?’

Cook indicated the front door with a jerk of her head.

‘In this cold, with the baby? She must be touched in the head.’ Emily went to the door and opened it a crack, feeling the chill course past her ankles. Sure enough, the eldest Marshwic sister was out by the stables, a tall, shrouded shape caught by the light cast from the house.

‘Mary, come in at once. You’ll catch your death!’ Emily shouted to her. She saw a pale flash as Mary turned her face towards the house. Beyond her, the lanterns of the approaching men were weaving hazily through the mist.

‘Mary, come on. Neither waiting nor watching will help them come any sooner.’ Or later, Emily added to herself. If it would, we’d both be standing out there.

She saw her sister turn and walk slowly back to the door, her face solemn. The baby clutched at her cloak with both tiny hands, its little red face screwed up against the cold.

Emily cast a glance about Grammaine’s spacious kitchen, seeing her whole life arrayed around it. Her sisters, Mary withdrawn and Alice fussing; Cook at the hearth and Jenna working at the imagined slight to Alice’s hair. There was Poldry, too, coming down the stairs in his shabby coat that he would never change until it fell apart altogether; while outside, she knew that Grant would be feeding a horse and getting it ready to travel.

Just one missing.

‘They’re at the gate, ma’am,’ said Poldry. He had stopped three steps from the bottom, his customary little pulpit from which he ordered the other servants. The station gave him a curiously sombre look, like a minister conducting a funeral. Emily and Mary exchanged a look of shared strength.

There was a knock on the door, and Emily knew that nobody else would open it. The task was left to her.

And there they were as she opened the door to them. Behind them, horses steamed and stamped in the cold and dark and, when the glow of the lanterns from the kitchen fell across them, it was as though they had not seen warmth or light for a long time. Here were a dozen serious-faced men on the move before the sun was, with pack-straps cinching their cloaks, and their crested helms tipped back. In that light, with only the night behind them, they could have been of any age, or from any time. They were soldiers only, with everything else stripped from them.

But closer study of each face in turn showed her many things. She saw eyes that were wide, a lip that trembled, pale faces, and all of them so young. Had any of them used a razor more than once? Had they sweethearts, these lads, or had the woman that kissed each goodbye been a mother, watching her son recede into the darkness?

In the lead was an older man, squat and unshaven in stark contrast to his charges. She recognized his face from two weeks before, preaching to these same young faces in Chalcaster Square.

‘Miss?’ he said. ‘All ready, miss? We need to be going.’

‘Won’t you come in for just a few minutes, Sergeant Pallwide? We’ve some porridge warmed up, and some bread, and you and your men have a long way to go. I’m sure a second breakfast won’t keep the uniforms from fitting.’ It was a well-rehearsed speech, and her smile no less. A few more minutes was all it meant. Just a few more minutes.

The sergeant’s face split wide in a grin. ‘Well, that’s mighty kind of you, Miss Marshwic. Mighty kind. That’s the sort of kindness that puts fight in a soldier’s belly when he needs reminding of what he’s fighting for. Hear that, lads? You’ll remember this place when you’ve a Denlander in front of you.’

He was first into the kitchen with a jaunty step and a too familiar nod at Alice, but he was too old and too plain for her, with his stubble and his lines. She was already looking beyond him at his recruits.

Emily could name about half of them: field labourers and farmers’ sons, the second children of tradesmen, lads whose hands had been trained and apprenticed for peacetime. They looked awkward and clumsy in their uniforms, gangling and unfinished, fruit picked before its time. They filed in, half grateful and half embarrassed. None had seen the inside of a fine old house like Grammaine, unless while running errands or making deliveries. They murmured ‘Miss Marshwic’ to her and ‘Miss Marshwic’, more warmly, to the preening Alice, and ‘Mrs Salander’ to Mary. They bobbed their heads in automatic respect and stood in the kitchen as though they had no idea what they were doing there.

And how true that is. ‘Come . . . come along, Cook.’ Emily felt her voice quiver as she spoke, suddenly on public display. ‘We mustn’t keep Sergeant Pallwide or his men waiting.’

They were not men, of course; would not be for two years or more. Cook began serving them with bowls of porridge, thick slices of buttered bread, mugs of hot broth. The sergeant gave her a smile.

‘Mind if I light up, now we’ve settled, miss?’ he asked.

It would have been churlish to refuse, and so she watched him take out a well-used clay pipe and stoke it with weed one-handed. She wondered if that was a skill he had learned with a gun in his other hand. Soon the sweet, fragrant scent was shouldering the aroma of the bread and porridge out. Emily caught Mary’s look, and knew that her sister was remembering the last time anyone had smoked inside Grammaine, while their father still lived.

There was a footstep above her, at the top of the stairs, and Poldry moved down into the crowded kitchen to allow room. Emily caught her breath as her brother Rodric came down the stairs, one careful step at a time.

How handsome he looks, was her first thought. He wore the uniform well, better than any of them: standing tall and straight in that red jacket, the brass buttons shining like the gold braid at his cuffs. His knee boots were polished to any sergeant’s satisfaction and he carried his gleaming helm in the crook of his arm, as if to balance the brass powder flask on the other side.

He looks like a general or a prince. Emily stepped back, and back further as Rodric descended, as though his neat brightness would scorch her. There was a set, determined look to his face. He had worn the same serious expression when he was learning his algebra or Classics. It was the look of someone taking care to avoid making mistakes.

When they saw him, a little cheer went around the young recruits gathered there, and Emily saw then that Rodric would be a hero to them: the young gentleman not afraid to take up a musket and defend the King. He would be a splendid soldier, an officer, a great man.

And she wished he did not have to go.

At the foot of the stairs he nodded to his fellows, saluted the sergeant. Cook bustled over to him with his breakfast, and he laid his helmet on the kitchen table to accept it.

‘I’m not too late, am I?’ he enquired, his voice sounding a little unsteady. Emily wondered how long he had been sitting, in his uniform, in his room, drawing together the courage to face his new life.

‘You take your time, lad,’ the sergeant told him. ‘We can hardly grudge you that, what with this fine hospitality your sisters’ve given us.’

Rodric nodded. His serious expression persisted as he ate, as though he was still somewhat unsure of what was happening around him but determined not to show it.

‘Sergeant,’ Emily spoke up, ‘might I speak with you before you leave?’

‘You may speak now, miss, if you will.’ Pallwide had finished his pipe and stowed it carefully inside his jacket before good-naturedly elbowing his way through his charges to get near to her. ‘What can I do for you, miss? Got a message for someone at the front?’

‘I have, yes.’ She pressed the sealed missive into his hands. ‘It’s for Lieutenant Tubal Salander at the Levant front. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?’

‘Certainly is, miss. I’ll see he gets it. Your sister’s husband, miss?’

‘That’s right, Sergeant. Oh – and Sergeant?’

‘Miss?’

‘You will . . . look after him, won’t you? Please.’ She swallowed, then got the words out as quickly as she could. ‘If anything happened to him, Sergeant, I don’t know what we’d do here. Please will you make sure he’s all right?’

Sergeant Pallwide gave her another broad grin. ‘I’ll make sure he’s put in my company, miss. I’ll keep an eye on him, never you worry. War’s not got much puff left in it, anyway. We’ll all be back looking for work ’fore the year’s out.’

She knew she should leave it at that but she wanted somehow to wring further assurances from him, to demand that he keep Rodric safe from all harm when the only way that could happen was if Rodric never left at all. Abruptly she felt a sob building up inside her and she turned away to hide it.

She turned back sharply at a touch to her elbow, to find Rodric standing there.

‘Em, thank you for not making a scene. I thought . . . when my papers came you might do something . . .’

She just waited quietly, not trusting herself to speak.

‘Something unpatriotic,’ he finished, ‘because you didn’t want me to go. So . . . thank you for understanding.’

‘And with that, young master, it’s time we were about,’ the sergeant put in from a respectful distance.

It was true. The young recruits were handing their bowls back to Cook, thanking her, giving a brave smile all round for Alice’s benefit.

‘I’ll be all right,’ Rodric promised her.

Feeling time slipping away from her she embraced him fiercely. ‘See that you are. I’ll never forgive you if something happens to you. Never!’

He slipped out of her arms to bid farewell to Mary and Alice. The soldiers were filing out of the door under the watchful eye of their sergeant. Rodric went last, accepting some final admonition from old Poldry, before turning at the door to look back at his past, his family, all that he had ever had.

‘Watch out for me,’ he told them all. ‘I’ll be back.’

Then he was gone, and only Sergeant Pallwide was left. ‘Much thanks, Miss, Miss and Mrs. I shall make sure your old man gets the letter, Mrs Salander.’ He retreated with a nod of his head, and they could hear the young soldiers mounting up on their assortment of army-requisitioned mules and nags outside. Grant was fetching Rodric’s riding horse out, a king of beasts amongst beggars. How would it fare, Emily wondered suddenly, in the swamps of the Levant front? Too late now to ask that question.

The three Marshwic sisters clustered at the door and watched the sergeant and his recruits ride off into the mist, until only the blurred light of their lanterns identified them in the dark.

I thought you might do something unpatriotic . . .

The time for such action was past. She was Emily Marshwic, of good family, with a public dignity that even old matrons approvingly remarked on; nevertheless she had done her level best to hold the King’s orders at arm’s length. Without Rodric’s knowledge, against his express wishes, she had tried her utmost to fight his drafting. She now had no more fight to give.

After the recruiting sergeants had drummed up all the actual volunteers they would get, and the proclamation had gone out that each household, high or low, must give up one of their own to take the Red, she had protested vehemently. She had gone and spoken her piece to the officers and the officials, and they had nodded and explained how important it was that this war was won quickly. Then Tubal had robbed her arguments of any force by purchasing a commission, and she had looked a fool, and her sister Mary had become a widow-in-waiting.

And when the order had come to her house that those retainers who had served the Marshwic family for so many years – whose families had grown with the Marshwics for generations like vines to a tree, and who claimed Grammaine as their home – must leave her, she had protested. She had refused, in fact. She had held out for two weeks until Mr Northway, the Mayor-Governor of Chalcaster, had come to her door with his odious smile and undertaker’s clothes, and explained things to her. He had said – and all the while his eyes twinkled with cold humour – that there were mills and workshops and farms that were critically undermanned, now that the men were at the front. He showed her the King’s sealed order dissolving contracts of service, allowing men like himself to take what they wanted. He made a great, ingratiating play of remorse, threatening to leave the three sisters all alone in Grammaine like mad recluses, and then magnanimously relenting. ‘You may keep your old man there, he’s surely not fit to work in the factories, and it would be criminal to leave three such vulnerable women without protection, so I’ll leave your groundsman too, although I’m risking royal displeasure by showing you that much favour.’ And he had smiled with a broad and lipless mouth, cold as a reptile. ‘You shall have a maid and your cook – at least until the next decree is passed to me. Can I say fairer than that? I don’t think that I can.’

And he was not a fair-minded man, that much she knew. The Marshwics and Mr Northway had a twisted history together, in which their own fortunes had only withered as he had leeched off them; until they were impoverished in all but history and memories, and he governed Chalcaster and grew fat.

Yet still, when the sergeants had come that last time and found that Rodric was now their lawful prey – when her brother was formally invited to grace the war with his presence – she had gone to Chalcaster, with a foul taste in her mouth, to plead with Mr Northway.

It had been no small sacrifice on her part to throw herself on the mercy of such a creature as he. It was widely known around Chalcaster that the man had bought his post, greasing every palm from here to the capital to ensure his own slick rise into fortune. To most it was just another example of the politics of power. The King’s justice would find Mr Northway out eventually, they said, but until then they just shrugged and sighed. For Emily – for the Marshwics of Grammaine – it was far more personal than that. Going begging to the man, going cap in hand in search of a charity she knew would not be extended, was like stabbing at herself with a knife and seeing which part of her would hurt most.

There were men standing at the doors of the town hall in Chalcaster: two soldiers in red that royal decree had not seen fit to request for the war effort. They carried glaives with broad blades, which clanked together to bar her way as she tried to simply walk between them.

‘Let me in. I have business with the Mayor-Governor,’ she bade them with as much authority as she could manage. They exchanged leering looks.

‘Bet you have, miss, I just bet you have,’ one said. ‘Only thing is, miss, he’s busy, see? Got a lot on, what with the war to run, miss. You wouldn’t understand, but it’s a difficult business.’

Emily had drawn herself up, as far as that went, and clutched at her purse furiously. ‘I fully understand that the business of a war, soldier, is a complex matter,’ she told him, making her ‘soldier’ every bit as much of an insult as his ‘miss’. ‘I also understand, however, that as Mr Northway only has a small – one might say insignificant – part of it to himself, I am sure he can spare me a few minutes. Kindly go and tell him that Emily Marshwic awaits his pleasure – if that is the right word.’

Mention of her name changed their expressions. She thought at first it was because the Marshwics represented a good old stock that went back forever, but then the soldier said, ‘Oh, right, miss. We got special orders about you Marshwics. I reckon you’d better go straight in, miss. He’s looking forward to seeing you.’

The two men exchanged knowing looks, but they lifted their glaives and she swept between them before they could change their minds, or decide to humiliate her any further.

And then she had been standing in front of Mr Northway’s polished desk, like a schoolgirl up before the master for truancy. The man himself, the loathsome Northway, was bent over a ledger, counting some minutiae. When she had entered he had given her a look that put her in her place and then, his eyes following his finger down a column of figures, made some calculations on his abacus and jotted a few notes, all with the air of a man with time to spare, war or no war.

‘Now.’ He had closed the ledger with a snap. ‘Why did I think I would be seeing you so soon?’

Mr Northway’s dour style of dress made him look not dignified but as morbidly patient as a vulture. His hair had receded into a widow’s peak over a high forehead, though the scholarly dignity it lent to his face was sabotaged by a mouth wide and mobile with mischief. His eyes were deep-set and piercing, but blinked furiously in mock emotion whenever he made some particularly bare-faced statement. He had spent perhaps near four decades on this earth, and in that time he had certainly been busy with self-advancement.

‘If you know why I am here, Mr Northway, then you might save me a great deal of explanation,’ Emily said.

‘My dear Miss Marshwic.’ Northway folded his hands across his belly. ‘Emily, in fact – I presume, on the basis of our long acquaintance I may call you Emily?’

‘As always you presume entirely too much, Mr Northway.’

‘You may nonetheless call me Cristan.’

‘Alas, that is a kindness that I cannot avail myself of.’

At last he had indicated for her to sit, and she did so with poor grace. Northway looked down at his hands, grimaced briefly, and looked back at her with his slightly mocking smile. ‘I do wish you would realize that I am not in any way your enemy.’

She considered retorting Except insofar as I am an honest woman, but felt that would be descending into mere abuse and get her nowhere. ‘You were no friend to my father,’ she noted, managing to bring her tone down to the merely accusatory.

Northway sighed. ‘You are not your father, any more than I am mine, Miss Marshwic. Mine was a bootblack polishing the boots of the lowly – and a petty criminal besides. I feel that, regarding both professions, I have at least moved several rungs up the ladder.’

His office was lavish by any standards. The stacks of ledgers jostled with marble statuettes and gold candlesticks, busts and fine paintings. There were gilts and velvets and rich dark woods in evidence everywhere she looked. She knew it well, for it had been her grandfather’s once – who had kept it in a far more spartan manner – and should have been her father’s.

‘You know why I am here,’ she reminded him, but he was not to be deflected.

‘Your father and I fought like cats in a sack, I know. We were not friends by any definition, or not at the end. We disagreed on everything. If I admit that, Miss Marshwic, you surely must admit that I did not kill him.’

You destroyed him. You did everything you could to ruin and discredit him so as to obtain this post. She said none of it, though. What would it serve? ‘You know why I am here,’ she repeated. ‘Have we not given enough?’

Northway’s lips twisted, and he shrugged. ‘You have heard the news about the war, surely, Miss Marshwic. You have heard that it takes a great many soldiers to secure a country as large as Denland. The broadsheets and the ballad papers are full of such accounts. You must have heard that we need to keep pouring soldiers into Denland until they finally reconsider their warlike and republican ways.’

‘I have not heard that they need my brother, Mr Northway.’

‘Every man from fifteen to fifty, so the order runs. One imagines such precise numbers were put in by some poetic-minded clerk, does one not? A little too convenient otherwise.’ He sighed again, the paragon of humanity. ‘What do you want me to say, Miss Marshwic?’

‘That my brother need not go for a soldier,’ she declared outright.

‘Special dispensation, is it?’ He leant back in his chair, putting his hands together as if in prayer. ‘There is such a thing, but not for him.’ As she made to interrupt, his hands stopped her. ‘I have such dispensation, as do some few of my remaining staff who are men. The rest are women, or will be replaced by them. I have no further dispensation to make, Miss Marshwic, and I am not going to commit treason by twisting an order from the King.’ Again she had tried to speak but his words ground over her. ‘Oh, I know what you would say. What view does the King take on embezzlement? On petty bribes and sleights of local justice, and all the other things they say of me in the marketplace? I say to you that he takes a very different view of those things than he does on a man stinting him when his war orders come.’ Without warning, he was standing, leaning over the desk, too close for comfort. ‘What do you want me to say, Miss Marshwic? That I have always done as I wished here in Chalcaster? Consider it said. That the King’s wishes trump my own? That also. That the war fought on the front is not the war reported in the papers, and a near-victorious army does not need so much recharging with raw recruits? There: I’ve said it. I have never lied to you, Miss Marshwic.’

‘The war . . . ?’

‘You are an intelligent woman, Miss Marshwic. You do not need such things stated: you need only to consider matters.’ He left a pause there for her thoughts to drop into, as he sat down. ‘But I fear consideration has not been your strong suit, of late. You storm into my office with all the righteousness of your good family behind you, and you demand. Out of the privilege of bloodline, you demand.’

‘I would entreat . . .’ she found herself saying, disgusted by herself for leaping so quickly to such words, but knowing only that this was surely her chance to save Rodric.

But he had cut her off with a wave of his hand before she could pawn herself. ‘The King demands too,’ he stated flatly. ‘For my part, Miss Marshwic, entreaties from you might suffice, but I could not be moved against the King’s will, even for honey.’ His smile soured as she watched, becoming something venomous. ‘Though you make it easier for me: you give me only vinegar. I would hope you might believe me if I said that I wished matters had not fallen out like this. But I am sure you will ascribe the worst of motivations to me. Let me take the responsibility from you, then. Let me put on the mantle of my office and simply tell you that your brother must take the Red, must go for a soldier. There. It is law now, and cannot be undone.’

She finally stood, and to her horror there was a moment in which she had no control of herself. She might have done anything. She might have wept before him, begging for Rodric’s life as though he were facing direct execution. She might have lunged at Mr Northway and stabbed him to death with his own letter-opener.

But propriety reasserted itself neatly before she could do anything foolish, and she was left standing opposite him, holding her purse like a tiny shield before her, impotent and frustrated.

If I were a man, I would have struck him. That seemed the proper response. A true fighting hero of Lascanne would have no time for a worm like Northway. If the impulse had come to her a moment before, then perhaps she would even have acted upon it, but now she just stood, prim and proper, and he sat there and leered.

‘One day,’ she told him, knowing how weak the words sounded, ‘the King shall learn what a creature you are.’

‘He knows I am his servant,’ Mr Northway declared smoothly.

‘You are a thief and a villain, and I will cheer when they hang you.’ And the words were out, what she had thought – surely what everyone thought – about him, but that nobody ever dared say. For a moment the room had balanced in silence, and his face was utterly without emotion or expression, and she did not know what he might do next.

Then Mr Northway’s broad smile returned, as cold-blooded as ever. ‘Why, Miss Marshwic,’ he observed, ‘always pleasant to know that I am in your thoughts.’

There were a dozen civilized apologies welling up inside her: the things she knew that society expected her to say to plaster over her breach of etiquette. She fought them down stubbornly.

For his part, he plainly had not expected them from her. ‘I am sure it makes this easier for you, to blame me and hate me for this. You have my permission to do so.’ He rose smoothly then, and made a short bow, never taking his eyes off her. ‘I think we are done here, Miss Marshwic. You know the way out, I believe.’

And now, days later, she could only watch Rodric ride away, and reflect on how she had tried and failed, and would never know whether she might have somehow won, had she bent more before the world.

The lamps of Sergeant Pallwide and his boys were finally lost in the night, in the fog, before she turned away from the door. Alice had gone long before, and Jenna had taken the baby upstairs, but Emily and Mary had stayed until all light – all hope – had gone. Soon afterwards, in the east, there arrived the faintest leaden grey that was the first grim herald of the dawn.

In the east and the north lay the Levant front, the swamps and dense forest that some small but vital stretch of the war was being fought through. There went Rodric and his fellows, to encounter the Denlanders, to fight a war the newspapers claimed was as good as won. With that thought, the words of Mr Northway came back to her. What did he know of it? Or was he just putting his knife into her, for her rudeness and her refusal to pretend he was anything other than her enemy?

‘I am sure Tubal will look after him,’ Emily said, her voice sounding hollow even to her own ears.

Mary sniffled. ‘My poor Tubal, he could never look after himself. I don’t think he would ever have got dressed or eaten a warm meal in his life without his mother and me to help him. I wish he would write more, Emily. It has been almost a season since his last letter.’

They went in at last, to a kitchen as cold as the night outside. Cook stoked up the fire and grumbled, because these days she had to fetch her own wood as often as not. Old Poldry sat at the table with folded hands and a mournful expression that set his moustache drooping. When he looked up, she saw a tear caught in the wrinkles beneath his eye.

‘Forgive me, ma’am,’ he said, rising stiffly. ‘I wish I could go with them, the young lads. I’d go in a moment, if they asked me.’

He had been a soldier in the last war, three decades ago, fighting overseas against the Imperial Hellics and their Grand Army. He had survived that, she reminded herself, and he looked back on it all quite fondly. Surely they were all worrying themselves over nothing.

But, when she returned to her room, it was the harsh words of Mr Northway that stayed with her.

3.

We have stopped fighting for now, for a five-day rain has set in. Five days is Master Sergeant Mallen’s guess, at least, and all here seem to accept his word as a divine truth.

I have yet to lay eyes on any Warlocks, but the camp is full of word of them: the King’s special servants bound to him in blood. I do not want for stories of their powers and the use they put them to in battle. I have tried to imagine how it must be: to stride through this gloomy place wreathed in flame; to sear away the fog and murk of the swamps with one’s very being; to carry no musket or pistol but to make one’s own hands weapons of war; to be a weapon.

It must be wonderful to be lifted thus above the common lot of humanity. Not, it seems to me, for the ability to destroy, nor even for the righteousness that must come from bearing the King’s mark, but merely because with such power comes control over one’s own destiny. Surely it must, for what use would such power be if its possessors are as confused and impotent as the rest of us?

Emily found Mary standing outside with a very small axe in her hand, staring down at a log.

‘What on earth are you doing there?’

Her elder sister looked up with a worried expression. ‘I’m trying to chop wood.’

‘What are you trying to do?’ asked Emily, incredulous.

‘Chop wood,’ Mary repeated hopelessly. ‘It’s just that Cook’s always complaining about having to cut the wood as well as her other tasks, so I thought I would help her. Besides . . .’

‘Besides what?’ Emily looked down at the log in front of Mary, which bore a very small incision, as that of a surgeon preparing to operate. ‘Is this it? How long has it taken you to do this?’

‘The best part of an hour, I’m afraid,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t think I have the knack of it. But I need to learn.’

‘Why? Why do you need to learn?’

Mary gave her a sad smile. ‘Think, Emily. Surely you must have thought of this. When we’ve won the war at last, what happens to all those heroes that come back? Do you think they’ll be content to go back into service, or to be mere tradesmen’s apprentices? The country will love them. They won’t want to go back to drudging, after the way they’ve fought. They’ll all be far too proud and warlike.’

‘You worry too much,’ Emily told her.

Mary essayed another hack at the wood, but the weight of the axe fell short and she failed to mark it at all. ‘Then there’s the women,’ she said.

‘Let me try.’ Emily took the axe away from her sister before she hurt herself, and tried a practice swing. The unfamiliar weight seemed so overwhelming on the way down, but the blade simply bounced back off the wood, leaving just a tiny scar far from where she had been aiming.

‘The women who’ve been doing men’s jobs,’ Mary continued, now free to philosophize. ‘Do you think they’ll all be happy going back to being maids and scrubbers and schoolmistresses? Everyone has different lives these days.’

‘Except us.’

‘We will, too. You’ll see.’

‘And so you’re learning to chop wood,’ Emily noted. ‘You’re right, there is an art to it. I think it might be easier if you got down on your knees and just chipped away until you cut through. How many of these were you wanting to cut?’

‘Grant said that Cook needs two dozen of them cut into something called billets before luncheon,’ Mary said. ‘Perhaps if we both held the axe, that would work better.’

‘That sounds like a sure recipe for injury,’ Emily decided. ‘I don’t want them putting my leg on the fire.’ She handed the axe back to Mary. ‘Is there anything you need from Chalcaster? Poldry’s going to take me in so that we can buy provisions, or at least whatever we can. Last week the market was almost bare. Everything’s going to the war. We will have to tighten our belts.’

‘Ma’am?’ Jenna had come round the side of the house to find them. Emily expected the girl to stare, seeing the two elder Marshwics about such a task, but she seemed already full of astonishment over something else. ‘If you will, Mrs Salander, ma’am, there’s a girl at the door.’

Emily stood up. ‘Please be more specific, Jenna.’

There was a peculiar look on the maid’s face as though laughter was bubbling inside her, just below the surface. ‘I really don’t know what to say, ma’am. You should come see for yourself. It’s mighty queer.’

That promised a diversion at least. Emily and Mary followed Jenna to the kitchen, where the maid’s behaviour was adequately explained.

There was indeed a girl at the kitchen table, lounging in a quite indecorous manner with a half-eaten apple in one hand. At least, from her face, Emily took her for a girl. It was not wholly clear.

Someone had dressed her up in uniform, just as though she were a soldier. She had the red braided jacket exactly like a fighting man, and shiny black boots and white breeches that showed her off scandalously, as though she was a stockinged actress in some louche revue. There was even a silvery helm with a swept-forward crest beside her on the table. Her coppery hair was cut short, and her green eyes crinkled with amusement as she saw Emily’s obvious shock.

‘Good morning. Mrs Salander and Miss Marshwic, I take it?’

Emily approached her cautiously. The girl had a sabre in a polished steel and brass scabbard, slung beside and behind her in the style of a cavalryman.

‘Emily Marshwic at your service . . .’ she began uncertainly. There was little in her books of etiquette to cover this. ‘Miss?’

‘Soldier-at-Arms Penny Belchere of the Royal Messenger Corps at your service, Miss Marshwic,’ the girl informed her, with a sharp salute.

‘Messenger Corps?’

‘That’s right, miss,’ Belchere said cheerily. ‘On account of all the men in the Messenger Corps sent to be lancers at the Couchant front, they’re taking in us ladies now. Anything for the war effort, eh, miss?’

‘I suppose so . . . soldier.’ Emily exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Mary and gave the woman another look over. She was no older than Alice and looked like someone from a mummers’ company, some tragic heroine playing at being a boy in order to follow her lover. ‘Then to what do we owe the pleasure?’

‘Message for you, miss,’ Belchere explained around a fresh mouthful of apple, producing a sealed parchment from within her jacket.

‘Is it from the front?’ Emily asked eagerly, thinking of Rodric, who had last written to say that his training was complete and that he was heading for the Levant in earnest.

‘No, miss, more important than that.’

As the girl handed the paper over, Alice descended at last from her beautifications upstairs and stopped in astonishment on seeing the apparition that had invaded their kitchen.

‘Why good lord, Emily, what on earth is it?’ she said, not without some cruelty. ‘Is it a costume party?’

Belchere gave her a very sharp look indeed, but Alice couldn’t care less. ‘Or is it the theatre?’ she asked. ‘We could do with a little relief. Things have been awfully dull here recently.’

‘Miss . . . Soldier Belchere has brought us a message.’ Emily held up the note, only to have it snatched from her by her sister.

‘Will you have tea, perhaps, before you go on your way?’ Mary was asking Belchere politely, but Alice had the letter open by then and let out such a squeal that Emily thought perhaps it contained a dead spider. Alice’s expression was pure rapture, though, and she held the note as though it reported the surrender of the whole Denland army.

‘Don’t keep us in suspense, please, Alice,’ Emily remonstrated. She could hear urgent running feet above them. Drawn by Alice’s shriek, Poldry came down the stairs as though ready to repel invaders.

‘Alice, just tell us,’ Mary insisted, but Alice was waltzing herself around the kitchen, clutching the letter to her breast.

‘Who is this young chap, ma’am?’ asked Poldry, whose eyes had grown no sharper with the years.

‘I am hoping that Alice can now enlighten all of us,’ said Emily meaningfully. ‘Alice, if you please?’

For once, though, Alice seemed speechless. All she could do was hand the letter over to Emily to read.

‘“To the daughters of the Honourable Gareth Marshwic at Grammaine House”,’ she read. ‘“Take note, one and all, that by royal decree you are hereby invited to Deerlings House on the last day of autumn to celebrate the great advances that His Majesty’s forces have made against the wicked inhabitants of Denland.”’ That explained Alice’s mad excitement, for sure.

‘A dance,’ she said hollowly.

‘I suppose our social calendar has been a little vacant,’ said Mary weakly. She and Emily exchanged glances of equal weariness. ‘I fear it will be somewhat weighted in favour of us ladies.’

‘No, you don’t understand,’ insisted Alice. She grabbed the note back from Emily. ‘By royal decree, you see. Royal decree.’

Emily started, ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean—’

‘But it does. Look, there’s the seal and everything!’ Alice said. ‘It’s the King. The King is coming to Deerlings House!’

‘I can’t imagine why he would do such a thing,’ Mary said uncertainly, ‘with the war to occupy his time.’

‘If I might speak,’ Soldier Belchere said, ‘it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. The King feels greatly for the privations besetting his subjects. He considers it his duty to travel the country and restore the morale of his people.’ She reeled these words off like a speech learned by heart. ‘So he may be at Deerlings. Who can say?’

Alice had forgotten her dislike of the messenger. ‘The King! The King, Em! And he won’t be alone. There will be lords and knights and officers and soldiers and . . . men!’

‘Alice!’ Emily said, with an embarrassed glance at the grinning Belchere, but her sister was too transported to hear her.

‘I will require a new gown, of course,’ Alice declared.

‘We cannot afford new gowns,’ Mary objected. ‘You will have to trust to your own skills, and work with one of your old dresses.’

‘But we must have new gowns, all three. We cannot turn up at Deerlings looking like urchins!’ Alice declared, as though this was a matter beyond argument. ‘Mary, we will be before royalty! We cannot turn up in three-year-old fashions, patched and stitched as best we can.’

Mary looked to Emily for moral support, but her sister was already frowning thoughtfully.

‘If you are to have a new gown,’ she said slowly, ‘you must not spend another penny between now and the ball.’

‘Yes, of course!’ Alice agreed readily.

‘And I shall do the same, for I think this time you are right, and we will definitely need new gowns.’ Emily felt an echo of Alice’s excitement rising inside her. The King himself coming so near – or even the faintest chance of it. She would be a fool not to grasp the opportunity.

‘Thank you for the message, Soldier Belchere,’ she remembered. ‘Please, take some refreshment before you go, and I’m sure Poldry here can find a coin for you.’

After the messenger’s departure, Mary cornered her, looking betrayed. ‘Where will this money come from, Emily?’

‘We will have to save and scrape.’ Emily found it hard to meet her sister’s eyes. ‘In this, though, Alice is right. The honour of our family is at stake: we must put on a good show, or no show at all.’

Mary’s lips moved, and Emily knew that she had been about to argue the case for the latter, but seen it for a lost cause.

‘The honour of our family will not feed us,’ she complained softly. ‘It will not repair the roof, or pay for medicine if Francis falls ill. Or will you have me go to our tenants and tell them their rents have gone up because Alice must go to meet the King. That is the honour of our family, Emily: looking after those who depend on us – and those whom we depend on. And now, with so many missing husbands and sons, will this idle pleasure of yours and Alice’s take food from their mouths?’

‘We have always managed,’ Emily tried weakly.

‘Yes, because I have always sat with the books and planned where each penny must go. And now I must go back to them and find some magical store of money, or find what essentials are not so essential after all, just so that we may go dancing.’ And she stormed off without giving Emily a chance to answer.

*

Mary had spent several days closeted with the accounts, moving beads on her abacus and imaginary money in her head, before finally naming a sum that could be sacrificed to the dressmaker’s. The price for this had been her own polite refusal of the invitation. She had never been one for dancing, she said, and she did not want to either leave Francis or travel with him. Emily and Alice had exchanged guilty looks and shuffled their feet slightly. With her husband gone, and all the burdens and stresses of Grammaine on her shoulders, Mary had become a master at hiding her true griefs. It was impossible to know how she felt as she made her announcement in a businesslike tone and packed them off with funds to Chalcaster.

As Emily climbed down from the buggy in the market square, she spotted a blind man begging there. He sat with his back to a wall, holding out a cap with a stolid, grim patience. He had a long coat wrapped about him, but within it, his shirt was a soldier’s issue. A leather band covered up his eyes.

‘Poldry, a coin.’

The old servant took out their purse, lighter than Emily would have liked, and found a penny for the man.

Alice tutted. ‘Emily, if we are to present ourselves to the King . . .’

‘You do not even know that he will come to Deerlings,’ Emily hissed at her, scandalized, for the girl had spoken quite loud enough for the beggar to hear her. ‘And this man is here now. He has fought for his country.’

‘And will you give away our funds to every supplicant until we have nothing?’ Alice retorted.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Emily told her. ‘Why must you always exaggerate . . . ?’ But, even as she said it, her eyes were roving the square. There were fewer market stalls than she remembered and, of those she saw, even fewer had the wares she might have expected. Little food, she noticed, and many vendors seemed to have simply brought in a jumbled haul of possessions in the hope that someone might desperately need old shoes, grimy clothes or battered furniture. And plenty of people in Chalcaster seemed suddenly to have lost all idea of what they really needed or wanted, instead staring at the detritus of other people’s lives as though it was impossible to know what preparation the future might require. They were mostly women, those who tried to sell, as well as those who picked over it all and did not buy. Women and old men, and in amongst them were the veterans.

These were the worst examples, she knew: men who would not die and could not be returned to the fighting. The new hospitals were ruthless in sending men back to the war, if they could serve in any way at all. Here were men who could not march, who could not hold a gun, who could not see the enemy. They passed through the thinning crowd with their awkward, arrhythmic gaits, each man moving to a different drummer. Alice’s expression was one of nervous revulsion. Mary would probably have been frightened if she were here, seeing in these men her husband or her brother. Emily herself was surprised to find that they made her angry. She seemed to have been angry a great deal recently, in a way that her tutors would once have beaten out of her. It was not becoming, they would have said. But it is what I am becoming. These men were the victims of the Denlanders. They were husbands and fathers and sons whose only crime had been to love their country and their king. They had gone to the war to defend all they held dear, and the war machine of the Denlanders had ground them up and spat them back, ruined them for all time with its guns and its knives.

She found the thought came close to overwhelming her, and she clutched at the side of the buggy for support, her knuckles turning white with the effort.

‘I know,’ Alice agreed, misreading her reaction. ‘Why doesn’t Northway do something about all this? If these men are in need of help, he could deal with it. Isn’t that what he’s for? Why have them all out in plain sight?’

Emily knew she should reproach Alice over that, but the girl had dangled some attractive bait before her. Why wasn’t Mr Northway providing aid to the veterans? The obvious answer was that it would cost money, and he surely coveted every penny the Crown gifted him with, and squirrelled as much of it away for his own use as he could. And so these brave, damaged men must hobble and beg. It was easy to look at them now and see his leering face condemning them.

And he was culpable, surely . . . but Emily found the thought ringing hollow for all that. Mr Northway was wicked but he was not the war.

Her eye was drawn then to the Mayor-Governor’s offices, which dominated one side of the market square. Another two of his soldiers were posted at the door, and they had guns now in place of the glaives. She had been hearing stories of how harshly they dealt with many petitioners.

She weighed her purse – light enough, given the tight hold Mary had kept on the family accounts. ‘Alice, why don’t you go and commence negotiations with Mrs Shevarler,’ she suggested, with a nod towards the dressmaker’s.

‘Please tell me you are not going to exhaust any more of our funds this way,’ Alice said crossly. ‘Mary will be furious.’

‘Mary says that the honour of our family is about looking after those that depend on us,’ Emily pointed out. She was not at all sure that Mary would quite see things her way, but she got the words out smoothly enough. ‘And it will only be a little.’ The words rang hollow as she looked across the market square.

Leaving Poldry at the buggy, she set out, facing the impossible task of deciding who was in greatest need, and where her charity might benefit most. The more she looked, the more need there seemed to be: injured soldiers who had marched out whole and come back only in part; thin, grimy women who had no living and nobody left to support them – and their children, all too often. Emily slowed to a halt, feeling something harden inside her. She had so little to give: could she find even a penny for them all? And what would a penny buy them? She could feel a thought hovering over her, waiting for its moment: Surely they cannot all really be in need. Surely some are faking, are taking advantage of the kindness of others. And if some are, then why not most of them? Or all? Despite the evidence of her senses, how convenient it would be if she could adopt that thought: what a salve that would be for her conscience.

This must be how Mr Northway teaches himself to think.

All eyes, she was sure, were fixed upon her. The honour of her family was at stake. Closing her ears to Alice’s mutterings, she got her purse out and began distributing small coins almost at random, passing down the row of stalls trying to distinguish, via some hitherto unguessed-at sense, the truly desperate from the merely needy. The pennies fell from her fingers into the cupped hands, the bowls, the threadbare hats of her targets. She felt as if she was pouring them into a hole, into a bottomless darkness. Increasingly, she felt very much that Alice was right. She found herself with that thought in her head, as she was brought up short before another man with a band of cloth covering his eyes. She felt as though she was waking from a dream, only to find herself trapped in another one.

One more coin and then I go, but something was staying her hand, some odd intuition. The man before her had a palm out hopefully, but there was something amiss about his posture, a tension here that she could not account for.

‘Emily!’ Alice had finally reached the end of her fraying tether. ‘We’re here to be measured! You promised.’ And she was pushing forward, forcing Emily to step back. The blind beggar’s head shifted sideways, that sightless gaze fixing on Alice.

Everything happened so rapidly that she barely registered the events as they unfolded, only pieced them together in retrospect. As Alice remonstrated with her, the beggar lurched up, barged into her, then was off down a side street and away from the market. Alice let out a gasp of utter outrage, mouth open to deliver some acid comment, but then she let out a wail of dismay.

‘My purse!’

Emily had sometimes called her a thoughtless girl – and applied that label silently in her head far more often – but she herself did not stop to think at all. In an instant, her feet took her in pursuit of the thief, leaving her mind to catch up. She was still getting past the thought, He wasn’t really blind, when the fugitive turned another corner ahead of her. When she followed him round it, she had got as far as, Thank God I wore good shoes! Catching sight of him making another turn – his face a pale flash as he glanced over his shoulder – Emily pushed herself onwards determinedly. She was full of indignation that this man should come to her town and steal from her sister. The very fact of it was a slight against her family. What is Mr Northway doing that he cannot keep order on the streets?

And then she had him: the last turn he had chosen was a blind alley, and she almost ran straight into him as he tried to make it out ahead of her. Abruptly she was standing between him and his escape route. Only then did she finally reach the thought: What if this wasn’t a good idea?

They were both breathing heavily: she was not used to running, and he was a thin-limbed, half-starved specimen of a man. The blindfold had been pushed back up his forehead, revealing wild mad-looking eyes.

‘Get out of my way!’ he spat at her.

‘Give me my sister’s purse.’ The words had fallen into place during the chase. Now, confronting him, she was not at all sure they were wise, but they came out anyway.

He bared his teeth and, with an ugly jerking motion, he had a blade in his hand – just an old kitchen knife, marbled with rust. ‘Just leave it,’ he hissed. His voice quivered, and she thought there were tears in his eyes. ‘Just get out of the way.’

‘You’re a deserter.’ Again, not the most diplomatic remark to level at a man with a knife, but her mind was still rattling after the chase. She was very aware that this was not a part of town she had ever frequented.

‘What if I am?’ He made an abortive gesture towards her with the knife, perhaps hoping that she would leap back and give him enough space to slip by, but she seemed to be nailed to the spot.

‘My brother, he’s fighting in the war,’ she told him. ‘My brother-in-law, too. Why shouldn’t you do your part?’

She saw very clearly when something snapped inside him, and abruptly he was right in her face, her nose filled with the unwashed reek of him, his blade wavering at the edge of her vision. ‘I did my part!’ he snapped. ‘I was a year on the Couchant. I took my wound! Twice I took my wound! But they wouldn’t let me rest. They had to send me back, over and over. You can’t know. You can’t tell me what it’s like.’

She kept herself very still. He had the stolen purse in one hand, close enough that she could have just taken it off him, had she dared move. The knife was an abstraction she did not go looking for, in case breaking his gaze set it in motion. ‘Are you going to stab me, then?’

A great shuddering breath went out of him, and it took something with it, blunting the edge of his desperation. ‘I just want to go somewhere they won’t make me fight.’ His thin, wretched voice snagged and caught as it came out of his throat. ‘I’ve got nothing, just . . .’

Alice will never forgive me. She took a step back and to one side. She could not quantify what it was she felt: it was not pity exactly, and it was not fear either, for, throughout, she had not felt any of the terror this encounter should have brought with it. Almost, she thought, it was duty that gripped her: as if she was writing a page into the text of how a daughter of Grammaine should behave. Magnanimously, it seemed.

He stepped away from her, the knife still held between them, circling her as though she was the dangerous one who might attack him at any moment. If he had simply taken to his heels, then he might have escaped. He wasted too much time, though, picking his away around her.

There was a shout from along the street, and she saw the flash of a red jacket. Then the deserter tried to make his exit, springing into motion away from her, away from that pursuit. She turned to watch him put distance between them, and there was a sound like a sharp rap, nothing dramatic at all. Even as it registered in her ears he was already falling, his hands thrust forward and up, as though he was offering both purse and knife to some higher power. Then he lay stretched out on the cobbles, weapon and bounty spilled from his grip.

Only then, after it was done, did Emily realize that she had seen a man die.

Alice hugged her fiercely when she arrived. ‘How could you be so stupid?’ she shouted, and similar sentiments. The two redjackets – Mr Northway’s own doormen, she realized – examined the body, and one reloaded his musket lazily.

‘All right, miss.’ The guard not attending to his gun nodded to her. ‘Looks like we were just in time, eh? His nibs’ll be glad of that.’

‘I was in no danger,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You didn’t have to shoot him.’

He frowned at her apparent ingratitude. ‘Law and order, miss. It’s our job. Can’t have thieves running all over, can we?’

‘But you could have caught him and locked him up.’

His face admitted no comprehension. ‘Saved ourselves the cost of a hanging, is all.’ He exchanged a glance with his fellow, eyes rolling, eyebrows raised. Practically written on his face was: These Marshwic women.

‘I shall have words with your master, the mayor!’ she snapped at them, a threat without any teeth whatsoever. ‘I shall go to his office right now.’ Her voice sounded thin and pathetic even in her own ears.

‘You’ll be waiting a while then, miss. His nibs is off somewhere on his own business. No idea when he’ll be back at his desk. Now, if that’s all, miss, we’d better find someone to come and clean up this mess.’

She watched as they sauntered off, almost barging into Poldry as he came wheezing along. For a moment an absolutely incandescent rage gripped her, not at them so much as at a world that she could not change or affect, strive as she might. ‘How could you, Alice?’ she hissed, knowing, as she spoke, that she was being bitterly unfair. ‘How could you go to Northway’s men?’

‘How could you just run off after him? I thought you were going to get . . . I don’t know what could have happened to you!’ Alice retorted hotly. ‘Emily, he was dangerous. He might have done anything.’

Anything was just about the last thing the deserter might have done, Emily considered hollowly. His options had been stripped away from him by degrees, until this – this miserable end – was all that was left for him.

She found that her heart was hammering away inside her, a belated response to all she had been through. She wanted to remonstrate with Alice some more, but she knew she would be in the wrong. Somehow, this time, Alice was the sensible one, even when she insisted that Poldry go and recover her purse because she did not want to be near the corpse.

And Mr Northway will hear all about this from his men, no doubt, when he’s back from whatever seedy dealings he’s engaged in. She could picture his amusement all too clearly.

By then, Alice was practically tugging at her sleeve, wanting to leave the body behind, wanting to leave this mean, poor neighbourhood. Wanting, most of all and of course, to commission a new dress. The entire interlude had been nothing to her but a minor obstacle, now circumvented.

The seamstress was lean, dark Mrs Shevarler, and in days of recent memory she had been somewhat aloof whenever Alice was about. The girl demanded the sort of attention due a princess, and the Marshwic money was frequently insufficient to actually purchase anything. Left to her own devices, Alice could waste the best part of a day with fruitless measurements and viewing swatches of fabric. Emily was almost hoping for that brusque manner but this time Mrs Shevarler seemed delighted to see the pair of them. She clucked and fussed over Alice, bustling around her shop with desperate cheer as if to make up for the staff that she was lacking. Alice, for her part, took the chance to turn the tables, making a great play of how dusty it all was, how small, how mean. Emily rolled her eyes. And yet the shop did have an uncared-for air about it, and she reckoned that business here had probably been worse than poor for a long time. Most of Mrs Shevarler’s clientele had eschewed their local estates, and for those who remained, fine tailoring was not a priority.

Alice’s standoffishness did not survive the first bolt of cloth, and Emily was soon trying hard to share her sister’s enthusiasm. She felt that Alice had the right idea, somehow, to simply take joy wherever she could, no matter how shallow it seemed. The mills of Emily’s mind continued inexorably, though, grinding over and over what had happened at the market, and all the frustrations of life.

Poldry had gone off to buy provisions, or at least to try. Even with money in hand, there was no guarantee of that, these days. The demands of the war and the feeding of the army took a toll of the harvests, while there were fewer hands to bring those harvests in. Emily felt a terrible sense of strain, a pressure as great as the sky. She felt the iron hands of Denland prying and pushing, just a thin line of red being all that was holding the enemy back.

And so she let Alice chatter on because that way at least someone was happy, if just for a while. Emily’s own thoughts wallowed and struggled, emerging from the dark only when she was asked a question. When Mrs Shevarler raised the subject of money, for example – or at least made hints about just how grand these dresses were going to be – she stirred herself to begin some veiled negotiations. Alice, of course, wanted everything, and Emily knew how little they could afford to spend. And yet it seemed that Alice would get her own way, for once, because abruptly Mrs Shevarler was letting it all go for a fraction of the value, almost throwing her finest wares at them. For a moment Emily assumed it was because she was a craftswoman, recently lacking the chance to truly exercise her skills. Then she realized that the dressmaker must simply be desperate for money, with useless unsold stock cluttering her storerooms. It was a buyer’s market.

And, despite all that, Mrs Shevarler chattered on, doing her best to pretend that nothing whatsoever was wrong. She was a proud woman and, though she offered more and more value to entice just a few more coins from the Marshwic purse, there was still no suggestion in her voice or her bearing that she was seeking charity.

Then Poldry came by, long-faced and confessing that he had found almost nothing at market for them, and Mrs Shevarler changed entirely. In a voice far sharper and quicker, she was soon instructing Poldry on just where in Chalcaster he should go – where the locals themselves went for food. And, she added, while he was there, might he save her the journey . . . ? And, although she would never normally ask for a down payment from her most esteemed customers – and here she had changed register again, adopting her superior voice for her superior clientele – she wondered if perhaps, if just perhaps . . . ?

And Emily spared her from saying it, and asked Poldry to buy for Mrs Shevarler as well, in lieu of receiving money on account, and the awkward moment passed.

By then, Alice had decided on cut and cloth, and it was Emily’s turn. True to form, Alice found no great pleasure in watching her sister become the centre of attention, and she took the first chance to wander out of the shop and stand by the waiting buggy.

Emily was thus left trying to keep up a conversation with Mrs Shevarler, both of them clutching for the ragged ends of the life they remembered, and trying to work them into whole cloth. How was Mary? How was little Francis? How he must have grown by now! And as for Tubal, had they heard . . . ? But no, they had not heard recently. He had proved to be abysmal at writing letters home from the front. And Rodric? Yes, he must be at the Levant even now along with his new comrades-in-arms. And what of Mr Shevarler? The dressmaker busied herself with the measurements, then went back over questions of colour and pattern and weave. Only then did Emily remember that Mr Shevarler had been killed in the fighting. He had signed up at around the same time as Tubal, and had gone off to the Couchant: the western front, which was where the great bulk of the fighting was taking place. His name had subsequently been sent back to his home town on the casualty lists. But Mrs Shevarler would never openly correct a customer, of course, and nor would she show weakness. And so she and Emily were bound together in that lie, that pretence, going on with their business as though there had never been any such man as Mr Shevarler. The absence of him seemed to grow and grow, until the dead man took up all the space in the shop, becoming impossibly conflated with the luckless deserter that Northway’s men had shot down just a few streets away. Emily began to feel claustrophobic and ill, and knew that she must leave immediately.

And yet if she just bolted from the shop, as she dearly wanted to, then she would expose their joint charade for what it was. And so Emily stood her ground and had herself measured, and agreed with whatever was suggested, and then she left.

When she finally got outside into the open air, there was a man talking to Alice, beside the buggy. It was a familiar enough sight, and proof that not everything had changed in this world.

‘Why, Alice, who’s this?’

‘Em, this nice man was just telling me some fascinating rumours.’

I thought the only rumours these days were war rumours. Emily looked at the man Alice was talking to, who was peering back at her, shading his eyes. He was lean and broad-shouldered, dressed in a long leather greatcoat stained and worn by both travel and time. His face had a few scars that could have come from fighting, one of them dividing an eyebrow in two. His moustache and beard were cut neatly short.

‘Perhaps you would care to introduce us,’ she prompted Alice.

‘The name’s Griff, ma’am,’ said the man. He was well-spoken enough, but seemed the sort of careworn character that Alice would not have deigned to look at before the war. Now she was starved of attention, and apparently anyone would do.

‘I hope my sister has not been annoying you with her talk, Mr Griff.’

‘Not at all, ma’am. She’s been kind to spend a few words on a poor traveller.’

‘I wonder that you have not taken the Red, under the King’s orders, Mr Griff,’ Emily said. ‘I’m sure a man like you would be a valuable asset to the war effort.’ Certainly this Griff seemed to have more intact limbs than most of the other men within sight, always excepting Mr Northway’s robust henchmen.

Griff tapped his nose conspiratorially. ‘We all serve in our own ways,’ he told her, with a smile that invited her to smile back.

All he got from Emily was a frown. She leant towards her sister and murmured, ‘Alice, would you explain to me what is going on? I’ve seen you cross the street to avoid men less shabby than this.’

Her sister made an exasperated expression. ‘Oh, you’re so shallow, Emily!’

‘Me? I am shallow?’

‘Well, really. Mr Griff, I hope you won’t mind me saying: I saw him eyeing the buggy, and I thought he was watching us, and so I did my duty and went out to ask him what business it was of his. Only, we fell to talking, and . . . may I tell my sister what you were saying?’

‘So long as it goes no further, miss,’ Griff agreed in a low voice.

‘Mr Griff has told me he is a servant of the King,’ Alice explained to Emily in an excited whisper. ‘Not in the way that all of us are, but a real one, travelling the kingdom as His Majesty’s eyes and ears. We must invite him home with us.’

Emily blinked. ‘We must not.’

‘Em, he’s met the King,’ Alice insisted.

Emily closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the events of the day suddenly building like a pressure in her skull. ‘Forgive us, Mr Griff, but we shall be leaving very shortly.’ And, true enough, she could see Poldry along the street, doddering along with a laden basket.

Griff gave that easy smile again. ‘Not at all, Miss Marshwic. It’s about time I was on my way, myself.’

‘Oh, but really—’ Alice started.

‘No, Alice,’ Emily snapped firmly. ‘I’m sure Mr Griff has plenty of important business to attend to.’ The stare she gave the man was pointed, and he made a brief bow and then set off, the smile still firmly in place.

Poldry arrived just then, with a meagre haul of bread and cheese, bacon and mutton, and he ducked into Mrs Shevarler’s shop to haggle over the dressmaker’s share. Alice had her arms folded tightly, her familiar indication of bad temper.

‘Why do you always find a way to ruin things for me?’ she demanded, in a fierce whisper.

Emily frowned. ‘Alice, you cannot simply invite some stranger into—’

‘A servant of the King—’

‘What would a servant of the King be doing here?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Alice snapped crossly. ‘Who do we know that has his hand in the King’s coffers every minute of the day?’ She sent a fierce look towards the Mayor-Governor’s offices across the market square. ‘And who knows what might have come of that, if we had shown Mr Griff some proper hospitality! Don’t you care about our family, Emily? About our prospects?’

‘Alice, that is exactly what I do care about.’ Emily fought to keep her voice down. ‘A strange man under our roof – what would people say?’

‘If there was even a chance he was a familiar of the King! How often does any man of quality pass through Chalcaster these days? Next to never! And yet you have just sent a decent-seeming man away as if he was a beggar – no, worse than a beggar! Apparently you have some regard for them.’

‘Alice, it is not appropriate for you to indulge yourself in this way.’

For a moment her sister stood rigid, with very real tears on her cheeks. ‘You don’t understand,’ she got out at last. ‘Emily, what do we have? A house and a name, and both too costly to keep. Mary married a tradesman because she was terrified of the poorhouse, and now he’s off to the wars – and Rodric too! How will we revive our fortunes if not by allying ourselves to a man of real standing? And will it come from you? No, you’re like a bee that buzzes in and out, defending us from all comers with the sting of your words, while Mary tries to gather honey. But if we are to ever be something more than we are now, it’s up to me to make it so. I am the only one who will restore the greatness of our family. And if I do, it will be in spite of you!’

Poldry came out then, blinking in the cold silence that had developed between the two sisters. He climbed up into the buggy and plainly decided his best choice was to give his attention entirely to the horses.

Leaving the town, Emily felt as though she had been driven out, as though she was an army that had been routed in a war.

4.

We have endured another engagement in the swamps of the Levant. I am proud to report to you that I carried myself like a proper soldier and stayed with the line as we advanced. We were told that the colonel wished to force the enemy back. In this he was successful, for we advanced through the thick and clouded air, burdened by our packs and our muskets, and never saw so much as a single Denlander. Our sergeant declared, arbitrarily it seemed to me, that we had achieved our objective. When we turned, to recross all that ground we had taken, there the Denlanders were.

They had been shadowing us all that time, but it was plain that they had been as ignorant of this fact as we. No doubt the papers will carry an account of our heroic stand against their foreign tyranny. In truth there was merely a handful of shot before both sides retreated to a defensible position, after which we were unable to locate each other to continue the battle. The whole event would more fittingly make the subject of one of the paper’s comic sketches than an account of our martial glory.

As the buggy drew up to Grammaine, Grant hurried out to greet them. He was Grammaine’s groundsman, currently left to them by Mr Northway’s whim. Not young, yet younger than Poldry, he was a big, broad-shouldered man stronger than many half his age. Striding over, she saw his face was tight with disapproval, and Emily felt a sudden jolt of worry.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Is it Mary? Has something happened?’

‘Nothing like that, ma’am.’ Grant’s eyes slid over towards the house as though something venomous was lurking there. ‘Wanted to tell you, before you go inside. There’s a visitor.’

‘Is it another messenger?’ Alice demanded. ‘Don’t . . . don’t tell me that Deerlings . . .’

‘Alice, enough,’ Emily ordered her, because apparently the worst the girl could imagine was that a ball might be called off, a catastrophe Emily rather thought they would survive.

‘He came while you were at Chalcaster, but he’s not said a thing about why. Wanted to talk to you in particular, ma’am.’

Emily let out a long breath, even as Alice began demanding to know who ‘he’ was.

‘Has he been waiting long?’

‘Best part of two hours,’ Grant confirmed. ‘Been making himself at home, he has.’

It was a confrontation Emily had not been looking for: this was something she steeled herself against before heading into town, not a trial to meet her on her return. She felt suddenly on unfamiliar ground, as though her own house had been turned against her.

‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘the sooner I meet with him, the sooner he can be on his way.’

When she stepped inside, the sight that met her eyes brought her up short. While she had been shopping, someone else had supplied their every need. The kitchen table was cluttered with more food than Grammaine had seen in one place for months. There was a whole side of ham, several loaves, a sack of oats, two wheels of cheese, even a bag of dried fruit and a basket of apples. Compared to the mean fare that Poldry had managed to find at Chalcaster it was a wonder to behold.

‘Cook,’ she said, ‘where has all this come from?’

The stout woman gave her a dour look. ‘He’s waiting for you in the drawing room, ma’am.’

‘He brought all this?’

‘And very proud of himself he was, too.’

‘Was he indeed?’ Emily passed by the groaning table and stepped through into the next room.

Sure enough, by a smouldering fire and sitting in the chair that had once been her father’s favourite, was Mr Northway.

She stared at him for a long time, without trusting herself to speak, and he looked back at her with that familiar insolent smile of his. They were like two duellists, each waiting for the other to make the first move.

‘My dear Miss Marshwic,’ he said at last. ‘Or may I call you Emily now, to avoid confusion with little Alice?’

‘You may not. What is the meaning of this, Mr Northway?’

‘Do not search for meaning in all things, Miss Marshwic.’ He settled himself more comfortably into the chair. ‘Can a man not pay a visit once in a while?’

‘You are not welcome in this house,’ she told him. ‘You have never been welcome in this house. And as for your . . . gifts . . .’

His raised hand stopped her, despite all her determination. ‘Before you make some noble stand, Miss Marshwic, you should know that nobody but I will profit if you refuse my little gesture. You will neither feed the poor that way, or help the needy. Instead, it will all return with me to the town hall, and my staff will eat a little better, and yours a little worse.’ His deep-set eyes watched her keenly between blinking, to see how she would react.

‘Do you expect gratitude?’

‘Heaven forfend!’ he laughed. ‘Consider a little talk with you my reasonable payment for goods delivered. After all, enmity or not, it would be a poor show of hospitality to throw me out into the cold.’

She left her response so long that he began to shift his feet uncomfortably, before finally she sat down on the chaise-longue across the room from him. ‘I would not dream, Mr Northway, of throwing the King’s duly appointed representative from the house. Do you have a purpose here, or are we simply the beneficiaries of your noted charity.’

‘The sole beneficiaries,’ added Northway. ‘Am I not solicitous of your well-being?’

A myriad of angry responses queued up on the tip of her tongue, and were bitten down. She let his goading pass her by in a single deep breath, and instead looked him in the eye. ‘Do you think I can be bought, Mr Northway?’ She was proud of herself, for her control.

But he just raised his eyebrows, insufferable as ever. ‘Can you? How much is the price per pound, I wonder? What currency would suffice?’

She stood at once, her hard-won composure abruptly falling away from her. ‘I feel hospitality has been served. I would like you to leave now. Poor Alice will not enter the house until you are gone.’

‘How very sensitive of her.’ He showed no signs of moving. ‘As it happens, I have a reason to be here other than simple benevolence. A warning, in fact, that there are house guests even more unwelcome than me, of late.’

‘I find that hard to believe.’

He paused a moment, and she wondered whether he was reining in a temper that she had always guessed at, though never seen. His smile only widened, though, as if feeding on her displeasure. ‘Miss Marshwic,’ he continued at last.

‘Mr Northway.’

‘You will no doubt find this hard to believe also, but I hold you in high esteem. Your conversation, whilst somewhat on a single note, is at least free and untrammelled by social nicety. How refreshing to find someone who will hate me to my face, rather than simply talk ill about me behind my back. However, I am here in my official capacity, and if you will not hear me personally, then hear the words of my office when it warns you. The brigand known as the Ghyer has returned.’

That dried up the harsh retort in her mouth. ‘The Ghyer? I thought he was dead.’

‘We all hoped it, but no. He was merely elsewhere, and now he appears to have returned to his old haunts. Two houses have been robbed by his men, isolated places just like Grammaine. There has been a death. I would have your man Grant keep loaded pieces to hand.’

‘He shall, Mr Northway. The Ghyer shall find Grammaine too hot for him.’

In this sudden ceasefire between them, Mr Northway’s smile grew crafty and calculating. She thought she saw a dozen separate overtures forming on those lips, only to be weighed and discarded as he sought to capitalize on his small gains. In the end all he said was: ‘I imagine you wish me to depart, now that I have given my warning.’

‘Thank you for it,’ she made herself say, watching him lever himself from the chair.

‘Just doing my duty, Miss Marshwic.’ He paused on his way to the door, hovering closer to her than she liked. ‘If there is any other small hardship here I can alleviate . . .’

‘We will cope, I am sure,’ she told him, not harshly but firmly.

After he had gone, her thoughts touched on the man, Griff, that Alice had been speaking to in town. Perhaps he had been a creature of Mr Northway keeping an eye on them. After all, the Mayor-Governor certainly seemed to be showing a great deal of interest in Grammaine these days, although possibly he just enjoyed vexing her with his presence and his impenetrable conversation. Or perhaps this Griff had been something even more sinister than that.

Stepping out of the front door, she could just see Mr Northway’s horse heading away down the path and out of sight. When he was gone from view, she called for Grant.

‘I think you had better take out and load Father’s guns, and keep them to hand,’ Emily told him. ‘There are brigands at large, I hear.’

‘Shall be done, ma’am,’ Grant promised.

Perhaps this Griff was working for the Ghyer. It was hard enough that the infamous robber had returned at all, but that he might be showing an interest in Grammaine, yet again . . . Perhaps he had come for vengeance upon her father, little knowing that such revenge had been cold and stale for many years.

Emily clenched her fists, trying to summon her determination. If the outlaw Ghyer turned up at Grammaine, then she and Grant and Poldry would treat him just the same as her father had, all those years ago. She would drive him and his villains away, or have Grant shoot them dead if he could. She was living in a world where men were shot dead, after all. She had the evidence of her own eyes for that.

She went back into the drawing room, but the spectre of Mr Northway still hung in it with the residue of his expensive, intrusive scent.

Perhaps this Griff had told Alice the truth, and he really was the King’s agent. Perhaps – and she found the thought too delicious to contemplate – he genuinely was investigating the misdeeds of Mr Northway. The Mayor-Governor’s corruptions were so many and manifest that word must surely have reached the King, and the idea of a spy investigating all Northway’s little treasons was vastly appealing.

*

In the weeks that followed, Mr Northway’s generosity continued to alight on them sporadically – though never regular enough to rely on, giving Grammaine’s finances a constant and literal feast-or-famine air. The man himself did not personally accompany his deliveries, though. Instead, he insinuated his way into Emily’s head every time she saw the kitchen filled with another load of unearned bounty.

She had discussed with her two sisters what they should do with such an embarrassing harvest. Northway plainly thought that he could secure an advantage over them, and if they simply hoarded it all for their exclusive use, then that would become true. They would be making themselves conspirators with him while the rest of Lascanne endured short commons.

It was Mary’s idea to simply go round the other isolated homes nearby and parcel it out. They would parsimoniously reserve sufficient for their own needs, and then load the rest on the buggy and visit the farmhouses and the cottages, bestowing Northway’s largesse on all and sundry. Emily gained some degree of satisfaction in recalling how he had boasted that no others would profit from his charity save herself and her family.

They learned a great deal by talking to the farmers’ wives. For one, they learned that the Ghyer was growing more active – waylaying travellers and robbing houses. He had even ventured into Chalcaster once to take revenge on a woman, they said. With news like that echoing in their minds, Emily and Mary always hurried to reach Grammaine before nightfall.

Alice had gone with them on the first of these charitable ventures, in high spirits at the thought of being received by the country people as an angelic saviour. The experience itself was less to her taste: too windy, too rainy, the roads too rutted, the people not ecstatically grateful enough. After that she left the task to Mary and Emily.

Soon enough there was more to argue over. Before the war, Alice’s energies had been given plenty of outlets, but now there were few social occasions, few men of good standing to enchant, few places to go. Alice felt boredom keenly. Many times she wanted the buggy to drive into Chalcaster when Mary needed it for making deliveries. At other times, when their own table was barren, she would lament that they had given so much away too soon. Emily’s patience with her, never capacious, frayed every time, and only Mary kept the two of them from a fierce row whenever they sat down to supper.

At last matters came to a head. Alice had been acting with a particular assurance for a day or so, a smug pretence that she had somehow garnered a new admirer. Emily had kept pointedly ignoring her, but her sister’s arrogance was irksome. Despite being older, Emily had always felt somewhat in Alice’s shadow. The youngest Marshwic had been everyone’s darling as a child, and always a great beauty. In better days, Grammaine had seen its share of respectful gentlemen callers, but they only came for Alice.

And that became their battlefield, when at last they were snapping at each other across the table. Alice, at the end of her tether for lack of entertaining company, brought the subject up as a time-honoured way of needling her sister.

‘I fear you’re catching up with me, then, Alice,’ Emily shot back, with eyes narrowed, ‘for you’ve gone as unadmired as I. What a shame that when this war is done and all the men return, there will be a new generation of beauties, and you will be old.’

That was plainly exactly what worried Alice, who went terribly pale. ‘Even with this inconsiderate war I am not without friends,’ she insisted. ‘You’re so busy doing your good deeds that you don’t even notice, but I have callers.’

This sounded like nonsense to Emily, and she said so.

Alice bit at her lip. ‘Oh, but I forget, you think yourself the catch now, do you not? You are the Marshwic beauty all of a sudden.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘But yes.’ Alice put on a particularly vicious smile, ‘I forgot! Emily had a caller, at long last. He came just once and has not come again. But what a shame that Mr Northway is your only admirer!’

‘Is that it, then?’ Emily felt herself very calm. Inside her, those words were rattling back and forth, hurting her every time they struck, but if Alice was going to be childish, then two could play. ‘Well, then, if I am such a disappointment to you, I would not dream of disgracing our family by showing my face at Deerlings.’

Alice stopped, open-mouthed and frowning. ‘But of course you must.’

‘No, my mind is made up. You’re quite right.’

‘But I can hardly go alone.’

‘Quite. So we will simply send our regrets, and sit here together at home.’ It was a stupid thing for her to say. She wanted to go herself, and of course they would go. They were words spoken in anger, that was all. Alice did not know it, though, and she just stared aghast at Emily, and then shrieked with horror and stormed from the room, leaving Emily looking shamefaced at Mary.

‘She’ll calm down by tomorrow,’ she tried defensively. ‘She was being intolerable, Mary. I had to do something.’

Mary’s expression said she was unconvinced, and Emily found that she agreed.

She would have addressed the matter directly the next morning, but Alice was always late in rising – and when she was in a foul mood she might not be seen before noon. Emily and Mary took the buggy out to distribute the last of Mr Northway’s most recent bounty, then returned for a frugal lunch just as Grant was riding back from Chalcaster with news. He had brought a letter for them: a letter from the front.

Mary snatched it first and read it out over the table.

‘My dearest Alice, Emily and Mary,

I am well. I have arrived now at the Levant, and conditions here are good.

I have already fought in my first battle. It was hard fighting but a great victory, and we routed the Denlanders from the field. I hope you are proud of me for serving king and country. I certainly am.

Uncle Tubal is well.

We are moving soon, pressing our advantage into enemy territory. I do not know how soon I will be able to write again.

I think about you all every day. It helps remind me what I am fighting to protect.

All my love,

Your little brother,

Rodric.’

‘It’s so brief,’ Mary complained. ‘How can he not have more to write?’ And why doesn’t Tubal write? It has been so long now since we’ve heard from him.’

Emily spread her hands ‘Perhaps he does not think to. You know how men can get wrapped up in their own schemes.’

‘Emily, he is a printer. If printers don’t think to write, who ever will?’ complained Mary. ‘Well, I suppose it is good, at any rate, to know that they are both safe.’

‘Rodric does sound like he is enjoying himself.’ Emily folded the paper, staring at the smudged print on the frontispiece: An artist’s rendition of the taking of Fort Lascaia. ‘I didn’t want him to go, as you know, but, now he’s gone, perhaps it’s for the best,’ she mused. ‘The newspapers say the war will end soon, and it would have been difficult for him later if all the other men had fought, and not he.’

‘Men,’ snorted Mary disdainfully. ‘Men and their games, who cares about them?’

‘And I’m sure you won’t care at all when Tubal comes back with his uniform and his medals,’ Emily said slyly.

Mary fell silent, and then she smiled a little for the first time in a long while. ‘Well, maybe—’ she began, before they heard a shrill wail from baby Francis upstairs. ‘Awake again, so soon? I swear he sleeps less and less every day. By three years old he will never sleep again.’ She started for the stairs, and then turned back and placed Rodric’s letter on the table in front of Emily. ‘You should have Alice come in and read it. She misses Rodric more than we do, I think. And it will put her in a better humour.’

‘She only misses having someone to tease,’ Emily remarked to Mary’s retreating back. She picked up the letter and read it over again. So much for Mr Northway’s dire hintings, she thought. And so much for my fears.

She went upstairs to rap at Alice’s door, but received no answer. When she pushed it ajar, she found the bed empty and neatly made. Apparently Alice had already arisen, and was presumably moping somewhere, avoiding her.

Emily decided that she was not going to play hide-and-seek with her own sister, and went to find Jenna instead. ‘Go find Alice for me, when you have a moment. She should see this.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Emily folded the letter and put it in the pocket of her dress, before strolling out into the kitchen, which still bore the faint, delicious smell of bacon from that morning, courtesy of what they had retained from Mr Northway’s latest donation.

‘Cook, have you seen Alice?’ she asked.

The stout woman looked up from scrubbing a pan. ‘Not since mid-morning, ma’am, when she was talking to that gentleman at the gate.’

Emily frowned at her. ‘What gentleman, Cook?’

‘Well, I say gentleman – a scruffy sort. Some wandering tinker or the like. I’ve seen him before around here, talking to the young miss.’

Emily nodded slowly, a little disquiet creeping into her. A traveller would have moved on by now, and anyone keeping watch on Mr Northway would be in Chalcaster right now. Obviously it couldn’t be the same man Alice had met in town . . .

It came to her then just how little she knew about how her younger sister spent her time, just as Alice had accused the night before.

Feeling anxious now, Emily stepped out into the stable yard, calling, ‘Grant! Are you there?’

She had to call again before the burly servant appeared from behind the house, with a shovel in his hand.

‘Sorry, ma’am. I’ve just been seeing to the garden. What’s the trouble?’

‘Grant, do you know where Alice is?’

‘That I don’t, ma’am.’

Emily clenched her fists, taking a deep breath. ‘Have you seen her talking, perhaps, with a stranger at the gate? A man in a long coat, like a traveller?’

‘That I have, ma’am. Some few times now.’

Emily stared at him. ‘Grant, why didn’t you chase him off or something?’

He stuck his thumbs in his belt. ‘Well, ma’am, I did try, but Miss Alice told me to mind my own stupid business, and that I was to go back to my chores.’

‘I’m sorry, Grant.’ Emily put a hand to her forehead. ‘If you see her with him again, you may chase him off with a pitchfork, and never mind anything my silly sister says to you.’

‘With pleasure, ma’am.’

‘Emily! Emily!’ The voice was Mary’s, coming from inside the house.

The baby! Emily turned to see Mary running out as fast as her dress would let her.

‘Mary, what is it? Is Francis—’

‘Not Francis. Emily, you must see this! It’s terrible.’

She had a letter in her hand, and for a confused moment Emily thought it was Rodric’s. No, I have that, so what’s—

Mary practically forced it into her hands. Emily unfolded the letter and read.

Dear Sisters,

I daresay you must be all in a tizzy now, and have no idea where I’ve gone, so I’m writing this to set everything straight. I’ll leave it with little Francis, because I couldn’t think of anywhere else you were sure to go eventually. I hope my nephew will not mind the intrusion.

You have probably noticed how very dull Grammaine is these days, with Rodric gone, and all the men gone, really, except Poldry and Grant, and I can’t really count them because they’re so old. Or perhaps you haven’t, since you two do seem not to feel the boredom as much as I do. I suppose it is because you are both settled. Mary with Tubal, and Emily with Grammaine. I never knew anyone could marry a house before.

Anyway, I’ve gone for a little holiday for a few days, to cheer myself up and get away from all of you, because to be perfectly honest you do drive me mad sometimes with how dreary you are. My friend Griff suggested I come and stay with his people for a few days, and he will tell me what it is like to be an agent of the King, who he has met three times. I will try and arrange an introduction for all of us, if the opportunity comes around.

Anyway, please don’t worry about me. I am perfectly able to look after myself for a few days, and I daresay I will love you all much more when I have had a break from you. I am not angry with you, and I know you do not mean it about Deerlings, because you are my sister after all.

Yours wilfully,

Alice.

‘“Yours wilfully . . .”’ murmured Emily. It was always Alice’s favoured way of ending a letter, but just now it seemed truer than ever. This was not new: Alice had done similar before – running off to the estate of some friend, inviting herself as a guest with the family of some beau or other. Since the war started, such opportunities had been few and far between, and now . . .

She passed the letter to Grant, who grimaced and looked to Mary for enlightenment. She whispered the main points to him, and he rushed to the stables instantly.

‘Her bay’s gone,’ he confirmed, on returning. ‘And the black as well.’ He turned, his jaw jutting out angrily. ‘That tramp has one of our horses.’

‘He has our sister,’ said Emily.

‘What are we going to do?’ Mary’s eyes were wide.

Another deep breath. Time to think, then time to act. ‘Grant, you must go and get the guns,’ she said. ‘Then saddle up two horses.’

‘Two, ma’am?’

‘For you and me, Grant. You can’t go alone. If we track him down and simply point a musket at him, it should convince him that it’s time for him to move on, I hope.’

He nodded grimly, and stormed into the house.

‘Emily, are you sure about this? You’ve never even used a gun before,’ Mary cautioned her.

‘I can at least point the thing at someone. I know which end of it makes the noise.’

‘But those guns.’ And a world of bitter shared experience passed between them in those few words. Shuttered windows and silence, and the smell of cordite. The dreams of her younger self that just would not go away.

‘What would you have me do? I can’t sacrifice the future to save the past, Mary, so it will have to be the other way round.’

Grant was coming out of the house now with the weapons.

‘Be safe, Emily,’ Mary told her.

‘Let Alice be safe. I will take my chances.’

5.

For so long a time, a passage of some fifteen years, the smell of spent firearms sickened me. You will know what memories the scent of hot metal and burned powder brought. We had those guns locked out of sight because I could not bear to look at them, though I am thankful we never threw them out or gave them away. They became like plotters, part of a terrible conspiracy, now consigned to an oubliette.

If I had my way, I would never have picked up a gun in all of my life. I would have sat at home and done my embroidery and read my romances, and probably married and had children, and never needed to know the secret of gunpowder.

I have learned well what my instructors since taught me. The secret of gunpowder is that anyone – a man, a woman, a child, a cripple – can kill with it.

‘Can you pick up their trail, Grant?’

He never really smiled much, but there was grim humour in his gaze now. ‘Oh, there’s precious little I can’t track, after twenty years on the estate, ma’am.’ His reins hung loose in his hands and he guided his steed with his knees. Emily’s own mount, a chestnut mare that knew her well, tagged docilely along behind. Emily rode astride like a man, her dress hitched up on both sides. The place and time did not lend themselves to the social niceties of side saddle, and privately she was proud of the approving look Grant had given her. He worshipped practicality, did Grant.

Their horses were taking them down the old path towards town, Grant’s narrowed eyes darting left and right.

‘Grant . . .’ Emily paused before asking it. ‘How old are you, exactly?’

He gave a gruff little laugh. ‘If the recruiting sergeants come asking, I turned fifty-one two years back.’

She frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound very patriotic.’ Grant was fit and strong, whatever age he was. If he had asked, as Poldry had asked and been refused, the army would undoubtedly have taken him.

‘Maybe I’m not, then, ma’am.’ Grant reined his mount in, staring keenly at the trees alongside the road. This limb of the forest was all new woodland, planted in Emily’s grandfather’s day, but towards the Wolds it was thicker and older, a deepwood that the brigands had once frequented, before they were driven away.

‘Don’t you love our King, Grant?’ she asked. She had never really spoken much to him before. He was a simple, silent presence, always a reliable pair of skilled hands.

‘As much as the next man,’ he said. ‘I did my fighting years ago. Overseas, against the Hellics. I got no wish to go playing that game again, ma’am.’

‘What . . . what was it like?’

His expression was unreadable. ‘Like hundreds of men I didn’t know were trying to kill me, ma’am.’ He urged his horse off the trail and in between the trees. ‘Looks like they came off here. Weren’t that long ago, either, for your sister always did dawdle. I reckon it’d be best to have the guns out, ma’am.’

Emily nodded, and watched him slip down off his horse to load them. The long musket came first, which he handed to her after setting it with ball, wadding and powder. After that he primed the blunderbuss, filling the flared muzzle with a handful of birdshot. Last came the sleek, vulpine horse pistol; its stock engraved with gold, it was a present from some long-ago business associate of her father’s.

She could not take her eyes off it, as Grant’s slow, sure fingers tamped the ball and wadding down the barrel, and tipped a measure of powder into the pan. This weapon had a presence of its own. It gleamed darkly with memories and family history.

When he was done, he tried to hand it to her, too, but she would not take it, so he thrust it through his belt and got back into the saddle, holding the blunderbuss barrel-up, like a lance. ‘Reckon we’re ready, ma’am.’

‘How far ahead are they?’ she asked as they got underway.

‘At a good pace, we’ll overhaul them in a half hour, ma’am. No more.’

Please, God, let her be safe. Stupid, foolish girl, please let her be safe.

She remembered the Ghyer. Before his infamy had become known, when he had still held on to his double life as a ranger and tracker, the Ghyer had once visited her father. He had been all smiles, a lean and handsome man with long, flowing locks and a neatly pointed goatee. He had spoken with her father of the emerging bandit problem, and Emily and Mary had peeked at him over the tabletop and thought him very good-looking and graceful.

She summoned the scene back now – or as best she could through the clouding years that stood between. There was the Ghyer leaning back in his chair, with a glass of wine in one hand. There was her father, his stern and regular face nodding carefully, a smoking pipe raised to his lips. It had been a long time, shockingly long, since his living face had intruded into her thoughts.

She had beaten her demons, she believed, driven them away, but instead they had been waiting inside her, all this while. They had known their time would come.

They were much deeper into the trees, where the land began to rise up in the undulating curves of the Wolds, when Grant reined in again and tutted at the ground.

‘What is it?’

‘The black’s taken a thorn. Bloody fool doesn’t know how to ride a good horse,’ the big man muttered, hurriedly adding, ‘begging your pardon for the language, ma’am.’

‘You use whatever language you feel appropriate,’ she assured him. ‘So what does that mean?’

‘It means he’ll ruin the horse if he takes her much further.’

‘But they’ll go slower, and we’ll catch them up sooner?’

Grant made a non-committal sound in response, as if that was quite secondary. ‘I’ll take it out of his hide, ma’am, if the black goes lame.’

‘If we catch them, you’re quite welcome to. I might take it out of Alice’s hide myself. What can the girl have been thinking?’

Grant touched his heels to his mount’s flanks and they were moving again. ‘Can’t say, ma’am, but she’s not been happy for a while, that one.’

‘I suppose—’ but Emily never got to reveal what she supposed, for a woman’s cry rang out, high and clear, through the trees.

‘Alice!’ Emily gasped.

‘Easy, ma’am.’ Grant stood up in his stirrups, looking first one way and then another. ‘Came from that way, I reckon.’

‘Are you sure?’

He nodded. ‘Round here the hillsides echo it all around you, ma’am. What you hear’s never coming from where you think. I’d stake my job that it’s this way, though.’ He hunched forward over his carefully pacing horse. ‘Lots of little dells and hollows all around here. Any of ’em would make a good camp, ma’am.’

Emily tried straining her ears, to make out something else from her sister, and it seemed to her that she could. Faint and jumbled, but there were distant words audible through the trees – and it was Alice’s voice, she was sure.

‘Grant—’

‘I know, ma’am.’ He continued to guide his horse forward, but she noticed he had the blunderbuss resting across the pommel of his saddle now. She tried to get the awkward length of her musket into the same position, but the barrel seemed terribly heavy, dragging itself towards the ground all the time.

The sound of her sister’s voice continued, in a long, complaining tirade. Evidently she had got tired of Griff, whoever he really was. Emily caught odd words now, and knew that Alice was demanding to go home, was criticizing her companion and her locale in as many shades of invective as she could muster. There was never anyone like Alice for complaining, Emily thought. If Griff had known that, then perhaps he wouldn’t have bothered.

They were closer now. Alice’s voice bounced through the trees: ‘. . . and you dress like a beggar, for all your pretensions, and you drag me to this misbegotten spot, this horrible dank place, and what I was thinking of, I don’t know—’

Quite. But then Emily heard a man’s laughter and she went cold when she heard other voices joining it. Three at least – or more. Not just one abductor, but a pack of them.

And Mr Northway’s warning came back to her.

‘Do you . . . remember the Ghyer, Grant?’ she whispered.

‘That I do. I went out with your father that one time. That was a rough business, ma’am.’

‘I remember . . .’ She had only been aged ten at the time, but she remembered clearly. She had been allowed to stay up well past midnight for her father’s return. He had eventually arrived, flushed with success, leading a troop of eight soldiers behind him (and hadn’t there been twelve when they set out?), and beside him was a Warlock: a wizard of the King. Together they had routed the Ghyer and smashed his little corps of brigands, but the man himself had escaped.

And now he is back, and he has more men, and he has my sister. A killer let loose in a land of women and children, the Ghyer’s thoughts would be turning to exacting a slow revenge now.

‘Reckon it’s him, ma’am?’ Grant asked her.

‘I cannot think who else it might be.’ She tried to take strength from the musket, but it seemed a leaden, useless thing to her.

Grant stopped his horse and nodded to himself. ‘Well, ma’am, it’s for you to say. You want to go on, then I’m your man.’ His glance towards her was nothing but simple sincerity.

‘I am very lucky to have you, Grant.’

He shrugged. ‘Grammaine gave me a home, ma’am, after I was done soldiering. There’s no easy way some debts can be paid.’

A blur of thoughts, like a flurry of bird wings, passed across her mind. How many men were there? She could not guess. What would they do if they caught her? She could only imagine, and her imagination surely understated the horrors and the cruelty. What did such men always do to the poor women who fell into their clutches? And yet if she turned back now, then they would do it to Alice. Vain and foolish Alice. Simple, trusting Alice.

I am stronger than she. I could endure such torments, perhaps, but she never could.

She had no idea in her head of what the next moments might bring, only that she had to act, because knowing she had not would be worse than facing the brigands themselves.

‘We go on,’ she decided, and wrestled the musket into a more comfortable position, virtually resting it atop her horse’s head.

And so it was that the two of them rode into the camp of the Ghyer.

The brigand had made his resting place in a hollow within the woods, where generations of woodcutting and charcoal-burning from the hill farmers had eaten a great bite into the trees. It was in this bite, ringed on three sides by looming forest, that the Ghyer lurked. On the fourth side, a winding track led up into the woods, and then off towards Chalcaster, taking in a score of farms and shepherds’ cotes on the way.

There was a flurry of startled movement as Emily and Grant emerged from the trees, but it could have been worse. That was the thought that occurred to Emily only later: It could have been worse. Here was not the army of bad men and villains that the Ghyer had once amassed, that her father and the King’s wizard had destroyed.

There were seven men encamped in the hollow, slouching around the scattered ash of a dead fire. Beyond them, the two Grammaine horses shared a hobble with a bent-backed farm nag. Emily’s eyes were only for Alice, though, and there she was, in her patriotic red dress.

Her sister’s face was so racked with emotion when she saw Emily that for a second it was impossible to read. Had she been ravished? What had they done to her? Then Alice gasped loudly, and Emily saw pure and utter relief there, magnified to such a size that it had been briefly unrecognizable. I am in time, she thought. Just in time.

Alice was not tied, but there were men close on either side of her. A purpled bruise was starting across one of the girl’s cheeks. Emily found that her musket, of its own accord, now pointed in the direction of her sister’s captors.

Only then did she spare the men themselves any attention.

There was Griff, she saw, on Alice’s right. The others were men of similar stamp: ragged runaways, refugees from the war. A pack of wretched criminals who had nothing to lose and for whom begging was too lowly an occupation.

Two of them had muskets, now pointed at Grant and herself. Against them, the muzzle of Grant’s blunderbuss seemed broad enough to take in the entire clearing. Knives had sprung into the hands of some of the brigands, and a woodsman’s long-hafted axe to the grip of another. One only had not drawn a weapon, although there was a pistol thrust into his sash.

‘Well, now, you have your father’s face, in a certain light, and obviously his bravery, although not his wisdom or his friends. What do you hope to gain?’

She studied his features, recalling the smooth and charming man her childhood recalled to her memory. He met her eyes a moment, then perhaps he saw himself through them, for suddenly he looked away again.

He had been the king of the woods, the lord of brigands, notorious outlaw and highwayman. There had been ballads, plays and stories about him. The Ghyer, deadly and delicate as a spider, fierce as a mad wolf, clever as a weasel. But that had been fifteen years ago and more.

He was still lean, gaunt even. His cheeks were hollow, and his lithe frame was all angles. His face was pocked and dashed with scars, all the baggage of a long life spent amongst rough company. He still had that spike of a beard that, together with his cropped hair, was now white peppered with grey. There were liver spots on the backs of his hands. Were he a respectable citizen, they would not have drafted him for the army.

The corner of his mouth twitched, and she knew that her thoughts must be plainly visible on her face. His expression was not of anger but of pain.

‘Not so very much to look at, am I?’ he said, and his voice sounded as old as he, not the easy lilt remembered from her childhood. It made her wonder what her father would have looked like now, had he lived. Such was her shock that she had no sense of the danger here, of the guns. A fraught, wire-taut stand-off was strung out between them like a tightrope, and she walked it without even thinking.

The Ghyer made a gesture, almost dismissive, to take in his men and his camp, with just an echo of the grace that she remembered. ‘It’s not the band I had when your father came down on me with his dozen and some, and his wizard’s fire, and put paid to all my little dreams of empire.’

She said nothing, but her musket was now pointing at him directly. He looked at it and sneered disdainfully. ‘It is enough,’ he said. ‘In a land where all the men have gone to war, my half-dozen is all the army I require.’

‘You are despicable. How can you do this to your own country in its time of need?’ she asked. A quiet current of laughter passed through his men.

‘Lascanne has never needed me,’ he replied. ‘Now put your toy away before you break it.’

She tightened her hold on the musket, wondering how it would feel to fire. Grant’s horse stamped nervously, but he kept his own aim steady, his solid face expressionless. The two brigands with firearms shifted unhappily.

The Ghyer sighed. ‘I thought, when I came to reclaim my kingdom, that I would at least have your father to deal with. Now all I find are silly little girls.’

Alice spat at him, and Griff raised his hand to slap her again, but obviously thought better of it. Emily was starting to realize how lucky she had been. They had caught the brigands off guard, thinking themselves secure in their tree-walled fortress. Things would go very badly for all concerned, though, when the first trigger was pulled.

She could see no obvious way out.

‘Imagine my surprise,’ said the Ghyer, emphasizing each word deliberately, ‘imagine how I felt, when I found that my old enemy was dead these last twelve years, and by his own hand.’

Emily felt as though she had been struck. Her hands twitched on the musket and the barrel jerked. The Ghyer flinched and ducked back, and for a moment he was just an old man, tired and frightened.

There was a long period of silence before he cleared his throat and continued, with a harsh, ragged laugh. ‘I see, in his absence, you’ve grown up into a man.’

To Emily’s shame, Alice giggled slightly. She put it down to nerves.

The Ghyer glanced between them, one hand raised peaceably. ‘Just put the gun down. Your man can go, and you and your sister’ll come to no harm. I mean to ransom her, and you’ll get the same. Ransom works best with undamaged goods.’

‘Ransom?’ she echoed.

‘Of course.’ He smiled, revealing teeth that were uneven and yellow, with gaps. ‘Why not ransom? Two ladies of quality. The authorities will pay a good price for your safe return.’ His eyes glinted, and that gap-toothed smile widened.

Emily looked him right in the face, a face that had been pared down by the trials of his life until it was too transparent to hide the truth.

‘You would never give us back alive,’ she told him. ‘You had Alice kidnapped for revenge. You hate my family too much. I hear it in your every word.’

His face froze up, except for his eyes, which flicked towards her musket.

‘And,’ Grant added, without looking round, ‘if your man there moves another step, I’m firing this thing and that’s the end of it.’

Emily became aware now that Griff had been inching towards her as soon as her musket had focused on the Ghyer, and that he was abruptly stock-still and scowling.

The expression on the face of the Ghyer remained calm, but his eyes were as wild as a trapped animal’s. He knows I’m right. Emily could almost hear the echo of the shots resounding back to her from some point in time just moments away.

What on earth have I done? I’ve killed Grant, and probably Alice. And me, too, but that’s no great matter.

She saw the Ghyer’s hand begin to reach for the pistol in his sash. ‘Just drop the gun,’ he was saying, his tone losing its nonchalance. ‘Drop it, Miss Marshwic. I’ll give you my word.’

And what would that be worth? She raised the musket to her shoulder and, as she did so, saw a movement behind him, further up the trail. She froze, and enough of the brigands noticed that even the Ghyer turned to look.

Three riders had appeared over the rise, and two of them were wearing the King’s red.

Relief washed through her, and she said, ‘I’d advise you to surrender now. Perhaps they’ll show you some leniency, in light of your age.’ But then she sensed the mood of the bandits. They had not tensed or lost hope. They had relaxed.

‘I’d take another look, Miss Marshwic,’ said the Ghyer, and his face shone with such triumph that it almost restored his youth. ‘They’re no friends of yours.’

Two of the riders did indeed wear the uniform of the King’s army, but the third was in drab undertaker’s black, and she saw that it was Mr Northway, which betrayed the other two as his henchmen from the town hall, with muskets held sloping over their saddles.

‘Put the gun away, Miss Marshwic,’ the Ghyer advised her. ‘Hoi, Northway, look who we’ve had come a-visiting! Some unfinished business of yours, no?’

Northway reined his horse in and studied the little knot of people before him: the Ghyer, the brigands, the Marshwic girls and Grant. A look crossed his face that signified sheer frustration, that of a man whose hand had been forced. He spoke several words to his men out of tightened lips, and kicked at his horse.

‘What have you done?’ he demanded of the Ghyer, as he and his men came trotting down towards the camp. ‘What is this?’

‘Oh, don’t pretend this isn’t music to you!’ the Ghyer remonstrated, and Emily felt her musket sag in her grasp. One of the brigands started forward to take it from her.

‘Now,’ said Northway, and both his men fired in unison, the roar of their guns echoing across the width of the clearing. The man reaching for Emily’s musket was slammed against her leg, bouncing from the side of her horse to crumple to the ground. Her mount reared frantically and lunged away, but the tangle of trees deflected it and it rounded back on the camp. Across the clearing, a second man was down, yelling and bloody, and then Grant fired the blunderbuss, and the bandit musketeer still standing loosed his own weapon, and the camp exploded into gunshot and smoke. Emily screamed at the thunderous noise of it, and felt her musket kick in her hands, discharging its load at the sky. Northway had dropped awkwardly to the ground, drawing a brace of pistols from a saddle holster. One of the red-coated soldiers was unhorsed, clutching at a raw wound in his arm. Grant had forced his mount between Alice and the rest, and his load of birdshot lashed across the remaining bandits, scattering them. Some were fleeing, some were down.

‘Alice! Come to me!’ Emily could not even hear her own voice.

Through the reeking smoke, which smelt to her of her father on his last night, she saw the Ghyer drag the gun from his sash. There were tears on the old man’s face, knowing that it had come to this. Betrayed, doomed by his own hand, he turned the gun on Emily. His mouth opened to spit out some invective lost in the roar of battle.

Something drove him to his knees, snapping his head back and throwing his arms wide like those of a crucified man. She saw him dragging the weight of his pistol back towards her, and still she could not react, could not take her eyes away.

The second shot hit him so hard, from a low angle, that it almost threw him up onto his feet again, but he collapsed instantly, his back a blasted ruin.

There were no further gunshots. The only sound was the echo and re-echo of the guns, fading and vanishing amongst the trees, and the wretched moaning sounds of the wounded.

Emily found that she could finally draw breath again, but the air she inhaled was choked with cordite and memory. Her hands holding the reins were trembling, and she felt the horse’s terror through the muscles of her legs.

Mr Northway stood up from where he had dropped to one knee to take his final shot into the Ghyer. The two pistols in his hands were smoking like pipes. His expression displayed only mild unhappiness, as the wounded soldier was helped up by his comrade.

There was a tugging at her leg and Emily started suddenly, but it was only her sister. Alice was sobbing, tears coursing down her cheeks, as she tried to bury her face in Emily’s dress.

Grant was across the clearing, checking on the stolen horses without a glance to spare for the fallen men – or for Mr Northway. After so much fury and gunfire, there seemed to be surprisingly few corpses within the clearing. She saw that Griff’s was not one of them. At least three brigands had made off into the trees.

‘It’s all right,’ Emily heard herself saying to Alice, though her head was still ringing from the noise. ‘It’s all over. We can go home now.’ She put a hand protectively on Alice’s head, and then raised the same hand with wonder, seeing it so fouled with grime and oil from the gun.

She heard a horse snort and stamp, and realized Mr Northway was now mounted again. He looked from her to Alice and back. ‘I had better escort you to Grammaine.’

‘Grant knows the way,’ Emily assured him, but Alice sobbed out, ‘Oh please, Mr Northway, please do. I don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t come – or what they’d have done to us.’ She raised her tear-streaked face to her sister. ‘I’m so sorry, Emily. I didn’t mean to cause trouble. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’

You didn’t mean to cause this sort of trouble, anyway. ‘Look, Grant’s bringing over the horses. You had better mount up,’ Emily said.

As Grant helped Alice into the saddle, Emily turned her gaze back onto Mr Northway. ‘I suppose we will be glad of your company on the way back to Grammaine, Mr Northway,’ she said. Then, as soon as Alice was mounted, she turned her horse towards the trees again.

She did her best to ride aloofly at the head of their little procession, but Mr Northway was like her shadow, his horse keeping steady progress at her shoulder until she felt compelled to look back at him.

‘You have some accusations, I think.’ His lipless, sardonic smile had returned.

She had resolved not to speak of it, but his words broke the fragile dam her discretion had built, and out came the words. ‘It was no chance meeting there between you and the Ghyer!’ she spat out.

‘Indeed not.’ His maddening expression did not change.

‘He was expecting you. He knew you.’

‘The Ghyer knew many people, you included,’ Northway observed.

‘But he was expecting you. The very man you came to warn us of – and you have been dealing with him.’

Utterly deadpan, he replied, ‘But as Mayor-Governor it is my job to deal with brigands.’

For a moment she was so angry she could not speak. ‘You were going to . . . treat with him. What was it about? Would you turn a blind eye in exchange for a portion of the man’s gains?’

‘I was going to make terms, Miss Marshwic, and let him know what targets would arouse official ire and which he could attack in safety.’

She stared at him. ‘Mr Northway . . .’ But she fell speechless. What could be said to such an admission?

‘You see here in my company most of the official fighting strength of Chalcaster, Miss Marshwic. The Ghyer had more than ten, all told, though never all assembled in one place. If he decided to declare war on my town, what do you suppose I could do? My job is to deal with whatever menace presents itself, and so I do by whatever means I possess.’

Still she was silent.

‘I would not have yielded Grammaine to him,’ Northway added.

‘Do you imagine,’ she said, ‘that I would be happy at having my safety bought with another’s blood?’

‘I don’t imagine you would, but you would never have known.’ Northway sighed. ‘However, the Ghyer was no more reasonable than you, in the end, and between the pair of you, the decent thing appears to have been done. The brigands are put to flight, the man who had unified them is slain, the town is saved.’

‘How disappointed you sound,’ she mocked, for his smile was now gone.

‘What do you propose I do, Miss Marshwic, when another dozen brigands drift in and start their predations? Do I go to make terms with them? And why should they listen, after I broke my word with the Ghyer?’

‘Do you blame me for—’ she started hotly.

‘No,’ he cut her off. ‘How can I? But do not cast so much blame my way, Miss Marshwic, for I do what I can. What would you do if all you could accomplish were little evils to ward off worse?’

‘You have not scrupled at little evils previously, I think,’ she said, but her tone was not as harsh as before.

‘But those were for my own good,’ he told her, and a ghost of his smile returned. ‘Now I am soiling my soul for others, and it does not sit half so well with me.’

‘You are candid, Mr Northway.’

‘I have always spoken the truth with you, Miss Marshwic,’ he said. ‘Possibly because I so enjoy your expressions of outrage.’

She nodded, and it was not outrage that touched her. Instead she felt numb inside. The roar of the gunfire was still coursing back and forth inside her head, and her clothes – and her hands and everything around her – stank of it.

She did not mind the noise, she found. It was like thunder, and soon over, but in her mind there was again a room with shuttered windows, filled with the smell of gunsmoke. There was a door she had opened, thirteen years before, while looking for her father.

By his own hand. He had cheated the Ghyer of a revenge, cheated Northway of any challenge to his ambition, cheated his family of a father, of an explanation.

She glanced at Northway again, the man whose machinations had put the gun in her father’s hand that fateful night. She searched for the wellspring of hatred that had simmered inside her for so long.

She could not find it amidst the numbness, only the thought that if Northway’s schemes had forced her father into that room, forced him to take up that pistol, it had still been her father who had decided to pull the trigger.

The thought shocked her, but it would not go away.

6.

. . . and I breathe it like the air, now. The smell of the guns is become to me like water to a fish: a thing I take for granted. At first it was simply something that I did not notice any more. Now it is a part of my life I cannot live without. There is power in pulling a trigger: power over the world, in that split moment of sound and fury.

Alice had recovered from her ordeal within days, and already she was capitalizing on it when she visited Chalcaster. She was the abducted princess, to hear her tell it. She had been wrested from her chamber in dead of night by a band of swarthy Denlanders and hied away with into the forests. They had been plotting to use her noble blood and gentle birth to destroy the monarchy, although Alice was never specific about how this might be accomplished. Before their evil plots could be enacted, however, her rescuer and his gallant few crashed out of the woods and saved her. Only the identity of that rescuer remained unspoken, with the heavy implication that it was some agent of the King desirous of remaining anonymous. Her gushing gratitude to Mr Northway had soured even before she returned to Grammaine, and she had decided that her loathing of the man continued unabated.

‘But wasn’t the Ghyer involved?’ asked some of her listeners.

‘He was,’ Alice replied, unperturbed. ‘The treacherous villain was in league with the Denlanders.’

‘But Denlanders aren’t swarthy,’ Emily once put in, though Alice ignored her entirely. Just as she had ignored Emily’s role in her rescue, for that matter.

Emily herself had taken longer to recover.

Back home, she had told Mary all: from their botched attempt at a rescue to Mr Northway’s unexpected intervention, to her ensuing conversation with the man and the thoughts it had awoken in her.

‘And this morning, before dawn, I was awake with the sound of gunfire in my ears and the sheets soaked as though I had a fever,’ she finished. ‘I feel as though I should have put it behind me. Am I letting the family down?’

‘You were only thirteen when our father . . . died,’ Mary said unhappily. With their mother dead bringing Rodric into the world, she had been left to bring up her three siblings after the suicide. ‘It was a terrible time to become a parent, although I suppose the experience has been useful.’ She looked down at little Francis, asleep in her arms after some early-morning hysterics. ‘All you knew, at the time, was the loss.’

‘And that Mr Northway was responsible,’ Emily put in almost desperately. ‘That he drove Father to it.’

Mary gave her a level look.

‘Mary, why else have I been hounding the man all these years? Why else have I been his most determined enemy in Chalcaster? We have all of us placed the blame for it at his door, myself more than anybody, but . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘But he was not the only one to blame.’

For a long time Mary regarded her silently, but then she managed a short nod. ‘I know. I hated myself for it, but I blamed him too. But do not forget that Northway is guilty, as well.’

‘Without a doubt, guilty as any man ever was,’ Emily agreed. ‘All the heroes have gone to war, after all. What can we be left with save villains? He should be the toast of Chalcaster, of course.’ But behind the bitterness there was a mixture of feelings. When she had ridden to town soon after the rescue she had expected to see bunting and cheering, and toasts drunk to the health of Mr Northway, but the Mayor-Governor was closeted in his office still, and would not see mere well-wishers. Any advantage he could have made of the situation was leaching away whilst he dealt with each new problem the war effort handed him. Most did not even guess that he had anything to do with the Ghyer’s defeat.

Can it be possible that the war will actually make an honest man of him? The idea was almost enough to make her laugh.

After that, perhaps she should have made a visit to Chalcaster, if only to assess her old enemy and see where his new weak points were, and whether his razor-edged wit had dulled after their adventure. But the ball was coming on apace by then, and Mrs Shevarler had the dresses brought to them for their final fitting, and suddenly there was more to do than Emily had time to cope with.

And anyway, she had been expecting him to darken her door in his mourner’s black. Surely he would come to exploit his newfound leverage, to barter the rescue of her sister into some usable currency. She was ready for the clash and had marshalled her arguments against him, ready to resist any blandishment he should employ. And yet he stayed away. Perhaps his work as mayor kept him busy. Or perhaps he himself was not sure how to approach this new stage of their rivalry.

And all too soon Emily and Alice were embarking for Deerlings, leaving Chalcaster and its problems behind them.

*

The approach to Deerlings had been planned two generations back to waste no opportunity of showing off the house or the splendour of its grounds. Now their buggy wound its way through ever-ascending slopes of lawns and fountains and exquisite topiary: even with winter just a day away, and the chills of the year’s end creeping in with the gathering dark, there were flowers still in bloom, each bed carefully seeded so that as one harvest of colour faded, another was awakening.

Emily had visited here once before when she was no more than eight, for her father to receive some honour from Lord Deerling. Her impressions were of massive high-ceilinged rooms finished in gilt, of mirrors and polished floors that showed her reflection equally well, of a host of soft-footed servants who were always there to keep an eye on the curious child. Alice had come more recently, as the guest of one of her well-born friends at a party four years ago. In that gentler age on the eve of the war her eyes had been drawn not to the furnishings but to the people. During their two-day buggy ride Emily had already heard from her sister a list of the great and the good who had attended, with especial attention to the eligible young men in their new coats of red.

‘Really you must marry soon, Emily, while I am still in the flush of youth,’ the girl fretted.

‘And whom do you suggest I marry?’

‘Oh, what do I care? After all, Mary married a tradesman, and you could hardly do worse than that.’

‘I apologize for spoiling your chances, sister, but I’ve no mind to marry any time soon,’ Emily said.

‘I know what it is,’ Alice said slyly. ‘It’s because the Ghyer called you a man. You needn’t worry. In a good gown like that you’re practically presentable. And even if you don’t possess my gifts, your birth should stand you in good stead.’

‘Why thank you, sister, for your educated opinions,’ Emily replied somewhat tartly. ‘Do note that our parentage is not going to open many doors for us here at Deerlings. We will be counted amongst the lowly.’

Alice sniffed disdainfully as though to indicate that her personal charm and beauty would make up for any deficit in pedigree.

Their little two-horse buggy was a shabby affair compared to most of the opulent carriages already drawn up outside the stables of Deerlings. Alice was too busy to make that comparison, though, intent on ticking off coats of arms and looking for the intertwined herons that were the King’s. Grant helped Emily step down, and she paused and took a good look at Deerlings House.

She had expected the giant edifice of her memory to be diminished now, no longer seen through the eyes of a child, but Deerlings remained the grandest building she had ever seen: a vast winged front of regimented windows flanking a colonnade, which framed great front doors that alone seemed as grand as all of Grammaine. A pair of statues faced each other across the doorway: a near-naked spearman with arched eagle’s wings menacing a coiled and barbed serpent in whose mouth glowed real fire.

‘Will you be all right, Grant?’

‘I’ll find my way, ma’am. I’ll put the horses to rest first, and then I’m sure the kitchen will have a bite for me.’ He chuckled roughly. ‘I shouldn’t say it to you, ma’am, but I’ll wager the kitchen girls’ll have time for a word even for an old’un like me.’

Emily found herself smiling, where only a season before she would have been shocked beyond all reckoning – or at least feigned it – to hear the old man talk like that. Nor, she guessed, would he have risked the words back then. Their escapade against the brigands had brought them closer through mutual peril. Now he was less formal with her, and she fonder of him.

‘I wish you well of them,’ she replied. ‘Come, Alice, we must go and present ourselves.’

*

‘Miss Emily Marshwic and Miss Alice Marshwic.’ It was announced in a piercing voice by a woman in footman’s garb, but neither of them really noticed. After a year and a half of war, deprivation and worry, this was like coming home.

The great ballroom of Deerlings had a gleaming floor that scattered light and colour in mother-of-pearl reflections from wall to wall. The walls themselves began with gilded skirting wrought into the form of waves, and rose up through spiralled pillars to merge into the ceiling’s spreading golden vistas of marine life. The first Lord Deerling had been a coastal man, and subsequent generations had elaborated on his original theme, so that here could be seen fishing ships hauling in their nets, while there a kraken, many-armed and twisting, broke the water to do battle with trident-wielding sailors. There were mermaids with their lyres, and schooling fish of silver and red and blue, and here the ancient sea king in his armour of shells, and each vignette was separated by coiling gilded plaster moulded into the shape of sea wrack.

Beneath, and multiplied back and forth by the mirrors hanging on two walls, were the great and the good, the young and the beautiful, the wealthy and the powerful of all Lascanne. Two score ladies of quality, from the stately Lady Deerling herself in pearls and white lace and satin, to pretty aristocratic girls a year younger even than Alice, each the centre of her own world. Their gowns were a kaleidoscope of hues and patterns, for the scarcity of society gatherings prevented any consensus on the season’s fashions. Each had chosen her very best and, seeing them, Emily knew that her own gown, made at such expense, was coarse and provincial. Some of these ladies probably dressed their servants in better. She did not care: she was here, and here at least was somewhere bright and lively. Here was somewhere her worries could not follow her.

If only Mary had come, she would have loved to see this. There had been no persuading her.

‘To think, I had almost forgotten what a man looked like,’ Alice declared, for amongst the throng of beautiful plumage there were men, perhaps one for every three of the ladies. They were all of a piece in their colours, of course. Who, with an invitation to Deerlings, would not have his dress uniform ready, resplendent in gold and red? Emily recognized but a few of them: there was Mr Markworthy, now a captain by the look of him. His head was cocked back, laughing, and he had three ladies half his age hanging on his arms. She spotted one of the Brossade brothers – the younger she thought – with a monstrously broad and moneyed widow entreating him to something. The woman tugged at his cuff, and Emily saw that the hand of his that she took was of polished brass, marvellously jointed.

She found Lord Deerling without effort; he was back from the Couchant front for this night only, or so rumour said. He was a tall man, not short of Poldry’s age, his thin face dominated by a silver moustache. A younger officer was recounting something to him, but his attention was mostly on his lady wife, clasping her arm in his own. Behind him in mute attendance stood two hulking men in feather cloaks: savages from some distant land.

‘But they’re all so old,’ complained Alice, having assessed each face in the room in only seconds. ‘Not one of them is under thirty, I’m sure.’

She was right, of course. These were the senior officers, the lords: those whose influence had wrested them away from the war for this.

‘Oh, look who it is!’ Alice exclaimed, pointing across the room and causing a few heads to turn. Emily followed her finger and saw a dark and shabby figure lurking by a statue. If she had not recognized the face, or the clothes, she would have taken him for a bailiff.

‘Mr Northway,’ she said softly. He looked resentful and ill at ease, and the people around him were doing their best to ignore his presence completely. Hateful little man, she told herself, like a black cloud of misery set to spoil the night for us. But, in spite of herself, she found some sympathy for him. He was a public servant, a man of papers and underhand action, and here he was adrift in a sea of gentry and gallantry.

Alice was tugging at her again, though, sounding breathless as she said, ‘Look, Emily, look!’

‘Is it the King?’

‘Almost, look!’ A group of men had entered the ballroom by the far doors, and the glittering crowd of the well-to-do eddied away from them to allow a better look. One was silver-haired, Lord Deerling’s years at least, an elegant gentleman with a cane and a great red patch, like a birthmark, across his face. The others were of an age with Emily, or even younger. What marked all of them out, though, was their dress. Their jackets were blue – but the deep blue of an evening sky on the cusp of night. The garments were cut longer than greatcoats, falling in great sweeping folds to the floor. There was silver piping at their shoulders, tracing the outline of twin herons across their breasts. They bore no swords, unlike the bulk of the officers and noblemen there, nor even a dirk at their belts, but each wore a chain of white gold secured on the left side with a sunburst inset with blue stones. There were other details that Emily could not make out clearly across the breadth of the room, but she knew them already. She had seen that uniform before.

‘Warlocks!’ breathed Alice. ‘Wizards of the King!’ She clasped her hands together. ‘And young as well! What joy!’

‘And every other eligible young woman will be thinking exactly the same, and most will make a better match, and they will not be aiming so wildly beyond their estate,’ Emily warned.

‘Oh, hush to you,’ Alice told her. ‘“Love cares not for privilege”,’ she quoted from somewhere.

‘You cannot have love at first sight, sister, until the gentleman has actually looked upon you,’ Emily chided her, but Alice, she felt, would make a fool of herself no matter what, and so why say more? She watched as the elder wizard accepted the greetings of Lord Deerling and his lady. The younger men’s eyes flicked around the room, from face to face, and Emily felt that they were mostly as overawed by the prestigious gathering as she was.

‘Oh, Emily, look!’ Alice cried again, but at the very room this time. The door through which the wizards had entered was now closed, but the wall it was set into was moving, opening outwards to reveal a mirror-image room beyond: a doubling of the ballroom; another swathe of gilt and paint and silvered glass that the guests dispersed into. Dominating the far end of this extended room was a magnificent staircase, carpeted in deep red with the fighting stags of Deerling heraldry embroidered on each step. Either side of these stairs was arrayed the orchestra.

At first, Emily did not see what caused the ripple of surprise amongst the guests, but as people drifted further into the larger space, and she and Alice were also drawn in, she realized that every musician was a woman. Some were girls younger than Alice, and some were spinsters with grey hair and lined faces, but each and every one was female. Even concert musicians had taken the Red in the King’s service.

The King—! And even as she thought it, the orchestra struck up the first passionate strains of Lascanne’s national anthem.

He appeared at the top of the stairs, casting his gaze down onto his lords and ladies, gentry and officers, with a slight and subtle smile. His Majesty, by the grace of God, King Luthrian of Lascanne, fourth of that name. A ripple went through the crowd below him, as men bowed low and women curtsied, all the way back as far as Alice and Emily, who bobbed with the rest. When they looked up again, he was halfway down the stairs.

Emily caught her breath because he was all she had heard he was, and every inch the most beautiful man she had ever seen. His hair fell to his shoulders in deep brown curls, and his heart-shaped face was free of blemish, regular as a statue’s but filled with benign and noble character. A half-smile never left his lips, as though he saw the joke in everything around him, but was far too polite to laugh. His beard was a sharply trimmed diamond shape, his moustaches elegant as stiletto blades. His eyes flashed, all human experience mirrored there. Here was a king who laughed and cried along with his people, who knew their ills and their woes, their great joys and their little pleasures.

His cloak of turquoise velvet was swept back from his shoulders like the wings of the heron that graced his coat of arms, and at his throat, above his shirt of spun silver and his waistcoat of cloth of gold, was a crescent gorget of precious metals inlaid with gems, which he was known to prefer to the weight of Lascanne’s crown.

‘Rise. All rise, please.’ His voice, clear as a bell, rang out across the great space of the ballroom. ‘My lords, my ladies, my guests and friends. I cannot express the joy it brings to me to be here visiting Deerlings once more. Not an hour have I ever spent here, but it has been a happy one, and none happier than this. Let no man say that, come strife or rack, we cannot hold to the pleasures and the heights of joy that we have known.’

‘Long live His Majesty! Long live the King!’ cried out the elder wizard, and the crowd echoed his words.

‘Isn’t he magnificent!’ Alice squeaked. ‘And scarcely five and twenty, your very own age, sister.’

‘I fear you match me above my station,’ Emily told her drily.

‘I could speak on at length, dear friends,’ the King continued. ‘If I were master here instead of a mere monarch, I would dote on each and every one of you, and give my thanks that you have come here at my invitation. It is Deerlings House that is the true ruler here, however, and the hands that built it intended this chamber for dancing. Who am I to gainsay their wisdom?’

He gave a flourish of one hand, and the orchestra took up the first dignified movement of a waltz they all knew.

‘I have no partner!’ Alice wailed. All around them, gentlemen were asking ladies for the honour of this dance, but there were far more women than men and Emily knew that she and her sister were destined to be left behind by the dancers like driftwood by the tide.

‘I do not feel like dancing just now,’ she declared, putting a brave face on it as she retired to one side of the room, where some of the Deerlings servants had been setting out chairs.

She looked round for Alice as she reached there, but her sister, who had been at her very shoulder, was now gone. A moment later, to her astonishment, she saw the girl partnered with a uniformed man twice her age, who was marching her gravely through the steps of the waltz as though it was a military manoeuvre. Alice noticed her staring and stuck her tongue out as she and her stiff major sailed past.

‘That girl . . .’ Emily muttered to herself, wanting to conjure up a remark particularly scathing, but the fact that she was genuinely envious took the moral wind out of her sails. Alice danced well, she noted, and she looked well too. If the cut of her cloth was inferior, then her energy and her smile more than made up the difference. She belonged here, Emily realized. Alice belonged in a way that she herself did not.

I am no socialite, after all, and I will be glad to get home again. But it was not true, and she felt utterly helplessly jealous.

The waltz drew to a dignified close, and their hostess, Lady Deerling, retired from partnering the King with a low and delighted curtsey. His Majesty extended one arm to a lady, swan-like in white, and the musicians took up the first few notes of a livelier tune. Alice was swooped upon by a debonair aristocrat whom Emily did not recognize. The dance began again, with the ladies and the men weaving in and out between one another, constantly slipping between partners in a complex, shifting knot.

‘My lady?’

Emily glanced up, and then rose to her feet more suddenly than she had intended, for it was one of the young wizards who now stood before her, watching her with amber-coloured eyes. He was a lean, neat-looking man with a narrow, clever face and hair like new-cut copper.

‘I am sorry, sir, you startled me.’

‘Miss Marshwic,’ he went on.

She opened her mouth a few times, utterly thrown from her train of thought.

‘Am I right?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I had thought . . .’

‘You are correct, sir, but how . . . ?’

‘No magic, Miss Marshwic. In truth, I can see your mother’s likeness in your face. Your father’s too. I heard that you would be here.’

‘You have me at a disadvantage, sir.’

He smiled, looking unintentionally vulpine. He might have been a few years her junior, but that face would still look young in a decade’s time. ‘I apologize. My name is Giles Scavian, a humble apprentice. My training was at the hands of—’

‘Of Patrick Scavian, my father’s friend.’

‘My uncle,’ he agreed, and she had placed him now. The same Warlock who helped her father oust the Ghyer had kept a boy in training. They all did so, as their duty to provide the King with fresh champions. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr Scavian.’

Giles Scavian gave her a little uncertain bow, and she wondered if a wizard’s training left him much time for learning the social graces.

‘That is not your uncle you entered with, I think?’ Emily enquired.

Scavian glanced at the elderly wizard, currently tripping the steps of the dance along with the nimblest of them. ‘Alas, no. My uncle has passed away.’

‘The war?’

‘Some years before, in truth. It always comes too soon, does it not? You can attest to that as much as I.’

She let her society facade drop at that, just a little; her father’s death had been so much on her mind.

‘It still seems so recent,’ he continued softly, and she felt a brief welling of misery within her that she fought down.

Scavian’s expression must have mirrored her own. ‘I am sorry to trouble you. I know nobody here,’ he confessed. ‘In truth, when I spotted your face from across the room, I felt that I knew you already. It was your parents that I read there, but still . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I am afraid I ramble. I have been a Warlock in training first, a gentleman only second, these years.’

She smiled at him. He was earnest, so still with an edge of awkwardness that most men of his age had long shed. ‘You do not dance, Mr Scavian?’ she enquired.

‘I cannot master the passes,’ he said. ‘Besides, my fellows and I are here for other purposes. The King has promised to anoint us this very night and make us Warlocks in truth.’

‘A great honour. Your uncle would be proud.’

‘I hope so.’ The dance was drawing to a close, and he gave her an apologetic smile. ‘Forgive me, but I must be on hand for the King, should he need me. May we talk later?’

‘I would like nothing more,’ she replied. As he slipped away she saw Alice approaching, flushed from her exertions on the dance floor.

‘Were you . . . ? Was that . . . ?’ she started, but there was no way to avoid the truth. ‘That was one of the King’s wizards!’ Alice exclaimed.

‘The younger sort,’ Emily agreed, enjoying the look that came over her sister’s face. ‘His name is Giles Scavian, a very pleasant fellow indeed.’

‘Well, all very well for you,’ said Alice. ‘But I warn you now that I fully intend to dance with the King before this night is ended, and so you may consort with as many wizards as you wish.’

‘How generous of you,’ Emily remarked. The King, meanwhile, had lighted on another partner, and she recalled how his reputation for seeking female company outweighed even his love of music and dance or sword and lance. Perhaps Alice might yet achieve her wish.

But Alice was off again as soon as the musicians signalled the next dance, straight into the arms of one of the Brossade brothers, his metal hand gleaming around her waist. Emily sighed, seeing no further sign now of Giles Scavian, and prepared to sit down once more, when a shadow fell across her.

‘Excuse me, Miss Marshwic. Would you do me the honour of this dance?’

She did not need to look: the voice said all. It was Mr Northway, of course.

7.

Surely you must remember that night as clearly as I? You must guess now how I felt in that moment.

I am looking across the edge of the swamps as I write this, or at least when the rain reveals them to me. I confess to a touch of that feeling even now: anger and horror and helplessness.

His expression was still that mocking thin-lipped smile, devoid of all mirth or conviviality, but she recognized in it a shield of sorts that could take the blow of her refusal and let him walk away.

What does he hope to gain? She met his eyes and saw there how he fully expected to be turned down, and that he would turn it into one of his jibes, at how predictable she was.

And no one else had asked her, the only man who had so far spoken to her having declined to dance at all.

And quite deliberately she took his proffered hand. ‘Mr Northway, I do not owe you this on my own account, but you saved my sister’s life as well, and perhaps I owe you one dance for her.’ So it is Alice’s fault. How fitting.

‘So you can be bought,’ he murmured, as he led her out onto the floor. ‘But with good deeds. What a costly currency.’ Nevertheless, behind the sly words something new had come into his face that she had never seen there before.

Does he look this way when he counts his gold? For surely there was a species of glee in his uncomfortable features, a fierce little joy born of avarice fulfilled.

This was another dance of changing partners, albeit one more measured and less tangled than the last, and Emily found her place just as the main movement started up and the dancers began revolving around each other in pairs. She had not danced for some while and the steps came slowly to her, so that for a dozen bars she was a fraction of a beat behind, until she caught the measure of it. Then she found the chance to watch Mr Northway, which was an education.

He danced like a man who had learned it from a book – and learned well – but had never actually practised before. Each move was there but clipped and careful, and each step he made drew his eyes down to his feet. He, who lived through situations wholly under his control, was abruptly out of his element. He danced with the worried concentration of a child, and could barely spare a look for her. That made her feel sad for him, which surprised her. He had schemed for this, and found the courage for it, and now he had what he wanted – what he had not really expected – and he still could not enjoy it. Instead she was the one watching him stumble.

Then they changed partners, and she was whisked away from him to touch hands with a grave-faced soldier who had not removed his sword, so that it rattled against his legs and hers as they passed round one another. Beyond, she saw Mr Northway trading his exacting steps with a lady of quality, who never glanced at him, as if he was beneath her notice.

Why has he come here? the thought occurred, as she grew more confident in treading the measures of the dance. And then a sour and unfamiliar stab of sympathy: poor Mr Northway, to have done such terrible things just to gain power, to have done the difficult things that had been forced on him once he had it, and to reap this penance as his reward . . .

She almost missed her step in her sudden confusion, but the grave-faced officer did not notice, and she caught herself. How her sisters would frown if she revealed such thoughts to them.

And what would Father say?

Ah, yes, but she would have her own questions to ask of her father if he was given back to her for just one night.

She passed from hand to hand, now partnering an elderly lord whose long steps were elegant as a stork’s, but she hardly noticed him. She had wanted so much to dance at Deerlings, and now, like Mr Northway, she could not enjoy it through the turmoil of her own thoughts. The bold soldier who partnered her next smiled at her, but she did not even look up at him. The black-clad Mr Northway kept passing at the edge of her vision, a hole cut into the colour of the other dancers. Still with his precise steps, he had grown in confidence now, and he even caught her eye once as they crossed paths.

Then the final leg of the dance began, and they were back together, her fingers touching his cool hand as they circled one another like prize-fighters. She realized now, and somehow had never noticed it before, that he was barely any taller than she. In that moment only she led, and he followed. For once, he had no sharp words, no mockery, no sudden reversals to bring to her.

As the musicians wrung out the final chord from their instruments, she gave him her best curtsey. When he straightened up from a bow, there was a little colour in his pale cheek. He stood and repaired his dignity, stitch by stitch, as though wondering what on earth he was doing there.

As she returned to her chair, he followed, but she found that she did not mind so much. The look she gave him, after she had sat, was challenging.

‘Thank you, Miss Marshwic, it was a pleasure,’ he said, his expression still not settled.

‘You did not believe I would accept, I think,’ she said lightly.

‘Am I so easily read, Miss Marshwic?’

‘This once. But why, Mr Northway? You owe me that.’ The musicians had struck up some incidental music as the guests milled and regrouped themselves across the dance floor. Servants passed amongst them with trays of wineglasses or titbits from the kitchens.

Northway glanced away from her. ‘Your sister does not approve,’ he noted.

‘She is entirely right in not approving, and your evasions are usually more elegant,’ she told him.

His protective smile was back, as he looked at her: that serpent’s curve of his lips that did not reach the eyes. ‘I have the greatest admiration for you, Miss Marshwic. You have quite enlivened my time in office, all these years that we have crossed swords. A woman of will and determination – I have always said so. You are a credit . . .’ To your father, she heard in his pause but, without losing an inch of smile, he wrestled it into, ‘to your family.’

‘Are you offering a truce, Mr Northway?’

‘Miss Marshwic, I would never deny you the chance to make war on me at every opportunity. It is one of your most engaging traits, and speaks highly for you.’

And she laughed, because she could not help herself, and for the briefest flash his smile reached up and touched his eyes.

The orchestra were drawing their intermission to a close, and he held out his hand, pale and slim-fingered.

‘May I presume as much as a second dance, Miss Marshwic?’

She rose, and the word that rose to her lips – the unthinkable correction – was ‘Emily’.

But, before she could speak, another voice cut across their conversation. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I believe it must now be my honour.’

She turned, ready to deal harshly with this presumptuous newcomer, but her voice died in her throat. From the corner of her eye, she saw Mr Northway turn and skulk away like a shadow when the lamps are lit.

‘Your Majesty,’ she stammered.

Close to, he seemed impossibly perfect, a piece of hyperbole stepped from a storybook. His skin was smooth and flawless as fine silk, and the curve of his lips made her aware of how poor her gown was, and her provenance. His eyes, though – his eyes were the special magic. They were hypnotic, deep as seas and, like the sea, changes and tides passed over them and currents lurked in their depths. Emily felt her heart hammering, and her breath refused to come.

‘We are told that you are of the old Marshwic line, my lady,’ he said, as though she was anything more than the second daughter of a provincial squire.

She found her voice with a great gasp. ‘It is good of Your Majesty to remember my family,’ she got out. She wanted to look, to find Alice, but she could not take her eyes from the King.

Luthrian, by God’s grace the fourth monarch of that name, smiled easily. ‘You are of a rare old stock, Miss Marshwic, and your grandfather, I recall, was one of my grandsire’s Warlocks. Your family has its place in the histories of Lascanne. Loyalty and honour, Miss Marshwic, should be your family motto. Do you think a generation or two of worse luck could erase such antecedents?’

‘Your Majesty . . . ?’

‘Barlocque here tells me that you serve me still, your family fighting at the front, eh?’ The musicians were holding off, playing masterly arabesques about the opening bars of the dance, as they awaited the King’s pleasure. She vaguely gathered that Barlocque was the elder wizard, now standing at the King’s shoulder.

‘That is so, Your Majesty. We are proud to serve you in any way we can.’

‘And it shall be rewarded, in due time. All my loyal subjects who have taken arms to defend us against Denland’s aggression will receive the rewards of freedom.’

There was polite applause from the guests all around them.

‘Will you dance with me, Miss Marshwic?’ the King asked.

‘Your Majesty has only to command—’

‘I command no such thing.’ His smile broadened. ‘Here and now, you may refuse a king and lose nothing by it. But I ask, merely as a man, will you dance?’

She could hardly believe that she was still speaking. ‘But, Your Majesty, why . . . ?’

‘Why you?’ He barked out a single syllable of laughter. ‘My lady, you looked so solemn, even as you danced in the midst of all this gaiety. I confess my eye was quite drawn. I vowed to see what was amiss, that such a noble lady as yourself was moved to frown.’

Emily heard the sound of a hundred noblewomen vowing to be more solemn in the future. ‘It was some small matter, Your Majesty, and it is quite gone from me now,’ she said, quite truthfully. ‘As your loyal subject, as a Marshwic and as a gentlewoman of Lascanne, I would be honoured to dance with you.’

She took his hand, feeling the smooth metal of the rings there, touching a faceted stone with her thumb. The evening was unreal around her, the guests faceless blurs of colour against the mother-of-pearl floor. Even the music seemed to lose its thread and tone. Only the King was there for her, as he laid a hand lightly on her waist, and hers found his shoulder.

He danced as though the music had been written for him, as though music – all music – had been written for him. He danced as though motion and metre were his to command. In his arms, with his guiding hand burning hot around her waist, so did she. She felt the gloomy pall of Mr Northway being burned from her by the radiance of the King.

And yet how strange: that one is this one’s servant, the shadow that moves at the behest of the sun . . .

She had no sense, during those golden minutes, that Luthrian was showing off for the other guests, or that he was merely fulfilling a duty. He was dancing with her because he wished it, and she danced with him for the selfsame reason. They could have been any young man and his lady, save that he was the most handsome man in Lascanne, while she . . . Well, Alice teased her for being plain, but in that moment she was the most beautiful woman in the room, and she knew that the others all saw it too. While the King laid hands on her, his divine magic cloaked her and she was a princess.

All too soon, the waltz’s measures drew to a close, and she located herself in the ballroom once more, among the dancers and the guests, the musicians and the frescos on the ceiling. But still the King held on to her, and his smile almost blinded her.

‘Stay by me, my lady. I have a task to attend to.’

She nodded dumbly. The crowd of guests had formed itself into a loose circle about them, expectantly. Emily wondered what was to happen next.

‘My lords and ladies, loyal subjects all,’ the King announced. ‘I have chosen this delightful gathering of Lord and Lady Deerling to confer upon certain soldiers of my cause a signal honour and a grave responsibility. I call upon you, each and every one, to bear witness to what I ordain here, and the charge I place on them.’

Emily saw men draw themselves up straight, soldiers looking serious and loosing their holds on their wives or their newfound partners so that they could pay attention.

‘Where are your charges, Barlocque?’ enquired the King and, on cue, the elderly wizard stepped forward with his apprentices in tow. Scavian was at the end of their line, his jaw clenched tight to disguise his nervousness. At Barlocque’s signal all six of them made a low obeisance to the King, then knelt before him. Scavian’s face was gripped with such intense emotion as he gazed up at his monarch: pride, fear, resolution. There would be no going back from this step, for any of them. They would arise something more than human.

‘You are each of you born into a noble house,’ the King addressed them seriously. ‘Your fathers and their fathers have served the royal line faithfully and well, and it pleases us to see you follow them on that path. Your masters have vouched for you, despite your youth, and in this time of war we think it right that you should be made ready to serve your country and your king. Prepare yourselves.’

‘What are they doing?’ Alice had squirmed her way through the crowd and was now whispering in her sister’s ear. Emily gestured her to silence.

Along with his peers, Scavian was unbuttoning his jacket, then pulling it open inches at a time with all the elaborate care of a ritual, until it hung loose about his shoulders. Without a pause his fingers moved on to his shirt, and Alice gasped as his bare skin was exposed – collarbones, chest and stomach – until there was a triangle of flesh visible from his shoulders to his navel under the ballroom’s light. He pulled his shirt aside and closed his eyes, as a man would do were he waiting for a sword thrust.

The King took a deep breath and the smile slipped from his face, leaving it bare of all expression and all humanity. He stalked along the line of them, the air shimmering in his wake like a heat haze. As he reached the end of the row of motionless young men, he lifted an arm, and Emily saw the air boil and ripple about it, the very flesh glow lambent and terrible with the power now contained in his hand.

‘Giles Scavian, apprentice, I deem you worthy to receive the sangreal, and with my touch I anoint you as a Warlock of Lascanne,’ the King declared. ‘May you ever use the powers I give you for the good of both king and country.’ Swiftly, he thrust out his palm and laid it flat against Scavian’s bared chest.

There was a hiss like meat sizzling on a fire, and Scavian stiffened, his features clenching in pain. The scent was not of burnt flesh, though, but of blood – freshly spilt blood with its metallic tang. Beneath the hand, something crackled and spat and glowed like hot embers.

When the King withdrew his palm, there was the red weal of a handprint on Scavian’s naked skin, and Emily knew that he would bear it forever, just as Barlocque bore a similar mark across his face, like a birthmark. ‘Rise, Master Scavian,’ the monarch said softly. ‘Rise as a wizard of the King.’

There was still pain in Scavian’s expression, but a fierce pride as well. ‘Your Majesty, my life and my endeavours are yours,’ he declared.

The King nodded slightly, a proud man accepting his due. The next apprentice wizard braced himself, wincing as he prepared for the pain.

A further five times, that terrible power seared from the King’s hand to anoint his new servants, until the room was filled with the hot blood–iron scent, and the air above them danced and shuddered with stray gleams and glimmers of regal power.

And at last the King had spoken his words to each of them in turn, and bid them all rise, and they stood before him trembling and scarred, but possessed also of a new and terrible purpose and power. ‘Now recover yourself, my loyal servants,’ he bade them. ‘I know well that the touch of the royal blood is a terrible burden. More than any, I know it.’

Barlocque ushered his young charges away through the crowd, which stood well back to give them passage.

The room was gripped by silence, the guests looking to the King or after the departing Warlocks. It was a ritual so seldom witnessed, usually performed behind closed doors. He has shown us this to remind us of the power of the Crown, Emily thought. And then: He touched me. She recalled his hand at her waist as they danced, how he had clasped her hand in his, the smooth warmth of his skin. How could she have done that if she had thought about the fire of the sangreal – the royal blood – just beneath the surface.

‘My lady Marshwic,’ the King turned to her, his smile immaculate. ‘What think you of the inner workings of the state?’

‘Could you have . . . burned me?’ She had not meant to say it, but it was out now.

‘Only by my express will does the blood of kings leave me to anoint my chosen, and you must know there are no women amongst my wizards, even though your line has produced Warlocks in the past. You need fear me not, my lady.’

‘The ways of the Crown are . . . mysterious,’ she observed.

‘Compared to the documents, the sealing and the signing, they pale into insignificance,’ said the King, the joke igniting a brief flurry of laughter around the room. ‘My Lady Deerling, there you are. Is your husband not with you?’

And with that the King strolled off amidst the guests eddying around him, leaving Emily feeling quite alone, despite them all.

Never alone for long, though, for now Alice was tugging furiously at her sleeve. ‘I don’t know how you managed that, sister, but I swear it is quite maddening of you.’

‘Maddening?’ Emily blinked at her in puzzlement.

‘That you should speak with the King and not introduce me. Honestly, if he can find favour in such a face as yours, why, I should have quite captured him.’

It was a strange thing, to realize that she had somehow outmanoeuvred her little sister, usually so adept in these gatherings. A spark of cruelty came to Emily, and she said, ‘Why, little sister, perhaps the King’s eyes are as enchanted as his blood, and he sees hearts and not faces.’

Alice pouted furiously, and stamped. Before Emily could apologize, the girl had stormed away, no doubt to start rumours, as was her wont. For once, Emily felt able to ignore her. She felt flushed, weak almost. Too much had happened to her in such a short space of time. The King. The King!

‘My lady, the musicians will soon strike up again. Might I request the next dance of you?’

She looked into the face of a lean, middle-aged nobleman she did not recognize. With the scent of the King fresh upon her, she was suddenly someone, where before they would not have looked twice at her.

‘Alas, my lord, I must rest out this next dance,’ she excused herself, and backed off to the edge of the room. Her mind was full of thoughts now, and she wanted to speak them to someone, anyone. Alice was out of the question, of course, and Emily looked around the room for the night-blue uniform of the wizards. She felt, of all the people she had spoken to this evening, that Giles Scavian would keep her confidences, and he might have revelations of his own in return.

The young Warlock was not in the room, and she guessed the newly anointed wizards had been taken somewhere else to rest. Deerlings was a sprawling mansion, but she decided he could not be far away, so while the King took the guests’ attention with another fine speech, she slipped unobtrusively from the room.

Heavy with memory, the cold quiet of Deerlings enveloped her. As the ballroom doors closed, so the sound of human joy was shut off behind them. The chamber beyond was empty of life, dominated only by the dead. Portraits of the family glowered down on her: warriors dressed in military garb or armour; women laced and whaleboned into aristocratic poses; men in the dark robes of the King’s Warlocks, many sporting proudly the handprint brand of their office. A huge bear menaced one corner vacantly, tall enough that the flat crown of its head brushed the ceiling, bared teeth and hooked claws raised to threaten the man who had slain it, himself now generations dead. Perhaps his likeness was somewhere on the wall, staring down at his great prize, the two of them locked in an endless rivalry.

She passed down a long hallway, the windows of which faced onto a walled courtyard long untended. The overgrown vines and weeds and bushes reached up as if to ensnare dark statues of winged angels taking flight. To Emily it seemed that they were striving to escape the foliage, and that it was dragging them down, seeking to bind them to the earth. She could see no door opening onto that garden, as though the house itself had closed it off and forgotten it, angels and all.

She paused at the doorway of the next dim chamber she came upon. From the darkness within, armour glinted on the walls: breastplates dulled with age, crossed sabres and antique broadswords beneath them; the bygone tools of the soldier’s trade arrayed now as heirlooms and prizes. Pikes and axes, she saw; helms and flags of all the nations that Lascanne had warred against. Perhaps there would be a Denlander flag here soon; at least she hoped so. Emily moved forward, brushing against a pike beside the door, which scraped across the face of a scarred shield.

There was a strangled cry and something lunged at her, slicing the air. She had taken only a single step into the room, and now reeled against the wall with a clatter of armour, sending a curved scimitar bounding angrily across the floor. She flinched, arms up to protect her face – and her eyes met those of Lord Deerling.

He had his drawn sabre halfway towards her, but the hand of one of his savages had stayed him from delivering the blow. The man’s old face was drawn and pale, aghast at himself. In the gloom she had not spotted him or his attendants, or had taken them for mere exhibits.

‘My lord, please, I apologize, I did not mean to . . .’

‘I’m so sorry,’ the old man said, his voice almost a whisper. With a heaving breath he lowered the sword, let it follow the long-familiar path back into its scabbard. ‘Please forgive me, young lady.’

‘My lord . . .’ she began, but did not know what to say. The two savages stared at her with eyes as round and orange as the orbs of owls. Their hair was feathery, brown and white and grey, blending with their cloaks. Their muscular corded bodies were dark and lean, with nails like talons. Close to, they did not look so human as she had thought. ‘My lord, is something wrong? I did not mean to intrude.’

His tension-drawn face essayed a smile, which made him look infinitely older and more fragile. ‘I came away from it all – the music and the crowds – because I cannot live amongst such things any more. I am unfit for company, young lady. I . . . have been at war such a long time. One can only witness so many terrible things before one becomes . . . unsuited for polite society.’

She saw he was trembling like a child. ‘My lord, will you sit?’

Gratefully he folded himself into a chair, tilting his head back until it touched the flat of an axeblade hanging behind him. ‘I wish you had not seen me like this, young lady. I have . . . spells where it all comes back to me, the fighting and the war, and then I must leave them all. I am not safe company in those moments. I see the enemy, then . . .’

She eyed the two savages. ‘I wonder that you keep such company, my lord, if you do not wish to be reminded.’

He laughed weakly. ‘I need no help in the reminding. I keep my friends here because they understand. They know what I have gone through . . . what I am still going through. They make sure that I do no harm. Please, young lady, you have strayed onto a sight you should not have seen, and I am sorry for that.’

*

Early the next morning, Grant was waiting for them with the carriage when the time came to leave. Alice was being secretive and mysterious, but Emily understood that she had not attracted the King’s attention. For her own part, Emily had seen no further sign of either Giles Scavian or Mr Northway.

No sooner had his name crossed her mind than Alice’s prattle moved on. ‘And I shall tell Mary that you danced with that loathsome creature Northway, and no doubt she will have a lot to say about that.’

‘Let her say what she will,’ Emily retorted sternly.

‘I do not understand how you could do that.’

‘You do not understand a great many things, Alice.’

The buggy shifted forward a little, then stopped as Grant reined in the horses.

‘Is there a problem, Grant?’ asked Emily, peering into the pre-dawn gloom.

‘I need to wait for the road ahead to clear, ma’am. Also there’s a gentleman here I think wishes to speak to you.’

Emily leant out, caught her breath in surprise, and opened the door as quickly as she could. The hand that helped her down was that of Giles Scavian.

‘Miss Marshwic,’ he said, ‘I had hoped to speak to you before you left.’

She almost told him then and there how she had gone in search of him, but it would not have been seemly. She confined herself to, ‘Mr Scavian, you seem well recovered from your ordeal.’

‘To be touched by the King’s fires is something not lightly undertaken.’ He looked about him awkwardly. There were a few lines on his face that she thought had not been there when they last spoke. ‘Miss Marshwic, I . . . in truth I found our talk together refreshing. You are quite unlike other ladies I have met here.’ He stopped then, colouring slightly. ‘I did not quite mean to . . . I hope you understand me.’

‘I do,’ she said, very conscious of Alice eavesdropping close behind her. ‘I enjoyed our conversation, Mr Scavian – very much so.’

His face lit up. ‘Miss Marshwic, I . . . I suppose you head now for your family home.’

‘Grammaine, yes. You are welcome to visit us there at any time. It would be good to have guests, especially one as eminent as a wizard of the King.’

Behind his eyes, something dropped, locking her out. ‘Alas, I . . . go to the war tomorrow. The King bestows no gifts idly, but would see them used. I just wanted . . . In truth I wanted to say goodbye. I would that we had met before, Miss Marshwic.’ He bit his lip. ‘May I take some message, or do some favour for you? Have you friends or relatives at the fighting?’

‘Where do you travel?’

‘The Levant front. The swamp country.’

Without thinking, Emily took his hand in hers and held it there, hot and dry from the King’s fire. ‘My brother Rodric serves there. Please see that he is safe. He is very young.’

‘I shall do all I can.’

‘And I have a brother-in-law, Lieutenant Tubal Salander. Perhaps he can help you there when you arrive. It will all be unfamiliar to you.’

‘It will,’ he agreed. ‘I had never thought there would be war during my lifetime. I had not looked for it, in truth.’

‘Will you do a third favour for me?’ she asked.

‘Only name it, Miss Marshwic.’

‘Will you keep yourself safe, Mr Scavian?’

He gave a little laugh at that. ‘I must needs do my duty but, beyond that, I shall protect myself as best I can – for you, since you ask it.’

‘Please do.’ She saw that the path away from Deerlings was clear now for them to travel, and he saw it too.

‘I wish you the very best of journeys,’ he said. Then, just as she turned to go: ‘Miss Marshwic?’

She looked back, and saw he had held out one hand. Briefly, a light flared up in the palm: a dancing, flickering ball of ghostly flame that lit up his face for her. He smiled uncertainly. ‘The gifts of the King are for more than just war.’ With his other hand he took her wrist, gently pulled it towards him, then decanted some of the pale fire onto her own palm.

She gasped in shock, but there was only the faintest heat from it, and the flame skittered between her fingers, and danced there for long moments before it died. ‘Beautiful,’ she said in awe, and his shy smile grew. ‘We shall see you at Grammaine some day, Mr Scavian.’

‘It shall not be my fault if you do not.’ He helped her back into her seat and gave a courteous nod to Alice.

Looking through the back window of the buggy, she saw that he remained standing there before Deerlings House, looking after them until she could not see him, and perhaps longer.

8.

From that moment in time, events fell into place without me asking them to. As though I have been moved like a piece on a chessboard, from square to square until the moving led me here. Looking back, it seems like the pulling of a trigger on a musket: that terrible pause while the arc-lock spins, which stretches for an eternity in the mind, and yet one knows that the powder must catch and the gun will fire. The inevitable can barely be stayed, and never stopped.

She would liked to have seen Northway’s face when it was announced, ‘A Miss Marshwic to see you.’ That would have helped what was about to come.

As she entered his office, the first thing she saw was that damnable smile, cold and sardonic. His head was cocked a little on one side and his hands clasped before him on his desktop, amongst the ledgers and stacks of parchments.

‘Why, Miss Marshwic, what a pleasant surprise – not to mention unexpected. Have I or the King done something to displease you? Nothing else seems able to lure you to my chambers lately.’

‘Mr Northway,’ she acknowledged, but all the words she had prepared while waiting had remained outside the room as she stepped in. She fought to recapture them in the sudden silence that followed.

‘Please sit, if you will, Miss Marshwic. I have pains in my neck and back enough, from sitting at this desk all day, without straining myself looking up at you.’

Grateful for this time to think, she took a seat across the desk from him, like an applicant for some menial position.

‘I was surprised to see you at Deerlings, Mr Northway,’ she said.

‘As the governor of Chalcaster, it would have been an unpardonable affront for them not to invite me,’ he said. ‘I daresay it was hoped that some pressing business would keep me away. Indeed, I regretted the venture as soon as I set out for the place. A man can take a dislike to being snubbed by so many all at once.’

‘You regret attending, then?’

He looked at her for longer than she was comfortable with, before he said, ‘As it happens, there were consolations.’

She broke eye contact and looked down at the wooden surface of the desk. Here it comes. Deep breath now. ‘Mr Northway, I fear I have been quite churlish towards you of late.’

‘If so, you are in good company,’ he replied wryly.

‘You did save my life, and that of my sister, and it is unfair of me to lose that fact amidst the . . . real reason that you were there.’

She did not look up, but there was an encouraging silence from him, and no further snide remarks.

‘And,’ she added, ‘you were the first man to offer to dance with me at Deerlings, before the King took my hand, after which I had to . . . to beat men away with a stick, is how my sister decorously put it. So perhaps our experiences at that house were not so different, all told.’

‘I don’t know. The King didn’t dance with me,’ he remarked, and she looked up sharply. His smile was still there, but perhaps it was less cold and impersonal than before.

‘You do not make this easy for me,’ she chided him.

‘I am not in the business of making things easy,’ he told her without apology. ‘And, besides, you are at your best when things are far from easy, Miss Marshwic. You are a fighter.’

She took the compliment, if it was one, uncertainly. ‘I asked you, that night, if you were offering a truce.’

‘I remember.’

‘I offer you one now. We have been enemies, and for good reason. No doubt we shall be again. For now, while both our lives are complicated by war, I will be civil and try not to hate you any more, if the same is offered in return.’

‘My, what a carefully worded treaty,’ he said. He had his pipe ready in one hand, but it remained unlit. ‘You hated me, truly?’

‘My family’s memory is long and clear.’

‘Ah, your family? So it was as a Marshwic that you hated me.’ He regarded the pipe intensely. ‘I never hated you, Miss Marshwic. And if I have not always been civil, it is because I feel you thrive on adversity. What would you crusade against, if not men like me?’ He smiled at her. ‘How unlike we are, you and I, but at the same time how much common ground there is.’

‘I do not see it,’ she said.

‘We question, Miss Marshwic, and we fight, and we are not prepared to accept the status quo. If you did, you would not pit yourself against me so frequently, and if I did, I would be a petty crook and not a great one.’

‘You are a civic-minded villain,’ Emily observed. ‘You do your duty by the King well enough.’

‘And better than an honest man could,’ he agreed. ‘If they won, the Denlanders would take by force what I would steal. It is in my interest.’

‘You are a truthful villain.’

‘To you, always.’

‘Do you accept my truce?’

His composure cracked just for a second, and something hungry and hopeful looked out at her. She thought it made him grotesque, but then she thought it made him human.

‘Willingly, gratefully,’ he confirmed. ‘And should you wonder if I’m keeping to it, you may check on me here at any time. After all, who else do you talk to as openly as this?’

It was only after she had left his office and walked out into the clear crisp sunlight that she realized he was right.

*

Her two sisters did not take kindly to Emily’s truce with Mr Northway.

‘He is a hateful man,’ Alice declared, without hesitation. ‘How could you even want to speak with him after all he did to Father?’

Mary frowned, her steady gaze reminding Emily of their last conversation on this topic. ‘You know he tried to buy up Father’s debts. He would have taken Grammaine from us, if he could. We sold half the estate, just to keep the rest away from him. You know that.’

‘We are at war. There is a common enemy,’ Emily reminded them. ‘He does what he can – as do we. In wars, you have truces.’

‘I do not know what you think he is, but he has always been a wicked creature,’ Mary insisted with finality.

Alice went on, ‘Look at the way he dresses: he is a repulsive, shabby little thing. He’s horrible. I wouldn’t have him as a servant, and now you’re dancing with him and going to visit him as if he’s a real person.’

And all of it just brought home to Emily what Northway himself had said. Who else could she talk to about serious things? Who else was there who would not judge her words poorly?

Over that same winter, she went to see him four times. None of her visits was just an idle social call. Each time she went along as champion for some wronged party: a family going hungry, a widow without firewood, a woman accused of theft who had a family to support. She had clashed with him over similar matters before, and it had been a duel of hates, as she focused her dislike of the man into a crusading fury against his selfish and biased governance.

And now, when she came to him, she argued as fiercely as before, using ploy and counter-ploy as she chased him through the mansions of self-serving logic that he threw up to counter her. And yet whenever they matched wits, no matter how life-or-death the stakes were for those she spoke on behalf of, she felt as though she and Northway were playing a game. Sometimes she broke past his defences and forced some concession from him, and sometimes he led her down blind alley after blind alley, until she had exhausted her sophistry without winning him over. She was free to be frustrated, to be angry with him, to decry his manners and his morals. The knife of her hate was sheathed, though. He mocked her words and ridiculed her chosen causes, but she mocked him back.

She was a changed woman. Deerlings House had made sure of that. She had entered into a wider world, coming of age in some new way. Some nights, over the long, mild winter, she dreamt of the King, of dancing with his warm hand in her own, feeling the fierce fires of the sangreal dancing just beneath his skin. Other nights she was called before him, in all his majesty, not for idle music and entertainment, but to bare her breast to him, to take the searing brand of his touch against her flesh, feeling the soul-shaking jolt of his royal blood as it infused her. She would wake, twined in her bedsheets and drenched in perspiration, convinced that she would find a livid handprint stark against her skin; convinced that she had given herself into his service, that her fate and that of the King’s were now inextricably linked.

*

Then came the day when Emily and Alice rode the buggy into Chalcaster market, only to find the stalls abandoned save for some determined few packing up their wares with the air of women moving on to fresher pastures. By far the bulk of the people there were gathered about the Mayor-Governor’s noticeboard in the centre of the market square, and most of them strangely silent. Emily and Alice slipped amongst the gathering of tradeswomen, market-seller’s wives, town gentlewomen and a few old men and children, until they were close enough to read.

The crowd around them was murmuring, a slow whisper that built gradually into something quite different. The women, for they were almost all women, were reacting with a ripple of horror to the message just posted, a wave of bad news that would carry and carry until every household got to know if it.

‘What is it?’ Alice asked crossly, feeling herself jostled by the crowd. Emily squinted at the tacked-up paper, seeing first the royal seal at the base and only later the words themselves.

Most who stared at the proclamation had no letters, she guessed, and those who could read it had done so and fled, as though the madness contained in those words might be catching, It was catching, she realized, and it would take a terrible toll of all gathered there. Listening to the snippets of rumour and misinformation as the crowd tried to puzzle out what was writ there, she cleared her throat and held her hands up for quiet.

When she had enough of them waiting for her words, and with a heavy, sick feeling within, she read aloud what wiser heads had decreed.

‘BY ORDER of His Majesty, by the grace of God, Luthrian, King of Lascanne, fourth of that name, Lion of Denland, let the following proclamation be enacted in all towns, villages and hamlets of the Kingdom of Lascanne, this fifty-fourth day of Winter, Year of the King Seventeen Eighty-Eight.

IN ORDER that the war against the regicides and republicans of Denland be concluded at its soonest eventuality so as to thereby release those subjects of Lascanne currently under arms, and;

IN ORDER that the rebellious nation of Denland be subdued forthwith, for which effort a sufficient and large number of soldiers is known to be required, to avoid the threat of further rebellion, and;

For the greater glory and furtherance of the policies of the Kingdom of Lascanne,

IT IS COMMANDED that a further draft of the people of Lascanne be enacted.

So that all households, be they town or country, that have more than one female resident between the ages of fifteen and fifty must, by the First Day of Spring in the Year of the King Seventeen Eighty-Nine, render up one such for the glorious service of her country, and, if it be thought fit, to be trained and outfitted as a soldier and put at the disposal of His Majesty’s Armies.’

Below was the seal and the signature of the King, but Emily hardly had eyes for them. Around her, a low moan of fear started up in one throat, and was taken up by the next, and the next. The working women, the wives, the mothers all around her, must feel just as she had done when first she read this. There was now a dreadful weight inside her, below her ribs. It pulled and dragged at her, choked her breath, hammered her heart. She felt ill, feverish. The sweat was chill on her face.

‘Oh, dear God, save us,’ she whispered, when she really meant, save me. This was fear, then. She had never really appreciated it before. She felt her legs buckle, and clutched at the shoulder of a tradesman’s wife, so that for a moment the two of them were supporting each other. She heard the first sniffles and sobs begin around her.

‘Emily?’ Alice demanded, and for a moment Emily thought she simply had not been listening, as was her wont. Then, heedless of the expressions of the crowd, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, don’t be foolish. It doesn’t mean us.’

Emily reached out and touched Alice’s chin, feeling suddenly very far away. ‘It does,’ she said.

‘No!’ Somewhere a woman started screaming: ‘They can’t make me!’ And it was echoed by others, at first few, then many – ordinary women thinking of their homes, of their businesses, of their children.

‘Everyone, Alice,’ Emily confirmed shakily. ‘Every household. A draft of women.’ She could not get her breath to come evenly. Around them the crowd was coming apart: women running home, or running away. The world seemed to spin slowly, ponderously, around her, with the proclamation at its centre.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Alice said, but she had gone pale. ‘It can’t mean . . . It’s just a . . .’

Emily looked around her, seeing her heart mirrored in every face. Here a girl of Alice’s age was weeping into her mother’s apron. Here a woman clutched her children to her, face upturned towards the pale winter sky. A tradesman’s wife started backing away, her husband’s tools slung about her waist, her face slack at the thought of it. A young woman kept staring intently at the notice, one hand clenched at her waist as though a sabre already hung there.

Beyond the disintegrating crowd, Emily saw the open doorway of the town hall, and a shabbily dressed figure standing framed within it. Mr Northway stared out across this great morass of woe, and she could not say whether he saw her or not.

*

‘It must be me,’ she explained calmly. ‘There is no option, no other choice.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ Mary protested, looking around the kitchen for support. Grammaine’s entire complement was there this evening: Emily’s sisters and the quartet of servants, all silently considering the news. On the kitchen table lay the papers delivered to each household so that a chosen new recruit could be nominated, named and her skills anatomized.

‘There has never been a draft of women,’ Mary continued. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing?’ In her arms baby Francis made a disgruntled sound as if in agreement. ‘It must be a mistake,’ she finished weakly. ‘They can’t really mean to send women to war.’

‘They must send someone,’ Emily said. ‘Who else, now, can they send?’

‘But they have sent men!’ Mary almost shouted. ‘They have sent the regular army, and then my Tubal, and a man from every other house, and then any man left who was not in his dotage or infancy. How can they call upon us now to send the women? It isn’t fair. We must not send anyone.’

‘And did we say that when Tubal went to war, or Rodric?’ Emily replied emptily. ‘We did not. If our little brother had the courage to take up a musket and go off to war, then what of us if we refuse? We make a mockery of his bravery, of the bravery of them all.’

There was a sudden sob from the corner of the room, and Emily turned to see Jenna putting her face in her hands.

‘What is it, Jenna?’

‘Please, ma’am . . .’ The maid tried to say more but huge, bullying sobs muscled in, one by one, to rack her, until old Poldry put his arms around her, letting her tears stain his threadbare jacket.

‘What is it?’ Emily repeated. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

‘She thinks you’ll send her, ma’am,’ Cook explained. ‘Ever since she heard the news, she’s been frantic. I heard this morning that other households have done it, sent a servant girl.’

Emily stared at her, and then at Jenna’s shuddering back, and inwardly her heart leapt. Life! it seemed to say. Life and freedom. I was so sure it must be me, and now . . . And her own words of just a moment before returned to her, and she felt ill at herself.

How could I? How could I even think it? Jenna was younger than Alice, a mere girl who had known little more than domestic service. How could Emily consider sending the poor creature to some distant war far beyond the world she knew, with a gun in her hands and no real understanding in her head.

‘We will not send Jenna,’ she declared with finality. Inside, she wanted to cry because of the load she was taking on her own shoulders. How much more prepared was she than Jenna would be? But still she spoke, and her voice barely betrayed the fear inside. ‘I think we all know who must go, now, to obey the King.’

‘Oh, no, Emily—’ Mary started.

‘Who else? Better me than Alice, and I will not have it said that the Marshwics send servants in their stead. We have always served the King, our family. We should be proud. I should be proud.’

‘There must be another way.’

‘No,’ Emily said. ‘No other way. First Tubal, then Rodric. Let us hope the war has had its fill once it’s got me. We have little enough left to give.’

*

Those women thus to be drafted from Chalcaster and its surroundings were to be sent to Gravenfield Barracks, thirty miles south along the railway line, for training to last forty days. So the next notice in the marketplace explained, and the eyes that had read it were dry now. The weeping was done, the decisions made.

A recruiting sergeant brought out of retirement had made his way from house to house throughout Chalcaster, and then by carriage between the outlying farmhouses and the estates of the countryside, and at every stop his list of names grew. When he came to Grammaine they were ready for him, and gave him bread and wine, and put brave faces on. Emily would be glad to go, she said. She would be happy to serve, as her ancestors had served.

He had a long, mournful face with a drooping moustache and, when he nodded, it seemed that he was seeing the worst he could imagine become real. At how many doors had he been an unwelcome guest? What scenes had he witnessed in carrying out his duty? What mothers had he parted from their children, sisters from sisters?

The list of the conscripts was posted in the marketplace, later, just in case any second thoughts were stealing about in the Chalcaster streets.

After the sergeant had been and gone, Emily’s dreams changed character, darkening into nightmares that tormented her. In those dreams, or most of them, she was running through Deerlings House, through room after room of cracked armour and rusting swords. Behind her, almost in arm’s reach, came the Denlanders. In her dream, they were just faceless grey shapes. She had no flesh to give them, but they had lusts, still. They called after her in whispering voices, entreating her, commanding her. They pursued her through the distorted rooms, chasing just exactly as fast as she fled them. The more she tried to find the ballroom and the King, the dimmer and smaller those chambers became. If she did not wake soon after that, she knew that she would find herself in the strangling garden with the futile angels, and so she forced herself awake each time the dream assaulted her, only to lie cold and alone in the small hours of the night.

One night, when she turned, at bay before the gate of the angels’ garden, it was not the host of faceless Denlanders that pursued her at all. Instead, Mr Northway stood there in front of her with his bleak little smile and his pale hand outstretched to offer her a dance, and she knew he was Death, and let him take her.

During the days those dreams overshadowed, she was listless, feeling each one fade into the next as the sands ran through the hourglass. Soon there would be none left.

The next night it was not through Deerlings that her nightmare rode, but to a place that she had never seen before.

The sun was like a glowing rivet in a bronze sky, and all about her was desolation and waste, a dusty, barren place of scrub and dry gullies, with canyon walls rising on either side.

‘Where can this be?’ she asked her dream and, beside her, Lord Deerling said, ‘This is my home now. This is the Couchant front.’ He had a musket in his hands, and his savages were with him, their owl-eyes glowing. Lord Deerling had the mad, staring eyes of an owl as well, and in the dream she realized it was because he had seen too much.

‘Why am I here?’ she asked him.

‘To fight. You are a soldier now,’ he replied. There were others there with them, as well. She saw Tubal, Mary’s husband. He had a gun, but was dressed in the brown suit he had worn at his printer’s shop. Rodric was in military uniform, though, and Giles Scavian wore the flowing long coat of a Warlock and he carried no gun.

‘The Denlanders are coming,’ said Lord Deerling, and pointed with an attenuated finger towards the horizon, at the very walls of the canyon. They were swarming with a great writhing grey mass that coated the rock and the ground beneath, and swirled and danced towards them, faster and faster.

Insects, she saw: crawling insects with great open jaws; a swarm of devouring insects rushing on them like a tide.

‘Aim your muskets!’ Lord Deerling commanded, but she backed away as the great host descended on them, devouring plant and earth and stone as it came.

‘Fire!’ barked Deerling, and he and his few loosed their weapons into that mass of gnawing things, and then the insects were on them, swarming all over them, consuming them and leaving only bones.

And then a thousand thousand glittering eyes were turned on her with all the malice and loathing that her own mind could generate. Scissoring mandibles sheared together and feelers twitched.

It was when they uttered her name, all of them together, that she awoke, thrashing at her bedclothes so hard that she tore them.

*

That morning found her in the drawing room, staring vacantly, lost within herself. Embroidery sat idle on her lap. She could apply her hands and mind to nothing. At the edge of earshot she seemed to hear again the gnawing and the chittering, the ant-army of Denland coming to devour her.

She was roused by the sound of raised voices from the kitchen. Alice’s was one – to no surprise – but the other was only slightly familiar. Emily summoned enough momentum to take her from her chair and through the door.

It was Penny Belchere, the messenger, in her pristine uniform, and she was holding a letter high, out of reach of Alice’s grasping hands.

‘What is going on here?’ Emily snapped, harsher than she meant to, one hand pressed to her head.

‘She won’t show me the letter!’ Alice complained. ‘Tell her she must!’

Emily turned a pained gaze onto Belchere, who saluted her smartly. ‘For your eyes only, see?’ She outlined the neat writing on the outside. ‘Miss Emily Marshwic. No other.’

‘Thank you, Soldier Belchere,’ Emily said, and took the letter grimly. Of course it was for her. Nobody else in the house was going to war.

‘If it’s from Rodric, I’m going to hate him when he gets back,’ Alice said. ‘How dare he write just to you?’

‘It isn’t his writing,’ Emily told her, and unsealed the paper.

She read it, and then read it again, slowly.

My Dear Emily,

Or is that time not yet come? My Dear Miss Marshwic, then.

I noted with interest and some apprehension that your name appeared on the list for the recent ‘Women’s Draft’, as the enactment is become known. I commend you for your public spirit. Well done.

Whilst I am sure that the glories and the camaraderie of the war front must appeal to one of your good breeding, it so happens that a post has recently been created here that I have yet to fill. Of course, I thought of you immediately. Taking myself as an example, I can say that there are many ways in which to serve your country, and the hand that holds the pen is as vital, albeit not so prestigious, as that which holds the sword.

I await your response at your soonest convenience, and ideally before the end of winter, at which point you will be required elsewhere.

Your obedient friend,

Cristan Northway.

She could almost hear his sly voice in the very wording of it. Unconsciously, she crumpled the message in her hands.

‘What is it, Emily?’ Alice was demanding, but Emily heard none of it. Instead, she was thinking: There is a way, after all. There is a way out. She had a reprieve. The guns of Denland would sound for someone else. The insects would not have her.

My Dear Emily, he had written. Was that show of interest news to her? He who never lied to her had yet lied by omission, his intentions towards her hidden in a storm of needling words. When they had talked, his objectives had lain on his desk between them, noted but unacknowledged. And she had conspired with him in that regard. She had never asked, never forced an admission from him and so never rejected him. She had been happy enough for his torch to be held for her behind his back. She had known.

She should be concerned, she realized, for he was a man who could not be trusted. And yet she did not care. He had given her a reprieve. What else was more important to her than life?

She felt her lip tremble suddenly, a sob of utter relief choked out of her. Alice was still demanding to know what was happening, and now Mary had come down as well. Emily regarded them through the blur of her tears and held out the creased letter.

Alice grabbed it first, and her eyes skipped across its words. ‘Oh . . .’ she said. ‘Oh my!’ And for once there was no more from her. She stayed quite quiet as Mary read next.

She could not have borne it if they had gone against her own wishes, but she asked anyway. ‘What do you think I should do?’

‘Take it!’ Alice insisted. ‘Oh, you must take it.’

‘Despite the way he dresses?’ Emily found a little of Northway’s own sarcasm creeping into her.

‘You only have to work for him, not dress like him,’ Alice said.

‘And you, Mary?’

‘I do not like the man, nor should you,’ said Mary. ‘But you cannot turn this down. You can stay at Grammaine. You don’t have to fight. This is wonderful.’

Emily thought of all her fine words, those wonderful words of duty and honour. She would not have thought that she could live with herself, by turning her back on them now.

Yet surely Mr Northway had to live with so much more, and did. So she could work for him and swallow her pride, and never have to go to war. And still, when Francis was a boy of seven asking, ‘What did you do in the war, Aunt Emily?’, she would have something to tell him. She could use Northway’s own words. Pens and swords.

‘I will go to Chalcaster tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I will accept his offer. I will work for Mr Northway.’

That night she slept well, for the first time since the draft list.

The morning found her jolting into Chalcaster in the buggy. All around her she saw signs of the times. Shops were being boarded up by wives who could no longer maintain them for their husbands. Possessions were being put away. Gifts were being given. In fifteen days, every woman on that draft list would be on her way to Gravenfield – except one.

She felt no guilt. She was beyond that now. The relief made her feel like a different woman. She had given in, finally. She had compromised and put herself first. It felt wonderful. It meant that she could sleep at nights.

Somewhere far off, the artillery was pounding at the Couchant front. The famous Lascanne lancers were thundering down on their foes. The Denlanders were creeping forward with their muskets, in their grey-clad hordes. She would see none of it now. It was as though the train that had been shunting her to some terrible destination had stopped, unscheduled, and she had got out and watched it steam away. What life she could make for herself, in this new place, she did not know, but at least it would be a life.

She brushed past the guards at the door without looking at them, without challenge. She did not wait to be announced. She swept into his office as though she owned it and stood before his desk, with her heart hammering. ‘I accept,’ she told him, casting his folded letter down on the desktop. ‘I accept it. Thank you, Mr Northway.’

The silence that fell after she said his name hung heavy in the air, like fog. It chilled her. She looked him in the face, at last.

She had never seen such an expression before, and never would again. Damned souls in hell would wear such a look of utter torment, but surely no man still living. It was the look of someone who had, in one single moment, been given everything he had ever asked for and had it denied him, all at once. Here was a man cheated by fate, robbed by blind chance, at the very moment when he came unto his kingdom.

‘Miss Marshwic . . .’ he began.

‘What is it?’ she asked him.

‘Miss Marshwic . . .’ The look of despair was slowly fading from him, to be replaced by an expression that was completely dead. His eyes flicked to the letter she had cast down, then to another missive he had lying open before him.

‘What is it?’ she demanded, more urgently. His hands were shaking slightly, and it was so out of character that it scared her.

‘I regret . . .’ He swallowed, voice drying up on him. ‘I am very sorry . . .’

‘What is it?’ for a third time. By this time she knew, and simultaneously she did not want to know – if he would only keep the news behind his teeth, then it need not be real. Her words spilled out from her nonetheless, inviting the worst.

‘It’s your brother, Miss Marshwic. He is dead.’

And the clammy silence descended on them both again. Emily clutched at the edge of the desk for support. There was a pain inside her, as though he had stabbed her. Northway watched her impassively.

‘Dead? Rodric?’

‘Miss Marshwic—’

‘Say nothing!’

She leant heavily on the desk, fighting for control, each breath more ragged than the last. A great emptiness was being torn inside her, gaping wider with each passing moment.

‘Mr Northway, you have always said you would not lie to me,’ she got out.

‘I have.’

‘Tell me one thing, Mr Northway. This post, you have created for me. This thing you have done, for me. When I came to you on his behalf at the start of autumn, and asked you to do this very thing for him, could you have done it?’

‘Miss Marshwic . . .’

‘Could you?’ she asked furiously. ‘Tell me the truth, as you claim you always do. Could you have saved my brother from this, Mr Northway?’

He was bold enough to look her in the face and say, ‘I could.’

Her resolve buckled at last and she collapsed into the chair across the desk from him and shook, fists clenched at her sides. She should weep aloud now: that was the dutiful sister’s part, after all. Her eyes remained dry, though. She had another role facing her than to be a stay-at-home mourner. Rodric was gone. He was gone and she knew what must be done now.

‘I bitterly regret,’ she forced out, ‘that I must refuse your generous offer.’

‘Miss Marshwic, please, this need not change things . . .’

‘It does, Mr Northway.’

‘But it need not. You can still . . .’

She looked up, steely-eyed, and pinned him to his seat. ‘I am enlisting, Mr Northway. I am taking the Gold and the Red. I cannot work for you, and I cannot avoid my duty any more. I thought I could, but what would Rodric have said? What would any true servant of our country say about this sordid little deal of ours?’

‘You cannot go to war,’ he insisted.

‘I will.’

He stood suddenly, knocking his seat to the floor. Emotions came and went across his face like clouds. ‘Listen to me, Miss Marshwic. You’re an intelligent woman. You must know what this damned draft means. No sane man depopulates his nation for a winning war. No ruler sends his women – his country’s future – into battle just to hold enemy ground. You cannot believe that, Miss Marshwic. We are losing. You must have realized that. Every fourth day a list of the Chalcaster dead arrives, a list of the wounded who will never fight again. The war is not those lies you see in print. The war is death and maiming. The war is terror and bloody stupidity. I would spare everyone if I could, Miss Marshwic, but I cannot. I can spare only one person that fate, and the person I choose is you. Please, take the post I offer you here, for God’s sake, because the war is not as the papers or the gossip or the King himself tells it.’

The harsh words, from a man who had never lost his temper before, shocked her. ‘And you yourself have witnessed this war?’ she said quietly, for she knew he had not.

‘I hear. I listen. Believe me, Miss Marshwic, I know. The war goes badly, very badly for us. You cannot be blind to that.’

Her recent dreams agreed with him, eager now to start haunting her again. ‘I suppose I have known somehow, but it changes nothing, Mr Northway.’

‘But it must. Miss Marshwic, please . . .’

‘If anything, my country needs what little help I can give it even more.’

He slammed a fist down on the desk, scattering papers. He was racked, teeth bared like a fighting animal, and he could not force out the words he wanted. She was filled with wonder and with pity, seeing him like this. How had she driven him to it?

‘Please reconsider . . .’ he said. ‘I . . .’ But he could not say it. Tell the truth all he might, there were yet words that would choke him.

The tremendous wave of anger that had engulfed her had ebbed away by now, but her resolution was left stranded behind. ‘Mr Northway . . .’ Gentle, now that all was decided. He looked up with hope, though, and she finished, ‘I must go to war.’

‘I did not kill your brother.’ His face twisted with something that looked like self-loathing. ‘I did not kill your father. I did not kill your brother. I did not.’

‘It changes nothing.’

‘I am asking you, Miss Marshwic, to change your mind. There is still time. I do not want you to go to the front.’

‘And why not, Mr Northway?’ she said at last. ‘Tell me more of your truth. Tell me why you would commit treason for me and not for Rodric.’

He stared at her with hollow, hungry eyes. His perennial mask was gone, and the smile with it. So little was left of the urbane, wicked man she had thought she knew. Slowly he righted his chair, slumped back into it. His lips moved, but no words came. He could only stare at her, with all entreaties exhausted. Of the two of them, he looked more like the one facing a death sentence.

9.

The first task at Gravenfield was to put us in uniform. You may imagine exactly what a travesty that was. Picture a mass of women of all ages, from girls younger than Alice to women older than Cook, cramming themselves into those ill-tailored britches and shirts. There was a great deal of amusement from all concerned, and I may safely describe it as a shambles. I believe women must be of a greater variety of shapes than men. Certainly we are quite different sizes. Nobody received clothes that fit. We looked more like tatty mummers than soldiers, and there was a sense that we were all playing some child’s game of dressing up.

Then the master sergeant asked for all those who had been dressers of hair or barber’s wives, and he had some old men on hand, too, who had shorn a head or two in their time. He had us line up, and then he told these people to cut our hair short – everyone’s hair to be as short as his own in a man’s style. There was no more laughing from that point on. Many complained and we protested, but we were soldiers now and we would dress like soldiers, and wear our hair like soldiers. It was cold in early spring, with our hair cut back to the napes of our necks.

Those of the women who had trades and skills that Lascanne could make use of were siphoned off to factories and workshops across the country, there to put their experience to work for the King’s shilling. They were the lucky ones.

Unsurprisingly, being a landed gentlewoman of good family was not a skill the war effort could find any great use for, and so Emily, along with around half the other recruits from Chalcaster, found herself dispatched to Gravenfield to learn how to become a soldier.

Gravenfield: it had been twenty years since anyone had thought of using that place as anything more than a store. A windswept, walled compound surrounded by bleak moorland, the erstwhile barracks had last seen active service in the Hellic wars. A day’s ride from the nearest railway station, it had been too remote during peacetime to amount to anything more than a punishment. Now, with the advent of the Women’s Draft, some resourceful mind within the army had unearthed Gravenfield once again. This was where the women of Chalcaster, and a half-dozen other towns, were to be turned into soldiers.

Their transformation would not come easily.

After providing the uniforms, with all that entailed, they tried to teach the women to march. The duty fell to a portly master sergeant, a few years short of three score, who introduced himself as: ‘I am MASTER Sergeant BOWLER, and YOU will call me SIR. Is that CLEAR?’ His moustache and his belly quivered in unison whenever he shouted, which was almost every third word.

‘ON this parade ground YOU will learn to MARCH like SOLDIERS. You are no longer WOMEN. There are no WOMEN in the ARMY. You are in the ARMY so you must be SOLDIERS, and SOLDIERS MARCH!’ he bellowed. A rabble of four hundred women, Emily included, stared at him blankly.

‘On my COMMAND, into COLUMNS. Columns NOW!’

There was a murmur of giggles. Master Sergeant Bowler surveyed his recruits with dismay. There was no attempt to line up in columns, and no real understanding of what a column was. He opened his mouth to shout and swear at them, as he was used to; to belittle and berate until his charges were broken and obedient.

It was to be the breaking of Master Sergeant Bowler, because he found himself unable to do it. After all, despite there being no women in the army, these were unmistakably women and, in the decent middle-class family that had produced Master Sergeant Bowler, one did not swear at women. He regarded them, goggle-eyed, moustache twitching. ‘Into columns,’ he suggested. ‘March?’

Eventually, and out of mutual boredom, he had them tramping about the parade ground for an hour, but it was a sight of dismal horror to a military man. The problem, Bowler must have realized, was that they didn’t understand the necessity of it. As a career soldier, he knew that to march – to achieve discipline and precision by the repetitious and orderly stamping about on a parade ground – was the very kernel of being in the army. All his previous recruits had understood that too, and if they had not, he had bawled it into them until they had. All his previous recruits, of course, had been men.

By the end of the fourth day he was beginning to feel like a shepherd without a dog. He gave up, at that point, and passed his grievances on to his superior.

The commanding officer of the Gravenfield camp made himself known to them on the fifth day, after Bowler had them approximately lined up before the stark grey walls of the main barracks.

He appeared not at the balcony Emily was looking up at but at the main door: a heavily built man in a uniform with the insignia of a major. He stood very straight, with one hand on the hilt of his sabre, and there was something wrong with his face, something not immediately obvious.

‘Good morning, soldiers,’ he said. His voice was quiet and crisp and authoritative.

‘Good morning, sir,’ came the ragged reply.

‘Master Sergeant Bowler has told me you will not march,’ he continued. ‘Very well. I don’t think we have time to drill you, or need. The rest you will learn, though. You will learn it because, when your papers come through, when we are done with you here, you will be going to the war. If you have not learned what we have to teach you, then you will die, and you will cause the deaths of your comrades. Is that clear?’

He had their utter attention now.

‘I can promise you nothing,’ he said. ‘You will learn only what you are willing to learn. I have no faith in sending women to war. If you listen, though; if you watch what is shown to you; if you give us your undivided attention, then you may leave here with half the skills necessary to ensure your own survival.’ The left side of his face had not moved during all these words.

They were split into classes of forty or so and put to work learning their geography and history, their ranks and uniforms, taking care of kit, basic medicine and the elegant business of taking a life with a gun.

Emily and her squad filed into the gunnery sergeant’s room with some trepidation. The rest had been window-dressing, they all felt. This was to be the true apprenticeship, the mark of a soldier.

‘Ladies, gather round.’ The gunnery sergeant was an unexpectedly small man, sitting low behind his desk at one end of his cramped office. To one side, the long windows had been thrown open to show the brown lawns of Gravenfield, with wooden targets standing mute and blasted.

‘How many of you have ever fired a gun?’ His face was creased with old pain, and it creased further when only Emily raised her hand. He took a moment to gather his strength. He was really too young for this, and they all wondered why he was not at the war front himself.

‘I am Sergeant Demaine,’ he told them. ‘I will teach you how to kill your enemies, and how not to kill your friends.’ He came out from behind his desk and a shudder rippled through the recruits, because his chair came with him, Demaine guiding it around the corners with awkward, angular movements. He had no legs, only stumps. He looked up at them brightly. ‘You think this is bad? You should see my horse.’

They fell back as he approached, and he wheeled his way spasmodically across the room and onto the uneven lawn outside, where he struggled to force it along.

‘Do you want help, Sergeant?’ Emily asked, and he looked up at her warningly.

‘No help,’ he said. ‘Now take up a gun, all of you. Get a feel for the weight. Get used to it.’

It was the death of innocence, that day. Two score women heard the thunder of a discharging musket by their ears, felt the murderous kick at their shoulders and smelt the stink of smoke in their nostrils. When they had been shown how to load, tamp and prime them, after they had put the guns to their shoulders and discharged that first volley, they were changed beyond all recognition. Some had dropped the guns in the instant of firing. Others clutched at their hands, or held their ears in pain. Only Emily remained with the musket butt tight against her shoulder, looking down the lean line of the barrel. The smell of that smoke – the smell of the shuttered room – passed over and through her, and she knew that she would lose the association now. It would not be the death of her father she smelt. It would just be the smoke of a gun, because she would be a soldier.

‘Yes, your shoulders hurt!’ Demaine confirmed. ‘Yes, they will hurt, and they will hurt every day from now until the war ends, whether on that day it ends for all of us or just for you. Get used to it, ladies. Yes, the guns are loud, the smoke hurts your eyes, and the sound hurts your ears. It is not the smoke or the noise that kills the enemy, ladies. It is the musket ball that you aim with care. You do not close your eyes. You do not flinch. You do not jerk away as you fire. These things a soldier does not do. You look your enemy in the eye as you fire, and, when the noise and the smoke come, you embrace them as your friends and allies, because they mean you have done your job.’

Emily lowered her musket slowly, feeling the weight of it already familiar. Some of the others were complaining, saying their arms hurt too much to fire the gun again. One said, ‘I thought you soldier types got swords. Why can’t we get a sword? I reckon I could use one of them.’

Demaine wheeled himself closer to her. ‘I haven’t got a sword myself, soldier.’

‘But I could have one,’ the woman pointed out.

Demaine smiled at her. ‘There is a sabre behind my desk. Go and get it, would you?’

As the woman ran off inside, he reached out to Emily and took her musket, then reloaded it without looking, fingers practised and nimble. When the woman came out with his sabre, unsheathed, he was aiming at her.

‘What . . . what’re you doing, Sergeant?’ she gabbled at him.

‘You have a sword, like you wanted. So now what?’

‘Well, I didn’t mean . . .’

He did not lower the gun. ‘If you have a sword, then you must be strong, swift, nimble all at once, and you must have your enemy within arm’s reach. I am no good any more with a sword, but I can kill a man a hundred yards away just with my eye and my finger. A gun makes killers of us all, ladies. It will make the slightest of you as deadly as the biggest, strongest man, and you will never have to pit yourselves against him, to strike and avoid his blows and land your own. All you have to do is pull the trigger and he will be dead. And when your own death comes, ladies, it will not be from a man standing before you, pitting himself against you. It will come suddenly, and you will never see who has done it.’ He lowered the gun at last and gazed down at it almost fondly. ‘With one of these, ladies, and a good eye, I am as deadly as any man that runs on two legs – and so can you be. Practice is all.’

By the end of their first day of gunnery practice, Demaine had deputized Emily as an instructor. She had not realized it before, but she was the only gentlewoman in the whole of Gravenfield. The rest were tradeswomen, farm girls and domestics, and precious few of them had ever so much as touched a gun before. Demaine took her and a few who had been gamekeeper’s wives, and made them his people. Soon they were holding classes of their own, teaching the swift reload, the steady aim, the measured breathing that would make killers of them all, even the weakest and the slightest. Demaine did not believe, as the major did, that women had no place in war. For him the musket had broadened the field of combat to the whole of the human race.

It was hard for Emily, during those early days. She gave her full attention to the task in hand, and found herself alone, amongst the four hundred women of Gravenfield. When she entered the dormitory, they looked at her as though she had come to tell them what to do. They resented her, because she was well-born and they were not, and it marked her out.

Oh, they listened to her as she showed them how the lock of a musket worked, or how to clear a misfire. They were quite attentive. As soon as the class was over, though, they turned their backs on her. She was different to them, singled out by birth and by experience. She met such a wave of cold hostility that she could not imagine what could have happened to harden them against her in such a way. She could not know – until it was explained to her later – that the prevalent belief was that she would be spared, held back as an instructor as the rest marched off, or just held back because of who she was. Encountering their coldness, she met it with an aloofness of her own that only reinforced the gap between her and her fellow recruits. It was as much her failure as theirs. She should have seen it coming.

History was taught by Mrs Melchance, a grey-haired schoolmistress drafted in because no further soldiers could be spared for the business. Emily considered that she did not really need to know about the causes of the war. Surely the fact of it was enough. For a soldier fighting at the front, the inexorable tides of history were as unalterable as the weather.

Still, some bureaucrat had insisted that the recruits should be educated, and so she listened grimly as Mrs Melchance recounted the shock that had gripped the country when the war started. Denland and Lascanne had been the sibling states, politically united against a hostile world. Their royal families had been close cousins, had intermarried. Soldiers from Denland had fought alongside the heroes of Lascanne as recently as the Hellic wars.

And then came the regicide. As all there recalled, the cowardly assassination of Denland’s royal family had been news that cut through the heart of Lascanne’s people like a scythe. Without warning, a friendly neighbour had been gripped by madness, casting off the cautioning reins of monarchy and adopting a proletariat government that turned its hate-filled eyes on Lascanne. To justify its existence, Mrs Melchance explained, the Republic of Denland felt bound to destroy that which was not like itself. A flourishing and happy monarchy next door might give its newly enslaved subjects hope.

That was why they must fight, the old woman told them, with tears in her eyes. The whole Lascanne way of life hung in the balance. If the monsters of republicanism and their Denlandish slaves prevailed, then Lascanne’s centuries of history would be rewritten in a day.

And she showed them the pages of a geography text that had been repurposed as a map of the warfront. She showed them where the lines were drawn. Here was the broad expanse of the Couchant front, the high country that formed the borderlands between Denland and Lascanne. There the war was being prosecuted in lightning manoeuvres by the dashing royal cavalry sweeping across the plateaus, or in pitched skirmishes in the canyons. Over there the great bulk of both nations’ forces struggled, each reaching desperately to establish a new foothold on the native ground of the other.

Regarding the Levant front, its dark swamps and desperation, Mrs Melchance said almost nothing, and yet a knowledge of it came seeping into the minds of the recruits like damp. The horrors of that inimical place were already the stuff of nightmares to them, even looking upon a simple and stylized depiction of it here on out-of-date maps.

Her mind full of hard, stale crusts of history, Emily was on her way to the refectory when she was called out.

‘Oi, miss!’ a harsh voice yelled at her, and she turned to see three of her classmates glowering at her. She recognized the woman who had shouted as Sally something-or-other, a burly creature whose uniform shirt strained over her large belly, and whose arms were heavy with muscle from a life of toil. Two women of more slender proportions, but the same unpleasant expressions, flanked her menacingly.

‘Were you addressing me?’ Emily asked them coldly.

‘Was I addressing her?’ Sally mocked. ‘How posh you do talk, miss. Think you’re the bloody arse of the earth, don’t you?’

Emily made herself calm as she realized what they wanted. This was their own little republican struggle, she supposed, inevitable as history.

‘Go away,’ she told them disdainfully, and Sally jeered back at her.

‘Won’t you say please, posh miss? I thought it was proper to say please.’

‘Please, go away.’ Emily kept her hands at her sides, but she was tensing up inwardly. She guessed that she could say anything and everything, and there would still be hell to pay at the end of it. If only the major, or Bowler, would appear round the corner. Nobody did, though. This once, the world had left her to her own devices.

‘Know what?’ Sally said. ‘I’m going to teach you how much better you are than me. I’m fed up of you going about with your nose in the air, thinking you’re such a bloody gentlewoman. Maybe you’ll change your mind once I’ve mashed it a bit.’

‘What have you got against me?’ Emily asked. She’s working her courage up, she realized unexpectedly. Sally was far larger than her but, even so, the woman had to talk a fight up. It gave Emily a sliver of hope.

‘You nobs! You know how long I was in service? Fifteen bloody years! And soon as the Draft comes along, I get chucked out here without a word of bloody thanks, cos they’re too bloody scared to send their own. Bloody cast-off, that’s what I was.’

‘Me too,’ said one of the other women. ‘I’d a son, too. They promised they’d find someone to look after him, but I know them. He’s only nine and he can’t look after himself, can he? But I reckon they had him out the door the moment they’d packed me off here!’

‘What is this to do with me?’ Emily said. ‘I came here, didn’t I? I didn’t send anyone in my place. Your grievances are with the households you came from, not with me.’

‘Oh, grievances,’ Sally mocked. ‘Yeah, well.’ She shook her head ponderously. ‘They ain’t here and you are.’ And with that piece of philosophy she lumbered forward with a surprising turn of speed and reached out to grab. She caught Emily off guard with her attack, despite all her preparation. One hand nipped at the collar of Emily’s jacket; the other grasped her hair and pulled.

She had fought before, this Sally. She was not new to the sport, but she was only used to fighting other women. The short-cut hair slipped from her fingers, and Emily cuffed her weakly across the face and fell back before her, tugging herself free. In a quick shrug she had her jacket off and on the ground, facing the larger woman in her shirtsleeves.

Sally lumbered towards her, face ugly, and Emily moved backwards and around in a wide circle. She kept an eye on the other two, but they seemed content to watch their friend do all the work. For a big woman, Sally moved well, and twice her great hands almost latched on to Emily. The third time one did, clasping about the smaller woman’s wrist and hauling her in so that Emily bounced off the woman’s belly. Sally slapped her across the face and shoulder, hard enough to make her head ring, and Emily tried to get an arm up to return the favour and banged Sally under the chin with her elbow instead. The big woman bit her tongue savagely and cursed. She still held Emily’s wrist, and shook her hard, rattling her back and forth before going for her hair again, trying vainly to get a grip.

Emily slapped her hard across the face, forehand and backhand, and then raked her nails into the other woman’s cheek, but Sally cuffed her firmly across the jaw and shook her like a dog, her grip unshakeable. She gave up on the hair and tried to hook Emily’s shirt collar.

This isn’t going to work. Emily realized that she was losing badly, and she also realized that she was fighting like a woman; they both were. I’m not a woman, I’m a soldier. She was dressed like one, shorn like one, she would fight like one. She bunched her free hand into a fist and punched the larger woman right in the eye.

She had not expected it to hurt her so much, given how much men were always punching each other. It must have had some effect on her target, though, for Sally squawked and let go, and Emily hit her again under the chin, pain be damned, and then stamped on her foot for good measure. Sally collapsed backwards, floundering madly, and Emily got in a kick that landed somewhere painful.

Then she stood back and waited, her breath heaving in and out, while the bigger woman clambered to her feet. Sally was staring at her, face purple and angry, and Emily felt the moment teeter in the balance. Scenarios were being played out in the minds of Sally’s supporters as they judged whether they were going to pitch in or not.

‘You see?’ she got out between breaths. ‘I’m no better. I’m just like you. And I’ll fight. I’ll fight all of you. But I don’t want to. Because you’re right, it’s none of it fair. None of us wanted to be here.’

She expected her words to fall flat, and for hostilities to be resumed forthwith, but instead Sally stared at her angrily, then nodded just once. There was no love there, precious little respect even, but there was something that had been absent before the fight. It was little enough, between them, but enough for some forbearance. After a moment, the big woman spat a gob of blood onto the ground and stomped away, with one of the two women following her.

I never knew I could do this. What put it in me? Perhaps this willingness to fight despite the odds was what Mr Northway had seen in her.

But haven’t I always been fighting? she considered, still catching her breath. After Father died, it has been one long struggle for me. So why not this? After all, fighting is for soldiers.

She looked at the one woman remaining, and was surprised by a broad grin.

‘You sure you’re a gentlewoman?’ the woman asked.

‘Last I looked. A very minor one.’ Her hand hurt abominably, and she set off for the refectory to get some cold water for it.

‘Hey!’ the woman called after her. ‘You know what you said about not sending someone else in your place.’

‘Yes?’

‘I understood it.’ She fell into place beside Emily. She was a tall girl, auburn hair now in the regulation cut, long of limb and slender, and she had an easy smile. ‘Hell, I wasn’t even in service when I got the Draft.’

‘No?’

‘I was locked up.’

‘Locked up?’ Emily raised an eyebrow at her. ‘In prison?’

‘Sure. A tiny misunderstanding. Say, what’s your name, my lady?’

‘Nobody’s lady. Emily; Emily Marshwic.’

‘Well, Emily, I reckon you’re a good sort, even though you’re posh. Good to meet you. I’m Elise.’

*

Elise was a well-liked girl. Having her approval meant that Emily became, if not popular, then at least tolerated. More than that, it gave Emily someone to talk to, someone to tell her worries and frustrations to.

She told Elise all about Grammaine, the house, the servants, the history. She told her about her sisters Mary and Alice, and all her concerns about them: how could they possibly cope without her? The one subject she did not touch on, because she was so unsure about it herself, was Mr Northway.

‘So, do you have family back home?’

‘I don’t even have a “back home”,’ Elise revealed. ‘My folks packed me off as soon as, and I’ve not seem them since. They had enough others to look after. No room for one more mouth that’s old enough to feed herself. I was in service myself for a bit, till they chucked me out. I’d gotten a little too friendly with the under-butler – and the youngest son. Well, they’d got too friendly with me, and how was I supposed to say no? But that’s never how they see it once the thing gets out. After that I tried all sorts, never really settled on anything.’

‘You’re . . . all alone?’ Around them were the quiet sounds of the dormitory just before lights out. Conversations, a few giggles, whispered gossip and gasps of astonishment.

‘On and off.’ Elise shrugged. ‘This Draft business’s turned out to be all right, really. I get meals and a roof, and people to talk to. I’m learning a trade. I’d like to see them put me back on the streets after this, with me knowing guns and things.’

She was a bold, brassy woman, unashamed of her past or her future. She seemed so very comfortable with who she was. Emily had not dreamed such people existed. She was beginning to realize that the belligerent Sally had been right to call her out. She knew so little about the world.

‘But . . . I thought I had to fight for things,’ Emily confessed, ‘but at least I had people, a home . . .’

Elise grinned at her. ‘Sounds nice, this home of yours. Reckon there’d be a place for me there after the war?’

‘Perhaps. Assuming I ever see it again. But surely you must have somebody.’ The thought was bothering Emily. ‘Friends? A sweetheart, perhaps?’

‘Oh, men!’ Elise laughed, turning the heads of the women nearest. ‘I wondered what you were getting at. Oh, I’ve had men, Ems.’

Emily put her hand to her mouth, scandalized and fascinated all at once. It was horribly wrong, this kind of talk, but for all that – because of that, even – it was interesting. ‘But . . . you weren’t married.’

‘They didn’t make the man that could marry me,’ Elise boasted. ‘A few of them offered, but they never meant it. That’s men for you.’ She leant close to Emily, glancing around to ensure secrecy. ‘Matter of fact I’ve had a few rumpled nights here, believe it or not.’

‘Here? Not with Sergeant Bowler, please.’

‘That bag of lard? God protect me. No, I talked my way into Demaine’s bed, though.’

Emily opened her mouth a few times before she managed, ‘Demaine, but—’

‘What, so his legs are missing? The important bits are still there. I just love the way he knows what he’s talking about so much. I always did like little men who knew who they were.’ Another broad, utterly unashamed grin. ‘So, your ladyship, any young lords in your life?’

Emily thought of Mr Northway, and fended away the image. Giles Scavian came to mind as well – and at his back the golden light of the King.

‘It’s complicated,’ she said, and Elise agreed.

‘It always is.’

*

A few scant days were all that was left of their training. The women at Gravenfield were almost finished, almost ready to be rated as soldiers. They could shoot and they could read a map. They knew where Denland was, and why they were fighting it. Some could ride, and some could follow tracks, and a handful had been trained as cannon crew. Emily had been placed in none of these latter groups, although she was already a better horsewoman than most of the other recruits. She had requested it, but her name had never been included on the lists.

They were just finishing a morning gunnery class with Sergeant Demaine. He had ordered a wire to be tied at a slant between two posts, and one of the recruits released targets that slid joltingly down it, while the firing line attempted to put shots into them. The success rate had been sporadic. A fair number of them still winced at the discharge of the musket, instinctively pulling it out of line. One or two were simply hopeless shots.

‘All right, all right, that will have to be enough, and God protect the lot of you,’ Demaine called out. ‘Off for your luncheon, then. I hear you’ll be running round the grounds this afternoon, so keep your strength up.’

The class began to move off the lawn and in through Demaine’s office, with Elise squeezing the sergeant’s arm as she passed him, their affair being public knowledge by now. Demaine glanced up at her and then barked, ‘Not you, Marshwic. Got something different for you. Stay behind.’

Emily watched the other women leave. Demaine’s face held no clues but she felt that somehow she had done something wrong.

‘What is it, Sergeant?’ she asked him, but he shook his head.

‘Not me. Major Castwood wants to see you.’

‘The major? Why?’ Since his address to them at the start of their training, none of the recruits had seen much of their commanding officer.

‘No idea, Marshwic, but I wouldn’t keep him waiting. He asked me to send you to him before the class, but I thought you needed the practice.’

He was seldom found beyond the confines of his private office, was Major Castwood, and there was much speculation about him. Why was he not at the war? What was wrong with him – with his face? He had almost never appeared to his charges during the time they had been under his care, but it was known he spoke to the sergeants and the teachers every day or so, hearing reports of who was proving apt and who was slow.

Emily approached his door now with trepidation. Had there been some more news from the front, perhaps. Is it Tubal? Had the war taken her brother-in-law now? Mary would be inconsolable. Mary would need her support just when she could not give it. Or was it news from home: terrible news that only the major could give? Brigands, perhaps. Debts that had fallen due, threatening the future of Grammaine itself. Or perhaps one of the staff had died – old Poldry maybe? But, no, they would not trouble to tell me of a servant’s death. It was an oddly bitter thought. So many of the women she was training with, the same women she would be fighting alongside, were servants thrown to the Draft. Who are the powers that be to count their lives the less for it?

She rapped smartly and waited, before his quiet voice came clearly through the door. ‘Enter.’

Standing before his desk, she remembered to salute. The room was a small one, and nothing like Mr Northway’s opulence. There were maps on the desk itself and on the walls, with drawings and notes on them. She imagined the major had been fighting the war here, solely for his own benefit, or fighting and refighting his own past battles, perhaps.

He looked up at her, and she took the chance to study his face, never before seen so closely. The one side was the face of a man of later middle years, lined with pain and toil. The other was smooth, pale, and the eye stared out of it as unnaturally as if it sat on a dinner plate.

A mask, she saw: a porcelain mask, but done very finely. From any distance one might almost not realize, until he tried to speak.

‘Miss Marshwic,’ he said out of one side of his mouth, and then: ‘The answer to your question is that I was standing next to Demaine’s horse. Think about it.’

For an awful moment she almost laughed, but he was being quite serious. She composed herself.

‘You sent for me, sir.’

‘I did. Listen up, Marshwic. I hear things about you. Think you’re having a tough time of it here?’

‘No more than anyone else, sir.’

‘Is that so?’ He raised his eyebrow. ‘Word is you’ve been getting into fights, is that so?’

‘Isn’t that what we’re trained for, sir?’

His lips twitched. ‘That could count as insolence, Marshwic.’

‘Is there a problem, sir?’

‘Yes, there is.’ He stood up, his broad-shouldered frame looming over the desk, overshadowing her. ‘The problem is that I have four hundred green recruits – four hundred women, for the Lord’s sake – who aren’t going to last a moment when the war comes for them. My problem is that they ship sooner than I’d like, and there’s not a damn thing more I’ve got time to teach them. My problem is that I am sending troops to the war who are undisciplined, unskilled and frankly just unready for combat, and that I have no choice but to send them. Orders are orders. Do you see my problem, Marshwic?’

‘I do, sir.’ Emily might have felt apart from the mass of her fellow recruits, but now she felt a sudden surge of loyalty towards them, hearing them attacked like this.

‘Any suggestions?’

‘If you give us a chance, sir, we will not disappoint you.’

He stood back, regarding her through narrowed eyes. ‘Will you not?’ He sighed. ‘Well then, I’m afraid I’m going to have to make an example of you, Marshwic.’

She stood silent and stiff, waiting for it.

‘I’m making you an ensign.’

‘Sir?’

‘You must have heard of it. It’s the lowest rank in the army above soldier-at-arms. In the olden days they used to carry the flags around. Now it just means you get to do the jobs the sergeant doesn’t want.’

‘Sir, I know, sir, but . . . why me?’

‘Because you listen and you concentrate, and you have at least some intelligence about you, or so I’ve heard. Sergeant Demaine says you’ve some idea of which way to hold a gun, which is more than most of them, even after all this time.’ He must have seen a hint of hubris in her expression, because he added, ‘But mostly because you’re a gentlewoman, and it’s bad form to have someone of good blood as a common soldier. And don’t get too proud of yourself. I’m making four ensigns and a sergeant today, so you’re not even top of the class. Any questions?’

‘What will this mean, sir?’

‘That you’ll have even more to worry about than anyone else. Dismissed, now, Marshwic. Off you go.’

10.

In the forty days since we left home, we had ceased to think of the war. It seems incredible to me now but the very training to become a soldier had eclipsed the reasons behind it.

All such thoughts returned to us a few days before the end of our time at Gravenfield when we were brought before Major Castwood again. He explained that we were to be portioned out. Most of us would go to support the dashing cavalry of the Couchant front: the mountain passes, the plateaus and the plains. This was Castwood’s old command, and Lord Deerling’s of course, offering the grand spectacle of war as we forced the Denlanders back beyond their own borders.

And some few would be consigned to the Levant front. Such a pretty name it is for such a place. Levant, meaning ‘to rise’, as Couchant is ‘to retire’; the nomenclature of the war dictated by the habits of the sun itself. But the sun has little enough to do with the Levant front. Here are only swamps, fetid jungles and a brackish salt marsh which draws no clear line between land and sea.

They were all terrified of being sent there. Not I.

The announcements were due to be made that day, and most of the morning there was a crowd of women waiting anxiously in the refectory or the dormitory. They talked in low voices about the future, muttering and murmuring about east and west. The war, staved off for so many days, was back with them, like a spectre haunting each and every face.

Emily had already made her way to the major’s office, only to find that others had got there first. There was a queue of women waiting to be seen, more than twenty of them, but none of them having to wait long. Each entered and was sent out again within a minute, with a set, despairing look on her face.

Elise came out next, and stomped down the line looking angry, stopping only when Emily caught her arm.

‘What did he say?’

‘He says we don’t get a say in it. We go where we’re put. Bastard. I asked Demaine to put in a word for me, but he said he couldn’t help either.’ Elise’s relationship with Sergeant Demaine had only just recovered from her discovering that she was not, after all, going to be an officer, and now it looked as though, at the eleventh hour, it was about to take another beating.

‘You might as well give it a miss,’ Elise advised. ‘He ain’t budging.’

Emily shrugged. ‘I’ll ask. What can I lose?’

‘Nob’s privilege?’ Elise asked her. ‘Take me with you, will you?’

Emily smiled, and saw that she was next to bring her petition. In such a short time the others had been disposed of, and there was still an anxious line behind her. She squeezed Elise’s arm and went in.

Major Castwood’s maimed expression, when he saw her before him, was one of disappointment.

‘Marshwic,’ he said. ‘I must have seen a quarter of Gravenfield’s complement today, but all of them soldiers-at-arms. At least those I promoted have had the sense and the duty to stay away, and accept what they’re given. Still, I suppose you are gentle born, and that usually counts for something.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Don’t,’ Castwood warned her flatly. ‘Your family gives you the right to be told this politely rather than summarily, that is all. There are soldiers required for the Couchant front, and soldiers required for the Levant front. The lots have been drawn. I will not borrow from one to pay the other, nor do I think it just to swap. Not even for your family name will I do this, Ensign Marshwic. The decision was made by pure chance, because in this I must be fair.’

‘I understand, sir.’

‘Than why are you here, Marshwic?’ Castwood demanded.

‘Because I want to go to the Levant front, Major. I know there are dozens, scores who want the opposite, but I want the Levant, and I would gladly swap.’

‘Why?’ Castwood leant back in his chair, frowning.

‘Because I have a brother-in-law there. Because I had a brother there, until he was killed. Because it was his death that brought me here. Sir.’

Castwood looked at her a long time, and Emily was aware of that long line of hopeful, desperate women outside, who would be noting the seconds as they dragged on. Bloody Marshwic, bloody nob’s daughter, they would be thinking, but they would have been surprised if they could have eavesdropped.

‘A dead brother is a bad reason to choose the Levant,’ Castwood told her. ‘I remember what it felt like to be righteous and noble about things and, believe me, I feel a fool every time I come to shave.’

‘But, sir—’

‘A brother-in-law, though: living family? That’s better,’ he said. ‘Stick close to him. The swamps of the Levant are a difficult place to be new in.’

‘Then you’ll—’

‘I see no problem with shipping anyone who asks to the Levant. As you say, there are plenty who want the opposite.’

‘Could I ask . . . there’s a woman called Elise Hally—’

‘Ensign Marshwic!’ Castwood barked. ‘If I will not dabble in the fate of my recruits for my own pleasure – and the offers I have had today, in money, goods or female flesh would make a bawd and a pawnbroker blush – then I will not do so for you. You yourself have taken the place of one woman who will find the Couchant front more to her liking, but which one you will never know.’

They were kept waiting in the refectory after lunch, and everyone knew that it was going to be then. Master Sergeant Bowler stepped up onto one of the tables with a great long list in his hands, all of four hundred names.

‘These now before me, whose names I read out,’ he called, ‘shall be joining His Majesty’s forces at the Couchant front. Absolon, Theresa; Acherson, Sally; Afland, Leese; Afland, Yolanda; Aillen, Jane . . .’ He marched through the names at a steady, military pace, and pockets of relief burst all over the room as one woman after another heard her name given, and knew that she was to be spared the swamps of the Levant. The quicker women understood, as the alphabet trudged past with no mention of them, and Bowler’s recitation gathered momentum with a growing moan of quiet despair from those who knew that they had been passed over. Emily looked to Elise, beside her, as Bowler ploughed through the H’s, and saw the realization dawn on her friend when the master sergeant got to, ‘Helender, Grace.’

‘I guess you couldn’t do anything for me,’ said Elise, with no blame in her voice. ‘I’m sure you tried.’

‘I did try,’ Emily told her, mentally marking off the names as they came, and waiting. ‘I couldn’t help you one way or another.’

‘One way or . . . What’s that supposed to mean?’ Elise asked, but Emily held a hand up and listened closely as the names paraded across the room, leaving joy and despair in their wake.

‘Mabbins, Cath; Masefield, Bridgett,’ Bowler announced, and then, ‘Matchlock, Gemima,’ and then another name, and another, and Emily waited for Elise to catch up and realize.

‘But . . .’ And then Elise nodded. ‘So, I reckon you couldn’t shift the old bastard either.’

Emily was going to explain then just what had passed between her and Castwood, and even about trying to swap with Elise. It would have been boasting, though, and boasting to cover her own fear. She did fear, despite what she told herself. The reactions of her fellow recruits were contagious.

‘I couldn’t, no,’ she told Elise. ‘Some things just can’t be changed.’

They listened together as the roll call continued, and each woman in the room understood what her fate was to be. Elise was trying to look philosophical, Emily saw, but there were tears in the corners of her eyes, and her lips were pressed tightly together. Emily took her hand and clasped it tight.

‘It will be all right,’ she promised. ‘I’ll look after you.’ What easy words they were to say.

‘Yanlo, Karen,’ said Bowler, and paused a moment before rolling the list up again with the precision of his profession. The room was quite quiet now, aside from a little sniffling, and on the master sergeant’s face there was an odd, awkward expression of sympathy that sat badly there.

‘Those of you whose names I have just read out are to report to the station on the fortieth, from where you will be taken direct by train to the staging post at Gare. You’ll have to march from there. Remember: left and then right?’ He made a weak smile. ‘You lot go out and make sure you’ve got your kit requisitioned and ready. I want to talk to the rest.’

After the chair-scraping, the quick steps and the excited murmur of conversation just outside the door, the room was a very still place indeed. About four out of every five of the recruits had gone, Emily saw. The Couchant front was a broader, easier field of battle, and thus could better use the greater numbers.

She turned her eyes to the master sergeant, as did everyone still there. He faced them with a soldier’s bravery.

‘The rest of you are for the Levant front, as you’ve guessed,’ he said. ‘Right then: they’ll be putting you together with a couple of other camps, so as to make you up to full strength, and some of them are behind schedule. They ain’t all such good recruits as you lot, right? You’ve done good.’ He was such an impersonal man, such a bluff and solid soldier, that it was almost embarrassing to hear such sentiments from him.

‘What this means,’ he continued, ‘is that you’ve got some time. Maybe ten days, maybe less. Now, anyone as wants can stay here for free, no problem. You can even give some tips to the next lot we’re getting in. Otherwise you can go home and wait for your call-up. Spend a few days with your families. We shouldn’t allow it really, but the major’s put his stamp to it.’ His face went stern. ‘Don’t get ideas. Anyone who doesn’t turn up when you’re called will be a criminal, right off, and they’ll hang you for treason when they catch you. Orders for the army come straight from the King. But, other than that, I’m sure you’ve got people you want to see.’ He surveyed them with such strangled humanity that Emily wondered when he had last seen his own family, for from that same look she knew he had one, and that it had been a long time indeed.

‘Where will you go?’ Emily had a musket on an oily cloth spread over her knees, and was cleaning its mechanism industriously. There was only a handful of women in the dormitory, since those destined for the Couchant front had already packed their bags and departed.

‘I reckon I’m staying here,’ Elise said. She lay stretched out on her bed in her shirtsleeves, with her uniform jacket draped over the bunk above. ‘Got nowhere else to go, after all.’

‘I suppose not,’ Emily allowed, recalling Elise’s patchwork history.

‘You’ll be going back to . . . what was it? Grimble?’

‘Grammaine, yes. It’ll seem very strange to me, now.’

‘All those sisters of yours getting to see you in your uniform,’ Elise said.

‘Mmm.’

‘You’ll be the toast of the town. Lady Marshwic come back to say cheerio before going off to do her duty. They’ll be proud of you.’

‘Alice will make fun of my clothes, and Mary will cry,’ predicted Emily.

‘Still, they’ll be proud. If I had sisters I was on talking terms with, they’d be proud of me.’

Emily nodded slowly. ‘Elise?’

‘What?’

‘Come with me to Grammaine?’

She looked over to see the other girl sitting half up, staring at her.

‘Do what?’

‘Come stay at Grammaine, until we get our call-up. Why not?’

‘You’re serious?’

Emily nodded, watching a few expressions try to form on Elise’s face and fail.

‘That’s . . . I always wanted to live like gentry, even for just a few days . . . Hey, you don’t mean as a servant, do you? Because if that’s—’

‘I mean as a guest. As a friend,’ Emily said solemnly. ‘I mean, unless you want to stay here with the gunnery sergeant or something, of course.’

‘Demaine can live without me.’ Elise swung her legs round and perched on the edge of the bed, still looking a little stunned. ‘You really want . . . someone like me, staying with your sisters and your . . . servants?’

‘What’s someone like you? You’re a soldier just like I am.’

‘Yes, sir, Miss Ensign.’

‘You know what I mean. Besides, you’ll annoy Alice beyond all measure, and that’ll be worth the train fare.’

*

As Emily and Elise marched towards the house, the look on Alice’s face battled between mockery and happiness for almost a minute as they came up the path. Then she went flying back into the house calling, ‘Mary! Mary! Come and see!’

By the time they reached the house, everyone was at the door and waiting. The two uniformed women laid their packs down gratefully, with a clatter of muskets, and Emily embraced her sisters, one after the other, and smiled around at the servants. Everyone seemed to be staring at her as if she was some long-lost relative, returned from foreign parts nigh unrecognizable. Even Mary, letting Emily escape from her arms, looked her up and down as though needing confirmation that this was indeed her sister.

‘You’ve . . . changed, Emily,’ she said. ‘You look . . .’

‘Like a soldier?’ Emily completed for her.

But Mary shook her head. ‘I don’t know what,’ she said. ‘Look at you, though. You look . . . strong. Hard, somehow.’

‘You look as silly as that little Belchere minx,’ Alice pronounced. ‘But we forgive you. Did they really have to cut your hair?’

‘It’s a soldier thing,’ Emily told her. ‘This is Soldier-at-Arms Elise Hally. I’ve invited her to stay until we receive our call-up papers.’ And then she named them all for Elise, although she could see that her companion recognized them already from Emily’s reminiscences.

‘They made you an ensign,’ Mary commented wonderingly, fingering the gold crown that Emily had stitched to her jacket sleeve herself. ‘Tubal will still outrank you, then.’ Emily recalled that lieutenantship which Tubal had purchased at such a high cost, which had been the cause of so many arguments before he had left for the front. Mary had mellowed to it since. It would put him out of the worst of it, she had decided.

Emily looked from her sisters to Elise, who was beaming happily at all and sundry. Even as they went into the kitchen, where Cook was hurriedly heating up a pot of soup for them, she was aware of an odd distancing: between herself and her sisters; between her and the house. She and Elise stood shoulder to shoulder, and she felt almost as much a stranger to this place as was the girl she had brought as her guest. In the back of her mind was the roar of muskets on the target range, the bark of Bowler’s orders issued on the marching square, the gossip of the dormitory and the rumour of war. Coming back to Grammaine was like visiting a place only dimly remembered, some peacetime paradise from that unimaginably distant time before the fighting had started.

She sat at the kitchen table and listened to Elise describe Gravenfield for Alice. Conversation moved briskly on to the merits of Sergeant Demaine, and Elise came close to convincing Alice that she should have gone off to arms instead of Emily, if only to flaunt herself before male company. Emily noticed that Demaine’s most visible attribute never entered the conversation.

‘You’re all right there, ma’am?’ It was Grant’s soft voice. She looked up at the big old man standing in the kitchen doorway, and smiled.

‘It’s just . . .’ she started.

‘I know how it is, ma’am. Ensign, I should say. I remember just how it was.’

‘I feel so different. I feel like a soldier, Grant. Will this ever go away?’

‘When you’re done soldiering, maybe it will, mostly. Still, after you come back from the fighting, you’ll never hear a gun go off quite the same, ma’am, or a shout or a sudden noise. Been twenty years for me, and still I sometimes wake, when the horses do, and reach for that old matchlock they gave me.’

*

To Emily’s surprise, Elise and Alice became instant bosom companions. The soldier-girl loved to gossip and somehow she managed to absorb society trivialities with an endless appetite. No matter how stale each morsel was for Alice herself, in Elise she had a perpetually eager audience, and the goings-on at Gravenfield were all intriguingly shocking, in return. The two of them spent hours in each other’s company, both at Grammaine and in Chalcaster.

Emily herself had intended to spend her time chiefly with Mary, because she knew her days at Grammaine would be few, and she must make the most of them. But somehow she could never sit alongside Mary as she used to, never just read or work on her long-idle embroidery. There was a restlessness in her now that constantly called her to action. She had got out of the habit of being a lady of leisure, and could not recapture it. Instead, most days found her riding, with Grant or alone, across the grounds of Grammaine and the neighbouring land. She rode in her uniform most times, and with her sabre at her side, which she had been given as ensign. She met no bandits – nothing more villainous than a twelve-year-old child poaching pigeons – and she almost wished she had. She assured herself that a confrontation with the Ghyer would go differently now. She would never be so foolish or so helpless again. But the Ghyer was consigned to history, and she would not have the chance to show him she was now her father’s daughter.

Mr Northway called for her once, or so Poldry told her. She did not regret being out. She could not say now what her reaction would be should she see him again. There was a glowing coal still within her that spoke of Rodric, poor Rodric, who had been so pale and brave in his own new uniform.

When she was out on horseback, she could forget her dead brother, her dead father, the tangled future of the Levant front. She could lose herself in the wind, the pounding of the hooves, the simple fact of riding.

Little Francis was bigger than before. He was teething, too, and making his discomfort known to all and sundry. Emily took her turn in holding him, swaying him from side to side to lull him. As he slept, she watched him for an hour or more at a time, listening to the sounds of the house around her: Cook in the kitchen, Jenna scrubbing the floors, Mary humming to herself in another room.

These are the things I am fighting for. She had stepped out of this place – stepping backwards as one might from a painting, to better appreciate it. Perhaps Grant was right and she would never truly re-enter it, never quite get past the picture frame again, but it would be worth it. She would go to war to save Grammaine from the ravages of Denland; to save the future for Francis; to save the past for her family. Love of her country was a great storm that bellowed and fell silent, but this love of home was a breeze that blew steady and forever.

So the days passed, one by one. She sat up in the evening along with Elise and a couple of glasses of wine, and they talked about other recruits and what they might be doing, how the Couchant front was advancing. Elise would tell her what she had seen in Chalcaster: the fashions, the people, the observations Alice had made. It was all so new to her, another world entirely, or perhaps the same world seen through a different lens. She wore clothes that were Mary’s cast-offs, the fashions and cuts all wholly strange to her, and she delighted in them. Yet Emily had not found any comfort in her own wardrobe. Instead, now she wore breeches, shirt and jerkin from Rodric’s room – and if Mary was shocked, she said nothing.

*

And of course the day came, the seventh or so, when it seemed that the call would not come, the papers would never arrive. Perhaps the army of the King could win this war without Emily Marshwic or Elise Hally. And, on that day, Emily went downstairs to find Penny Belchere in the kitchen with a solemn look on her that did not suit her at all, and in her hand two letters marked with the King’s seal.

‘Tomorrow, first thing,’ Emily announced, when she had read hers. Elise’s was still unopened in her hand, for the girl was no great reader. ‘They want us to report to Chalcaster station tomorrow, five in the morning. The train will take us to Locke, wherever that is.’ Even as she said it, the map unfurled in her mind’s eye. Locke, mustering point of the Levant front, last port of call for civilization, before the swamps began.

‘Hell,’ said Elise quietly. ‘I wish I’d been clever enough to run away.’

Emily gave her a long look. ‘You still can. I won’t say.’

Elise grinned at her. ‘That’s mighty generous, Ensign Marshwic. Any chance the offer’ll still be open after the fighting’s started?’ She clapped Emily on the shoulder: a familiar mannish gesture. ‘It’s a strange thing, you know? Now it’s come, now we’re off, I don’t care. It’s been great to visit here, to meet your family and all that, but I’m going home now. Tell me you don’t feel the same, just a little.’

‘I know what you mean.’

By this time, the news had spread. Emily could hear Mary’s feet on the stairs. She turned to Penny Belchere and saluted as smartly as she could. ‘Thank you, Soldier Belchere. You’ve done your duty.’

Penny saluted back just as seriously. ‘Thank you, Ensign. Permission to go on my way?’

‘Granted.’

Elise leant in the doorway, watching the messenger mount up and canter off, while Emily turned to her sisters. The opened letter in her hand told them all they needed to know.

*

The pack’s weight was a familiar burden, even a comforting one. She and Elise had walked all the way from Chalcaster with these. They were a soldier’s life contained in a single bag: clothes, utensils, tools, weapons, everything the King’s largesse supplied for new recruits to his army. Emily had made sure every last thing was there, and checked that the action of the musket still moved freely.

Downstairs, Mary and Cook were preparing a cold spread. Emily already had a letter from her sister in her jacket pocket, exhorting Tubal to write more frequently. She wondered whether she herself would write, and how often.

‘Ma’am?’ The voice, in this room, was unfamiliar. It was Grant, of course, and, when she saw him in the doorway of her bedroom, Emily realized that to her knowledge he had never been above stairs before.

‘What is it, Grant?’ she asked.

‘Well, ma’am, maybe it isn’t my business to say it, but I reckon there’s something you should take with you.’

As she frowned at him, he moved awkwardly into the room and she saw he was holding a flat, black-wood case with brass corners. A familiar case, for all that she had avoided the sight of it for many years. It had re-entered her life at the same time as the Ghyer had, and she had hoped never to see it again. Her father’s pistol case, of course. Within it nestled the exit he had chosen when his life became too harsh for him to handle.

‘I can’t,’ she said shortly, but Grant was resolute.

‘You shouldn’t turn it down just because of what it’s done. It’s just a thing, ma’am. Just a weapon. It’s a good one, though, better than any the army’ll give you. I reckon you might need this – need the extra. It’s a good piece, all right. Think about it, ma’am.’

He placed the dead weight of the case into her unwilling hands, and she laid it on the bed beside her pack. Steeling herself, she undid the clasp and lifted the lid, and looked within. There it was, nestling in its velvet: sleek and deadly, a long-barrelled horse pistol of dark iron with gold inlaid in the grip. It must have cost her father a fortune in the happier days when he had ordered it made. He had not known then what use he would put it to at the last.

Pistols were not standard issue for junior officers. The army would not find her a replacement if she left this lying here. War was an uncertain business, and sentiment had little part to play in who should live and who should die.

‘You’re right,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘I’d be a fool to leave it.’ I will give it a second chance to prove its loyalty. Perhaps a term in the army will erase the stain on it. ‘Thank you, Grant. You’re right, of course.’ She closed the case and found room for it in her pack.

The morning came before that final day, the darkness outside misty with the last of the winter weather. Emily sat at the kitchen table with her empty porridge bowl in front of her, and thought about another dark morning years ago, or so it seemed. Then she had been nothing but a spectator, watching Rodric and his brave companions being led away by the recruiting sergeant.

She glanced across the table at Elise, who managed a pale smile. She had drunk a lot of wine the previous night, making many boasts and toasts in a soldier’s fashion. It was not the hangover, though, that dragged her face down.

Grant was making the buggy ready, so they could ride into town like ladies of leisure. Mary and Alice had wanted to come to Chalcaster to see them board, but Emily had told them they should not. They should say their farewells here, under Grammaine’s protective aegis. It would be a cold, uncomfortable ride. They would be jostled by the crowds at the station. Excuse after excuse just so that, when the time came for the final step aboard the train, her nerve would hold. She could not leave, she thought, if they were there to beg her to stay.

‘It’s been a good few days,’ Elise remarked.

‘It has,’ Emily agreed. ‘It really has.’

She saw Grant approaching the door, dusting his hands off, and she stood, with a soldier’s proper resignation, hoisting her pack up on her shoulders. Mary and Alice bustled in just then, and she hugged them each in turn, tight as she could.

‘You will come back to us,’ Mary insisted. ‘I could not bear it if anything happened to you.’

‘I will. If God permits.’

‘And tell that wretched husband of mine to write to me.’

‘I’ll tell him. I’ll even force the pen into his hands.’

‘And you come back, too,’ Alice told Elise. ‘We want to see you here. Come back in the season and I’ll introduce you to all the best people.’

‘I’ll be back,’ Elise promised, ‘just you see. I’ll come back with a wound and a medal, like proper soldiers are supposed to.’

Grant moved to help them up into the buggy, like ladies, but they climbed up themselves like fighting men, and thought nothing of it.

There was a real mob around the station, what with the departing soldiers in their reds, and all their friends and relatives, their mothers and sisters and children, pressing them from all sides. As Grant reined in the horses, Emily could hear the train itself arriving, the great slow rhythm of its ponderous wheels, the hiss of steam as it slowed and ground to a halt alongside the station platform.

‘Looks like a mess,’ Elise said. ‘Hey, if we just start shovelling everyone onto the train, we’ll get double the recruits we had to start with. They’ll give you a bonus for that.’

Emily jumped down from the buggy and reshouldered her pack. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ she shouted, and then had to shout it twice more before the closest soldier noticed her.

‘What’s that?’

‘Who’s the ranking officer here?’ Emily asked. ‘What’s going on?’

‘We’ve got no officer here,’ said the soldier, a frail-looking girl Alice’s age. Then she jumped visibly and said, ‘Sir! Ensign, I mean,’ and saluted, jogging the next woman with her elbow.

‘There must be someone outranking me here,’ Emily said, but Elise was busy looking at sleeve after sleeve.

‘I don’t see one. Looks like you’ve got command, Ensign.’ She grinned with the easy grin of a woman who doesn’t have to be responsible for what is happening.

Emily looked at the great mess of soldiers, and of their relatives who would not willingly allow a minute here to be wasted. They would be forever taking their leave, yet the train was here now.

She had a duty. Major Castwood had placed this burden on her when he gave her the promotion. It would be a harsh baptism for her, her first task as an officer.

She could shout, like Bowler; she could bellow and swear at them. What would it accomplish? She looked around from face to face, and saw some streaked with tears or red-eyed from weeping. Some hugged their loved ones close to them, and others sat on the ground beside their packs, clutching their muskets and looking ill. This would have to be done firmly and gently.

‘All right now,’ she said to the frail girl nearest. ‘Say your last goodbye and get aboard. You, too,’ she said to the next. ‘Come on, soldiers. Kiss them goodbye and everyone get on the train. We’ve got to be somewhere else tomorrow morning.’ She moved through the crowd, laying her hand on arms and clapping shoulders. She avoided the fake joviality that some sergeants seemed to prefer, and instead adopted a manner of mere efficiency. A quiet word, a touch, then she moved on. Behind her, the crowd began to unbutton itself like a shirt. Soldiers gave their families a final hug, a last fond word. Women began to embark onto the train in a steady flow, and still Emily passed amongst them, saying, ‘All right, now, say a last goodbye. You all knew this was coming. We can’t keep them waiting up at the front. Come on, soldiers, time we were going.’

At the far end of the platform, she turned to survey her handiwork. The crowd was disintegrating, the soldiers – her troops – were vanishing into the train, raising the shutters on the windows for a last look at their loved ones. She saw Elise hop aboard, calling out that she would save Emily a seat.

Emily sighed, knowing that the people of Chalcaster, those they would leave behind, were watching her. Knowing that to them she was the enemy in that moment, because she was the one taking their mothers and sisters and children away to war. This was what it was like to have responsibility for the lives of others. There was no greater burden.

She began to walk slowly back along the platform, looking for any last red jacket that might still be dawdling. She could hear the train’s engine gradually building a head of steam, blowing out smoke to be lost in a dark sky.

‘Miss Marshwic, I presume.’

She stopped, did not turn yet. The voice needed no introduction.

‘You presume?’

‘Your new wardrobe makes it hard to tell.’

At last she turned, and it was as though nothing had changed, as though she had never signed up, just for a moment. He was standing there, in the same tatty black, and she felt a wave of complex, angry emotions at the sight of him. She could have been back at his office, hearing the news of Rodric’s death.

‘Mr Northway,’ she said.

‘You make a fine soldier, Miss Marshwic. Ensign Marshwic, I beg your pardon.’ His face was oddly naked, and only later did she realize that it was without its customary defensive smile.

‘Are you here to count heads, Mr Northway?’ In saying his name, his title, she felt a strange power over him. He was a civilian and she a soldier.

‘As it happens, I am. The King may not have sent sergeants to round you all up, but he nonetheless wishes to ensure that none of his new darlings of war has second thoughts.’ A pause hung between them, and then he forced himself to say, ‘I am here to see you, though, one last time. Speak with you as well, if you will. But see you, at any rate. Which I have now done.’

The noise of the train was building behind her, and she felt unjustly put upon that he should beard her here. What did he want with her, after all that had been said the last time – or left unsaid?

‘I must go to my command, Mr Northway,’ she said, feeling strangely important.

‘I . . . have great hopes of your return, Ensign. Emily,’ he said, and when she moved to correct him, something in his face held her back.

‘Mr Northway . . .’ She wanted to turn away angrily from him, to board the train and never see him again, but she did not. Instead, she recalled dancing with him when nobody else would ask her. She saw the dreadful storm of emotions that had unmanned him when he had won her and lost her over Rodric’s dead body. She saw him shooting the Ghyer, a villain turning on a villain, and all for her.

Her father’s ghost clamoured at her, but it was a spectre that had lost its substance this last year, as she had finally faced up to whose finger had been on that trigger. What a knowledge for a daughter to bear that, when the accounts were drawn up and the auditors in, he would rather spare himself the hurt than spare his daughters. No wonder they had all loaded their hate onto Northway, for where else could they direct it?

And Cristan Northway was no saint: a villain through and through, but one freely condemned out of his own mouth. In the end, save for that one omission, he truly had never lied to her. How many other people could say as much?

She looked at his face again, and saw that he was frightened for her, and had no way to say it, but his eyes spoke it clearly enough.

The train made a deep, solid sound, and she knew it was about to get underway.

‘We will continue this conversation when I return,’ she told him and, before she could think about it, she had taken his cold hand in a brief clasp with both of hers and let it go. Behind her, the train began, ever so slowly, to move, lumbering along the length of the platform at a slow walking pace that was increasing speed every second.

‘Return,’ he told her, ‘please.’

And she turned and caught at an open doorway and swung herself in, pack and all. She glimpsed him just the once through the window, as the train pulled away: a slump-shouldered shadow detached from its object, falling away into the night.

11.

My leadership lasted only as far as Tarrent’s Wey, where I was able to surrender my authority to a sergeant – a man. The train was soon quite full of new recruits, as it thundered along the track with the dawn breaking all around us. The trip was to last two days and nights.

The first night was the strangest. The train made no concessions to darkness, and I slept fitfully. The rhythm of the engine and the tracks, which seemed to lull everyone else to sleep, did not work on me. I was continually catching oddments of sound and waking to see a carriage full of sleeping women in, or half in, military uniform. It seemed to me like the dressing room of a theatre where the chorus have all overslept their cue.

I would look out of the window and see the darkness looking back at me. I would walk the swaying length of the train and see perhaps two or three other women still awake. Near midnight we got a four together and played a few hands of Fly-away. We became the night watch, I suppose.

I find myself looking back on that night, and the strangest idea comes to me. This place I am in, the swamps and the insects and the death, cannot, surely, exist in the same land as my Grammaine, as Alice and Mary, as the quiet fields and woods of Chalcaster. It seems to me that we surely must have done more than simply travel to reach this place. We must have undertaken some more fundamental journey to some dreadful spirit world.

If all that separates this terrible place from home is mere distance, then we are lost. If the Denlanders do not creep past us and into the green land of my memories, then the swamps of the Levant will do so, with their death and mud and leeches.

When the train pulled into Locke it was night again, after a long day’s journey through an ever more sparsely populated landscape. The sweeping Wolds of Chalcaster, the hills and the dales and the tall plantation woods had given way, hour by hour, to flat agriculture and small white-painted farmhouses, the breadbasket of Lascanne. It was mostly reclaimed marsh, Emily recalled from her lessons. The ancient empires of a bygone day had drained it to sow their seeds and mine their gold, and modern Lascanne reaped the benefit.

But on the next day there was less of the agriculture and more of the wilds. Heath and scrub and desolate moorland stretched either side of the tracks, where the odd crofter or peat cutter was the height of civilization. The towns they passed through had a tough, knuckled-down look: trader towns, through towns, towns that made a living by taking in and passing on.

As the sun set on the second day, it lit up red on standing water amidst the moors, bogs and pools set deep beside the raised track. No hand had ever drained this land, and in her naivety Emily imagined these were the swamps of the Levant front, and that this was the worst nature had to offer.

They saw little enough of Locke when the train pulled in, past midnight: a few lanterns and the bulky shapes of ugly buildings. A sergeant passed down the train, saying, ‘Stay on for now. Sleep more if you can. Come dawn and we’ll be marching, so rest while you can.’ He fought a losing battle. Everyone had been cooped up on the cramped train for far too long and nobody was in the mood to rest. All around Emily there was a buzz of speculation as to what they would meet on the morrow. She offered nothing herself but heard a score of contradictory suggestions, each delivered as fact. Nobody there had the faintest idea, really, what the battlefield of the Levant front would be like. They were all as far from home as she was. They were maids, cooks, skivvies, seamstresses and market-stall girls, and they talked and talked simply to keep the fear at bay, while the unknown quantity that was Locke lurked beyond the shuttered windows of the train.

‘You’re going to meet up with this brother of yours, then?’ Elise asked, and Emily felt a stab of disorientation before she realized what the other woman meant.

‘Brother-in-law, yes. Tubal Salander. He’s a lieutenant.’

Elise whistled. ‘In with the brass, is it? Is he in charge, or what?’

‘Nowhere near. There’s a colonel . . .’ What was the name? She had been told it, by Major Castwood or Sergeant Demaine or somebody. ‘Colonel Resnic, I think it is. He’s got charge of the Levant front.’

‘I’d have thought it’d be a general,’ Elise murmured. She slumped down in her seat with the obvious, though futile, intention of catching a little sleep. ‘I wonder if he’s married. Could be a good deal, being the colonel’s bit.’

‘Depends on the colonel.’ Sharing a dormitory with Elise had cauterized that part of Emily’s brain once shocked by such talk. ‘You might find you prefer the fighting.’

It was not the sight of Locke itself that silenced them, as they climbed down from the train. Locke was a cluster of mud-stone buildings, thirty or forty, with a hundred shacks and lean-tos and tents making a sea of temporary construction all around them. It was a town whose population was constantly on the move, either to the war or from it.

It was the thought of what lay beyond Locke that closed mouths and opened eyes. Soon the train’s entire complement of soldiers, from girls of seventeen to women of forty-five, were standing along the platform, looking beyond the roofs and dirt streets of the town towards the unknown.

To the west, the land rose sharply to become sheer, weathered cliffs towering in stone folds. A thread like a pencil line ran all the way up, over hill, up ramp and across bridge, and a train that seemed built by ants put its minuscule trail of smoke into the air as it hauled itself up the steep gradient with its string of carriages, its cargo of soldiers and munitions. Beyond the last rise, the plateaus and the ravines of the Couchant front could not be seen at all. All that came from that quarter was the rumble of distant thunder, dry and cloudless, far, far away. They had never heard the sound of massed artillery before.

‘All right, ladies! Attention!’ Their feet snapped together even before they thought about it. A master sergeant from Locke – a matron with grey hair and a face like boot leather – glowered at them, striding past the unruly face of their formation. The morning sun cast her face in shadow beneath her gleaming helm. ‘Come on, ladies, remember the parade ground. Get yourselves into columns, will you? Come on, we’ve got a war to get you to. Officers front and right, soldiers line up!’

Elise squeezed Emily’s arm and then got into place, as the enlisted women formed a dozen ragged rows. The master sergeant did not look impressed. ‘Pathetic,’ she snapped. ‘Bloody pathetic, pardon my Hellic, but it’ll have to do.’ She gave Emily and the other officers a once-over. There were only a half-dozen ensigns and a sergeant amongst them.

‘All right, get these soldiers moving, left and then right, remember? I want them in the central square on the double.’

Somehow Emily and the other officers got the unwieldy body of women moving and marching into the circular patch of dirt that made up the centre of Locke. A series of low, irregular buildings ringed it, each commandeered by the army for one purpose or another. Emily saw messengers running their errands, or mounting up and riding at a gallop. There were quartermasters checking in supplies that had come on their train, soldiers in their shirtsleeves hauling crates of rations away. In the middle of the square was an ominous pile of boxes, all stamped ‘Lev’ in black.

‘Right, ladies, everyone to the stack there, and take a box. Anyone I see weighing them up to get a light one gets to carry two,’ the master sergeant announced cheerily. A protesting groan went up from the soldiers and she grinned broadly at them. ‘What’s that? What’s all the complaining? Downhill all the way to the camp, after all. Just hope your boots are waterproof. Come on, pack mules, we haven’t got all day!’

Grumbling and moaning, the recruits shuffled forward to take boxes, heaving them up and clutching them awkwardly, until someone had the idea of hauling them on to one shoulder. Most were narrow ammunition boxes, heavy as hell with lead shot. Some were bigger crates marked ‘rations’ or simply ‘supplies’. A few were wrapped tents or half-dozen bundles of spare muskets. As the crowd began to thin, Emily moved forward to collect her load, but the master sergeant grabbed her arm.

‘Not for officers, the heavy stuff. Need you to keep them moving,’ she said. ‘Let them get their loads sorted, and then it’s a long, hard trek to camp, Ensign.’

‘Right, Sergeant.’ Emily stood back unhappily, watching Elise drag an ammunition crate from the pile, swearing at it with every step. Rather than watch the pile diminish crate by crate, Emily looked about at Locke instead. What a shabby little place, she had to think. What a fluke of geography had thrown this little trader town, this end-of-the-track prospector’s place, into such sharp relief. Some places were never meant to bear the weight of history.

A sergeant – a man – approached them and conferred briefly with their own officer before turning to them.

‘All right, ladies, I’m going to make a count now, so’s we know how many we’re sending on. Everyone stay still and give a smile for the sergeant, now.’ He was a short, stocky man with a lined, humorous face and a jaunty step, but she would never have recognized him if he had not spoken. His voice brought it all back, that dark premorning that she had consigned to the bins of her memory. It brought it all back, and it hurt.

She was a soldier, so she silently let him complete his count as the women around her lowered their burdens and waited patiently. She even waited until he had made his final tick on the sheet of paper he was carrying, and was just turning to go back to the little office he had emerged from. Then, as the women finished demolishing the pile of crates, she accosted him.

‘Sergeant,’ she began.

He turned and eyed her. ‘Something I can do for you, Ensign?’

‘Sergeant Pallwide,’ she named him.

There was no recognition in his eyes, but his face might have been lifted straight from her memory of that morning when he came with his band of recruits to take her brother Rodric to the war.

‘Emily Marshwic, Sergeant,’ she prompted, and still he did not know her until she added, ‘you came to Grammaine last autumn, for my brother.’

Then something came to him, but she never knew for sure whether he had placed her as a person, or just placed her in a class, in a category of women. ‘What of it?’ he asked defensively.

‘You took my brother to the war, Sergeant, and you told me you would look after him. You said he would be serving in your company. What is your company, Sergeant?’

‘Administration corps,’ he almost mumbled.

‘You lied to me,’ she said flatly. ‘You lied to me, and you threw him to the wolves.’ She knew she was going too far, getting too emotional, but she could not stop herself.

‘It’s war,’ he said flatly. For a moment she had him: she was the lady of a great house, and he was a dirty, embarrassed soldier not knowing what to do with himself. At the last he remembered, though, what their positions were.

‘People die in war, that’s the point,’ he told her, with a look that said that he himself would be staying to file papers while she went off to the front. ‘I tell everyone I’m going to look after their sons and brothers and husbands. It’s good business, but I can’t watch over everyone, can I, Ensign?’

‘But you said—’

‘I said “Can I, Ensign?”’ He stepped in close to her, staring up at her, daring a challenge.

‘No, Sergeant,’ she said resignedly.

‘That’s right, Ensign. Now you go off, and you can die yourself for all I care. Your company’s waiting for you.’

He strutted away, leaving her to turn and face an accusing look from the master sergeant. But perhaps the woman had understood some of what had gone on, for she said nothing, only gestured for Emily to catch up as the great train of soldiers began to move off, staggering under its collective load.

Back in Mrs Melchance’s classroom, Emily had studied the maps of the Levant front with an almost morbid interest. She had marked out in her memory the swathes of green where the artist had drawn sketchy trees or ripples to indicate swampland. She recalled the careful shading of tans to browns, then to greens; the little rocks and pools that marked the approach from Locke to the Levant. On the maps, the trails had been dotted lines winding their way from point to point. They had seemed the sort of trail one might follow into the Wolds, for a picnic on a sunny afternoon.

From the ground, in the mud, it looked quite different.

Emily gritted her teeth and strained furiously, ignoring the yell of pain. Another two soldiers joined her efforts by hauling on the stuck woman’s other arm, then grabbing the unfortunate by the armpits and pulling back by main force. With a vile sucking sound, the trapped soldier was released inch by inch from the rank mud, leaving her boots and the crate she had been carrying lost beyond all hope. The four of them collapsed back onto the path in a tangled heap, and Emily got the rescued woman’s elbow in her stomach for her pains. The master sergeant called out for anyone carrying a box marked ‘boots’ to step forward.

Around them the landscape was a nightmare of pocks and craters enlivened by vast bushy tufts of marsh grass with fronds as tall as a man. The rocks, which on the maps had seemed so picturesque and tiny, were like great jagged teeth thrust at random through the skin of the land, hairy with weeds that sprouted from every crevice. The path itself was made of stones piled on stones and then paved with earth, uneven and hard underfoot. Those that stumbled off it found the ground beyond, that looked so solid, had no more substance than the stagnant pools of water that lay all around. There were serpents, too: great eight-foot monsters that slid lazily out of the way of the soldiers’ marching feet, or raised themselves up to chest-height, watching with yellow, lidless eyes as the recruits straggled past. Before them, down a long, shallow incline undercut by a thousand small streams, was a misty expanse that must be the swamps proper, for it seemed all of this was but precursor.

On the maps, the swamps themselves had been enlivened by chains of blue lakes laid out like beads on a necklace, and thumbnails of light green that were fields of scree sloughed off the Couchant cliffs and turned into meadows by colonizing vegetation. The cartographer who created those maps had crossed the swamps in a balloon, and never had to set his foot upon them nor breathe their rank air.

Emily increased her pace to catch up with Elise, marching near the front of the column.

The girl gave her a tight-lipped smile and shifted her burden from one shoulder to the other. ‘See you lucked out then. I’m going to kill that bastard Demaine if I ever see him again,’ she grunted through gritted teeth. ‘Just think, one word from him and I’d be the one walking, and you’d be lugging this bloody crate.’

A little later, while trudging along a track that never seemed to bring them any closer to their destination, one woman broke into song. She must have been a brave soul, to break the grumbling silence like that, with her high, clear voice springing into the dank air. It was a familiar tune as well, although Emily could not immediately place it.

‘We crossed the sea at dawn of day

Blue-heron sails, the red and grey

An eastern wind from Gathern bay

We march to war with red and grey.

Oh, the grey is sharp and the red is brave

With a hey ho! the red and the grey

But the red rules high on land and waves

And the red will last to the end of the day.

The eagle legions marching nigh

With gold and green ’gainst red and grey

So bear the heron standard high

With blood of red and walls of grey.’

By that time those few familiar with the verses had begun chiming in, until even the master sergeant was roaring out the chorus, the garbled, overlapping mishmash of ‘Oh, the grey is sharp and the red is brave’ rolling out over the uneven terrain as they marched.

Emily was just starting her third ‘With a hey ho!’ when she suddenly remembered when she had heard this song, and why it was so inappropriate. Old Poldry had sung it sometimes, when he had been a little in his cups. He had sung it and talked about his own soldiering days, for it was a soldier’s song: a song from the Hellic wars. The red and the grey were the soldiers of Lascanne and Denland, fighting side by side against the empire overseas.

Where did it all go wrong? she asked herself, her mouth shaping the words automatically. The regicide, of course; the end of Denland’s royal line, when their whole nation had run mad.

But still she sang, off-key and hoarse, and they all did, and if not that song then the next: women singing men’s songs on their way to war.

*

The soldiers of the Levant front had heard them coming, and sent scouts out to investigate, who had run back with the news. Consequently, the new recruits came in sight of the camp to see a whole wall of incredulous men staring at them. That was to be their first impression of the front: not the swamps; not the ranks of tents on pole frames, raised off the ground to keep them dry; not the towering cliffs that formed the western extent of their sodden world; but a wall of gawping men, an expanse of staring eyes.

Some were shocked, and could not take it in. Others were angry: there were frowns and clenched fists at these girls playing at soldiering, making a mockery of the uniform. There were a few who searched each newcomer for the sight of a familiar face: a wife, a daughter, a sweetheart. News from home had been scarce.

Many were grinning openly. Women, they thought. No doubt they had heard news of the Women’s Draft along the way. They had surely had time to concoct their own little imaginings. Now here was the proof: several hundred of Lascanne’s female finest marching into their camp, two hours before sunset. They passed comments to their fellows, eyeing up particularly choice specimens, and grinned like dogs.

‘Set down!’ the master sergeant called, and the exhausted recruits let their burdens fall. Some, testing their luck, sat down on the grass or on the crates, and when the master sergeant made no comment, they all did, finding a dryish patch where they could take the weight off their aching feet.

‘Someone get me an officer,’ the master sergeant called out and, when nobody moved, she singled a man out. ‘You, baboon, go get me an officer, or you’re on a charge.’

In this case, the military overruled the masculine, and the chastened soldier pushed off through his fellows, whom the master sergeant rounded on sternly. ‘As for the rest of you, if this is your war effort I’m amazed Denland isn’t in the capital by now. Haven’t you got something better to be doing with your time than drooling?’

Some of the male ensigns and sergeants began to round their charges up and move them on, to cooking, to cleaning, to sentry duty. There was a fair crowd still goggling at the women when the colonel arrived.

He was close to Lord Deerling’s age, she judged, but shorter and broader, with a small moustache and beard seemingly tacked to a round face. His hair was little more than a white fringe above his ears, giving him the look of everyone’s favourite uncle. His uniform was well decorated, though, with mementos of the Hellic wars, and the soldiers instantly made way for him, lining up to see what he would do.

He surveyed the newcomers, and Emily thought she detected in his eyes a certain weariness at it all. He had been given an unwanted gift, however much needed. Like Master Sergeant Bowler at Gravenfield, he did not know what to do with a company of women soldiers.

‘Master Sergeant,’ he called, ‘before you return to Locke, do me the favour of sending them to join their companies.’

‘Sir? I was informed that they would remain under their own officers,’ the master sergeant replied.

‘No, no, no. We have three understrength companies here already. There’s no sense shipping in another one that’s all comprised of women, by God. No, we’ll sort out the divisions later, then. Where’s Captain Mallarkey?’

A clean-shaven man not much younger than the colonel made himself known.

‘Get them billets, Captain. Get their gear stowed. Then get everyone lined up first thing tomorrow morning. I need to have a word. And, in the interim, give every officer the word that I’ll have no unsoldierly business, despite this . . . this. And make it understood.’

They had their tents allotted them, while men hefted the burdens they had carried so far. They were allowed to put down the packs that had travelled with them from all the way up the rail track, and before that from their homes. Outside, the sky was a deepening blue, resolving itself to black in the east. There were no sunsets in the Levant. The sun swept behind the monolithic cliffs to light that other war that was being fought up there, in the canyons and the valleys and the great open wastes of the plateaus. The nights were sudden here, in the Levant, and the sunrises drawn-out and bloody.

Emily fell onto her bunk and slept, without dreaming, for as long as she was able, worn ragged from the long march. None of the training, the sedate trots around the Gravenfield grounds, had prepared them for this. Soldiering was too much to teach anyone from scratch in forty days, and none of them had taken it seriously enough.

The next morning, she opened her eyes to light as scarlet as her jacket, summoned from her chill and clammy bed by the sound of a horn. Without ever quite waking up, she found herself lined up with all the other soldiers, men to the left, women to the right. She looked across the faces of the existing garrison, hoping to catch sight of Tubal, but she recognized none of them, all pale strangers. Many were wounded, she saw. There were bandaged heads and arms in slings, scars and livid pockmarks she would soon know to be the work of the local insects. These men looked solid, resolute, unhappy. She wondered what her company looked like to them.

Women, of course.

The colonel came out of the shack from which he commanded the war effort. He looked no happier with his new charges in the light of dawn than he had the evening before.

He stood for a moment, looking left and then right with a grim expression. Two captains flanked him: the older Mallarkey and a younger man with his long face made lopsided by a jagged scar.

‘All right, you’ve heard the news,’ the colonel said. ‘And now you’ve seen it for yourselves. Women, in the army.’ He shook his head. ‘You all know. We need the extra guns. If we’re to drive the Denlanders from this place, we need the manpower. Even if it’s woman-power.’ He stopped a moment, and Emily wondered how well he had thought his speech through.

‘This is going to work,’ he declared. ‘Now, I have never fought alongside a woman before. My orders are that these women are properly trained and ready to fight.’ His little runs of words each came out quite separately, like prophecies on slips of paper drawn by a fortune-teller. He thought quite a lot between them. ‘That is the situation. You will all accept it. They will obey your officers’ orders. You will obey their officers’ orders. A sergeant is a sergeant. I don’t care about the man or the woman of it. Any insubordination will be treated just like insubordination. It’s no excuse.’ He glowered hawkishly at the lot of them.

‘Now, the other thing you must remember is that this is the army of Lascanne. The army of the King. We are civilized. Decent people. Not like those animals from Denland. We have rules. Now, I know a lot of you will have thought about this, having heard the news. Women in the camp and all. Quite un-military. Let me tell you, there will be no fraternizing.’ He paused to consider the word. ‘No involvement between the men and the women of my army. None. If any of it comes to my attention, there will be severe punishments for all involved.’ He paused to glare at the men and the women equally. ‘You are here to fight, not anything else. It takes away from the war effort, yes?’

There were black looks amongst the men then, frustration and disappointment. Some of the women, too, Emily noted. She wondered just how enforceable the colonel’s demands would be.

‘Finally, and this is the most serious part,’ the colonel continued, ‘if I hear of a man forcing himself on one of these women, on any woman, then it will be treated as the worst court-martial offence, and one I’ll have the fellow shot for, believe me. This must be understood. It will be seen as an assault on a fellow soldier, as well as an attack upon the King’s own writ. I will not have any of it in my army. From this point on, these women are not women. They are soldiers. They will be treated as such. Any man who steps across that line runs the risk of a firing squad. It will not be tolerated. Is that clear? Well, is it?’

After a moment’s caught-out pause there was a harried ‘Yes, sir’ from the ranks of the men.

‘Right, then,’ said the colonel, seeming mollified. ‘If that is understood, then we may as well use what has been given us. Give them badges. Put them into companies, Mallarkey. Then I want five squads from Stag Rampant ready for a sweep, day after tomorrow. We need to blood them, Captain. We need to blood them.’

Ensigns passed down the ranks of women with sullen looks or smiles or just blank faces, depending on their nature. To each waiting pair of hands they gave a cloth badge, some stained, and most with loose stitching where they had been cut from other uniforms. Emily turned hers over to look at the device upon it: a black stag on its hind legs, antlers cocked back, forelimbs pawing the air. A Stag Rampant.

Elise came to find her, to show her an identical badge, and they sat together that morning, sewing the patches onto their jacket shoulders, whilst all around them hundreds of women did likewise.

‘I thought we’d never get here,’ Elise said. ‘All that slogging yesterday, I thought my shoulder was going to fall off.’

‘It was a long way.’

‘You can say that? You were on the light shift, Ensign.’

‘A long way from home,’ Emily clarified. ‘From Grammaine.’

‘Oh, well, maybe.’ Elise shrugged. ‘I’ve not really done the “home” business for a long time. Gravenfield was the nearest I got to it for years. I reckon the army’s a home now. A career. Maybe I’ll even stay on after the war’s done. I’ll be at least a sergeant by then, I reckon. Got to be. And you’ll be a major-general or something.’

Emily tried to imagine leaving this place, the war a finished thing; going home and hanging up the musket. Never again having to march or shoot or take orders. Her mind would not stretch to it. The road to the Levant was like sliding into a pit that was too steep to crawl back from.

Above them, the flag of the Stag Rampant company snapped in the light breeze. They would spend that first day simply discovering the layout of the camp, and the next meeting their new company, under the dubious looks of the male soldiers that were now comrades-in-arms.

The day after that, they would enter the swamps for the first time, and Elise and seven other women would not return. After that, Emily had to assume, they were well and truly blooded.

12.

I killed my first man today.

She came back to herself, slumped upon the ground just beyond the swamp, with the sprawling jumble of the camp in sight. There were others around her, she noticed. While most of the company were staggering on towards the tents, others had come out into the light and air, and just dropped: breathing freely and seeing clearly was suddenly all too much. One woman shook violently, retching. There was a deeper red staining the sleeve of her jacket.

And, of course, some had not re-emerged at all. Some were still there, with the waters their final resting place.

Elise.

There was a numbing, gnawing hole within her. Emily hunched over it, fingers digging in through her shirt. She would tear it out, if she could, both the horror and the guilt. If she had only been faster; if she had only stood a yard either side; if only, if only, if only . . . Oh, Elise, this can’t have happened. Not so soon. Not so very soon, a mere handful of days after arriving here. Not after forty hard days at Gravenfield and eight sweet ones at Grammaine.

Master Sergeant Mallen helped the injured girl up, caught her as she stumbled, and then led her away. One or two of the others had managed to lurch to their feet and were treading slowly into the camp, but Emily could not make herself move.

There was a hole in her mind, and it was where the face of the dead Denlander would have been, could she but remember it. She was profoundly glad she could not. Two deaths on her conscience, and the guilt was real – friend or foe. I was never made for this. Too late to discover that now.

She was still clutching her musket in the crook of her arm. Now she let it fall, stared at it: a lump of machined metal, the tool of her trade. She hated it. She wanted to smash it against a rock, and watch its jagged pieces spin madly away. She wanted to make it so that it killed nobody ever again. But it was hers, her musket. She was a soldier now.

‘Ensign.’ She looked up to see Mallen standing there.

‘I’m sorry, Master Sergeant . . .’ Emily started to rise but he put a hand out to stay her, and then dropped cross-legged onto the ground beside her. He was a strange man, Mallen: lean and hard. His thin face hosted two frighteningly intense eyes set within a tableau of abstract, irregular tattoos that blurred and smudged the natural outlines of his cheeks and forehead. His hair was long, but nobody ever told him to cut it, and there was something fierce and feral about him. He wore his uniform like a straitjacket. This was not a civilized man: when she had first set eyes on him, she had felt frightened of what he might be capable of. Now she had found out what she herself was capable of and he sat before her and began stripping off his jacket, with its insignia, as if to say that rank was being put aside for now.

‘How goes it, Ensign?’ he asked her, and she could not answer him. She was ashamed of losing Elise, ashamed of feeling pain for the Denlander she had killed. She was a poor soldier.

‘Get someone?’

She nodded, avoiding his eyes.

‘A lot of them can’t, first time.’ His voice was soft, surprisingly well-spoken. ‘Thank God for it. Means we’ve still something worth fighting for. The day they send us a conscript company who can put a shot into a man without thinking, that’s the day I quit. But everyone has to learn how, and better sooner than later. How do you feel?’

‘Sir?’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Bad, sir.’

Without warning he reached out and pinched her chin, tugging her head around to look at him.

‘That’s right, you should,’ he told her. ‘Every time, understand?’

She nodded wordlessly.

‘But we have to do it, understand? To protect Lascanne.’

Another nod. He clapped her solidly on the shoulder, one soldier to another, and she burst out, ‘Elise. Elise is . . . she was . . .’ Then the words would not come. If she tried to say them again, she would weep, and she would not be seen weeping before the master sergeant of Stag Rampant company.

Mallen studied her with the same intensity he turned on everything, and then stood up and backed off a pace. ‘It’s war, Ensign. A fool’s excuse for killing, but it’s a fool’s world. Makes fools of all of us. Come on now, Ensign, set a good example.’

He put a hand out for her, and she took it, feeling the strength of him as he pulled her to her feet.

‘What happened, Master Sergeant?’ she said.

‘We surprised them.’

‘We surprised them?’

He glanced off towards the swamps. ‘They were trying to get two hands of squads up the Dareline Channel, when they ran into our sweep. We turned them back. They won’t try it on for a few days, at least, but there were more of them than us, that’s all. Twice as many as we had, so we sent them away but they bit us bad as they went. Jungle war, Ensign. No clear winners.’

‘I understand.’

‘That’s good. Marshwic, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Marshwic,’ as though committing her name to some deep ancestral memory. ‘Get them moving, Marshwic,’ he told her briskly. ‘Show them how it’s done.’

He padded off into the camp and she retrieved her musket and looked around at the few women still left at the swamp’s edge.

‘Come on, soldiers,’ she tried, but her voice failed her and she had to say it again, forcing volume into the words. ‘Come on, soldiers! On your feet! Food and beds all waiting for you. Let’s go!’

There was a memorial service the next day. As the mourners lined up, Emily was surprised how few there were. Most of the soldiers, the men especially, simply glanced up and went somewhere else, so they did not have to watch.

The burial plot itself was hard up against the cliffs, where the ground was firmest. The whole camp was set within one of the slip-fields: earth and rock that had collapsed down from the cliffs above. The landslide had formed a highland of dryness that had been colonized by grass rather than the voracious swamp vegetation. The swamp gnawed at it, though, creeping up on it like angry natives waiting for a chance to take back what was theirs. Emily was surprised at the small number of markers in the field, until she realized that few corpses would have made it out of the swamps. Most of the casualties of the Levant front remained where they fell, and the swamp consumed them. Three days, Mallen said: that was all it took for the busy mouths of the Levant to strip a corpse to bones, and another ten would see the bones buried and broken up as well. The swamps of the Levant were the last resting place of a thousand men of Lascanne and Denland both, who would never see home again, and now eight women had joined them.

The colonel was out of his hut, with Captain Mallarkey dancing his usual meek attendance one step behind, but as yet there was no sign of a priest. Eventually, Mallarkey was forced to enter a nearby tent and haul the man out. He was a sway-bellied creature, short and dishevelled, with an uncombed beard and a face blotched with red. His robes of black velvet were open halfway to his navel, stained and torn, and he looked at the colonel with obvious incomprehension. Belatedly, Emily realized that he was drunk.

‘Father Burnloft,’ the colonel said. ‘The service, if you please.’

The priest mumbled something, and turned to face the meagre gathering. ‘List,’ he muttered. ‘Got the list?’

Mallarkey handed him a piece of paper and he nodded myopically at it before focusing on the mourners.

‘Here we gather,’ he intoned, slurring the familiar words only slightly. ‘Here we gather to honour the names of those gone before. Gone before to their judgement. May God look upon them for their deeds here. They died defending their country. No death is sweeter in the eyes of the Lord. They died defending their land and their divinely appointed sovereign. No death better assures them of happiness and content in their new home. They shall not fear harm or tyranny; they shall not know pain or weariness. They shall live the life of the blessed until the last days, when all the world shall be restored unto the paradise once it was.’ This had come out almost as one rambling breath and now he paused. His podgy hands, clutching the list, shook slightly, and Emily could hear his breath wheeze. A single fat tear ran unnoticed down his hairy cheek.

‘Now we honour those who fell in righteous battle yesterday, and commit them unto the mercy of God that he may know them. Now we honour Geraldine Braedy and Julia Samphor; Elise Hally and Dina Garton . . .’ As Elise’s name struggled through the man’s lips, Emily hugged herself hard, just keeping it all in. Elise, poor Elise, why her? Of Grammaine’s daughters, only Mary had ever been anything other than an indifferent churchgoer, and on this morning Emily’s faith was evaporating like the mist off the swamps.

The priest’s voice had now slowed, and he blinked at the list in his hands. In an aside to the colonel, loud enough for everyone to hear, he said, ‘Must be some mistake. They’re all girls’ names.’

There was a tortured silence then, and Emily felt the grief surge up inside her, ravening through her until her shoulders shook, and each sob battled its way from her by main force. Dear God, dear God, please look after her! Racked with grief she swayed and nearly fell to her knees, as the idiot drunken priest stared at the names, and the colonel ground his teeth and told him to finish it.

‘Marta Sands,’ the priest intoned. ‘Freya Lincaster, Olive Swach, Lindsey Pailler. We ask you, O God, to take them to you and protect them, and reward them for their bravery. This we ask.’

Emily could not bring herself to join in the scattered chorus: ‘We ask, O God.’ She simply hunched over her despair as the priest shambled away, and the mourners drifted apart, each swathed in her own bleak thoughts.

‘Hey, you,’ she heard, but did not look up until a finger prodded her shoulder. The first thing she saw was the rank, the blue and gold wings of a lieutenant on his shoulders. Mopping angrily at her face she struggled to recover her composure and hash out a salute.

‘Sir,’ she choked, still dabbing at her cheeks.

‘Hell, Em, have I changed so much?’

‘Sir?’ She stared at him stupidly, not seeing beyond the decorations on his sleeves – until he smiled at her and then she knew him.

‘Tubal!’

‘In the flesh,’ he said, but that was less true than it had been. He had always been a little round at the waist, a little soft. Now there was nothing of that. He was as lean and honed as Mallen, his long dark face turned gaunt, brown locks shaved almost to his skull. He looked a soldier first and Tubal Salander second.

‘Mallen told me you were here,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve been out on patrol or I’d have found you sooner.’ He reached out to tug at her company patch. ‘Thank God,’ he said, and showed her the rearing stag on his own.

‘Was Rodric . . . ?’

‘They put him in Dead . . . in the Leopard Passant,’ he whispered. ‘I couldn’t get him moved. I couldn’t help him. Emily, I’m so sorry.’

She read in his face the pain of seeing his little brother-in-law come fresh from training. Poor Rodric, lost out in the swamps, food for the leeches, graveless and alone. Had Father Burnloft dragged his way through a meaningless ceremony then, too, with ‘Rodric Marshwic’ dropped in amongst the names of strangers?

She wanted to say something, to tell Tubal it was not his fault, but she still carried the grief like a weight in the pit of her stomach, and it hurt. It hurt her and she could do nothing. When she collapsed into Tubal’s arms, she did not know whether it was because of Elise, or Rodric, or all the dead, the unnumbered dead of the war, or for herself.

He held her close for a long time, let her tears stain his uniform, and she felt a tremor in him, telling of his own losses and pain.

‘It’s all gone wrong, hasn’t it?’ she said.

‘It’s not how I’d have planned it.’

‘Tubal, what are we going to do?’

He held her at arm’s length. Mary’s cheery, harmless husband looked so stern now, so hard-edged.

‘We’re going to survive,’ he told her. ‘Don’t let them tell you different.’ And then he grinned, with the desperate, carefree expression of a man who has already lost, and has more to lose. ‘Welcome to Bad Rabbit,’ he told her.

‘Bad . . . what?’

He tapped her on her sleeve, meaning the company badge. ‘Look at it.’

She craned down to peer at the little heraldic design, then up at the company flags that flew above the camp. The black stag reared there, antlers high. ‘Stag Rampant,’ she said slowly, closed her eyes and then reopened them.

‘Do you see?’ he asked. And she did. It was a terrible thing, with death so close, but she started to laugh. The pompous-looking deer with its malformed antlers could just as easily have been a rabbit, a very badly made rabbit.

‘Oh, that’s funny . . . no, it shouldn’t be funny.’ But, all the same, she was laughing now. It felt so good to have something to laugh at, no matter how little. ‘What are the others then?’

‘The Leopard is Dead Cat,’ he explained, and she recalled she had seen most of the Leopard Passant troopers with their company badges sewn upside down, the strutting animal’s legs stiff in the air.

‘And the bear?’ The brown beast sitting on its thick haunches, one forepaw raised as though objecting to something at council.

‘Fat Squirrel,’ said Tubal, and she laughed until she cried.

Later, they sipped warm soup fetched from the kitchens, and she told him about home. Her words conjured up for him the Ghyer, Alice, the ball at Deerlings House, the Draft and, of course, Gravenfield. Not Mr Northway, never Mr Northway, but Tubal must have sensed the unseen worm that tunnelled through her narrative. He did not interrupt, though. He let her words tumble out at their own pace and in their own order. Outside, rain that had been a drizzle just after the funeral was a solid downpour now, and showing no signs of stopping.

‘Back home they keep saying it’s all going so well,’ she said. ‘It’s not, is it?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ he admitted. ‘God, I wish I could see Mary again. I don’t like the fighting and dying part much, but it’s missing her I really object to.’

‘She’s very cross with you. She says you should write.’

A tight look came across his face. ‘I can’t.’

‘Then I will,’ she said. ‘I need to tell them. I need to tell them about Elise, poor Elise.’

‘Emily . . .’

‘I will write a letter,’ she decided. ‘How do I get it out of here? Do people go to Locke ever? To the trains?’

‘Emily, you can’t . . . Look, every letter has to go through the colonel. He reads them all. Why do you think I never wrote? I’m a printer. I deal in the truth of the written word. The only stuff that you can write is that drivel Rodric sent you that one time.’

‘But that’s . . . wrong!’

‘Isn’t it? But it’s all there is. I’ve tried, believe me. The colonel’s gotten sick of me badgering him about it.’

‘Well, then, I’ll go and badger him myself,’ she decided.

Tubal weighed her up with a glance, then shrugged. ‘Try,’ he said. ‘Why not? After all, I’m just a Salander that married into money, but you’re a Marshwic. The colonel’s a Resnic, old family. Hell, maybe he’ll listen to you, when he won’t to me. That sort of thing counts with him.’

*

The rain had been a solid thing for three days and Mallen had declared, with his curious certainty, that it would be a good five-day rain. Nobody made war once the clouds broke in earnest against the cliffs of the Couchant front and started to shed their load. Somewhere out in the swamps, the Denlanders would sit hunched under the canopy shelter, flicking water out of their eyes, just as the Lascanne troops did. In this weather they were all victims.

Those that chose to could make the pilgrimage to the acerbic, toad-like quartermaster and demand their regulation-issue rain-cloaks, which in Emily’s recent experience had no water-repelling qualities whatsoever. Still, she took what shelter she could from it as she hurried across the centre of camp.

The tent city that was the Lascanne base camp had a heart of wood. A half-dozen of what would be mere shacks anywhere else were here the epitome of architecture. Three were company headquarters, along with one for stores and one for the infirmary. The last, and grandest, was the colonel’s. This she made for, swatting her way through the rain, slipping on the treacherous, churned grass.

The door opened just as she approached, and she stopped dead, for the figure descending the slatted steps to the ground was swathed in a mantle of dark blue, the hood shrugged up to hide his head. Twin herons held their heads high across his chest.

She was abruptly taken back to far-off Deerlings House: the ball, the gaiety of the great and good. And, of course, he had been sent to the Levant front. The Women’s Draft, and Mr Northway, and now Tubal, these things had conspired to force him from her mind. She had never thought to meet him.

‘Mr Scavian!’ she declared, a society lady again for a moment, and no soldier. ‘I had not thought . . .’

But her voice died away, for the face that stared out at her from that hood was not Giles Scavian’s but belonged to a man older by a decade and more, with hair receding from his forehead and a raptor’s cruelty about the mouth. His eyes were like flint.

‘Scavian, is it?’ he snapped out. ‘So, you’re one of little Giles’s playfellows,’ he snapped out.

‘Forgive me, sir. I merely thought . . . I saw your dress—’

‘Oh, Mr Scavian considers it beneath him to dress according to his station,’ the Warlock snarled. ‘Who are you, then, girl? Where did you dredge Giles Scavian from in your past?’

‘My name is Emily Marshwic, sir. I met him . . . just before I joined.’

His eyes narrowed to such a sharp edge that she felt they might cut her. ‘Marshwic,’ he echoed. ‘Well, now, we’ve more than scullions and maidservants in the latest load for the grinder, have we? Marshwic, well, well . . .’

‘Sir, I’d like to see the colonel.’ She made to move past him, but a strong-fingered hand hooked her collar and dragged her back and round to face him. His hand, against her skin, was hot, shockingly hot, and when he pushed his head forward to look at her, she saw that the King must have been of an odd humour the day he anointed this one. The red weal of the royal hand was wrapped about the man’s throat like the mark of a strangler.

‘Marshwic?’ the Warlock pronounced. ‘Know me then, Marshwic: Justin Lascari, Warlock to the King, of seniority and power, I am by far the better of that creature Scavian.’ The rain sprang away from him as steam, although his clothing never smouldered. ‘I am the King here, and no other,’ he told her, and then his hand blessedly released her. She felt that she, too, must now have a raw red mark about her throat.

His expression changed into something else, equally predatory. She realized belatedly it was a smile. ‘You interest me, Marshwic. That’s a name to conjure with,’ he said, and then he was gone, stalking off into the rain that barely touched him.

She took a moment to calm herself, before struggling up the steps and rapping at the door.

It was opened, quickly enough, by a man of middle years, who looked at her dully. ‘One of the women to see you, sir,’ he announced, not letting Emily step an inch out of the rain.

From inside, safely in the dry, the colonel made some noncommittal reply, and Emily was suddenly reminded of Elise’s mad dream of becoming the colonel’s mistress. She wondered how many woman had already tried.

‘Ensign Emily Marshwic, if you please,’ she called out, hoping Tubal’s thoughts on names and good family were accurate ones.

‘Marshwic, is it? Well, let her in, Stapes.’

The doorman stepped aside without a change of expression, and Emily gratefully hurried inside.

There had been a creditworthy attempt to civilize the inside of the colonel’s hut. There were portraits hanging on the walls, a white cloth spread on the central table. A small shelf held a few books that looked like histories, and the candles lighting the place were set in silver candelabra. The colonel himself sat at the table, plates and cutlery cleared off to one side, with a newspaper in front of him that she knew must be days out of date.

‘For the Lord’s sake, Stapes, take the poor girl’s cloak,’ he directed, and Emily gratefully slipped out of the sopping garment.

‘He’s a good fellow, old Stapewood,’ the colonel explained. ‘Not the quickest, mind you. Marshwic, is it? Now there’s a name.’

She gave silent thanks to Tubal for knowing his ground.

‘Fought alongside a Marshwic in the Hellic wars, you know,’ the colonel recalled. ‘Damned good soldier, pardon my language.’

‘That would have been my grandfather or one of his brothers, sir,’ she said, sitting down when Stapewood brought a chair for her.

‘Grandfather, is it?’ The colonel looked a little sad at that. ‘Well, time will move on when you aren’t looking, won’t it. Will you have a little wine, dear girl?’

‘Thank you, sir, I will.’

‘You needn’t bother with the “sir”, dear girl. Old Seb Marshwic’s granddaughter, eh? And here to serve your country. He would have been proud.’

‘Thank you, s— Colonel.’

‘Resnic. Colm Resnic. Sir Colm, technically, but I won’t insist on it, eh?’ He smiled at her warmly. ‘I wasn’t sure about you women turning up. Wasn’t sure you had it in you. Gave a good showing of yourselves, I hear. Struck fear into the heart of the enemy, so they tell me.’

Remembering those bewildering, murderous moments in the swamp, Emily said nothing.

‘Ah, well. Ensign, too. Quality will out, they say. We’ll make a lieutenant of you yet, I dare say – at the very least. Good of you to come by and introduce yourself, dear girl. Especially in this weather. Something foul, isn’t it?’

She nodded. Sitting here a few hundred yards from the swamp in the pounding rain, dead friends and dead enemies on her conscience, it seemed unreal for him to be talking about the weather.

Stapewood brought the wine, just then. The scent of it, rich and heady with home, caught at her throat.

‘Now, then, Miss Marshwic, what can I do for you? Settling in all right, are you?’

Yes, sir, except for the dead friend. ‘Well, sir, I was thinking that I’d like to write a letter home, and I was told to talk to you about it.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, well, only natural. Letters home, yes. Excellent idea. Tell the people at home how the war was won.’

She grimaced. ‘Only, I was told there was . . . a problem?’

‘Ah, yes.’ He gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I understand, dear girl. It’s all been a shock, this place. I don’t blame you. It’s no place for a civilized man – or woman. But the thing is, dear girl, you can hardly just write home and tell everyone what a miserable time you’re having, you see?’

‘Why not, sir?’

‘Well, it’s morale! Morale, you see. I’m sure everyone back home is distressed enough, what with having so many fine women such as yourself go off to war. They don’t want to hear how awful things can get. They want to hear how well we’re doing. They need their spirits kept up.’

‘My family would like to hear the truth, Colonel.’

His smile was maddening, unthinkingly patronizing. ‘You may think so but, really, people just want to be comforted. Honestly, you wouldn’t want to be unduly worried, if you were back home. You wouldn’t want to frighten people.’

I want them to worry, because my situation is worrying. I want them to fear, because my plight is fearful. ‘Colonel, please—’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Marshwic, but it really is for the best. Write them something nice and reassuring. It is for the best, believe me.’

She discovered something new within herself then. She discovered that she could dislike a man for something other than bad character. She could dislike men like the Ghyer and Mr Northway because they were bad men, and she was used to that exercise of judgement. Colonel Resnic was not a bad man: he so clearly believed what he said, and believed it to be the best thing to do. Yet she felt a sudden wave of fierce dislike spiking within her, because he was unfit. He did not understand.

He was a fool.

‘Dear girl,’ he continued, and he never paused to read her expression at all, ‘if you had known what you would find, would you have come here? Well, of course you would – being a Marshwic and all. No fear, eh? But others, of the lower ranks, you can imagine they might not be so happy to march out if they knew all this would be waiting for them. It never does to spread panic, spread worry.’ He drained his wine, held his glass out for Stapewood to refill. ‘Up against a madman, we are. A mad genius, they say. You must have heard of the doctor.’

‘Our doctor?’ she said, puzzled.

‘No no, not Doctor Carlingswife. Dear me, no. Why, I mean the leader of the Denlanders. You didn’t hear? Their commander: Doctor Lam. A terrible man, they say. Brilliant, but quite mad. And cruel, so very cruel. Anyone they catch is brought to him, and he holds the scalpel, I hear, when he gets what they know out of them. I shouldn’t say this in front of a girl, but you should hear it. Doctor Lam, the Butcher of the Levant – now how would it look if we said all that to the people back home? How would they feel, do you think? Fairly downhearted, I’d say.’

She stared at him, thinking: One insipid letter, long weeks of nothing, and then we hear that he is dead, just like that. Is that better, Colonel? Does that spare us the pain?

‘I can’t write, then?’ she said heavily.

‘Write, please do, but, you know, something nice,’ he said jovially. ‘Something pretty.’

He beamed at her in such an avuncular way that she felt she would be sick.

13.

Beneath the canopy, we feel as though we are under water. The sounds of all the animals and insects and the water merge into a single mumble in our ears, as stifling as silence. Even the sounds we bring ourselves, our boots through the water, our breath, the metallic clink of harness, are eaten up by that constant murmur. It is a dream there; a terrible fever dream. We cannot wake.

She waded carefully around the edge of one of the deeper pools, eyeing the water. The heat, the closeness of the air, plastered her shirt to her body like on a summer’s day before a thunderstorm. Her jacket hung open, bunched into odd bulges by her sabre baldric.

Something moved in the murky depths, but declined to investigate the ripples Emily was making. Gratefully she stepped up to a snaking tree root, put a hand to the slick trunk to steady herself. She looked back as the three soldiers behind her made the same journey. She watched over them as they trod carefully or slipped down to one knee with a curse. That was the only sound that broke from clear from the susurrus: a human voice. She signalled furiously for quiet, and the swearing man was righted by his fellows until they were all across, over the root and spreading out along a silt bank. At the rear came Mallen, stepping without looking at his footing, his eyes shifting all around him instead. The unseen pool lurker gave another indecisive motion, then lay still. Mallen did not even glance at it, but he knew it was there.

He nodded acknowledgement to her, as he reached her, putting a hand on her shoulder, soldier to soldier.

‘You have the end, Ensign,’ he said softly as he passed, and she turned to follow them up as he moved their squad of twenty onwards.

She took a moment to breathe, sucking in the thick, wet air. Her helm felt like lead. Her musket was weighty as a stone pillar in her hand. The heat rode on her shoulders like a fat man. Life beneath the swamp canopy sweltered with a constant patience that knew nothing of the seasons. The swamp consumed itself, burned itself in the furnaces of rot and decay, and breathed out the stench and the steam of it.

The eternal mist was thickening now, and she made haste to stay in sight of the last soldier of the column. She was supposed to look out for the enemy; for an ambush from behind. She could barely see three yards in any direction. If there were any Denlanders out there, she hoped they were as lost and blind as she was.

From ahead there came a cry and a shot simultaneously and she crouched, without thinking, into the shadow of the bank. There was no whistle, no signal from Mallen, but she let a slow count of three go by. There were voices ahead, complaining, but no more gunfire. She pushed herself to her feet, skidding in the mud, and made her halting way up along the column, telling each man or woman she passed to stay still and stay calm. And to keep an eye out.

She found one of her soldiers, a girl no older than Alice. She sat clutching her musket, white-faced. Two others stood by her, looking uncertain. There was no sign of Mallen.

‘What’s going on?’ Emily asked, as loud as she dared. ‘Where’s the master sergeant?’

The girl would not meet her eyes, but one of her escorts pointed into the mist. Emily’s eyes located Mallen across another pool, examining something on the ground. She made to join him but he waved at her to stay put. For a long moment they all sat or stood, with the ashen-faced girl still trembling, until Mallen pulled something shapeless up off the mud and padded back to them with it in his arms. The girl squealed and tried to squirm away across the mud but, before she could get away, Mallen was squatting before her and dropping something hideous at her feet. It was a monster like a husky spider, with claws on its feet and a high eye-dotted brow staved in by the shot. The creature was over a foot long.

‘Oh God, take it away, take it away!’ the girl cried, until Mallen gripped her about the jaw, cutting her words off.

‘Look at it,’ he said and, when she wouldn’t, he twisted her head until she had to. ‘Look at it. There are thousands of these all over. You’re going to shoot them all? Never, ever shoot unless it’s the enemy, understand? The next time your gun goes off it could be another squad of ours you’re putting lead into. It could be me. Understand?’

The girl looked from him to the broken creature.

‘Start shooting tarbids or otters, snakes, whatever you don’t like, you tell everyone we’re here.’ Mallen released her, and she looked up at him with tears in her eyes. Emily crouched down beside her.

‘You want to leave this to me, Sergeant?’

‘I plan to live,’ he told her impassively, the tattoos blurring any expression he might have worn. ‘A count of two hundred, and then we move again.’

He stalked off into the mist and Emily put an arm about the shaking girl’s shoulders. ‘Easy now, soldier. What’s your name?’

‘Jenny, sir. I mean Soldier-at-Arms Jenny Haworth. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. It just . . . moved all of a sudden and . . . I twitched. I couldn’t help it. It was horrible.’

‘Keep your finger off the trigger when you carry your gun,’ Emily advised.

‘I don’t like spiders, sir.’

‘It’s not a spider, soldier. It’s a . . . whatever the sergeant said it was,’ Emily assured her, privately deciding that it was the most unpleasant-looking spider that ever lived. ‘Now stand yourself up. Let’s make a good showing, shall we?’

Jenny Haworth levered herself to her feet with Emily’s help, mopping at her eyes with a dirty sleeve. ‘I . . . Do you think he hates me?’

‘Who? Mallen? Soldier, he’s already forgotten about you. I don’t think he’s the type to hold grudges.’

She was surprised when Jenny looked a little disgruntled at that. ‘Only I just want to . . . impress him, sir.’

‘Impress . . . Mallen,’ Emily repeated slowly.

‘Yes, sir. Only because he’s the master sergeant, of course, sir.’

Mallen? God save us, Emily thought. I’m in a swamp, with a score of loaded guns, and the girl has an adolescent fancy for the master sergeant. Her thoughts must have shown in her face because Jenny coloured and looked away, mumbling, ‘It’s nothing like that, sir.’

‘Load your gun, now, soldier,’ said Emily, deciding that it was neither the time nor the place to go into this. She could see Mallen returning, and so she signalled her readiness to march. He moved down the line of gleaming helms with his head uncovered, long hair tied back and a band of cloth keeping the sweat from his eyes. Jenny was meanwhile ramming powder down her musket barrel furiously, and Emily had to intervene and push her face further from the muzzle, in case another accident happened.

Once Mallen gave the signal, they moved off into the hazy air again, slow and cautious. They might as well have been the only people in the world.

They had spent the night in the swamps. For all but Mallen and one other, it had been the first time.

Darkness had come without warning. No gradual fading skies here, from blue to a darker blue, then all the way to black. No, once the sun had passed the line of the western cliffs its fires were eclipsed in an instant, and night rode fast on its heels. In the swamps, the green air died like a fire guttering out. Then the night-shift of beasts and monsters took up where the day creatures had left off, calling and croaking at each other twice as loud to make up for the darkness. Mallen had guided them to an island formed where a succession of mosses and fungi had accumulated over a downed tree, and they had slept there in shifts. No fire, because nothing would burn, and the Denlanders might see it anyway. The darkness was not absolute, though. Certain parts of the swamp – slimes, mushrooms, the bulbous leaves of some trees – gave out a faint and weird phosphorescence. They lit up little but themselves, but they gave a reference, a point to watch. The larger beasts of the night showed up as mobile shadows across these greenish constellations, as would enemy soldiers if they were moving in the dark.

On Emily’s watch, there was something else. She had been sitting with her jacket off and her shirt half open, marvelling that not even the forces of night could lessen the heat by much, when she saw a fire spark up, off between the trees. Denlanders! was her first thought, and she reached for Mallen to shake him awake. Her hand never made it to him, stilled by what she witnessed next. The fire was a ghastly green-white, a corpse-light flare, and it was moving. She saw its reflection as it drifted aimlessly over a broad pool, saw the dancing pinprick lights of insects skip around it and scatter. The sight of it filled her full of awe and fear. Trees and pools and insects she had at home, in civilized measure. This was from a world beyond her world: this unfuelled, untethered flame; this spirit.

She stared into its pallid depths, half expecting to see some face or figure deep within it.

‘Ensign?’ Mallen had woken, though she had not touched him.

‘What is that, Sergeant?’ she asked him.

She heard him sit up, imagined him stripped to the waist, lean muscles and no wasted flesh. There was nothing for her there, of course, but Jenny was not alone in her interest. Emily had seen the way several of the other girls looked at the master sergeant.

‘You know it, Marshwic, surely?’ His voice, closer to her than she had thought, was amused.

‘Sergeant, tell me. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

There was an odd little cough beside her, and she realized that he was chuckling. ‘It’s you,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘It’s a marsh-wick. Swamp light. Understand?’

‘But . . . what is it? Is it an animal? Or dangerous?’

‘Gas, Ensign. Harmless.’

She watched the eerie light bob over the water, flare up and dwindle down. ‘Is there anything you don’t know about this place, sir?’

‘Many things.’

‘But you must have come here right at the start. You must have been here for years.’

Again that cough of a laugh. ‘Since long before the war,’ he told her.

When dawn thrust its way upon them through the leaves, they woke along with it, scratching at the new bites that the night had left on them.

‘I thought the quartermaster said we were – what was it? – “unattractive” to insects after we took his disgusting medicine,’ Emily complained, on finding a new raised weal by her armpit and slapping at it with unladylike rancour.

‘Try coming here without,’ said Mallen. He seemed to be taking his bearings, standing straight and turning slowly. Perhaps he was looking for signs of the enemy. He had tried to tell Emily how a compass needle was thrown off kilter by something in the water or the mud, but that compass points in the swamp could still be reckoned by the ubiquitous slow seepage of the swamp’s waters, always leaching east towards the sea. Emily herself could see no such movement. To her eyes, the waters just sat and turned rancid, and ran nowhere. She would never make Mallen’s elite band of scouts and trackers, and she decided she didn’t want to. The swamp was bad enough in company, but far, far worse alone.

That morning he led them differently. The day before they had moved slowly and cautiously, a steady sweep to feel for the hand of Denland on the surrounding marshland. Today he moved with more purpose. Had they been anywhere else, Emily would have said he stepped along like a man wanting to keep an appointment. The rest of them did their best to match his brisk pace, and those who slipped or fell – and they all did from time to time – had to hurry to regain the rest before the drifting mist enveloped them.

‘Where are we going, sir?’ Emily asked, slightly out of breath after she had forced her way to the head of the column. ‘I mean, where is there to go?’

‘No landmarks, right?’ Mallen flashed her a featureless glance. ‘Near right, but not quite. Almost all the swamp shifts, day to day. Trees, even – not quite where you left them each time. Not quite all, though. Understand?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You will.’

And she did. They endured two hours of swamp-marching, at a pace as rapid as was practical over the mounded roots, the boggy banks and clouded pools. A townsman strolling down the streets of Chalcaster would have counted it leisurely, but then his road would have been flatter and less riddled with venomous monsters. Emily reckoned them all lucky that so far nobody had been stung or bitten by anything deadly, for to her eyes there was little that lived in this godforsaken place that was not inimical to mankind.

At last Mallen signalled the halt, though, and the column straggled in, gasping, sweat-stained and red from the effort. Only then did she notice that they had reached one of his landmarks.

She remembered the marsh-wick last night, and the feelings of dissociation it had inspired in her. This was the same: her life was never meant to hold such things.

From the mire, from an island of driftwood and weed and mud that had bulked about it, thrust a squared pillar. Moss grew on it, and lichens in discolouring stains, but less than she would expect, given the age it so obviously bore in every line. It had been cleaned from time to time.

Those parts of it that were not lost beneath the blooms of the swamp showed intricate work, human work. She noted symbols and lines, and tangles that might have been pictures, but which her eyes could not make out. Heedless for a moment of the danger, she approached it, splashing through the shallow water and the inches-deep mud. The characters might have been anything, the children of no alphabet she ever knew. The pictures . . . As she gazed on them, they brought strange thoughts to her mind: this one made her feel dread, this one gave hope, this other one spoke of movement and action. They were faint and weathered, with only the dirt ingrained in them making them visible at all.

She looked back at Mallen, who was watching her keenly.

‘Who . . . ?’ she asked, and when he smiled it was a civilized thing, not his feral grin, the tattooed-savage leer he usually made.

‘Nobody knows,’ he said softly, coming over to join her. ‘Here and there, throughout the swamp, you find them. What race raised them was gone before we arrived, long before.’ He reached out and traced the design gently, almost lovingly.

She was taken by his face, its utter transformation. Had he been standing in a schoolroom, speaking thus, how appropriate his expression would have been. Here, beneath the tattoos and in these surroundings, how out of place.

‘You’re a complex man,’ she said, without meaning to speak aloud. He glanced at her, the hunter’s grin returning. She saw then, without partaking, exactly what Jenny and the other girls saw in him: his energy, his sureness and capability. She saw, too, why he did not look at them. This was his love, here in this place that he had made his own.

‘Why are we here, sir?’ she asked him.

‘Wait.’ He lowered himself down, his back against the stone, and Emily signalled that the squad should take a rest too. She deputized two to take look-out, and splashed back to join Mallen.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘Of?’

‘The squad, me included. Are we going to make it? Do we pass?’

‘You pass every day except your last,’ he said, and then his eyes flicked up and recognition crossed his face.

Emily looked about, expecting to see another squad, and for a moment she saw nothing. A ripple of panic had passed through the soldiers, though, and Mallen said, ‘Nobody raise a gun,’ in a voice that brooked no opposition.

What is it? Is it the Denlanders? For a mad moment she thought Mallen had betrayed them. Then she saw.

There were three of them come from between the trees, approaching the stone. Three little men in green, like something from a fairy story. Little men in green, with vast white eyes.

The more she saw, the less storybook they looked and the less she liked them. None was over four feet high, and they did not carry themselves quite like men, but a little hunched, a little long-armed, They wore suits of coarse fabric, green underlain with black . . .

She realized they wore nothing. They were hairy: an oily, short-furred pelt from head to toe. She had not wanted to acknowledge the fact but, as they got closer, she could see every hair on them. Beasts. But they had hands, and they had woven straps about them, belts and baldrics and bags. Men, then, but what men?

She made herself look at their faces, which were as furred as the rest of them. They possessed slightly pointed heads, with large ears flat alongside the skull. Long noses came almost down to the small, surprisingly delicate lips. The eyes that stared at her were as round and huge as the moon in a night sky, with a faint shadow moving within them, as though they kept their eyelids on the inside.

Their open mouths revealed thin, sharp teeth. Their hands, not webbed as she had half expected, had long fingers with hooked nails.

She recalled Lord Deerling then, and his strange companions. Not like these, not at all like these, but she had heard how the Levant front had its own natives: swamp-people. People?

They stood in a crescent before Mallen and the pillar, as though it was their god and he their priest. Emily and the other soldiers could only stare.

‘Indigenes,’ Mallen said softly. ‘Call them that, properly.’

‘What are they?’ Emily asked in a similar tone. ‘I mean natives, obviously, but . . . did they build the pillar?’

‘No stonework, no metalwork. No stone or metal to work. Not their doing, this.’ He turned his attention back to the creatures, and one padded forward quicker than any human, through the water and the mud, and took his hand. Emily shrank back, but Mallen held there a moment, quite still, before releasing and drawing away. The indigene bared its teeth nastily, but then she reassessed the sight and guessed it was pleased. A moment later, it spoke: hisses and clicks, but also sounds like something imitating the human. A gabble, a jumble, but clearly Mallen understood and he spoke right back at them in the same nonsense tongue, gargling and babbling conversationally. More teeth were bared. A ritual of greeting was exchanged.

‘What . . . what do they want?’

‘What do we want? This is their home, remember, not yours.’ Mallen shot her a sardonic look. ‘We want news. We want food. They fish, hunt, feed us what we can’t get from rations when we’re out here.’

‘And in return?’

‘We leave them alone. Everyone hear me? Nobody harms them. Nobody offends them.’

There was something of a grumble amongst the soldiers and Mallen rounded on them angrily. ‘Understood?’ he demanded. ‘War with Denland, one thing. War with the indigenes is war with the swamp.’

‘Do they track the Denlanders for you?’ Emily asked him.

‘No. No more do they track us for Denland.’

‘I don’t—’

‘We give them peace. Denland does the same. They feed us both, warn us both. Neutrals, Marshwic.’

‘But surely they—’

His very look stopped her. ‘Take sides? You’d better hope they don’t.’

He turned from her then, starting a conversation with the indigenes that batted back and forth for some time. She studied the little people as they spoke. They were most human when they were still, she decided. Despite the eyes, the face, the hair, they could almost be children standing there. When they moved or spoke, the humanity fled from them. Every gesture or expression bespoke an ancestry utterly at odds with her own.

Mallen bridged the communication gap, though. He must have been here a long, long time. She wondered how they looked to him, whether he could tell them apart, read nuances of feeling in those vast eyes.

*

Not a sign, not a glimpse of a Denlander, after that three-day expedition into the swamps. She was relieved. She was also frustrated. Elise was unavenged, in some strange way. Emily herself was untested. She did not know if she could do what a soldier must, now that Elise had died on her. She could not talk to Mallen about it, for he had no small talk. She did not want to take it to Tubal either. He was her brother-in-law, but he was her superior officer. He was also her commanding officer until Captain Goss returned to lead the Stag Rampant. So she kept it inside, instead, and it sat there uneasily.

The camp provided a welcome chill, after the suffocating heat of the swamps – a heat that owed nothing to latitude or altitude, and everything to the furnaces of rot that underlay all things. Up above them all, two hundred feet of sheer rock away, she heard the distant pounding of the big guns. The Couchant front was seeing a busy day. A thunderhead of cloud in the east was lumbering slowly towards its precipitous demise against the cliffs and crags. More rain being delivered, regular as the gunfire.

She sat heavily at a trestle table before the cooking fires and called out for something to eat. Privilege of rank. Let someone run after me, for a change. The stocky woman stirring the pot gave her a sour look as if to say she had snubbed higher ranks than ensigns today, and Emily was about to lever herself up again when she sensed someone approach from behind.

When she turned, more quickly than she had intended, she found her hand had gone instinctively to her father’s black pistol, which was loaded and thrust through her belt.

For a second, lost from context, she did not recognize the girl, and she was not quite recognized in turn: two familiar women cut apart by a change of scenery.

And then: ‘Who . . . Is that Penny Belchere?’ Emily stood up, making connections.

‘It is you!’ Belchere exclaimed, sounding as much angry as glad. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘In the swamps,’ Emily replied simply, and then, with a little justifiable exaggeration, ‘Fighting the war.’

‘I’ve been here almost a day,’ Belchere complained.

Emily looked at her blankly. ‘Count yourself lucky. I’m here for the duration. Have you been drafted?’

‘No!’ Belchere exclaimed. ‘Though everyone round here seems to think I have. I’m messenger corps, remember? Why do you think I’m here? If I’d known I’d get sent here, I’d never have joined—’

‘And then you’d be here for good, like enough, just as I am,’ Emily pointed out. ‘Now, keep calm and talk straight or I’ll make you salute me, soldier. What is going on?’

Belchere visibly composed herself. ‘I’ve got a message for you. Can I give it you now, so I can get the next train out of Locke?’

‘A message . . . ?’ A shiver went through her: something wrong at Grammaine; some disaster befallen her sisters. What else could drive a message so far from home? ‘Let me have it.’

‘All yours.’ Penny handed over a sealed envelope. ‘I’m supposed to wait for a reply.’

‘Well, then, you’d better wait.’ Emily reconsidered her tone. ‘Sit down. Get something to eat. Let me read.’

She moved off a few steps, to keep it private, and broke the seal.

My Dear Emily,

Or perhaps we are once again distant in manner as well as geography. My Dear Ensign Marshwic, then. What a chimera you have become.

I hope this missive finds you well. I hope it finds you at all, indeed. I exceed my authority in simply sending my messenger so far off course. In these days, though, a governor’s writ runs far. What crimes of avarice I could get away with if my waking moments were not divided between the essentials of duty, and you.

You will remember what I told you about the war. You will have found the truth of it: not so well as the papers proclaim, is it? I would that I could have kept you here, Ensign. I would that I could have kept you safe.

It is the strangest thing that I cannot close my eyes, or take a moment’s thought, without thinking on you and where you have gone. I read each day the reports of what is daily done in the name of war. I would spare you, Ensign, if I could.

The past is no man’s clay for remodelling. It is fired the moment it is moulded, alas.

I have an offer for you, Ensign. I want you to commit treason with me. I want you to join with me in a conspiracy. Have I outraged you? Do you tear up this sheet of paper even now, or cast it at the feet of your Colonel Resnic? I say not. You read on.

You will wish to speak to those you love here, to tell them how it goes with you, in words that the King’s law does not permit. I will give you that chance, Ensign. What you hand to Belchere will make a most secret progress back to Chalcaster, and thence to wherever you will. There is my treason, and there is yours. I only ask that, as you write, you do not forget him whose venal soul gives you that chance. Write to me, Emily, if you would.

Do I know you so well? Have I struck a mark? Always, even with your anger and loathing turned on me, yet you know me and I you. Who is there now to slam back my door and harangue me with such righteous indignation? Who is there now to hate my name so fiercely? What a flame has gone out here, since you went to war!

We understand each other, do we not?

Your obedient villain,

Cristan, if you will have him so – if not, Mr C. Northway, Mayor-Governor of Chalcaster and servant of the King.

After the last word, she read through it again, and then let the piece of paper hang from one hand, as she stared off at the slow-approaching cloud. She felt her loneliness so keenly that it cut her like a knife. She had so few friends here, so many strange faces. And the war was not going well: he had been right. The insidious Doctor Lam played his games, and men and women of Lascanne died amid the hell of the swamps. Nothing was as she had been led to believe. The world – all bar one man – had lied to her. She had tried so hard to force her words out of this place, to speak to Mary and Alice across the miles, and he could not have known that. Belchere must have received her orders before Emily had ever gone to the colonel. And yet here his message was, his lifeline: a hand extended by Mr Northway, bane of her family.

And it was not Mary or Alice she thought of, as she held the letter close. Instead, she saw a man in shabby black on the railway platform at Chalcaster, felt the coolness of his hand as it slipped out of hers. Return, please.

She read the letter once more, and saw again words that she had taken for granted. He knew her, her fears and her wants. If she gave her imagination the freedom, she could know him in return: the cold office, the papers making demands in the name of the war effort, his slim-fingered hands pursuing their joyless work. Was that a heaviness about him, that no Marshwic could tear him from his duties with her demands? I would that I could have kept you safe.

Write to me, Emily. Her name, unqualified. She was always Ensign Marshwic or Sir here. Her name sounded strange to her own ears; she had left it behind, in the keeping of Mr Northway.

His words sidled into her mind, his imagined voice sly and mocking. She felt oddly awkward, exposed. He had read her mind. He had known her needs before she ever formed them. He was Mr Northway the villain, made to gloat, boast and threaten. His entreaty slid beneath her defences. She felt weak and angry with herself for it, but she could not put the letter down.

I should expose him, tell the colonel of his treason, finish the man. He had put the blade in her hand.

But Mary, Alice! This is what I want, after all, only what I want.

And she smiled ruefully because that was not it. Her sisters had been forgotten, these last five minutes. Instead she knew only that a man she had once hated had gone to these lengths for her, risked all to give her what she needed. The man cared enough, despite his faults, to put this chance her way. His cool hand, she thought. His tight carefulness on the ballroom floor. And she saw again his expression as she left him for the train and the war. She relived his despair when he held the knowledge of Rodric’s death and yet, when he could have had her in his hands, he had told her the truth, as he always did. The idea of Mr Northway, the bitterly truthful Mr Northway, crept into her through her own treacherous memories and the words of his letter. She felt hot and unsteady suddenly. He was seducing her in ink, and she was being seduced. A wave of contradictory feelings threatened to overwhelm her. What could she do to escape Mr Northway, when his hooks were planted inside her by her own hands?

She would write to Mary and Alice, yes, but what could she write to them that they would understand? The sudden death a musket shot could bring, the venomous oven of the swamp, the guilt of having a death hanging about her neck? How could she load these burdens onto her two sisters? They would not bear them. The colonel was right: the weight would break them. Tell them that she lived, yes; tell them that she fought for king and country, but how could she wound them with the truth?

But she had never hidden a thing from Mr Northway, as he had not from her. Of all people, he would understand. He would not flinch. He had known grimmer things than this. She did not need a priest for her confession, but a devil.

How strange that war has brought the two of us to this pass. She felt so close to him now, as she had never done when he was there right before her. How the war had remade her, remade them both, into two halves of a broken thing!

She would write to him. She would write to her sisters, something true but, yes, shying from the whole truth, but she would write honestly to him. He would keep her heart for her, until the war was done and she had need of it again.

That decision made, she folded the letter to slip into her jacket pocket, and one of the many weights she bore was gone from her. The bottled thoughts that sat so heavily on her stomach could now be poured out.

She returned to Belchere and told her to wait, for there would be a reply.

14.

We are not the things we think we are, when we are tested.

We do not know how much we lean on others until those props are taken away. On our own feet at last, we are unsteady. I am grateful, therefore, that you have sent me this crutch, just as I began to fall.

Your martial adversary,

Emily.

Tubal cast himself down beside her, heedless of the mud on his jacket. His helmet was pushed back off his head until it hung between his shoulders from its strap. There was dirt on his face, but his expression was calmer than she ever remembered from home.

‘So,’ he said, his voice a mere undertone, half lost amid the water-sound. ‘Settling in all right?’

Emily, lying stretched along a moss bank with her feet in the water below, shifted slightly, trying for comfort. ‘It’s hard, Tubal,’ she said.

‘Hell, yes,’ he agreed. ‘So tell me about how it’s hard.’ Around them, the swamp covered a multitude of sins as eight squads of Stag Rampant, one hundred and sixty soldiers in all, eased into position, one by one.

‘I don’t mean this.’ Emily took a chance to look at him, rather than at their objective. ‘This is hard, but I expected it. I knew fighting, warring, was going to be like this, but . . .’

‘It’s the gaps in between,’ he finished for her, elbowing his way up the bank a little, keeping his musket just clear of the mud.

Emily thought of her letter, winging its way to Mr Northway even now: her kindred spirit, her adversary. Locked in conflict for so long, they shared some place between them that no other could touch. But he was not here. It could be tens of days before she heard from him, if at all. It was a dangerous game he was playing, after all, by flouting the King’s law.

‘It’s . . . I had a good friend when I first came. Now she’s gone and . . . I’m an ensign and so the soldiers hold me at a distance.’ Her birth worked against her, too. Just as at Gravenfield, she was the only gentlewoman in camp. It seemed all the other houses and families of Lascanne had sent servants to do their dirty work.

Down the line, Stag Rampant troopers were falling into place like game pieces being advanced. Mallen was out there somewhere, invisible, with a whistle to his lips.

‘I bought myself a lieutenancy when they were going cheap for volunteers,’ Tubal recalled. ‘Hell, if I’d known it would put me in the firing line so much, I’d have saved my money.’

‘Tubal . . .’ How unlike a soldier she would sound. She did not want to embarrass herself before Mary’s man, did not want to become just his sister-in-law and not his junior officer, but it hurt her. Each night, each empty day, weighed on her more and more. When the orders arrived, it had been a relief to descend into the boiling purgatory of the swamps, to take up the musket once again. At least there she had a place and a purpose. ‘Tubal . . . I’m lonely.’

When she said the words, they sounded so poor that she wanted to take them back, but Tubal’s expression was nothing but sympathy.

‘You’re right, it is hard,’ he agreed. The last few soldiers were just moving into place now, and Emily felt the almost welcome knot of tension form inside her. Any moment, any moment . . .

‘You know,’ said Tubal, tensing too, ‘if we’re both alive at the end of today, I’ve a mind to invite you to become a member of my club.’

‘Your club?’ As if he was a man of means in Chalcaster again and could spend his evenings as he chose, in the company of his peers.

‘Why not? We never said “no women” when we made the rules. It didn’t come up.’ He flashed her a quick grin, and then Mallen’s whistle sounded and they were both scrambling to their feet, along with tens of other soldiers, to go charging down a root-studded slope into the mist and the trees.

Down the line, Justin Lascari, resplendent in his night-blue robes, thrust forth his hands at the unseen enemy and gave out a harsh shout. Fire leapt from his palms, from his fingertips, in a screaming explosion that seared its way with withering force into the trees and plants before him, shrivelling them and blasting a tract of water into scalding steam. There were screams then, and Denlander soldiers bolted out in all directions, some on fire, some clutching their faces, their eyes. Shots from the advancing Lascanne line picked at them as the ambushers skittered down the slope towards their targets.

In those first few seconds, it was all Emily could do just to keep on her feet. Tubal was skidding and sliding beside her, holding his musket high for balance. A tree sped past between them, and she burst through a spiderweb of vast proportions; then there was movement ahead.

She saw a glimpse of recognizable motion, a human form in drab clothes bolting away, and she tried to bring her musket to bear on it, but the shape was gone too fast into the mist between the trees. Elsewhere, down the line, she heard shots and cries, all muffled in the dank air.

She did not stop to think, not for one moment. Concentration took up the whole of her mind.

At the foot of the slope, with a tree to one side for cover, she swept the barrel of the musket about, looking for targets. Along the line on either side of her there were brief rattling volleys, but she and Tubal seemed to be in an oasis of calm. Mallen’s second whistle came, issuing belated orders to push forward, engage at will. She thrust herself away from the tree and shouldered her way through the dense foliage, the vast overarching ferns, the ankle-deep moss.

Something passed before her face, without being seen, and punched a perfectly round hole through a fern frond beside her. She had a instant’s shock, despite herself, and then she had pulled the trigger, punching her own borehole through the greenery and hitting nothing. Cursing herself, she dropped into the shadow of the plants and reloaded as fast as her shaking hands would permit. Tubal went down on one knee beside her, gun to his shoulder and waiting for his moment.

‘Ready?’ he asked her. She nodded, breathlessly. The Denlander would have reloaded, too. He would be just as ready as them.

‘On three,’ he said. ‘One . . . two . . .’ His knuckles whitened on his gun.

There was a brace of shots from up ahead, and then a third loud enough to have come from straight in front of them.

‘Three!’ Tubal hurled himself up, gun first, and Emily was right behind him. They smashed through the cycad stand they reckoned the Denlander was in, and caught him frantically dropping another ball into his gun. The small man, his grey uniform as mud-streaked as their own, dropped his musket and tried to hurl himself away, but they fired at once. They never knew which of them had hit him, but he dropped, clutching at a dark mark in his chest. All around them there were sporadic exchanges of fire. It was impossible to tell where the lines had been drawn.

They reloaded, standing back to back, watchful eyes on their surroundings. The firing was growing steadily less.

‘Ready?’ he asked again and, at her nod, they pressed forward and left, hoping to recover the end of the line. Almost immediately the entire swamp around them seemed to explode with gunfire. Two or three shots passed between them, and Emily hurled herself into the muddy water at her feet, with Tubal following. For a moment, she thought he had been shot, like Elise. It could be as sudden, as unremarked, as that. Instead he lifted his face from the mire and grimaced at the world in general.

‘What the hell?’ he asked.

Someone bolted past them, almost over them: a Denlander unarmed and fleeing. He was gone before either of them could get their guns up, dashing off between the trees.

‘We are way off course,’ Tubal observed. Emily hushed him and then they could both hear more coming, at a walk this time, a cautious walk. She took up her gun and found it clogged with mud.

‘Tubal . . . Sir . . .’ she gestured. His own gun was ready for the newcomers and, after a second, she slid her sabre from its scabbard, aware of the awkward, wrist-twisting weight of it.

Three men broke cover suddenly, and Tubal came within a hair’s breadth of firing at them, but the red of their jackets warned him off just in time. He put a hand up and stood, Emily along with him.

‘Dead Cats.’ He noted the company badges.

‘Bad Rabbits, is it?’ said his opposite number, a sergeant managing half a salute. ‘Guess that means there’s no more of them.’

‘Someone might have told me it was a pincer movement,’ Tubal complained. The Leopard Passant sergeant merely shrugged.

High and clear through the trees came Mallen’s whistle calling: Regroup. It was over. Seven Lascanne soldiers had been killed, and a rough count reckoned up some fifteen fallen Denlander scouts, whose position Mallen’s people had pinned down the day before.

By the standards of the Levant front, it was a great victory. That was the terrible thing about it.

*

‘So,’ Tubal said, ‘here we are. I invite you to look upon the fashionable address of my new club. Splendid, isn’t it?’

It was the headquarters shed of the Stag Rampant. The yellow flag, with its deformed animal in black, sagged limply above. She glanced at Tubal to see if he was making fun of her. He had always possessed a quietly wicked sense of humour.

‘No lie,’ he assured her. ‘I hereby formally invite you into the town address of the Survivors’ Club, positively the most elegant resort for any gentleman of leisure on the Levant front. Or lady, either.’ He stepped forward and pushed the rickety door open, and a surprising wave of warmth washed over them from inside, the play of firelight and the smell of pipe smoke. Emily recoiled before it, momentarily bewildered. It was as if the door led somewhere else, somewhere like home. It had no right to open where it did.

Another glance restored her sense of reality. They had done their best to commandeer the place in the name of civilization, but the board walls, the two narrow rooms it was divided into, had defeated them. It would have made a better prison cell than a club lounge, no matter how hard they had tried.

There were two men in the room already. One was Mallen, to her surprise. He sat at a table on a rickety stool, with a pipe in one hand, caught in the act of lighting up. With his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open halfway down his chest, he looked no less fierce and strange than he did out in the swamps. It was as though someone had dressed up a savage as a civilized man.

The other was the camp quartermaster, a man she knew by sight. Heavy-built, unshaven and jowly, he slumped within the confines of a vastly moth-eaten, stuffed-leather chair that had seen many and varied better days. She had always seen him before in scruffy civilian attire, the tail of his shirt hanging out, the top button of his breeches unbuttoned beneath his swelling belly. Here, though, he appeared a true man of means in his club, with a blue-and-gold checked waistcoat complete with watch-chain.

‘Emily, you know Daffed Mallen, of course,’ Tubal said, indicating Mallen. It was her first indication that the man even had a first name. ‘And this reprobate and general no-good individual is our quartermaster, Mr John Brocky. Gentlemen, I would like to introduce my sister-in-law, Emily Marshwic.’

‘To what end?’ Brocky asked suspiciously. ‘Are you pimping her?’

Before Emily could retort, Tubal got in. ‘I am proposing her for membership.’

‘A new member?’ Brocky laughed. ‘A little late for that, no? And a woman? Can’t be done.’

‘Rules say nothing about it,’ Mallen noted quietly.

Brocky squinted at him. ‘I’d have thought you’d be with me on this, Mallen.’

Mallen looked from Emily to the fat quartermaster, and back. ‘I know Miss Marshwic. Knows her business, she does. She gets my vote.’

Tubal gave him a nod of thanks, but Emily was too surprised to stay silent. ‘Master Sergeant—’

Mallen raised a finger. ‘Club rules, no ranks.’

‘Where’s his lordship?’ Tubal asked.

‘In the next room, opening a bottle or two,’ Brocky told him. ‘Let’s call him in, get a second opinion. I’ll wager he’ll back me. Sorry, Miss Marshwic, but, really . . .’

A third man had appeared at the narrow doorway leading to the next room, a corked bottle in one hand and a blankly surprised look on his face. ‘What . . . ?’ he began.

She did not recognize him at her first glance. Out of context, out of uniform, it took a second look to match his face and the sheared-copper colour of his hair to her distant memories.

‘Mr Scavian,’ she said, and feared that he would still not know her. Two brief conversations, one crowded evening, a lifetime ago and a country away. How could he be expected to recall? But a faint smile was coming to his lips, although his eyes were bewildered, still, and unsure. ‘Upon my soul,’ he said, ‘Miss Marshwic. What . . . what brings you to this place?’

How far we have travelled, she thought, but this was the same man she remembered so clearly.

‘You can’t know each other,’ Brocky complained, somewhere in the background. ‘It isn’t fair.’

‘Looks like you’re in, Em,’ Tubal told her, but she barely heard him, approaching Giles Scavian as though he might vanish at any moment.

‘I looked for you,’ she told him. ‘I remembered, but you weren’t there. The only Warlock was—’

‘Lascari,’ he finished. The scowl he gave did not suit him. ‘I learned soon enough not to wear the blue. Nineteen Warlocks have been sent to the Levant. Only two yet live, myself included. The Denlanders learned to aim at our robes. They know to fear us.’

‘Excuse me, club rules, or do you put a shilling in the jar?’ Brocky objected. ‘All too serious, no?’

‘Brocky, this is not club business. This is my renewing an old acquaintanceship, in truth,’ Scavian told him with dignity.

‘Then you’re agreed that Emily can be a member,’ Tubal said to the quartermaster in triumph.

‘Shall we say I’m resigned to it,’ Brocky grumbled sourly. ‘Look, Scavvers, if you’re going to sweet-talk the lady, can you at least finish fetching the brandy as you do it?’

Scavian coloured a little, and backed off into the next room. Emily followed him in, expecting a map room, a war room. Instead, she discovered something of a secret larder. Bottles, she saw; bales of pipe tobacco; dried meat hanging from hooks in the ceiling. ‘What is all this?’ she asked. ‘There’s nothing like this stuff in the stores.’

‘Our quartermaster has a multitude of contacts,’ Scavian explained. ‘In every shipment from Locke there’s something of his crated up and marked “medical supplies”. Miss Marshwic . . . I do not know whether I am glad to see you or not.’

‘Oh . . .’

He hauled the cork from the bottle in a single violent motion. ‘Were we anywhere else, I would be overjoyed,’ he said, ‘but this is no place for . . .’

‘For anyone,’ she finished. ‘Mallen excepted, perhaps. But here you are, and here I am. I don’t think anyone would have chosen the way things have fallen out, Mr Scavian.’

‘No, in truth, they would not.’ He had a quartet of glasses ready there, and he added a fifth whilst pouring into the first.

‘How many members of this Survivors’ Club are there, anyway?’ she asked his back.

‘Four. Five now,’ he said, dipping the bottle from glass to glass expertly, not wasting a drop. ‘There were eleven founder members, I believe, but we had to expel some.’

‘Why . . . ?’ She stopped herself, because abruptly it seemed to her that there was only one way to be expelled from the Survivors’ Club.

Brocky’s voice bellowed from the other room. ‘Make sure she’s got fifty pounds to her name, Scavvers!’

‘Ask her yourself,’ Scavian replied mildly. ‘You mustn’t mind John, Miss Marshwic. He just loves to complain.’

‘Mr Scavian . . .’ He turned to her, a glass in each hand, and she took them from him, holding his eyes. ‘If he is John to you . . . you may call me Emily, if you will. I would not wish to bring too much ceremony here just because I’m a woman.’

His uncertain smile returned. ‘To each other’s faces we call each other by the family name, as soldiers do. Between ourselves, though – you and I – I would find no greater pleasure but to call you Emily, and have you call me Giles.’

They rejoined the others, and Emily found herself seated in an uneven chair as the brandy glasses were passed round. The drink smelled acrid to her: it was not a lady’s usual libation.

‘To the King, gentlemen,’ said Tubal, and they all raised their glasses and sampled the deep brown liquor. Emily made a face at it, despite herself. It was sharp on the back of her throat, fiery all the way down. The men were sipping appreciatively, though, and Brocky was taking compliments on his best find yet.

‘What’s this about fifty pounds?’ she asked them.

‘Well,’ Brocky shifted expansively in his chair, which had also presumably been crated in marked ‘medical supplies’, ‘each of us, all the members of the Survivors’ Club in fact, have put a note of promise in the kitty, you see. It’s a strict condition of membership, in case you were wondering.’

‘To what end?’ she asked, and Mallen gave her a dry look.

‘Last man gets it,’ he said. ‘Last man standing.’

‘You can cover the sum, I take it?’ Brocky insisted.

‘But . . . that’s cold,’ she said, and at the same time she was thinking that the accounts at Grammaine would surely suffice.

‘We’re at war, Em,’ said Tubal. ‘And it’s hard, and it hurts, and the only way to avoid the knife is not to take it seriously. Hell and fire, we’ve all buried friends here. We might as well play a game with it, show death we’re not so scared. We all know the next killing shot could be ours; we all want to leave something to help the friends that survive us.’ He laughed unexpectedly. ‘Except for one fellow, of course, who’s already earmarked the kitty as “the John Brocky benevolent fund”.’

‘The quartermaster knows where he’s safest,’ Brocky announced loftily. ‘Damned if you’ll get me out in the mud with a gun, when I don’t have to.’

‘You don’t fight?’ Emily asked him.

‘Far too valuable, not like you spear-carriers,’ Brocky replied, without rancour. ‘Your basic quartermaster’s a skilled professional, see? I was a dispenser back in civvies. I brew that muck they make you drink to ward off the bugs and the plagues. If I don’t want to get this blessed body of mine shot full of holes, neither the colonel nor the Ravens are going to make me.’

‘Is that . . . fair?’ she asked, and they were all grinning.

‘Anything within the rules, Marshwic,’ Mallen told her.

‘War isn’t a stickler for niceties,’ Scavian added. ‘Why should we be? If Brocky stays home, or I take off my coat and dress like a soldier, all’s fair.’

Eleven founding members, she thought. These four are the true survivors, worthy of the name. And now I have joined them.

She sipped her brandy again. Somehow it wasn’t so bad now. It tasted like inclusion, like being part of something. Mallen was shuffling a deck of cards, his pipe jammed between his teeth.

‘Serg— Mallen, you . . . seem comfortable with civilized niceties,’ she noted.

He shot her a humorous look. ‘Just a jungle savage, me. You want to play a hand, rob me blind?’

The other men hooted with laughter at that. ‘You didn’t fall for that native-guide act of his, did you?’ Tubal asked her.

She frowned. ‘But he said – you said you were here before the war came,’ she accused Mallen.

‘I was.’

Brocky snorted on his brandy. ‘Oh, he was here all right. But only because the University of Colemansworth gave him a stipend.’

‘University . . . ?’

‘Our friend Mr Mallen is a scholar,’ Scavian clarified. ‘I suppose the pre-eminent scholar on the swamps here. In truth, there wasn’t much competition. We’re lucky to have him. Things would be a lot worse otherwise.’

‘Enough of the compliments.’ Mallen dealt five hands with the air of long practice. He caught her stare, still accusing, and shrugged. ‘So what? My father, his father, they came here and met the indigenes. Family trade, you understand? Nothing wrong with an education.’

‘He’s written books,’ Brocky chuckled. ‘Papers, lectures, you name it! You’re right, though, at heart he’s just a dumb swamp-boy brought up by the dingies, aren’t you, Mallen?’

‘That’s me.’ He put on a surly and savage expression, then proceeded to win three out of four hands of cards. Emily was quietly pleased to win the fourth, to Brocky’s curses.

After the cards, they emptied a second bottle of the brandy between them, and the men sat back and filled the air with the sweet scent of pipe smoke. She imagined her past self, the woman who had not known Gravenfield or the swamp or the rattle of muskets. That other Emily could have imagined nothing stranger than this: sitting with the menfolk in a man’s ill-fitting clothes, talking to them as one of them. But, then, how innocent that lost Emily had been. The brandy put a pleasant fogginess into her head.

‘The King and his Ravens,’ toasted Brocky, which seemed to annoy Scavian.

‘Herons, surely.’ Emily was thinking of the royal coat of arms. ‘I didn’t know he had ravens.’

‘Denlanders call our wizards that,’ Mallen explained. ‘When they aren’t running away from them.’

‘What do we call theirs?’

‘We’ve never needed to decide. They don’t have any.’ Tubal made an expansive gesture with his brandy glass that somehow managed to spill nothing. ‘Their king is dead, his royal line vanished, so who’s to make wizards in Denland now? Those they had, they became naught but normal men the moment their king was murdered.’

‘That’s why they take such exception to us Warlocks,’ Scavian noted. ‘Though Justin gives them other reasons, in truth.’ He stared down into his liquor and then drained the cup in one. ‘I have been with the colonel today, gentlemen. Counting Miss Marshwic as an honorary gentleman, of course.’

‘Of course,’ she allowed.

‘What’s he come up with now?’ Tubal asked.

‘Only if you absolve me from putting shillings in the jar. This would bankrupt me, else.’ He maintained his smile with some effort. The shillings, Emily had gathered, were the penalty for ‘serious talk’.

There was a moment’s hesitation before Brocky nodded, wordlessly indicating that Scavian should continue. The Warlock toyed with his emptied glass, the cheer sloughing off him. He had no rank, formally, but the touch of the King meant he was the King’s own presence out here. Emily understood that he was as good a man as a company captain, whilst the senior Justin Lascari was on a par with Colonel Resnic himself.

‘The colonel intends,’ Scavian said at last, ‘for there to be what he calls a “Big Push”.’

‘A Big Push,’ Brocky murmured uneasily. ‘Sounds positively obscene, Scavvers, old chap.’

‘You know . . . we all know, I hope, that this war is not like any other,’ Scavian went on. ‘This is no land war, aiming to seize and hold an acre at a time, until the enemy are forced away. No man, saving yourself, Mallen, could stay so long in the swamps and hold a position. If anything it’s more like a naval action, with rival fleets trying to find each other in a sea fog.’

‘They would have done well to send us an admiral,’ Tubal agreed.

‘But they sent us Resnic, who has thirty years’ experience of textbook war,’ Scavian acknowledged. ‘He does not know how to fight Dr Lam’s forces. So, now that the women are here, now they are tested a little, he has conceived his idea of a Big Push.’ He stopped, glancing from face to face. ‘Is nobody going to stop me, under the rules of the club? Am I not too serious for you?’

‘I think we’re all listening to you, Scavvers,’ Brocky admitted.

Scavian put on his small, sad smile for them. ‘He will throw us all into the mix, gentlemen – saving yourself, Brocky. He will take up all his forces in two hands and cast us in the direction of the enemy. I hear Captain Goss is returning to retake command of your company, Salander, and that will be the trigger of this plan pulled.’

They sat in silence after that. Emily looked from face to face: Mallen tattooed and unreadable; Brocky’s scowl, and Tubal’s philosophic half-smile. Scavian met her gaze and then lowered his eyes, relighting his pipe with just a touch of his finger.

Late on, when Tubal declared the meeting of the Survivors’ Club over, it was Scavian who approached her to say, ‘Miss Marshwic, I wonder if I may escort you to your . . . to your tent.’ She read his dissatisfaction with the word and smiled at him.

‘Why, Mr Scavian, I would be delighted.’

It was quite dark without, the camp’s lanterns and candles looking like nothing so much as the marsh-wick she had witnessed with Mallen. She found the ground unaccountably treacherous with all the guy-ropes, as she and Scavian made a tentative progress towards where she was barracked.

So here we are at last. ‘Do you remember Deerlings House?’ she asked him.

‘It has never been far from my mind,’ he said. And then, with understated gallantry, ‘A man going to war could wish for a worse send-off than an evening of your company, Emily.’

A shiver went through her, from the cold, the company, the words. What a place is this! Out here on the edge of civilization, death and his harvest every other day, and I feel as though I have left a host of fetters behind me. Surely Miss Emily Marshwic of Grammaine would not have been seen thus, dressed as a soldier and leaning on a young gentleman, with three glasses of brandy inside her. How Alice would talk!

‘I have a great deal to thank you for, Emily,’ Scavian continued. She leant a little further into him, and his arm found its way around her shoulders to steady her. ‘It is because of you that I sought out Tubal when first I arrived here. Without you, I would not have found my club, my friends. I would have had no company but Lascari. I think you must have saved my life ten times over by now, just for pointing me in that direction.’

She could see, out at the edge of the camp, the dancing dots of fireflies, the swamp’s own torch-bearers. She stopped, seeing now for a second what Mallen could find to love in such a place.

‘God knows, this can be a lonely place,’ Scavian remarked in hushed tones. Around them the camp made subdued noises, everyone asleep now bar them and the sentries. ‘A man needs good company here.’

He felt warm against her in the dark, even through her jacket. She thought of the King’s mark on his chest, and what it would feel like to put her hand on that imprint. It seemed utterly incredible that she was here beside a King’s Warlock, with his arm about her. She was only Emily Marshwic, after all. How daring this should be. And yet how natural.

‘I’m glad I found you, Giles. I had thought . . .’ But she could not say what she had thought, for the words choked in her throat. A moment later she had her arms tight around him, her head on his shoulder, and he held her just as close. His arms were not iron hard and lean, as she might imagine Mallen’s to be, but they had a power in them, like the King’s own power. He was warm as a fire, hot as the swamp air. She felt his lips touch gently on her cut-short hair. What a spectacle we must make. Thank God for the darkness.

The brandy, the place, the strangeness; what else could she blame? This was a new world, here, with new rules. She knew, though it would have shocked and horrified that previous Emily Marshwic of Grammaine, that she could ask him to lie with her now. She need not even ask: such things could be communicated without a word being said. His warmth infused her, awoke the brandy and made her bold. He would not agree if she asked outright. He was a gentleman still, and not one to take advantage. He would not agree but she knew, ahead of time, that he would want to, and if she made an overture in just the right way, perhaps he would . . . The thought made her dizzy. What am I thinking? She knew that a gentlewoman did not think this way. But I am a soldier now. They have taken the gentleness away. The thought of it quickened her breathing, tightening her grip on him, infinitely attractive to her for a myriad of reasons. She wanted him because he held her, because of the warmth that boiled off him from his magic. She wanted him because of what he represented: all the King’s power in one man. She wanted him because death could ride in with the tide to fetch her, any day, and she would die without ever having known him. She wanted him because he was Giles Scavian and he looked on her as though he loved her, and that was enough.

Another glass of brandy, perhaps, or a greater understanding of the action the colonel was planning for so soon, and she would have taken his hand and led him off to find a place to lay her down, and perhaps he would have gone along with her. He must feel it too, that closeness that comes only in the shadow of death.

Instead she held him to her, and let his arms take her, and when she finally allowed her grip to loosen, he took her by the shoulders to examine her. He kindled a fire in one palm, with no more than an idle thought, and it showed them each other’s faces for a second. Lit by the flame of the King’s magic, he looked so young, so brave and handsome. There were tears glinting in his eyes.

When the fire died, she closed her eyes, locking in the memory of him. Her hands slipped to either side of his face, and she pulled him forward until their lips met. The shock that went through her was like burning. It made her tremble with fear and wonder.

‘Don’t die,’ she told him, when she could speak. ‘I will never forgive you if you die.’

‘Let them try a dozen times over; I won’t let them keep me from you.’ It was a boy’s callow boasting, but right then it sounded right to her.

It was so hard now, to part from him, to return to her damp and lonely tent. It would have been so easy not to let him go. What was growing between them, though, she did not want to harvest in a single night. It had more life in it than that.

Still she ached for him after he let her go.

15.

The camp abounds with the news of Colonel Resnic’s ‘Big Push’. We talk of it jokingly, as though it is a bowel disorder. We are all aware of the truth of it, though. The colonel has lost patience with the enemy, who will not do what he wants. It seems that this is some military version, vast in scale, of a child throwing a tantrum upon the floor.

‘Hoi, Ensign!’

Emily looked up from her bowl of gruel to see a big, bald-headed man approaching her, his uniform jacket opened to the late spring heat.

‘What is it?’ she asked, tacking on, ‘Master Sergeant,’ as soon as she recognized the three crowns on his sleeve. Now she knew him: Sharkey, from Bear Sejant company. She had seen him around the camp before but heard little about him.

He stopped before her, looking her up and down. ‘Morning, Ensign.’ He was a massive-shouldered man, a real bull of a master sergeant. His uncovered, shaven head gleamed in the sun.

‘Good morning, Sergeant. How can I help you?’ She did not like the leery rictus of his grin.

‘“Good” morning? I like that. That’s a proper greeting for you,’ he observed. ‘Though I don’t see what’s so good about it. No bloody morning round here’s ever good, wouldn’t you say, Ensign?’

‘Sergeant, is there something I can do for you?’

His grin widened. ‘It’s true, ain’t it, you can tell just from how you speak. You’re a real nob. Bloody hell.’

She regarded him narrowly.

‘Must be a real come-down for you, ending up here. Must be hell finding you’re inferior to types like me. See, I earned these crowns, here, Ensign.’

‘I’m sure you did, Sergeant.’

‘Didn’t get them because I was some brass’s daddy’s pal. Must’ve been a real shock to find you weren’t posh enough to be made general right out.’

‘Sergeant, if you’ve got orders for me, or a message for Stag Rampant, I’ll have it now. Otherwise this is no conversation for two officers to be having,’ she said through gritted teeth.

‘Wondered what it’d take to get her mad,’ he said to himself. ‘See, what it is, Ensign, is this. I hear that ladies of a certain class get so bored sitting around in their big houses that they get . . . what was it? Jaded, right. They get jaded.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said and made as if to go, but a huge hand clamped down on her shoulder and she was abruptly looking straight into his cold blue eyes.

‘Jaded,’ he repeated. ‘I heard, and correct me if I’m wrong, m’lady, that they just do all sort of things because they’re so awful jaded. With servants and that.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she told him, somewhat primly.

‘I don’t think I am. I reckon a lady like yourself must be getting real bored out here. I reckon you’d be glad of a little attention from a big lad like me.’

She stared at him. ‘You must be forgetting the colonel’s orders,’ she got out. True, they had been erratically enforced. She knew a lot of the women who had gone willingly enough to assignations with the men. As she herself had felt, the presence of death stripped away a lot of inhibitions. Still, only twenty days previously, a man had gone before the firing squad, for rape. She was surprised that Sharkey would try something like this.

‘Tell me you ain’t interested,’ he told her, trying to lower his mouth to speak into her ear. She ducked her head and squirmed out of his grip, putting a yard of space between them.

‘Not in the least, Sergeant. I thank you for the offer, but I’m afraid I’m not nearly noble enough to get quite that jaded.’

The look on his face was ugly enough; his words were worse. ‘I know ways to change your mind,’ he said.

‘Really?’ She backed off a little more. She was very aware that she could call out, shout for an officer, shout for the colonel. At the same time she was aware of his bulk, the sheer size of him. If he were to get hold of her in earnest . . . But they were in the middle of camp: surely the advantage lay with her? Although Sharkey did not seem to think so.

He’s a master sergeant, she thought. His word counts for more than mine. And besides . . . the thought of simply calling out, and waiting for rescue, did not sit well with her. She was a soldier now and she had to act like one. The moment she cast herself as someone who could only rely on others to protect her, she was lost.

She squared off against the big man. ‘Not interested,’ she told him. ‘Find someone else to give flowers to. Now, if you’ll excuse me—’

‘You are not excused.’ He was angry now. ‘You go think, Ensign, about how much you want to be friends with me. I don’t just outrank you, I’m in with the brass. Pordevere, he relies on me for all kinds of little jobs. You piss on me, you might never see the outside of the swamp again.’

It was a perverse relief, to hear that. Whatever friends he had, she had Tubal and Giles Scavian, and even the colonel perhaps. Now he was threatening her as an officer threatened an officer, rather than as a man threatened a woman, and the situation was defused. He had chosen the wrong weapons.

‘Sergeant Sharkey,’ she said, ‘I have work to do.’

His face twisted, but she heard her name being called, and quite deliberately left him and walked off, not even turning to see how he took it.

It was Tubal calling her. He strode across the camp with that familiar harassed look on his face. She remembered it from when a paper mill was late with a delivery, back home.

‘There you are, Em. Just the person I want to see.’

‘Why’s that, Tubal? Or is it Lieutenant?’

‘It is, I’m afraid,’ he conceded. ‘I need an aide.’

‘I’m sorry?’

He grinned, shrugging. ‘I know – news to me, too. But Captain Goss isn’t here yet, and the colonel’s called all companies in for briefing.’

Her heart lurched. ‘You mean . . .’

‘I think this is it.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, as acting chief officer of the company, it means me, and I need a second. Hell, everyone else’ll have one. It won’t do for me to be left out.’

‘But . . . I’m only an ensign. Surely someone else would look better.’

‘Mallen out-and-out won’t do it. He says he’s got no time to watch the colonel and his cronies comb their moustaches for hours on end. And I wouldn’t trust any of the sergeants to be able to write their own names. That leaves you, Em. Come on, it’ll be . . . educational.’

In that moment she had a very clear image of Elise with the red rosette flowering on her shirt.

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘What?’ He gave her a quizzical look that she did not meet.

‘The battle plan, Tubal. I don’t want to hear it: that this squad or that company will take the brunt. That the charge will come here, or there. Who lives and who dies. I’m an ensign. I just lead squads into battle.’

Tubal put a hand to her arm, unconsciously mimicking Sharkey’s earlier clutching. ‘Em, how do you think I feel? And what do I say when the colonel says, “Lieutenant, I want six of your squads to charge the Denlanders here, as a diversion.” But it’s all part of the job, Em. It’s not just leading from the front. Sometimes that’s the easiest bit. I want you with me. I know I can rely on you.’

Those last words decided it. The words, again, of an officer to a junior, not a relative, nor a friend. If he knew he could rely on her then she would have to be reliable, to justify his trust.

‘I’ll come,’ she agreed, and a soldierly nod hid his relief, and they both pretended it was just another onerous part of the job, like fighting the Denlanders.

The main table of the colonel’s building had a pitifully small map tacked out on it. She recognized it instantly and the sight brought a sound – half-laugh, half-sob – into her throat. It was the very same map they had studied at Gravenfield: that pitifully inadequate balloonist’s-eye view of the swamp. There was no other map, she realized. All their strategy would be based on this: an artist’s impression of one fleeting aerial glimpse from years before, of a terrain that could shift from one day to the next.

She and Tubal were the last ones into a room already crowded. As Tubal stepped into the place left for him, she looked from face to face. She recognized most, but actually knew very few.

The decisions these men make will govern the future of my world. It was not a pleasant thought.

To one side of Tubal stood the greying solid form of Captain Mallarkey, commander of Leopard Passant company for his sins. The colonel’s favourite henchman looked worried, eyes shadowed by sleepless circles. His hands unconsciously wrung the hem of his jacket as he stared at the map. The prospect of imminent action on such a grand scale did not sit well with him, but Emily was unsurprised. He had a camp-wide reputation as a cautious, even pedestrian, man – an administrator, not a field officer. Regarding his second, the slight-framed Lieutenant Gallien, Emily knew next to nothing. Mallarkey had spared Tubal a nod as they entered, but his attention was away from anything actually in the room, looking into a dismal future instead.

Bear Sejant company was the province of the grandly named Captain Sir Huillam Pordevere, a man ten years younger than Mallarkey and about whom the women recruits whispered adoringly. He was a trim, athletic piece of work, never without his sword, never anything less than immaculate. His word or smile could inspire men and melt women; his duelling scar did not detract from his looks but lent him a rakish devilry. He had a reputation to match his appearance, too, and Emily knew he was a man for leading from the front and surviving the experience. Most of the long-time soldiers had a lot of time for Captain Pordevere, but wiser men like Mallen shook their heads. Mallen had no time for recklessness. As an example, Pordevere’s second was the newly arrived Lieutenant Caul-dry, a youth of good family and three years younger than Emily. Lieutenant Potter, Pordevere’s old second, was dead out in the swamps, having followed his master on one dashing charge too many.

At the far end of the table stood Colonel Resnic, pipe in hand, waiting for them to settle so that he could begin. Either side of him were the Warlocks and, with both in their robes for this formal occasion, they appeared ravens indeed: great dark birds of ill omen. Scavian managed a smile for her and Tubal, but Lascari just stared.

‘All here, are we? About time,’ the colonel rumbled. ‘See you’ve brought Marshwic along, Salander. Good choice, good choice. Good family.’

Tubal made some noncommittal comment, but Emily suddenly found all eyes turned on her, a host of unnerving attention ranging from the easy smile of Huillam Pordevere to Justin Lascari’s disconcerting frown.

‘Didn’t want to wait for Captain Goss, you see. Good intelligence in from our scouts,’ the colonel explained. ‘Fellow’s on his way from Locke, anyway. Give him a chance to get his hand back in, soon as he arrives, eh? Don’t want a chap to go rusty. Just have everything ready for the Push once he arrives, Salander.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good fellow. Now, Stapes, would you do the honours? Eve of battle and all that. Deserves something a little special.’

The colonel’s batman, Stapewood, moved around the crowded table with difficulty. To each officer he gave a glass of rich brown brandy. Tubal and Emily exchanged furtive glances. Brocky had been ambitious in his pilfering, it seemed, because he had plainly been filling the Club’s decanters from the colonel’s own stock.

‘Now, lads,’ continued the colonel, ‘Let’s see how the land lies.’ He upended a wooden box, spilling out what looked to Emily like nothing so much as a child’s building bricks. Some were red, she saw, some grey. Stapewood began setting the grey pieces precisely out on the map in little stacks and clusters.

‘According to the scouts, this is how it is,’ Resnic declared. ‘Denlanders clustered like this. Main advance camp here. We think they’re building up for an attack. Got to get there first, you see? Can’t be left to react. Rules of good war. The plan is to mobilize our full strength. Move in – pincer movement with all three companies.’ Stapewood put out the red pieces as he directed. ‘Or whatever a pincer movement is called when you’ve got three pincers.’

‘Trident,’ suggested Tubal, but nobody paid him any mind.

‘So, Mallarkey?’

‘Sir?’

‘Take the east pincer. Have the chain lakes as a border, here.’ The colonel’s finger traced the outline of the string of saltwater lagoons that cut off the bulk of the swamps from the sea. ‘Make as good time as you can and catch the enemy unawares, yes?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Mallarkey didn’t seem to be looking forward to it.

‘Boats,’ Pordevere said.

‘What’s that, Huill?’

‘Get some rafts made up, row or pole along the chain. It’s got to be better than slogging cross-country. You’ll be there faster than anyone.’ Huillam Pordevere thrust the stack of red that was Mallarkey and his troops across the map.

‘Now, hold on . . .’ Mallarkey began.

‘They’d be sitting ducks for Denlander fire,’ Tubal pointed out. ‘There’s no cover on a raft.’

‘That assumes the Denlanders know they’re coming,’ Pordevere argued.

‘I’m really not one for boats. Besides, I don’t want to arrive that far in front of anyone else.’ Mallarkey began drawing back the red pieces, one at a time.

‘Quite right,’ the colonel agreed. ‘Don’t want to complicate things. Simple plans work best. Don’t worry, Huill, you’ll get your chance.’

Pordevere looked dissatisfied but held his peace.

‘Salander, I’m giving Stag Rampant the west. Remember this, because you’ll need to tell it all to Captain Goss when he gets in. Come up along the cliff-line. Mop up the enemy as you find them. Get this far and join in with the others.’

‘Along the slip-fields, sir?’

‘That’s right, Salander. Should make very good time.’

Tubal’s face showed that the prospect did not delight him either. She tapped him on the shoulder and he leant back to whisper, ‘Same problem as old Mallarkey. Nobody wants to be first at the party.’

‘Huill, you know what I’m going to say.’

Pordevere nodded, grinning fiercely as Stapewood put out the remainder of the red blocks. The map was now so crowded that it was nearly impossible to tell where anything was properly supposed to be. An unsettled feeling grew in the pit of Emily’s stomach and she knew it to be a peculiar type of fear. Fear not of the now, not of a harm within arm’s reach, but of a terrible thing that was looming in her future, and was absolutely inescapable.

This is not going to go well, she thought: three companies of soldiers pushing through the treacherous swamps; Denlanders that could be hiding anywhere except where they were supposed to be . . . and of course the camp left unguarded. She wondered what explosive invective John Brocky would muster if his plans to live forever were thwarted in such a way.

‘Right down the middle,’ the colonel was saying to Pordevere. ‘You get the hammer, Huill. Make good use of it. The other two companies are supporting you. Everyone’s got that?’

There was a general murmur of nodding around the table.

‘Now, Warlocks,’ said the colonel. ‘I want you both with Bear Sejant, to push the main attack. One at each end of the line. Pincer within a pincer, I suppose.’

Before Scavian could reply, Lascari put a finger down to the left of the map. ‘I will post myself here, I think, towards the Stag. Scavian, you can support the Leopard’s end of things.’

He’s keeping Giles away from me, Emily realized, blankly puzzled. Even if Lascari knew of Scavian’s attraction to her, what possible reason could he have? Or was it simply that he and Scavian did not get on? She had seen plenty of evidence of that already.

‘We move day after tomorrow,’ the colonel said. ‘Short notice, I know. Have to catch old Jan Denland on the hop. Make sure your companies know what’s happening.’

The day after tomorrow. Her stomach wrenched suddenly. Tomorrow was too soon. She needed more time. She could not march out for such a venture without at least three days, four days, more, to compose herself.

But she knew that was not true. The more time, the more twisting of the knife. The day after tomorrow was as good, or as bad, as any day. There was never an ideal time for a venture of this sort.

*

Captain Goss returned the next day.

Emily wasn’t sure what she had been expecting of the man. She had heard so little during her time there. Only that he had fallen, taken down by a Denlander musketeer, then was dragged back in agony to the camp and carted away to Locke for treatment. It was not the history of a man so much as the anatomy of an injury.

‘Was he a good commander?’ she asked Tubal.

‘He was the only one I’ve had. He could have been the worst or the best ever. I’ve got nothing to compare him to.’ The lieutenant was mustering all of Stag Rampant to welcome the captain back. Almost half the company would be completely unknown to him.

‘Did Mallen like him?’ she asked, because Mallen, to her mind, was a good yardstick for the character of military men.

Tubal shrugged. ‘Mallen never expressed an opinion. He was master sergeant before Goss came, and you know he only really takes orders from the colonel when he’s doing his scouting.’

They had the company lined up parade-ground-style. There were so many of them, all put together; Emily had never imagined Stag Rampant could field such a host. She stood at the front and left with the other junior officers, the soldiers-at-arms arrayed in red-coated rows behind them, with polished muskets at the shoulder. She glanced across the line of her peers: ensigns and sergeants, with Mallen at the end of the line. Tubal was a few paces ahead, his sabre drawn, glinting in the wash of warm sunlight that had come with the captain’s return.

There were a good two score men coming into camp now. Some of them limped and others were gaunt and drawn like fever victims. One had his left sleeve pinned up to his shoulder. They had a common look about them, of men returning to a nightmare. They were the walking wounded, she realized: the men who had survived long enough to get to Locke and the physicians, and healed well enough to be sent back. By the look of them, the doctors had not been too stringent in their criteria. Some would never hold muskets again; some could not march or run. One man had a patch across his eye. What madness has refused to release these men, but has sent them back to war?

The same madness that brought me here, of course. We stand on a knife-edge. Even a single hand will do to defend Lascanne from the enemy.

Individual soldiers broke away from the parade ground to find their quarters, their comrades. Some were met by friends: tentatively clasping hands with a few awkward words exchanged. A few just struggled off on their own; perhaps they no longer knew a single soul here. Perhaps they had been the lucky ones, out of all their comrades.

Captain Goss approached Stag Rampant slowly. After the company he had been keeping, the first thing Emily noticed about him was that he still had two arms and two legs.

He was not a young man, but his injury had changed his face in a way that made his exact age impossible to judge. The lines she saw there could have been drawn by hurt or by time. He was broad-shouldered and as tall as Tubal, though: a heavy, powerful man now hollowed out, his uniform hanging loose on him. His hair was bronze streaked with grey, above an expression two shades short of tragedy. Captain Goss surveyed his company with a look usually reserved by prisoners for their jailers.

‘Stag Rampant company all present and accounted for, Captain.’ Tubal saluted him with desperate pride, but for the moment the captain looked straight through him, past him, at the ranks on ranks of soldiers drawn up there.

When he finally spoke, Emily was just close enough to hear his words.

‘I am not afraid.’

‘Sir?’ Tubal cast half a backwards glance at the company.

‘Don’t mind what you’ve heard, Lieutenant,’ Goss said.

‘No man here thinks it, Captain,’ Tubal assured him, slightly thrown.

Goss narrowed his eyes as though against a bright light. ‘What’s our fighting strength, Lieutenant?’

‘Eight hundred and thirty-eight soldiers-at-arms, seventeen ensigns, four sergeants, one master sergeant, me and you, sir.’

‘And what’s going on here, Lieutenant?’ Goss looked bleakly across the camp, to where the other two companies were unpacking supplies and ammunition, and checking their guns.

Tubal swallowed. ‘We attack tomorrow, sir. The Big Push, they’re calling it. We’re going to drive them back, sir.’

Goss’s damaged gaze slid off him again, and pierced the ranks of his soldiers until it met the impenetrable wall of the swamp.

‘Tomorrow.’ The word dropped off his tongue like lead.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Goss repeated. Emily wanted to go to him in that moment, for all that she had never met him before. She remembered the colonel’s bland blather of Give him a chance to get his hand back in. It was unfair; it was too unfair. His first day, his very first minute, and he had encountered the worst he could have imagined.

‘Sir,’ Tubal said, hushed. ‘No man will think the worse of you if—’

‘No,’ Goss cut him off sharply, even as Emily was thinking, But they will. Oh, but they will. ‘I am not afraid, Lieutenant. I shall lead them out, as I have done before.’ A shudder went through him. Perhaps most of the soldiers would not have noticed, but Emily was just close enough to see. ‘Just . . . give me a junior who knows what’s going on. I will lead.’

She knew it was coming before Tubal craned back to send her a silent, imploring look. He would not force this on her, but he had nobody else.

Nobody would know, except him, if she declined this duty. It was over and above an ensign’s role. But she had made an oath to serve her country, not merely to do her duty to the letter. And he was family, and he needed her. This time it was as Mary’s man that he asked, and as Mary’s sister that she gave a curt, reluctant nod.

‘Ensign Marshwic will junior for you,’ Tubal said, gesturing her forward. Goss stared blankly at her as she approached.

‘You must be new, Ensign. We’ve had reinforcements in, I take it, Lieutenant?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Tubal confirmed.

Goss frowned at her. ‘Ensign . . .’ In a tone of utter incomprehension: ‘You’re a woman.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

Goss looked from her to the ranks of his company, stopping at every third face, seeing the women past the mannish clothes, the shorn hair.

He said nothing. What could he say? The world had fallen crooked while he had been recovering from his wounds.

‘Ensign Marshwic, will you take the captain through the colonel’s plan?’

What little there is of it. The image of that cluttered, useless little map was another weight adding to the stack of dread in her stomach. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘May I dismiss the men, sir, or would you like to address them?’

Goss’s stare had been drawn inexorably back to the swamps, both in actuality and in his mind’s eye. He had nothing useful to say to help his men. His lips shaped the words: ‘I’m not afraid . . .’

‘Sir?’

‘Dismiss them, Lieutenant. Ensign, you’re with me.’

That night, the Survivors’ Club met late, after Emily had left Captain Goss with Pordevere and Mallarkey, and some port, in the Bear Sejant hut.

Despite the rules of the Club, there was a solemnity they could not shake off. Not pipe nor cards nor brandy could lift their spirits, and by unspoken consent nobody placed shillings in the jar, lest it overflow. Brocky the non-combatant’s face was raddled with misery, as though he was the one condemned and not they. That sour nature, his normal defence against the world, was showing its cracks.

He drank immoderately, but the others little. Tomorrow, a clear head could separate life and death. Scavian looked pale, holding his glass with both hands. Tubal grinned emptily, laughing too hard at any joke the others could dredge up, and at his own. Mallen’s painted face was darkly unreadable. She wondered what they saw in her own.

A silence descended on them, Tubal’s laugh fading away into it. Their eyes sought each other’s around the room. It seemed fragile words had been extinguished, until, ‘I had a girl, once,’ Brocky announced.

‘You surprise and appal me,’ jibed Tubal quickly.

Brocky swilled the liquid in his glass, a curious smile on his face. ‘Even I, dear fellow. I once had a girl. Damn, I’ve not thought of her for many a year. We were close, so close . . . A lithe and bonny lass she was.’ His head came up angrily, daring them to challenge him. ‘We were engaged, you know.’

‘You, Brocky, tying the knot?’ Scavian asked doubtfully.

‘Oh, I cut a better figure back then, I grant you, but not that much.’ The fat man slouched further into his chair. ‘Broke my heart, she did. Poor old Brocky, eh? Went off with some fellow of a lawyer, she did, some wordy weasel from the courts. She always did love a professional man, and I was only a dispenser. I could brew a poison or cure the plague, but he could argue the toss before a judge, and so they showered gold upon him. I ask you, what kind of a world is it where men of such slight merit . . . ah, well . . .’ A monstrous sigh welled up inside him. ‘But I had a girl once, in case you ever wondered. Hurt me worse than the Hellic pox, losing her.’

He blinked at them, looking sober as anything, nothing of the brandy touching him now. From one kind of loss to another, Emily understood. He could not open his heart – perhaps such men never could – but he had let them know, nonetheless.

‘We are a sorry pack of fools, are we not, my friends?’ Scavian said sadly. ‘In truth, what are we? A printer, a chemist, a scholar, one lady of leisure and an idle second son. No man’s heroes, surely. Is it not ridiculous, all this? We should complain to someone.’

‘So we should,’ Mallen echoed. It was the first thing he had said all evening.

‘I want to go back to my dispensary,’ Brocky mumbled. ‘I wasn’t happy there, but so what?’

‘I want to see my wife and son,’ whispered Tubal. His mouth twitched, holding back a tide.

‘I want you lot all to bugger off out of my swamps and take your stinking war with you,’ Mallen said, sparking a few smiles at least.

‘God protect us, all of us,’ Emily said.

Brocky cocked a beetling eyebrow. ‘God? He doesn’t visit here.’

‘Do the indigenes have gods, Mallen?’

The master sergeant nodded, regarding her curiously.

‘Let them protect us, then. Let us be protected,’ Emily decided. ‘Is there a thing you can do? Can you give us their blessing? Say some words or paint our faces?’

‘Em, this isn’t really . . .’ said Tubal, the churchgoer.

‘Doesn’t work like that,’ Mallen told them all stubbornly. ‘They’re not like us. Their gods aren’t like your God.’ And then a pause while his eyes switched shiftily from one face to the next. ‘But I’ll ask – inside here.’ A fist went to his chest. ‘I’ll ask.’

‘Well, then,’ Emily managed brightly, ‘let us meet here, tomorrow evening, when it’s done. All of us – let’s say we will.’

They regarded her cautiously.

‘Just say it,’ she insisted, louder, and heard her voice tremble. ‘Brocky, lay in some supplies: something to smoke, something to drink. Let us all meet here tomorrow evening.’ By now the trembling was worse. She was holding on to her voice like the reins of a panicked horse. ‘And . . . and . . . and if we do not . . .’

‘Then those that live will remember,’ Scavian finished for her, once it was apparent that she could not.

Emily nodded, dug into her inside pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper. ‘My note. Fifty pounds, was it?’

Brocky took it from her reverently. ‘If . . . God above! If I . . . I’ll look after your son, Salander, I swear.’

‘It’s yours. If it’s yours, it’s yours,’ Tubal said.

Oh, Mary. What a weight, on this cast of the dice, for the Marshwic family. What a weight for Lascanne.

They were late to bed, all five of them. They knew they would not sleep long, and that dawn’s pale fingers in the eastern sky would find them awake and ready.

16.

My Dear Mr Northway,

Today there is to be a great battle. We are all invited.

Dawn, now, as I pen this for you. Too many things to say. Too little time.

I am in your debt, because you have given me this opportunity. Because you have given me someone to confide in. Because you taught me a little about the world, before I came here, that I needed to know. I am in your debt.

I will write again, if I can write again.

Yours,

Emily.

The companies were assembling before the black rim of the swamp even as the sun cast its first light over the sea. Emily bolted from her tent towards the storehouse and banged furiously on the door until its latch jumped from its mounting, leaving the portal gaping wide. She found John Brocky inside and roused him from his hammock by way of tipping him onto the floor.

‘Time, is it?’ he croaked, clutching his head.

‘Brocky, you must do something for me,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I have a letter here, and a messenger called Penny Belchere may come asking for me. Give this to her if I am not here to do so myself.’

He blinked at her. ‘What?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, yes I do.’ She left him sitting on the storehouse floor and went to join her company.

They were all falling into place, eight-hundred-odd soldiers of the Stag Rampant, and as many for each of the other two companies. It was a vast force of armed men and women, the whole strength of the Levant; for all she knew it was only a fraction of Lascanne’s force in the grander war being fought on the Couchant front up west. Were those soldiers also mustering at this daybreak hour? Were they also embarking on their own Big Push? Perhaps the fate of Lascanne would hang in the balance of a single coin toss today.

‘Emily! Ensign!’ Tubal hurried up to her. ‘Have you seen Mallen?’

She shook her head and he gave her a frustrated look. ‘His scouts are taking point. We need him here now. Go find him, will you?’

Behind him, Captain Goss was walking slowly along the front rank of soldiers, saying nothing, his eyes heavy with emotion.

She found Mallen quickly enough, tucked in behind the company shack. He was squatting on his haunches, and it was a moment before she spotted the two indigenes crouching with him. They spoke softly in the creatures’ own garbled language, and she wondered whether she should wait, to see what would come of it. Instead, she coughed pointedly to announce herself, and Mallen jumped to his feet.

‘They need you, Master Sergeant,’ she told him.

He gave her another of his unreadable looks, of which he seemed to have an endless store, and muttered a few more foreign words to the indigenes. Straight away they were off, scurrying low, towards the swamps. She had lost sight of them long before they reached the trees.

‘What was that about?’ she asked Mallen, and at first he simply looked at her and muttered something about it not being an ensign’s place to question him.

‘Tubal’s going to want to know,’ she pointed out, as they both jogged back towards the company.

He hissed through his teeth. ‘They must not be near the Denlanders when we attack. They had to know that.’

She stopped abruptly. ‘You told them to get away from the Denland camp?’

A nod from him, no more.

‘But . . . if the enemy realize . . .’ She gaped at him. ‘Mallen, they’ll know we’re coming!’

He stared back at her. Scholar or not he had the closefaced pride and dignity of a savage prince. ‘So what, then?’ he said. ‘They will die caught between the lines, else. This is their home – my home. Before we turned it into our battleground.’

‘But—’

‘Will they notice when the indigenes leave? No. But if they do? We come here to die, Marshwic. This is their place to live, and they have no other. I will not betray them.’

‘Tubal . . .’

‘Will understand.’ And he was off again, leaving her to catch up. By the time she had found her place in line, Mallen had his two score scouts away from the main force, giving them their briefing.

She spilled out to Tubal all her worries, even as Captain Goss approached down the line. There was a grimace on the face of the lieutenant, but in the end he merely shrugged.

‘Hell, I can’t say I couldn’t have guessed he’d do that. He virtually grew up with them. I can’t blame him. We’ll just have to hope.’

‘Hope?’ Emily echoed, and then Captain Goss was upon them.

‘All accounted for, Lieutenant?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Three divisions. I’ll take far west: point of the pincer. You’re centre. I’ve put Sergeant Shalmer on east, alongside the Bear. We need to make rapid going of it, Lieutenant. I know Huill intends taking the swamps at a run, punching into the Denlanders before they get the slightest warning. We need to be there to support him.’

‘Yes, sir. What about the Leopard?’

Goss bared his teeth. ‘If we waited for Mallarkey to put in an appearance, who knows what kind of a defence Denland will have had time to put together. No, he can make his own time. But I spoke with Huill last night. We’re going in fast as we can.’

And already the great plan falls apart.

‘Mallen’s scouts will screen for us, pick up any enemy spotters in our path. Ensign Marshwic?’

She jumped on hearing her name. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘You’re my second, since Salander here vouches for you. Lieutenant, go choose your own.’

Tubal cast a helpless look at Emily. ‘But—’

‘Go, man. We haven’t the time.’ Goss’s fingers clenched about his sabre hilt were white. ‘Ensign, get a third of the company under orders to advance along the cliff-line.’

Tubal looked ready to argue, to snatch Emily back from Goss’s command. She could see that it would not work: Goss was on broken glass here, dragging himself through it step after bare-footed step. He would smash down any opposition, because he had no give left in him.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and gave Tubal’s arm a reassuring squeeze she did not fully feel confident in. When she went off to carry out the orders, her mind and his mirrored each other’s thoughts, she was sure: Will I ever see him again?

Less than an hour after dawn, all three companies of the Levant army were marching into the swamps. Colonel Resnic, whose idea it all was, watched them go.

Once under the shadow of the cliffs’ overhang, it seemed to Emily that the sun would never penetrate the dark. Between the towering cliffs and the dense trees of the swamp itself, she might as well have been in a valley. Surely dawn never broke here, just as the sun never set. Certainly, beneath the trees, the best showing day could make was a gloomy twilight. With Captain Goss forging ahead, she was left with three hundred soldiers to marshal, their neat line broken into unruly clumps as they pushed through the dense undergrowth that somehow thrived in fecund abandon even here. Goss himself she kept a close eye on. He was locked down tight. He could face his fears rigidly or he could crack, she guessed. His experiences had left him with no leeway, nothing flexible. He did not even look back to see if anybody was following him.

He carried no musket, she noticed. She had heard he had been shot in the shoulder, and his right arm was held stiffly as he walked. She only hoped he had pistols about him, or that he could handle a sabre left-handed.

Tubal would be even deeper into the swamps on her right and, beyond that, the mass of Stag Rampant company, straggling amidst the fog, the pools, the treacherous ground. This was no place to fight a land war. If there was an ambush, they would only know about it by the shots. And she knew, by now, how hard it was to locate a sound in this thick, cloudy air.

If the Denlanders know we are coming, they could kill four score of us before we could mount an effective response.

She felt she understood the captain, then. March on, march on, because any other options are gone. March on; or turn and flee, and never look in the mirror again.

‘Keep up. Keep the line together,’ she told the nearest soldiers, trusting them to pass it on. It was a hopeless endeavour. ‘Keep in sight of your neighbours,’ she added. That was the only means she had found to keep even a small squad together.

Light struck her and for a moment she was blinded. To either side of her was a staggered line of soldiers shading their eyes. They had broken into the first of the slip-fields, a vast open meadow of grass and briars rising almost up to waist height. The morning light cutting over the canopy of the swamps was fierce and unsparing. Captain Goss was already forging ahead, most of the division accompanying him, but she stood, stunned for a second. Without the canopy, without the all-consuming heat, how was this different to some overgrown field near Chalcaster? A summer’s day . . . a different world.

‘Keep up, sir,’ came a muttered aside, as a soldier passed her, and she kicked herself into motion again, pressing forward to catch up with Captain Goss.

An ambush now . . . ? But Mallen’s scouts were ahead of them, ready to fall back and cry a warning if the enemy were near. If Mallen can be trusted. But she baulked at the thought. Of course he can be trusted. He is one of us. But he is of the swamp, too. You cannot blame him for wanting to save the creatures he has made his friends . . .

Animals. Sub-human things. How could he weigh them against his comrades? But he saw them differently: he must do. She would not blame him.

Ahead, Captain Goss re-entered the shadow of the forest canopy without a tremor, and she made sure she was one of the next to go in. She had to set an example. The rotting heat struck her like a hammer after the mere warmth of the slip-field. The atmosphere of air and light became fetid and insect-clogged. Instantly she was splashing through a pool, watching a great reptile flick lazily away from the crashing boots of her soldiers. No shots yet; no whistles.

They forced their way through ever-thicker undergrowth, man-high ferns and cycads, vines strung like nets, great uneven moss mounds bulging knee-high. She stumbled, steadying herself with her musket butt, then hauled another soldier to his feet when he went down. Captain Goss had his sabre out, hacking fiercely at the foliage, carving out his anger on it. She remembered his ‘I am not afraid.’ He was afraid, but he made it push him forward, not hold him back.

Not too far ahead, please, sir. She increased her pace again, slipping and skidding on the poor footing. Gnats alighted on her, lanced her with their little daggers, and fled away when vast-winged dragonflies gave chase. Banded serpents eyed her from above, and water-scorpions fled from beneath her feet. Around her, the line became ever more ragged, and she gave a frantic signal for them all to keep up. She had no idea how many could even see her. Oh, for a whistle like Mallen’s!

The light blazed forth as before, but she was ready for it now: the second slip-field. All around her, Stag Rampant company were breaking out from the bog, picking up their pace. Goss looked back then at last, waving angrily to her. Or, at least, she registered his taut expression as anger. Any number of emotions could be sheltering under that mask.

‘Sir, look!’ She followed one soldier’s pointing arm and her stomach clenched. It was Mallen, with a half-dozen scouts, running back towards them at a full charge.

‘Captain! Scouts!’ she called out, but said no more, for there was movement beyond the fleeing Mallen. A line of grey coats was pushing out of the treeline at the far end of the slip-field. At this distance she could see no details, pick out no single target, but Mallen was still fleeing at top speed. The Denlanders made a movement almost in unison, half of them falling to one knee, and all of them bringing their muskets to their shoulders.

‘Get down!’ Mallen’s voice came to them. ‘Everybody, down! Down!’ Then he took his own advice, hurling himself into the long grass, and Emily dropped to her knees, aiming her useless weapon towards the distant enemy.

Goss grimaced madly, his empty fists clenched. ‘Get up!’ he roared, glaring around at his company. ‘Get up, you fools! They can’t touch us at this—’

First she saw the smoke, an almost solid curtain of white that flowered before that grey firing line, and Captain Goss and two dozen others simply collapsed as though their strings had been cut.

She heard the shots immediately afterwards, the insignificant rattle of gunfire far off, as if in another place entirely. Aside from that, the world seemed to have lost all depth for her, all sound.

‘Up! Up!’ a voice was shouting. ‘Up and charge them before they reload!’ Preposterous! They have time enough twice over. But she was on her feet and running forward, heedless of the rest, and only then did she realize that the voice had been her own.

Mallen rose up before her without warning, spun on his heel and ran alongside her with easy loping strides. Ahead, the Denlanders were reloading, as she knew they would, with careful, practised motions. She could see details now: small men with dark hair or wearing leather caps, their grey clothes not quite uniform. They were noticeably ragged, bringing their muskets up. The onrush of their enemy had thrown them. When they fired, it was piecemeal, while the Lascanne line was now scattered and straggling, so that there was plenty of open space to swallow stray Denlander shot. Emily heard cries and screams behind her from plenty of those less fortunate, but she still kept pounding forward for God and the King, with Mallen beside her.

Now there was feverish activity all along the Denlander line, as they tried to ready a third volley that would butcher their enemies at close range. Their legendary efficiency seemed to be lacking, however. Surely we would have given three rounds of fire before now? And she was closer and closer, and she could not say whether they would manage it. She heard the shouts of their officers; some of the greycoats were already beginning to lift their guns.

In the teeth of the enemy, the only thing she could think to say to Mallen was, ‘Is anybody following us?’

And still the bulk of the enemy were feverishly recharging their muskets – their officers calling shrilly for a massed volley and not individual shots – and she saw more than a few pale faces looking up in alarm as she neared. ‘Firing line here!’ she called out, because it suddenly came to her that her own people were still loaded and ready to shoot.

Suddenly there was a massive crowd of Bad Rabbit soldiers on either side of her, and she put the musket to her shoulder – even as the Denlanders were starting to bring their pieces up – and yelled, ‘Fire!’

The air was briefly choked with smoke as a good seventy guns on either side of her spoke in unison with hers. With no idea if she had hit anything, she let the musket fall away and dragged out her father’s pistol with her left hand, unsheathing her stubborn sabre with her right. Denlander guns were going off all down the line in individual flashes of fire, but not the devastating mass of gunfire she had feared. A voice, high and shrill, was crying out in threat or fear, and it was hers.

Then she was out of the smoke, just a short distance from the Denlander line, and her voice was magnified a hundredfold as the soldiers of Lascanne took up her shout. It had words now: a battle cry to shake the hearts of the mighty. ‘Stag Rampant! Stag Rampant! Stag Rampant!’ Or perhaps it was ‘Bad Rabbit!’ It was impossible to tell.

The Denlander line broke.

Some were still reloading, desperate to take another shot, but she saw a tide of fear flash across the faces of them all. Terror sparked through them like a fuse as the soldiers of the Stag Rampant bore down on them. Even though a complete volley this close would have shattered their enemies, the Denlanders began falling back. Some retreated in good order; others scattered in panic. Directly in front of Emily, one of the braver souls had charged his musket, and was dragging the muzzle up towards her. The movement seemed strangely sluggish and dreamlike. Locked in the silence inside her head, she thrust the pistol towards him, watched the arc-lock spin, and a jet of smoke gout from the muzzle. The gun kicked in her hand, and the Denlander arched backwards, his musket discharging in his grasp. His shot – or another shot – whipped past her ear like the buzz of an insect. Then she had reached their lines, swinging the heavy blade of her sabre down to bite into the upraised arm of a man; still dragging madly on her pistol’s trigger, empty as it was. A soldier in grey went scrambling back before her, musket forgotten, and she lunged for him with her blade, ripping it out of its first victim. Even as she overextended, she saw a patch of grey cloth explode into red over his breast, so that what she fell over was a dead man. Beside her, Mallen leapt atop the man with the wounded arm and buried a knife beside his collarbone, before looking up and about him.

‘Into the trees!’ he bellowed. ‘Don’t stop at the treeline! Get into the trees! Into cover!’

Emily staggered up and onto her feet, her body obeying his order automatically. The sledgehammer of the heat, she now hardly noticed. Instead she was looking for more Denlanders to menace with her blade.

Moments later she was crouching alongside a jumbled assortment of Stag Rampant soldiers, the mist showing her perhaps a hundred of them. Of the Denlanders there was no sign, and she could only hope that they were still in flight. There were a few staggered shots, she could not judge from where, and then the only sounds around them were from the swamp, its eternal round of animal life and death.

She watched a thumb-length fly settle on her arm and pad the jacket sleeve with its feet. Looking up, she saw the wide frightened stares of her comrades-in-arms. What happens now?

‘Is there a sergeant here?’ she asked.

‘Here.’ The answering voice sounded hoarse and rusty. When she scrambled over the roots and men and women to reach him, she found a man with his right sleeve dark with blood, another soldier tying an inexpert bandage about it.

‘Sergeant . . .’ What happens now? ‘Are you . . . can you go on?’

He looked up at her with a faced creased in pain. ‘Don’t think so. Sorry, Ensign. Where’s the captain?’

She jerked her head back towards the deadly slip-field, and he swore. Meeting his eyes, she saw her own question in them. Someone tell me: what happens now?

Right. She looked around at the soldiers again – her company – and names welled up in her mind, or at least some of them. ‘Wells, take two others and escort Sergeant . . . escort the sergeant back to camp. Pick up any other wounded you find back in the field.’ And what if there are more wounded than three able bodies can take? The question went unasked. It was out of her hands.

She watched with detached amazement as Soldier Wells and the two nearest him helped the sergeant stand up. He gave her a look, before they left: it might have been wishing her luck or it might have been expressing no confidence in her. She let the thought go.

What happens now? ‘You, Gallster and Pachleby, go back to the field. Fetch a dozen muskets. I can’t be the only one to have lost mine.’ And as if by magic, the two named soldiers were already retreating back towards the slip-field. That was the easy part.

‘Where’s Mallen?’

‘Gone ahead, Ensign.’

‘Stockton,’ she said, addressing a young woman she thought looked sound. The girl’s expression suggested that she was not Stockton, but Emily ploughed on regardless. ‘And you,’ she decided, letting her finger indicate the next. ‘Go scout ahead. I need to know where we are, and what’s going on.’

The woman who wasn’t Stockton stood up, looking pale and less sound than she had a moment before, but she saluted and she and her nameless companion stepped away into the mist and the trees, and were lost and gone in ten paces. Emily was uncomfortably aware that she could have sent two soldiers to their deaths without knowing the name of either. I will improve, if I get the chance. ‘Someone make me a count,’ she instructed them. ‘How many of us are left?’

She used the meantime to lean back against a tree and work out what she would do next, what news she might expect to hear.

The count of two hundred and twenty-one came in, perhaps including Gallster and Pachleby, as they came back with their cargo of replacement guns.

Seventy-odd dead in the field. So few moments to account for so many.

And now two hundred and twenty-one men and women looked at her and waited for her to tell them what to do.

The knot in her stomach, tight enough during all these days, clenched fully at last. Don’t rely on me. I only got the rank because of family. I’m no real officer. But she couldn’t tell them that. They were relying on her. She was Lascanne, to them. She was all they had right now of the colonel, and the King.

There was a sudden scuffle at the fringe of the group as the woman who wasn’t Stockton was nearly shot three times while making a sudden reappearance. She kicked her way hurriedly through the mob of soldiers to get to Emily.

‘Ensign!’

‘What is it? Where’s . . . ?’

Thankfully the soldier cut her off before she could stumble over the lack of name. ‘Ensign, we found the lieutenant’s party. They’re two, three hundred yards that direction. He doesn’t know where the third division is, but . . .’ She paused to get her breath back. ‘As I was telling him where we were, we heard gunfire – lots of it. There was a big fight up ahead. He didn’t know if it was Sergeant Shalmer’s men or the Bear. The lieutenant was moving out to assist, when I left. He’s kept Breedy in case he needed to send another message.’

Thank God this woman can at least make half a report. Emily stood up to let everyone see her, as far as the mist allowed. ‘We’re going now,’ she told them. ‘Everyone loaded?’ Even as she asked, she realized that she still had no musket, but the very next moment Gallster was pushing one into her hands. Everything was falling into place. She had now started to slide, and she could not stop until she reached the bottom.

‘Everyone up!’ she called, and the division picked itself out of the mud, battered but determined. She elbowed her way to the front, because it was more than she could manage to lead them from any other position.

‘Let’s go!’ And, like Captain Goss, she did not look back to see if they were following her.

She knew they were. It frightened her worse than the Denlanders, worse than Mr Northway. She was carrying the weight of their trust on her shoulders now. Her feet sank heavier in the mud because of it.

There was a distant sound of firing, no louder than pattering rain, as they reached the next slip-field. At the edge of the swamp, looking out at that bright-lit expanse ahead, Emily hesitated. Quicker if we go over it; quicker than fighting this confounded mud and root-tangle.

But another ambush and you’ll have nobody left to lead. She had no idea where Mallen was, whether he was still scouting or had been caught up in the fighting.

‘Go round!’ she called. ‘Round the edge of it,’ and she battled her way off through the foliage, sensing the relief of the soldiers closest to her.

‘Good choice, sir,’ she heard at her shoulder, not looking back to see who it was. Instead she picked up the pace, heading as fast over the twisted terrain as she could, vaulting over roots, splashing through pools and slogging through mud that wrenched at her boots. Then she took another great wall of root at a run, slung her feet over and went up to her waist in water.

The shock of it made her gasp even as she pushed onwards, feeling the black slime of the bottom ooze beneath her. Musket held high, she waded forward, seeing the bulk of her soldiers overtaking her, left and right, around the pool.

This I’ll never live down.

And then the Denlanders came through the trees ahead of them.

She felt the musket’s trigger click in her hands, realized that she had dragged it down to rest against her shoulder. There was the heartbeat of dreadful anticipation as the arc-lock spun.

The Denlanders had been hurrying across the division’s path – falling back, she assumed. She would never know whether they had, in fact, been watching over the slip-field for their enemy.

The musket bucked against her shoulder and, all around her, her troops were firing. She heard her shot go off, as a single distinct entity, before the roar of the massed fire that the others belted out. The recoil of the gun made her heels skid in the mud, and she almost lost her balance and went under completely.

When the smoke cleared, there was a score of dead Denlanders splayed and scattered before them, while the living had fled.

‘Reload and then on!’ she called, and she waded out of the pool. Someone took her musket, whereupon she snatched her pistol from her belt. It was empty still from the previous engagement, and she had no idea whether it would fire at all now. She dried it as best she could with her shirt and loaded it anyway. It was a good-quality, robust weapon. If the worst came to the worst it would be worth the hazard, and she could always use it as a cudgel.

And they pushed forward, as the sound of gunfire, volley overlapping volley in a continuous thunder, grew ever louder.

The trees were thinning ahead of them, and she broke into a run.

For her first astounded second, it looked like some corner of a soldier’s vision of hell.

The ground was churned calf-deep in mud, and littered with bodies. It had been the site of a camp, a big one, but there was little enough left of that now. The tents were trampled, and everything that stood over a foot tall provided cover for more soldiers than it could reasonably hide. Across the far side, she saw the Denlanders strung out in a long line behind cases and crates and a few overturned carts, firing and reloading with fearful determination, half and half, taking it in turns to peer over the barrier and let fly. Closer by, a few hundred yards along her side of the clearing, there was a mass of men, tight-packed in a block of hundreds, ducking behind what cover they had, the front ranks returning fire on the Denlanders. These were Bear Sejant men, she assumed at first, but then she caught a glimpse of Tubal’s dark face in the nearest lot and knew that he must have come to the Bear’s aid and was now as pinned down as they were.

What happens now?

‘Sir, look!’ She followed the pointing finger of the woman who was not Stockton, and saw a detachment of Denlanders, their grey uniforms smeared with mud and blood, making their way around the clearing’s edge, as they tried to get into a position where they could flank the embattled Lascanne forces. Much further and they would secure an unobstructed line of fire into the heart of Tubal’s men.

‘Follow me!’ she ordered without explanation, and charged forward into the trees, following the periphery of the clearing under the canopy. Please, please, don’t let them see us. A ridiculous supposition. Two hundred men and women and more, all in red, with guns gleaming in the weak sunlight, how could they go unnoticed?

But the swamps and the trees, which had been her enemy since she came here, were with her now. Their roots gave her purchase as she charged her soldiers through them. They gave her mist to hide her from the enemy. She passed through the water and the muck and mire like an indigene, like Mallen himself.

She stopped, letting the division form up around her. The Denlanders had almost crept into position. She had their backs. Shooting men in the back: no honour, no valour. The colonel would mutter into his moustache: This is not what war is about.

And she thought: This is absolutely what war is about. The real war.

‘With me!’ She pulled the trigger, kneeling to reload as her comrades’ fire lashed through the flanking party, smashing bones, punching through lungs, killing men in all the ways a swiftly hurtling ball of lead can. She came up to see the enemy survivors under fire from the front as well, and she mercilessly brought her gun to bear on a second target. This time she saw the Denlander die, flung forward even as he was taking aim. She bent again to reload.

What happens now? She had no plan. Each fresh idea came without ancestor or descendant. Every man and woman who had survived the slip-field was still with her, but that would not last for long.

We will do to them what they would do to Tubal, she decided. Why not let the Denlanders advise her on strategy? By all accounts they were good at it.

She managed another hundred yards about the edge of the enemy company before her nerve failed her and she knew they had to go in. The Denlander line was strung out: there would be no great triumphant smashing of it. They had bought themselves one volley of surprise, and no more.

‘When I move,’ she told her soldiers, ‘get into range and take what cover you may, then fire at will.’

‘What then, sir?’ someone asked her.

She could not admit to them she did not know, so she told them nothing.

The Denlanders fired again, one half dropping down as their fellows stood to take another shot. Emily felt her insides squirm. When she stepped out to the trees’ edge, into good range of them, it would be with two hundred and twenty-one soldiers, all of whose lives depended on her choices.

She wanted to wait and wait for some golden opportunity, some great moment when all knots might be undone with just one pull of the string.

There will never be a good time for this. She clutched her musket closer to her. On three, she decided. She counted: one, two three. She still did not want to go in.

She went anyway, charging out into the open and collapsing before a toppled barrel that would protect her hardly at all, raising the gun to her shoulder. The trigger jerked, the arc-lock spun.

It misfired. No smoke, no sound, but the lack of it was swallowed up in the great thunder of her division’s guns, the choking pall of rank smoke once they found their places and fired. Ragged pot-shotting, nothing like the mechanical order of the Denlanders, but still, guns were guns. She saw twenty or more of the closest enemy punched off their feet, or slumping across their barricades, and she realized to her horror that if she wanted to press her advantage, she would need to close the range. We need to move forward again.

And if the Denlanders have more men concealed in the trees they can do to us what we have done to them.

Dragging her sabre from its scabbard, she pushed herself to her feet. ‘Go! Charge! Go!’ she screamed at the top of her voice, and dashed forward, sword first.

Denlanders were turning to confront her division now. Something plucked at the sleeve of her jacket and she felt a sting as that of an insect. The man beside her stopped dead, doubling over and falling out of her sight.

She screamed, eyes almost shut, sword held high. No words, but just a yell of rage and defiance and fear.

She was within the line of their barricade. Shots sang past her, heading both ways. The nearest Denlander dropped, blood spouting from his throat like a stage actor’s feigned expiry. The next was still facing out at Bear Sejant, about to make his shot. She rammed the sabre into his body, losing it between his ribs as he howled in agony. She pulled the doubtful pistol out and held it at arm’s length, looking for a target.

Her division began to overtake her. Stockton, or whoever she was, dropped to her knees beside Emily, aiming and firing with clenched teeth, eyes wide.

The Denlanders were breaking apart, backing off. Tubal and Captain Pordevere had led their men charging out, a great tide of red that spilled over the clearing into the final round of fire from the Denlander line. From within the Lascanne ranks a great sheet of fire swept over the barricades, setting Denlanders alight like torches as Justin Lascari made his presence known.

In her mind she heard Mallen’s voice: Into the trees! Don’t stop at the treeline. Don’t let them regroup.

‘After them! Follow them!’ she shouted, her voice hoarse and raw. She hauled once more at her sword, but the dead man held it securely, so with pistol only she charged. ‘Bad Rabbit! Bad Rabbit!’

Into the trees. The whole action so far had been a string of beads, alternating light space and dark swamp. There were Denlanders fleeing ahead of her, pelting and jumping over the treacherous ground. One fell, too close for her to strike, and she leapt over him, trusting to her soldiers to finish him off.

Into the mist, into the trees, splashing madly through the shifting waters, and always knowing that she was being followed, whilst the quarry was vanishing swiftly out of sight ahead. It was like some strange nightmare where she constantly pursued, but never caught. The pistol, a weight on her arm, lower and lower.

Where am I?

She stopped running. There was water before her. For a mad moment she thought she had reached the sea.

A lake? A vast lake that receded into the drifting fog. She stood at its very edge, on a finger of higher land that jutted out into it, gnarly with trees sprouting in single file.

Somewhere out there, cloaked in the murk, some great beast splashed and howled.

She turned numbly back the way she had come. None of her soldiers had followed her this far. It seemed they had the good sense to follow the enemy instead, as they were supposed to.

She sank back against a tree, feeling it give a little, its roots loose on the edge of the water. Her heart fluttered within her ribs and it was hard to catch her breath. She had a burning pain in her side, born of too much running and fighting.

Lost? She ignored the thought. She needed to catch her breath and get her mind back in order. She would be no more or less lost with that achieved.

She found herself shaking. The fierce determination that had brought her here was fast leaking out of her. How many men have I killed? How many nearly killed me? She collapsed to the ground, thrusting her pistol back into her belt on the third try. So this is war.

She could not, in that instant, imagine what national insanity had brought Lascanne and Denland to a pass where this ordeal might be required of their citizens.

A king’s death? Is that all it takes to drive us to this?

She sagged back, and then scrambled for her feet, as she saw movement.

Red; a red jacket. Ours.

A shuddering sigh of relief tore itself out of her before she recognized the newcomer. It was Master Sergeant Sharkey of Bear Sejant.

He smiled at her unevenly. ‘Well, now,’ he called as he approached. ‘Look at the two of us.’

‘Sergeant?’ She felt weak still. Her knees might give way at any time.

Sharkey pushed his broad frame around the intervening trees. ‘Looks like it’s over,’ he told her, grinning still. She nodded wearily.

‘And look at the two of us,’ he added. ‘Isn’t this something?’

‘What, Sergeant?’ Wary now, for he was not stopping his approach.

‘Little Miss Marshwic all alone here,’ he pointed out. ‘All alone with just old Sharkey to look after her. Ain’t that nice.’

‘Sergeant—’ And then he moved, covering the last few yards to reach her in a sudden dash that put one hand about her throat, smashing her head back against the tree. Her world reeled and she felt his fingers tighten. ‘Now you be nice,’ his voice growled in her ear. ‘Be nice, you stuck-up bitch, and maybe you’ll enjoy it.’ She scrabbled at his clutching hand and he whipped it away, grasping one of her wrists and hauling her up by it onto tiptoe. His other hand was fumbling at her belt, prising at the man’s clothing, until eventually he yanked it hard enough to sprain her back, and it snapped in his grip.

She could not cry out; that was the worst thing. Even though nobody would hear – or, if anyone did, then Denlanders only – she could not cry out for help. The sheer physical fear of him, his brutal grip on her, had closed down her throat, forced silence on her as though he was making her voice his accomplice. He had locked her in his grasp. His heavy-jawed face loomed in her vision, teeth bared. She felt his hand tugging at her breeches.

He was stronger than she was, bigger, faster. He had done this before. What could a woman do to defend herself against such an assault?

Sergeant Demaine had said that in modern war it mattered not: man or woman, whole or cripple. Modern war was the leveller of all.

His hands stopped in that instant. He had felt the change come over her body, from woman to soldier. She saw the merest blink of uncertainty touch him, and she rammed her knee as hard as humanly possible between his legs.

He doubled up, fell back, both hands clutching his crotch as he roared with pain and fury. He came up fighting mad, killing mad, and within that time she had snatched her pistol from the ground and levelled it at him.

They stopped, both of them. Sharkey’s face was a picture of anger and fear, all of the vile things that mankind is inheritor of. Her own face, had she known, was expressionless.

‘A duel of weapons,’ she said, her voice wild, trembling and terrified. ‘I will pit mine against yours.’

He bared his teeth, but her gun was levelled at waist height and he dared not advance into it.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that we should now rejoin the company.’ Her voice, her every muscle, was steady as a rock now. The fierce fighting spirit was back in her.

He nodded and turned to go, and she took a step forward.

With a crazed animal sound, Sharkey leapt back towards her with hands outstretched, and she pulled the trigger, remembering as she did so that she had no idea whether the gun would fire.

The butt, slamming back into her hip, felt as though she had shot herself. The pistol ball punched a bloody hole in Sharkey’s groin, and he somersaulted forward and tumbled into the waters of the lake.

Her legs gave way and she sat down heavily. The image in her mind was of Grant forcing the same pistol on her. He always did look after me.

Sharkey would have killed me anyway, she realized only afterwards. The simple act of rape was enough to get him shot. He would have throttled me, snapped my neck. He would have done it to others. Perhaps he has. Who would inform on a master sergeant?

Still, it was some minutes before she could muster the strength to stand up, to go and look for her company, to see who yet lived and who had died.

What will Brocky think? was the thought that occurred to her, imagining his incredulous mirth at her going to stores for replacement musket, sabre and a belt. What will he think?

17.

I have told no one of this. I cannot speak to Mallen, nor even to Tubal, my own brother-in-law. They would not understand.

To you alone can I communicate these events. I believe you will understand, whereas they may not. Your world has plenty of shades between the colours. In this world we cannot but compromise.

She left the lakeside behind her, hoping to retrace her own or Sharkey’s tracks, some path to take her home.

The impenetrable, unmastered jungle confronted her: the tangle of greens, the shifting footing. She was out of sync with it once more. That golden moment where she and it had moved as one was now over.

What a figure she made: a lone soldier with but a pistol to defend herself, a cannibalized baldric holding her britches up. A joke, a clown soldier, a badly cast mummer.

She put one foot in front of the other and set off under the forest canopy, because what else was there to do? She had no idea where she was. The lake at her back was to be found on no map she had seen, or else she was miles adrift. Perhaps she would come up against the sea, perhaps she would even set foot on Denland soil.

Perhaps she would wander, lost and maddened, until the swamps claimed her.

She did not call out for assistance. Dying in the swamps was one thing. It was a death she had almost made her peace with. Being captured by the Denlanders, being taken before their diabolical Doctor Lam, was another matter entirely. She knew little enough, but no doubt the Denlanders would find it a worthwhile story when they had cut and prised it from her.

She tried to use Mallen’s trick of finding east by noting the gradual movement of the water, but she could discern no such movement. It was standing, brackish, undisturbed by all but the amphibians. She crouched over pool after pool, plagued by insects, and saw in the mire not even her own reflection.

It took an hour of roaming, of oppressive heat and slimy water, before she spotted the indigene.

She saw it only when it moved. It was crouching in the fork of a tree, staring down at her with its vast, blank eyes. They caught all the dim light that penetrated through the overreaching canopy; they almost seemed to glow with it. It had a bundle of long, slender javelins in one hand, tipped with bone, and Emily nervously put a hand to her pistol butt.

‘Well now, hello there,’ she said to it carefully, wondering how many friends it had nearby that she could not see.

With a sinuous motion, the hairy creature dropped onto the roots below and bared its narrow teeth at her with a brief chattering and jabbering. As alien to her as her own tongue surely was to it, she let the sounds wash over her.

‘I don’t understand,’ she tried, as loud and clear as she dared. ‘Sorry. Not understand you. No good.’

‘Mar’n,’ it said emphatically, jabbing its weapons at her chest.

I must be somewhere they don’t want me to be, she thought. Well, I’ve no great wish to be here either. Feeling tired and frustrated, she sat down on the nearest tree root, which seemed to agitate the indigene even more.

‘Mar’n!’ it said. ‘Mar’n!’ Then kept saying it, hopping from foot to foot. She just stared blankly at the creature until finally it lunged at her, swift as blinking, taking her utterly by surprise. She went for her pistol, but got it tangled between her shirt and the improvised belt, and then the indigene was right in her face. It had a strange smell, something of the swamp but with an acrid musk overlying it, and it was tugging fiercely at the red of her jacket with its free hand.

‘Mar’n!’ it yapped, and there was something human in its tone: it thought she was an idiot.

‘Mallen?’ She gaped at it.

‘Mar’n! Mar’n!’ it repeated, and there was no mistaking the exasperated confirmation. With the linguistics cleared up, it scuttled off a dozen paces, wiping its hand on the greenery to rid it of her touch, then turned back to watch her. There was no beckoning, no human gesture to explain it, but she understood. She heaved herself onto her feet, and stumbled after the indigene as it led her further into the swamps.

An hour later she was in sight of the camp. She looked around to thank her guide, but it had vanished without her ever seeing it go.

Step after dragging step, she walked out into full view of the tents, and the sentries spotted her and raised a shout. Moments later, Tubal came running from the camp’s edge towards her, with an expression of amazed joy on his face.

‘Hell and damnation, Em!’ he shouted. ‘Where the hell did you get to?’ He clasped her to him fiercely. ‘God, but it’s good to see you! I thought . . . Well you can guess what I thought!’

‘It’s good to see you, too, Tubal.’ She slumped against him a moment, feeling utterly drained. Out of the swamps at last, the air was chilly, the sunlight too bright.

‘You must be the last of us,’ he said. ‘There can’t be anyone else, now.’

She caught his eye. ‘How many? How many dead?’

He sighed. ‘Well, nobody ever said it was going to be easy.’

‘Tubal, how many?’

‘Our current strength is six hundred and thirty-six soldiers-at-arms, Em, besides thirteen assorted officers.’

Two hundred dead and more. She shivered.

‘Between your lot getting caught in the field, and Sergeant Shalmer’s boys getting pinned down early on, not to mention me getting cut up going in to help Pordevere,’ he said. ‘On which subject, Fat Squirrel lost well over one man in three.’

‘One in . . .’ She could not quite imagine it. There had been a thousand souls under the Bear Sejant banner only this morning.

And one of those dead men is my doing. Amongst such a welter of the dead, she found that she could muster no remorse for Master Sergeant Sharkey.

‘Pordevere put them in too fast and too soon. They were taking the Denlanders’ full fire for a long time before we turned up. Dead Cat got off lightly, no more than twenty or thirty down.’

Because they were late, she thought. And, because they came late, we suffered.

‘The enemy?’ she asked.

Tubal’s smile was small and pained. ‘Oh, we won, no question. We broke up their entire camp. Wherever they’ve retreated to, it’s a damn sight further back. Hooray for our side, right?’

‘Hooray,’ she echoed hollowly. ‘I need to sit down, Tubal. I need to eat.’ A sudden thought, and with it, guilt that it had not occurred sooner. ‘Tubal, is Mr Scavian . . . ?’

‘Perfectly alive and well, despite a few near misses,’ he assured her, with a smile a touch too knowing for her comfort. ‘He gave them good service, I hear. For all he hates the fight, our Giles does seem to be particularly good at it.’

*

She slept through from before dusk until just after dawn, a blessedly dreamless rest. Only in the morning did she think to go and see John Brocky.

He had made the storehouse his own special sanctum, a labyrinth of skewed crates and boxes without labels. He was clearly doing his best to make himself irreplaceable. She found him poking around under some shelves with a broom handle, an expression of intense concentration on his face.

‘Rats?’ she asked.

‘Snakes,’ he explained. ‘Our good friend Mallen, out of the kindness of his little heart, decided I should have some snakes to keep the rats down. Now the rats won’t come near this place, and I can quite understand them.’ He straightened up mournfully. ‘Once again, outwitted by a reptile.’ His tone could have meant either the snakes or Mallen. ‘What can I do for you, Ensign? Good to see you well.’

‘I need my letter back,’ she explained.

He spread his hands. ‘Can’t help you there, Marshwic. Your pretty little messenger girl turned up at lunchtime yesterday, and I handed it over just like you said. Got a return message for you, as well.’

He pressed the sealed note into her hands, leaving her thinking numbly of what Mr Northway would think when he read what she had written: her last few words, last morning’s hurried work.

He will worry. The feeling it brought to her was strange, bittersweet. He would be worrying when, by the time he read the words, she would already have returned alive and safe. He would worry.

It felt good to think that there would be someone back home who would know the truth, and worry. She could not put the weight of that on her sisters, but Northway could bear it.

I am become as strange as he, she told herself.

‘Marshwic?’ Brocky queried dubiously.

She broke out of her reverie to collect replacements for all her missing kit, and was just bundling out of the hut when Tubal found her.

‘Em, got you! The colonel wants to see you right away.’

‘What?’ She grasped for calm as he bustled her away from the store.

‘No time for questions. Come on.’

‘Very well, Salander, that will do,’ Colonel Resnic said, with a dismissive gesture, almost the moment the two of them entered his headquarters. Tubal saluted smartly, then was gone before Emily had quite worked out what was going on. There was no clue on the colonel’s face as he gestured for her to sit across from him. The map of the swamps was still pinned to the table, though the coloured bricks had gone.

‘Sir, I don’t—’

‘Salander,’ the colonel mused, cutting her off. ‘Some sort of relation of yours? By marriage, obviously.’

‘Brother-in-law, sir.’

‘Must be hard for you, I suppose.’

‘I’m . . . not sure what you mean, sir.’ She watched impatiently as he signalled for Stapewood to light his pipe, and then took a few reflective puffs on it before continuing.

‘Well, you know. Decent chap and all, but the fellow’s a tradesman, and his family have hardly been in Lascanne three generations, I hear. Can’t be easy, taking his orders.’

Still utterly wrong-footed, with no sense of what was going on, Emily could only stammer, ‘I’ve . . . found him a very able officer, sir.’

‘Loyalty. Good show, Marshwic. First virtue of a soldier. Now look, heard a few stories, you know, about your actions yesterday. I’m sure you know what I mean.’

Her recollection of the previous day’s fighting was like a box of mirror shards cast across the floor: the rattle of muskets, the deep pools, Goss’s fall and Sharkey’s grin. ‘Sir,’ she said without inflection. It was a soldier’s trick Mallen had taught her.

‘Balance of opinion seems to be,’ the colonel continued, ‘you should have this.’

He passed to her, over the spread-out map, a cloth patch with a crown that perfectly matched the one already stitched on her sleeve.

‘Sir?’ She took it automatically, not quite understanding.

‘Keep up the good work, Sergeant,’ Resnic told her, rising to let her know the audience was over.

‘Your work, of course,’ she accused Tubal, when she met him outside.

‘I gave the recommendation to the colonel, yes. Sorry to bring you down, though, but it wasn’t just nepotism at work. While you were still missing, I had half a dozen soldiers come to me to report what you did – how you took over when Goss got his wound.’

Emily stared down at the little patch in her hand and shrugged. ‘It seems to me that anyone else would have done about the same, if you’d put them where I was.’

‘They didn’t, though. Your lucky break.’

‘Lucky?’

‘Maybe not. You’re filling Sergeant Shalmer’s boots, after all. He didn’t make it back.’

Her fingers closed about the patch. Bought with blood. ‘Does that mean we’re short of an ensign?’

‘You have someone in mind?’

‘Yes, it’s . . .’ In her mind was the young woman who had scouted for her, backed her and been her second in the assault, and to Emily’s horror she realized that she still knew her only as ‘not Stockton’. Eventually she had to describe the woman to Tubal, and then go and actually find her and point her out. The subject of their deliberations straightened awkwardly when she saw them coming, her boots half-shined before her. Her expression of unfocused guilt must have been the mirror of Emily’s before the colonel.

‘Caxton,’ Tubal named her effortlessly. ‘Congratulations, you’ve just had a pay rise – assuming we ever get paid.’

*

The days following the Big Push were oddly quiet. Mallen’s scouting parties pushed deeper than ever before into the swampland, but made no contact at all with the enemy. The ground they had taken, the expanse of water and mud they had bled for, remained unsullied by any new Denlander feet. Colonel Resnic did his best to push the advantage, sending armed parties deeper in, searching for other camps, but there was nothing. The enemy had fallen far back, or was simply one step ahead, giving ground only to retake it once the troops had gone.

Still trying to fight a land war, Emily thought.

Instead of musket fire, the soldiers of the Levant front were treated to the distant thunder of cannon, but not from on high. Once the echoes had been sifted out of the sound, it could be heard coming from the east – from the sea.

‘It happens,’ Scavian told her. ‘In truth I’m surprised we’ve not heard more. Our fleet is out across the bay and beyond, trying to pin down the Denlander ships, just as we try with their infantry. They’ve obviously found each other at last. Whoever wins the sea battle can put their own men on enemy soil along the coast but, as yet, the admirals have the same problem as our colonel: how to smash an enemy who won’t sit still for it?’

In the unexpected idleness resulting from Colonel Resnic’s bewilderment, they sat together with their backs to the cliff, looking out over the camp, the trees, the distant mist that cloaked the sea from view.

‘What will you do when the war has ended, Giles?’ she asked him, resolutely not looking to see how the question impacted on his expression.

‘I have never thought too much about the future. I was destined to be the family layabout, you know. A spare heir if my brother met with misfortune.’ She felt a change in him at this thought. She knew that his brother’s footsteps, the ones he followed in, had led no further than here. That was another shred of circumstance that bound them.

‘You will be a hero, though, when the war’s done,’ she pointed out. ‘Your father . . .’

‘Will be unimpressed. It would take more than winning a war to raise his eyebrows.’ She heard him snort at his own self-pity. ‘I suppose I shall stay in His Majesty’s service. I hear it is easy enough, in peacetime. Lascari certainly seemed to do well out of it.’

‘I do not like Mr Lascari,’ said Emily, and Scavian nodded in quick agreement. Before he could pass further comment on his fellow Warlock, he stood up, pointing south. ‘Emily, do I see soldiers there, or am I mad?’

‘I see them, too.’ For a moment she was convinced that the Denlanders had somehow circled them, perhaps even landed their troops by sea, as Scavian had suggested. Then the mist gave up the red coats of the newcomers, and she cried out, ‘Reinforcements!’ loud enough to echo from the cliffs behind and roll across the camp.

*

In the letter he’d sent to her, Northway wrote of things going awry back home. It was not news she was glad to receive, yet she would not have wished to do without it. There were rumours of a new draft, though no firm news had reached him, and he confessed he could not imagine how the King’s advisors could possibly intend to scrape away at the barrel’s bottom any more. Worse, a fresh war tax had been levied again on a population bereft of much of its menfolk and many women as well, already denied the means to make a basic living. She detected a familiar smug note in his writing when he explained that the Chalcaster area had yet to suffer any great hardship, ‘owing to the financial acumen of certain public servants therein’, but other boroughs were apparently baulking at the fresh taxation. He wrote of some protests, even a riot in Arbormouth.

We must win this war soon, she decided. It would not be won on the Levant front, though. That seemed plainer to her than ever, despite the colonel’s ambitions. The swamps of the Levant hosted a dreadful, costly battle of attrition, like two men with hands tight about each other’s throats. The prime troops of Lascanne were funnelled into the level fields of the Couchant, where the nation’s pride – its cavalry – could be put to best use.

There had been two hundred and twenty women in the reinforcing division, and eleven boys just over fifteen. The numbers were less than those lost by Bear Sejant alone, quite aside from the other companies. Emily stood back and watched as the newcomers were given patches and assigned their places. How young they looked, most of them: the girls only sixteen, seventeen years, perhaps. Daughters and granddaughters, with a few grey-haired matrons thrown in. There will be few more now, after this.

Northway had sent her a second missive: a page torn from some ledger, scrawled in crabbed writing and couched in such scholarly tones that it was near impossible to decipher. The last paragraph alone offered much sense for her, discussing her new home in layman’s terms:

CONCLUSION: there is no future, alas, in the plan. These swamps will never be satisfactorily drained, reinforced as they are by the sea. The vegetation herein growing will not give way easily to any crop considered useful to man. The animals are not to be farmed, seldom edible, often venomous. Even the airs are heavy and inimical to human labour. What minerals there are would not repay any industry set to sieve or mine or distil them. Moreover, the native folk are slight and unfit even for the labours one might entrust to a child, let alone a man’s work. In short: expend your efforts on the rail and road of the western passes. This place will not serve.

She thought at first it was his dark jest, to show her what she knew already regarding what a hellish place she had found herself in. Only on a second reading did she unlock the final scribble: ‘Jakob Mallen, Surveyor by Royal Appointment, 43rd Day of Summer, Year of the King 1727’.

She had made mention of Master Sergeant Mallen in a previous letter; now Mr Northway had repaid her confidence. The present Mallen’s grandfather, she guessed from the date. The family had been the guardians of this place for so long, at least. What would old Jakob think of his descendant doing a soldier’s work sixty years down the line?

*

The infirmary door hung lopsided on its hinges, and gave way only after some persuasion. Emily peered into the lamplit interior, asking, ‘Doctor Carlingswife?’

‘Go on in,’ she heard Tubal, from behind her. ‘Let’s get out of the rain at least.’

She ducked inside the doctor’s hut, whose interior resounded to the drumming of the weather on its roof. Eighteen men lay there on raised pallets, with room for six more. There was precious little space to walk between them. These were the worst of the wounded, after the rest had been discharged to their units or sent limping off to Locke. Many were sleeping, and two lay so pale and still that Emily wondered if they were already dead. One or two propped themselves up, on her approach. One man even managed a salute with his remaining arm. Soon enough there would be a detail to get them to one of the hospitals further back, probably once the weather cleared. Until then they would lie here, as they had done since the Big Push. Most likely some would move no further than the burial field in the shadow of the cliffs.

Tubal closed the door behind them, as Emily saw a stern-faced woman appear amongst the racks of medication hanging at the far end of the building.

‘What is it, Sergeant?’ this apparition asked, eyes narrowing to pick the new rank from Emily’s sleeve.

‘Is Doctor Carlingswife here, Miss . . . ?’ Emily asked, for a moment feeling uncertain of her position in relation to this woman. Tubal coughed discreetly behind her, and she realized the error that she, of all people, should not have made. ‘Doctor . . . Doctor?’

‘No doctor,’ said the woman, weaving her way between the palettes with a skill honed by long practice. ‘Merely his wife.’

‘Doctor Carling . . . ?’

‘Left us.’ Her voice gave no indication of how this should be taken. Seeing Emily’s confusion, Doctor Carling’s wife sighed. ‘Infection. An insect’s bite that suppurated. The irony was not lost on him.’ She wore austere, dark clothes, with a leather apron atop them that was stained by marks no amount of cleaning would clear. ‘Lieutenant, there has been no change. You waste your labour coming here.’

‘I know, ma’am,’ Tubal said politely. ‘With respect, it’s not as though I’ve anything better to do.’

Doctor Carling’s wife gave him a disapproving look, and stepped back from the motionless form lying in the bed closest to her. With a start, Emily recognized the pale, closed features of Captain Goss.

‘I can’t believe he’s still alive,’ she whispered.

‘He has not regained consciousness since this latest wound,’ Doctor Carling’s wife told her crisply. ‘He will not die, it seems, nor return to life.’

His courage has failed him at last. It was an unworthy thought but Emily, looking at the captain’s face, could not blame the man. At the edge of the abyss, clinging by his fingernails, what man would want to haul himself up only to be pushed back again?

‘This is the third time I have had him under my care, and I do not think there will be a fourth.’ The old woman’s hands brushed Goss’s brow for his temperature, then folded themselves back at her waist. ‘He’s to go to Locke to recover.’ The strain she placed on that last word revealed all they needed to know of her prognosis.

‘Does this make you captain now?’ Emily asked Tubal, after they had stepped back out into the rain.

‘The colonel says not. The colonel is waiting for our Captain Goss to make his full recovery and rejoin the fray. In the meantime I will act as commander for the Rabbit, again. And you’re my second.’

‘Me? What about Mallen?’

‘Mallen does not command. He won’t. He’s chief scout, not a combat leader. He’s master sergeant just so people will listen to him when he needs them to. Sorry, Em, but I’m going to have to lean on you a little harder.’

‘I can’t lead people, Tubal. I’m just . . . not made for it.’

‘Who is?’ He stopped then, despite the rain. ‘Am I? I’m a printer from Chalcaster, if God’s plan is to be adhered to. As a printer, decent enough; as a father and husband, I begin to feel somewhat neglectful. But a lieutenant? A battlefield tactician? A commander in all but name, for God’s sake, of a company of the Lascanne army? Where was that in God’s book, when he set me on my path? Hell, Em, we none of us had this in mind when we were being schooled.’ He grabbed her by her shoulders, held her still a moment. ‘You’ll serve, Em. Like the rest of us, you’ll serve because you have to. And you’ll serve well because you’re a Marshwic, and the Marshwics, as I know well, always serve when they’re asked. Don’t think I didn’t know the family I was marrying into.’

18.

After the Big Push, they wheeled out Father Burnloft once again, to read the roll of the dead.

Apathy greeted him, and yet I would not have it. I went amongst them, at least the men and women of my company – and especially those I had commanded. I told them that, whatever the deficiencies in the human medium, the message itself still commanded our respect. Let the drunken priest slur the names and gabble them; still our dead comrades deserved our presence.

I think the old priest had never seen such a turnout. I think the whole of Bad Rabbit was there to watch him sway and stammer.

It frightens me. I feel myself a fraud, to be exposed at any given minute. How is it that they all do these things when I ask?

And what happens when the thing I ask them to do is wrong?

‘Brocky’s in love!’ Tubal exclaimed delightedly. He had been bursting with the news ever since the members of the Survivors’ Club had convened this mild evening in the first blush of summer. He had held it in whilst the drinks were poured and the pipes lit, the first hand dealt. Now, as Brocky himself made a cunning play at cards, Tubal came out with it. The quartermaster spluttered and spilled his hand across the table, revealing a mediocre flush at best.

‘I am not. Who ever heard of such a thing?’

There was such a defensive tone to him that he found no sympathy.

‘Evidence?’ Mallen required. ‘Instances, come on, Salander.’

‘You say not a word!’ Brocky insisted.

‘Vote?’ Tubal asked. ‘Mr Mallen has tabled a motion. Who’s in favour?’

Every hand bar Brocky’s was up before he finished speaking.

‘Carried,’ he announced. ‘Yes, my good and dear friends, it is my sad duty to inform you of the death of John Brocky’s common sense at the less than tender age of forty years.’

‘Thirty-seven, you bloody bastard,’ Brocky growled, but Tubal paid that no mind.

‘Who’s the lucky lady?’ Emily asked. Brocky glowered at her.

‘Ah well.’ Tubal teetered back on his stool. ‘Propriety suggests that I name no names, and thus preserve the sweet creature’s modesty.’

‘Damn right,’ snarled Brocky.

‘However, we are at war, friends, and this is no place for niceties.’

‘Bastard.’

‘So I can inform you all that the object of our quartermaster’s affections is none other than Master Sergeant Marie Angelline, of Fat Squirrel.’

There was a speculative pause at that, into which Brocky inserted, ‘Absolute nonsense,’ and was roundly disregarded.

Of course, Bear Sejant had needed a new master sergeant. The former incumbent had never returned, as Emily had more cause to be aware of than most. The surprise was that the new officer was a woman, one of the newcomers who had marched in on the last day of the spring. Emily had seen little of her so far, but had in mind a tall, athletic girl with golden-fair hair, always racing about the camp in her efforts to rebuild her shattered company. It was rumoured that Captain Pordevere was sweet on her, but such rumours were easy to spread about that man, and Emily put little credence in them.

‘Out of your reach,’ Mallen remarked at last. ‘Give up. Nothing doing.’

‘As if you’d know a thing about the business!’ Brocky snapped at him. ‘There’s no reason on earth why a well-brought-up lady such as Miss Angelline would not be flattered, I tell you—’

‘Thought it was “absolute nonsense”, Brocky.’ Despite the tattoos, Mallen’s mocking expression came through.

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘Instances, Salander,’ Mallen said again.

‘Oh, one hears of certain things. Bear Sejant being better than usually supplied. A bottle of port reaching the master sergeant’s tent, for one. The affections of a quartermaster, you see, being of a mercantile sort. Also a hint of Mr Brocky being witnessed combing his hair for the first time this decade. And you must agree that the beard there on display is definitively trimmed, as it never has been before.’

‘A man likes to keep well turned out,’ Brocky said weakly.

‘Well I think Mr Brocky is entitled to entertain his affections,’ Emily mused, ‘however unrealistic. Mr Scavian?’

Scavian, who had said little so far, looked up from his reverie. ‘Almost certainly. What is it we’re discussing? In truth I was miles away.’

‘Would that we all were,’ Brocky remarked. ‘These fools have conceived the idea that I am, in some way, infatuated with that Angelline woman. A more foolish idea I have never heard.’

‘Oh, but you are,’ Scavian said. ‘It’s well and widely known.’

Brocky eyed him narrowly. ‘What?’

‘The lady has a generous heart, old friend. When a collection of candies falls into her possession, she is remarkably free with them. But the question arises, where did she get such a treasure? And eyes inevitably point to the stores . . .’

‘Oh hellfire.’ Brocky scowled ferociously. ‘Are we playing cards or aren’t we?’

‘Amongst other games.’ Tubal gathered and redealt. ‘Mallen’s right, of course. I hate to break it to you, but you’re not quite her type.’

‘Am I not?’ Brocky glowered. ‘What type might that be, perchance, Mr Salander?’

‘Captain Pordevere has been romancing her these past four days,’ Tubal revealed. ‘He’s nowhere yet into the lady’s heart, but I’m afraid he’s her type if any man is: dashing.’

‘Daring,’ Scavian added.

‘Knighted,’ said Emily.

‘Handsome,’ Mallen put in.

‘Presentable.’

‘Of good family.’

‘Courageous.’

‘All right! All right! Bully for bloody Huill Pordevere.’ Brocky gathered up all the dignity within his reach. ‘Even if I had taken a shine to the woman – and there’d be nothing wrong with that because she’s a fine piece of female flesh, and no mistake – even if I had taken a shine to her, and I’m not for a moment at any rate admitting that it’s so . . . even if I had, then Captain Pordevere, who in any event is a posturing fool, has nothing on me and can do nothing that I can’t do.’

He folded his arms with an air of finality.

‘He can still buckle his belt past the endmost hole,’ said Scavian, after a pause.

‘“Piece of female flesh”?’ Emily couldn’t quite believe she had just heard the expression.

‘He can lead a company into battle,’ Tubal continued.

‘Get four hundred people killed in one day,’ Mallen said – and the mood guttered for a moment.

‘Shilling in the jar, Mallen. Rules of the Club,’ Tubal said firmly.

Mallen shook his head at the foolishness of the world, but made the required donation.

‘Are we quite finished?’ Brocky demanded of them all. ‘Is the topic well and truly exhausted? Honestly, a right knitting circle you all are. Gossip mongers, the lot of you.’

He went on to lose spectacularly at cards, which went no way towards improving his mood.

*

Two days later came the sequel to all that.

‘Marshwic, I need a word.’

She turned, not recognizing the voice, but only because its owner was out in the open rather than back in stores.

‘Mr Brocky?’ Remembering the Club’s last meeting, she was hard pressed to keep away a smile. He looked so very solemn, though, and she managed it. ‘How can I help you?’ His position in the army was unclear, being a civilian. It was generally reckoned that he was around a master sergeant’s rank though.

‘I need a quiet word. In stores, if possible.’ He glanced around as though expecting all the spies in Denland to be eavesdropping.

Inside the storehouse it was cool and quiet, fragrant with the supplies and Brocky’s hanging bunches of herbs. Rather than taking his place behind the counter, whence he dealt out his lopsided provisioning, he beckoned her into the back room, where he tipped out the last of their port from two nights ago.

‘Drink up,’ he instructed. ‘John Brocky has a favour to ask. You may not survive the shock.’

She lounged back against the door frame. It was shock enough to see him standing; she was so used to his overstuffed chair, the high stool behind his counter or his hammock, as his natural habitats. He was bigger than she had realized, quite a bear of a man and taller than she was by a handful of inches. His belly sagged out over his breeches, despite the best efforts of his straining shirt.

‘So what’s in it for me?’ she asked him, watching his eyes widen. ‘Come on, Brocky, I’ve been here long enough that I know a favour done for stores must have its benefits in return.’ She would not usually have insisted on it, when doing a favour for a friend, but somehow she felt he would think less of her helping him out for free. It was a strange thought; something Mr Northway might have suggested.

‘You wise up fast,’ he muttered.

‘I’m sure you draw up a bill as soon as someone gets a favour from you,’ she replied.

His face suggested that he could not deny it. ‘Well . . . let me know what you want. I’ve got my share of contacts back home. But, listen, you mustn’t tell anyone. I’ve got to have your word on that before I say more.’

‘You have it.’ It was a man’s world, here, of giving and taking words for surety, and she felt oddly flattered that he had no doubt about the strength of hers.

‘Well . . .’ He wrung his hands. ‘Listen, Marshwic, you’re a woman.’

‘I can’t deny it.’

‘You must get that habit of backchat from your brother-in-law,’ he observed glumly. ‘Well, it so happens that . . . You remember the ribbing you all gave me? Well, well, I can’t honestly say that I haven’t . . . noticed Miss Angelline. Master Sergeant Angelline, rather.’ To her amazement, he sighed as mournfully as any callow swain mooning over his shepherdess. ‘She’s quite a sight, isn’t she?’ he said fondly. ‘Lovely girl. Any man would be happy . . .’ Another monstrous sigh. ‘All right, so I’ve taken a shine to her. Nothing wrong with that, is there?’

She let him off the hook with: ‘None of my business either way, Brocky.’

‘Thank you, Marshwic. Good of you to say so. But the thing is . . . Well, what you all were saying about Pordevere, that maniacal bastard. I mean, even if I wasn’t . . . it’d still be my duty as a decent chap to make sure he didn’t get his philandering hands on her, wouldn’t it? But he’s got all those medals, all that charging-around-with-drawn-sword rubbish going for him. I mean, I could beat him at chess any day of the season, but that’s not what women look for in a man, is it?’

Emily wasn’t sure whether to feel mortally embarrassed for him or to collapse in fits of hysterical laughter, so she made do with a strangled ‘Different women look for different things.’

‘The thing is, just because you wouldn’t catch me marching around with a musket all day doesn’t mean I’m any less of a man, does it? I’m just too sensible to go constantly throwing myself in the way of the guns. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy attitude, surely?’ He had started pacing the narrow width of the room. ‘Only . . . if I want that woman to notice what a well-favoured and eligible individual I am, it’s not easy to do it from behind a counter. I need to step up my campaign. I’ve sent gifts. I’ve made my first moves. Now I need to try something a little more . . . high profile, if you see what I mean.’

‘And this is where I come in?’

‘Yes. Right, look, I happen to know your lot are backing the Bear next. Three days’ time, you’re heading out with them.’

Emily nodded. With the Bear Sejant’s strength still down, its squads were pairing with Leopard and Stag soldiers when their turn came to sweep the swamp for Denlanders.

‘She’ll be on your shift,’ Brocky explained.

‘You know that for certain?’

‘I got a look at the colonel’s rota. In fact I had some influence in how it fell out. Let’s just say that old Stapewood owes me a few favours. I just know it, all right. You and Miss . . . Sergeant Angelline will be on patrol together.’

‘Do you want me to put in a good word for you?’ Emily asked him, but he was already shaking his head hastily.

‘No, no, don’t say a damned thing to her, you hear? I don’t need any pander wooing for me. No, I want to come with you.’

She let her silence hang for far too long, as his expression soured, before she replied. ‘Brocky . . . is that really wise?’

‘Wisdom doesn’t win women,’ he stated. ‘I want to come with you. I want to show her that I can do the soldiering thing. How hard can it be?’

‘Can you . . . have you ever fought?’

‘I did the basic training, same as everyone.’

Same as Elise. ‘Listen, Brocky, I’m really not sure of this. I . . . don’t want to see you get hurt.’

He gave her a smile on hearing that, breaking out from the clouds of his usual expression. ‘Emotionally or physically?’

‘I don’t want to see you get shot, Brocky,’ she said flatly.

‘Nobody’s so much as seen a Denlander for ten days,’ he argued. ‘I just want to show to her that I’m not some goods-in clerk: that I’m actually there, winning the war with the rest of you.’

She said nothing. His words had brought back the weight that so often knotted up her stomach. ‘And if we’re the first to find the Denlanders?’ she asked.

‘What are the odds?’

The twisting inside her wound its way through another two turns. ‘Don’t say things like that.’

‘Marshwic, it’s a simple enough request. I could ask anyone, but you’re . . . a woman. I thought you’d understand.’

In the end she agreed. She asked for no payment. She wished more than anything that he had not asked her.

*

‘Master Sergeant Angelline, I’m Ens— Sergeant Marshwic, from Stag Rampant.’

Angelline was taller than she was, slender and long-legged, endowed with a presence and a grace that Emily found unsettling and larger than life. The woman had the sort of face that sculptors coveted for their finest work. Her responding salute was smart, and Emily could tell that the squad behind her had already decided to adore her. She could quite see what had caught the eye of John Brocky – and why the wretched quartermaster was so outclassed.

She found herself feeling quite jealous, to her surprise. It was a feeling she thought she had left behind years ago.

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Sergeant. Mallen has said a great deal about you.’ Angelline’s voice was slightly accented, revealing just a touch of the foreign.

‘He has?’

Angelline smiled. ‘He’s quite a talkative man when you get him going.’

‘He is?’ It was hardly the way Emily would have described him. She wondered if Mallen, too, had eyes for the beautiful Angelline.

‘He has a list in his head, did you know?’ The master sergeant’s smile virtually shone. ‘Those people he would trust, out in the swamps. You’ll be pleased to know you’re on it.’

‘Surprised, certainly.’ Perversely flattered, too. So Mallen had a list, did he? She wondered who else had made it. ‘Is your squad ready to go, Master Sergeant?’

‘Ensign?’ Angelline asked, and her second stepped forward, with an over-enthusiastic salute, to confirm that it was. ‘Your own?’

‘Almost.’ Emily glanced around, seeing one man obviously missing. Perhaps his nerve had failed at the last moment. She could not blame him for it. ‘Caxton, would you go and . . .’ She fell silent, because the storehouse door had opened, and there stood John Brocky attired for war.

He was in uniform, which was a first. The jacket failed to meet at the front, and looked distinctly tight across the shoulders. The belt was in fact two belts tacked together, and its contents showed that being the store-master offered a few more perks than Emily had realized. There must be eight pistols thrust through it, she decided. She wondered if they were just for show or if Brocky had actually loaded them. As he strode up to them, he clanked with every step.

‘Mr Brocky will be accompanying us,’ Emily explained with a straight face.

‘Will he, now?’ Angelline cast a discerning eye over Brocky, who was looking everywhere but at her. His pose was trying for the heroic, but managing more the look of the constipated. The firm set of his jaw was lost between chins.

‘Quite the formidable soldier, Mr Brocky,’ the master sergeant said, dead-pan.

‘We, ah, all have to do our duty,’ Brocky replied, in an unnaturally deep voice.

Emily glanced from him to Angelline, who was smiling a little but trying to hide it. Any longer, she felt, and he would burst, or she would laugh at him. ‘Shall we set out, Master Sergeant?’

‘I think we had better, Sergeant Marshwic.’

It was, to be frank, less than a joy being on duty with John Brocky.

At first he had taken a place as close to Angelline as he could, striding along with pomp and attempted dignity; stumbling over every root the swamp had to offer; whomping through the pools and spattering them all with spray; falling to his knees in the mud and having to be helped up. The stifling heat had started to tell after that, and he had fallen halfway back to where Emily was shepherding the line along. He was breathing heavily by then, sweat sheening his brow, mouth gaping.

‘How are you coping, Brocky?’ she asked, but he had no breath left for a cogent reply. Instead his expression suggested he was already regretting this entire business. As far as Emily had seen, when mist and vegetation had allowed, Angelline had barely glanced at him.

It was not long before he was blundering along right at the back of the line, having to scrabble and scramble to keep up with the moderate pace that Angelline was setting. In a rush of pity, Emily sent Caxton back to keep an eye on him. She had begun to see why it was a good idea for Brocky to shirk the fighting. He seemed just the type to spring a trap or get bitten by poisonous spiders. He had been hushed three times so far for cursing at the swamp, the air, the water, the beasts. Now he kept his complaints down to a huffing of breath. He hadn’t enough wind for anything more.

They stopped, some hours in, for rations and a chance to rest. John Brocky sat apart from the soldiers, a broad, hunched bag of misery. Emily would have gone over to him but she knew that he would not have appreciated it. He was a swelling boil of self-loathing just then, waiting for someone to burst upon. It seemed an apposite metaphor.

‘Why has he come?’ The soft voice was Angelline’s. Emily glanced at Brocky’s slumped form and judged them out of earshot.

‘He . . .’ But what could she say? ‘He feels he should do his bit.’ It was a creditably neutral offering. Angelline’s look suggested she did not quite believe it.

‘His place is back at camp. What would we do if we lost our quartermaster?’ she pointed out. Emily could only shrug. What am I supposed to say? When we started out, he carried a torch for you, but I suspect the swamps may have doused it.

‘He’s a complicated man,’ she managed.

‘Inner demons,’ Angelline said. ‘I’ve known many such men, driven men.’ Her voice sounded halfway approving. ‘Greatness or madness, I find.’

Emily began to feel awkward with this subject. ‘Tell me, Master Sergeant, your accent?’

‘Am I a Denland spy, you mean?’ Angelline laughed. ‘My grandparents came from across the sea, from the Small Countries. Because of the Hellic wars, you know. What about you?’

‘Am I a spy?’ Emily asked.

‘I hear you are of great nobility, an important family. They say you are a duchess.’

Now it was Emily’s turn to laugh, and as she did the shooting started.

Three of their men fell instantly, even as the echoing crack of the muskets sounded. Angelline leapt back and rolled behind a buttress of roots, shouting, ‘Down, down!’ For a moment, Emily was caught out in the open, crouching low but without cover. A shot whistled through the air beside her and she hurled herself sideways into a stand of ferns before coming up with her musket ready.

‘There!’ someone shouted, and she saw in that same moment the movement of grey-clad forms between the trees. She counted up to a dozen, and then lost count. Many, many Denlanders: two squads at least.

‘Fall back,’ she advised. ‘We’re outmanoeuvred here.’

‘Back! Fall back on me!’ Angelline called out in a voice, loud and clear, that cut through the gunshot and the fog. She fired her musket and began backing off, still shouting. Emily did the same, discharging her gun towards the movement ahead, and then spotting movement to the side as well. The Denlanders must have moved men round to their left, and were now firing into their unprotected flank.

‘God almighty! Get to cover, quickly!’ she yelled. Already another two were down, picked off neatly at a range she would have thought impossible in this murk, had she not seen Captain Goss’s collapse. Better guns; they have better guns.

‘To me! To me! Into the thick!’ came Angelline’s shout. She had found dense cover in a stand of trees, and the remainder of the two squads tried to join her there, as the Denlanders took shots at them and advanced, always advanced.

Brocky! Emily peered about her, for a moment seeing no sign of the quartermaster. Then she had found him: a great ungainly shape trying to negotiate the roots and banks and get himself into cover.

‘Brocky! Come on, man!’ Another shot whipped past her, and her eyes were dragged to the perfectly circular hole suddenly in the cycad leaf right beside her head. She backed and backed away, stumbling and clambering, the useless musket clutched close to her. She saw Caxton vault past, her face set and without expression. The next man behind her stumbled and fell, clutching at his belly. The Denlanders were close now, a staggered line of grey men advancing, firing calmly and then stopping to reload.

How they have outwitted us!

She called out to Brocky again, and he gave her a desperate look full of knowledge of his own foolishness. ‘Marshwic!’ he cried, and in that moment he lurched forward and toppled, ending up draped over a root five yards away from any cover.

She screamed his name, but the shots were nearer now, and she bolted for the deeper vegetation, to where Angelline and the balance of the soldiers were returning fire at the Denlanders, who all the while were getting closer.

The master sergeant had found a good place to make a stand. One great tree had split near its base, and a dozen divided trunks fought upwards, and gave shelter to the besieged soldiers. Emily reloaded feverishly, hearing the crack and snap of musket fire all around.

‘How many are there?’ she called over the din.

‘I count twenty left at least,’ Angelline said. ‘A little fewer than us, perhaps, but they have us pinned down.’

‘Can we charge?’

‘We’d be running straight into their fire.’

‘They might break.’ God help us if they don’t break.

Angelline ground her teeth. ‘I don’t want to risk it.’ A shot hammered splinters from the trunk by her face, and she barely flinched. ‘Though we may have to,’ she allowed.

‘I can lead some men out to flank them.’ Emily sighted along her musket at the Denlanders. They were advancing from cover to cover, making use of everything the swamp could give them. Their greyness bled into the mist, where they shifted and flowed. She cursed, and fired anyway, ducking back to reload without seeing if she had hit home.

‘You’d not make it,’ Angelline warned her. ‘They’ve got too good a view of us. I’m sorry I brought us to this, Sergeant.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘My command, my fault . . .’ Angelline’s voice cut off so abruptly that Emily thought she had been shot. Instead she was staring out at the enemy, her mouth open.

‘Is that . . . ?’ she said, speechless for once.

Emily risked a glimpse out, and her finger twitched on the trigger, sending a wild and unaimed shot over the enemy’s heads.

John Brocky was up.

He had pulled himself to his feet, with a pistol in each hand. The Denlanders had been in a hurry to press forward and surround their stubborn foes, which left the quartermaster now behind the enemy. She could not see what kind of mad expression might be discovered on a man in his situation.

‘Everyone reload and be ready to move,’ Angelline said.

Even as her hands went through that familiar task, Emily could not but watch the resurrected John Brocky. For a moment he just stood there, knees bent and hunched forward for balance in the shifting mud. Then he seemed to come to a decision within himself, and his hands exploded with smoke and fire as the pistols discharged in unison, directly into the backs of the Denlanders.

The weapons fell from his hands instantly and he reached for the next pair. His mouth was open and he was yelling something – probably something obscene. The Denlanders were turning even as he fired again, and they must have believed an entire squad of Lascanne soldiers had come up behind them.

And then Angelline bellowed, ‘Charge!’ in a voice like thunder, and her surviving soldiers boiled out of cover with their muskets firing, with their knives and sabres bared.

Brocky stood still and fired his third set of pistols. His face was a study in panic, a man who has opened a door onto something he had never wanted to see. At a range of no more than five feet, he had not missed a shot.

Angelline and Emily, leading the charge, met the Denlanders head on. Emily’s sabre flashed and missed, but the Denlanders were falling back. She saw a man try to bring his musket to bear on Brocky, far too close for such elegant shooting. Brocky’s final pistols flashed, one firing, one not. The Denlander was punched from his feet, falling backwards over the bodies of his comrades.

And there was quiet for just a little while, as some twenty-three natives of Lascanne crouched amongst twice that many corpses of both nationalities.

‘Brocky,’ Emily challenged him, ‘you were faking! You pretended you’d been shot to fool them.’

He turned world-weary eyes on her. ‘Oh, I wish,’ he replied. He used one pistol butt to hook aside his jacket, and she saw a small patch of red across his shirt that in any other circumstances she would have taken for wine.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘There’s a stupid question.’

‘Sergeant, there are more of them out there,’ Caxton reported to her urgently. ‘Must be at least two more squads, judging from all the movement. What the hell are we going to do?’

‘The colonel must be told,’ Angelline stated flatly. ‘He must know that they’re back.’

‘Can you manage, Brocky?’ Emily asked him.

‘Going to have to.’ From inside his jacket he had pulled a metal flask, and was now opening it with his teeth. With a hiss of pain, he half-emptied it over the wound, pouring the rest down his throat.

‘Can you walk?’

‘Going to have to.’ He sat down beside her heavily. ‘Did I do all right?’

‘It was perhaps the most stupid thing I’ve yet seen someone do out here, if that’s what you mean,’ she said.

‘I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I felt like the world had written me off for dead, but forgotten to actually do it . . . Then they stepped over me, and I had this . . . mad idea.’

‘We all saw your mad idea,’ Angelline put in from behind him. ‘Sergeant, I want to split the squads. We’ll make our separate ways back to camp. It gives us a better chance of someone getting word back.’

Brocky had gone very quiet, and he set to reloading his last two pistols with great industry. Emily glanced around at the soldiers still with them. ‘Caxton, how many of our lot made it?’

‘Twenty-two, counting you and me,’ the ensign supplied. ‘Also twenty-nine of the Bears.’

‘Right.’ Fifty-one soldiers in a swampland crawling with Denlanders. Emily knew what Angelline was hoping for. One group, either group, would catch the notice of the enemy, and in the confusion the other might slip by. Might, for it was a risky business, but they were fast running short of options.

She glanced at Brocky, still reloading, and then back at the master sergeant. She felt she owed the man this, after his rising from the dead and saving the day. ‘Master Sergeant, you have more men. Will you escort Mr Brocky?’

‘Of course.’ There was a fair amount of knowledge in Angelline’s smile. ‘I’d be glad to.’ She put out a hand. ‘Good luck to you, Marshwic. Good luck to all of us.’

Her clasp was firm and brisk, the handshake of someone agreeing on some minutiae of business, not to a life-or-death gamble. Emily returned her grip as best she could.

Then she and Caxton got the Stag Rampant soldiers together, and moved them off cautiously into the mist, waiting for the next musket shot to find them.

19.

In the swamps we can be sure of nothing. At any time, we can feel the eyes on us, and we never know whether some dumb beast stares, or the invisible indigenes, or the Denlanders. The place is full of ghosts.

The mist was thickening, which was the first piece of luck that had come their way. Somewhere to the east the tide was running in, flooding the pools and the shallows, climbing up along the arching tree roots. Bay fish and other sea beasts were nosing their way up with the rising water, and above the tide the curling mist rode in, spreading its tendrils between the trees as far as the battered squad of Stag Rampant troopers.

They had made a slow and careful progress so far. Emily was taking them on a curving course, as best she could judge, hoping to reach the camp by a roundabout way. She guessed the Denlanders would seek to ambush them by the most direct paths, assuming the enemy had the faintest idea where they were. She supposed that even Denlanders could get lost.

Strung out behind her was the score of soldiers-at-arms who had been fortunate enough to survive this far. She could feel the twanging tension in them, from never knowing when the next shot would come at them. She never had a sense that they were free and clear of the Denlander net, not since they parted from Angelline. Whenever she motioned for a halt, the character of the swamp gave the enemy away; there was movement and motion out there that was not native to the mud and the mist. The Denlanders were pacing them, never quite finding them in the fog but knowing that they were close.

At the end of the line was Caxton, and Emily hoped she was bearing up. It was a hell of a first assignment as an officer. If the woman was an ounce less dependable than she had reckoned, Emily would discover it soon enough.

And meanwhile, she was lost.

Not a certainty yet: she might come across some stone landmark or running channel that would confirm or dispel her suspicions, but she was starting to believe that the Denlanders were managing to keep south of them, cutting them off from the camp.

She could not see them or hear them, but she knew for sure they were there. This was a sense she was developing that could not be accounted for in any normal way. Now she felt a noose drawing close.

She signalled them to pick up the pace, clambering faster over the rising root buttresses, heading for denser and denser vegetation. The enemy have new guns. She had reported it to the colonel, and he had not believed her, but she knew it. The Denlanders could fire over a distance with great accuracy, in a way that Sergeant Demaine at Gravenfield had never dreamt of. New guns or new training, but the Denlanders were changing.

‘Sergeant!’ Caxton shouted out and, for her to break silence, Emily knew the new ensign must have spotted the enemy. All of a sudden Emily was running as fast as she could over the awkward ground.

‘Go! Go!’ she was shouting, feeling rather than hearing the squad take to its heels after her. There were four discrete snaps, from muskets barking out, but she could not take the time even to glance back to see how many still followed her.

She hurled herself onwards, running along roots with desperately uncertain balance, rebounding from tree trunks, forcing her way into the densest foliage she could find, anything to obstruct the Denlanders’ line of sight. There were more shots behind, but none close to her. She hoped to God none of her squad had stopped to return fire, or they would be lost.

She sank up to one knee in mud, cursing like a real soldier. Two or three of her squad ran past her before someone stopped to help her out. A shot struck the water near her, throwing up a fan of spray.

Suddenly the woman next to her was Caxton, and Emily had to assume the ensign was still last in line, so that she herself was now at the rear, lumbering and scrabbling between the trees with the Denlanders closing in. There were twisted boughs on every side now: a maze of tortured limbs clawing at one another in their slow fight over the sunlight. Emily concentrated on keeping the backs of the fleeing soldiers before her in sight, feeling her sides ache from all the running, from the weight of her pack and weapons dragging at her. That extra sense told her that pursuit was not so close now. The Denlanders had turned wary at her choice of battlefield. Their new guns would be less use within a sabre’s reach.

Beside her, Caxton was white as a sheet, wide-eyed, gasping for breath. It made Emily feel better to see someone suffering as much as she was.

Her eyes on the ensign, her feet hit uneven ground and she tripped, virtually dragging Caxton down on top of her.

She had braced herself to hit the ground, but the impact came late, she and Caxton tripping down a shallow slope, jarring every joint and bone before separating at the foot, each clawing for their own musket.

There had been enough stones and shards to leave her black and blue all over and she cursed aloud, unable to stop herself. Caxton was sitting up, staring with a slack jaw at the vista all around them.

‘What? Is it the . . . ?’ And Emily stopped, for she too had seen.

She recalled the stone monument and the oddments of ancient masonry that the swamp still displayed. Well, here was the mother-lode.

It was impossible to know how much of it there was, but she guessed the slope she had fallen down must be built on it, stone on stone beneath the green, beneath the mud. All around them the ground bulked out and away in great lumpy mounds. There could be a town here, even a city stretching all around them, and none would have guessed it from any vantage point but here. Here alone the mud had given up its treasures to the air.

They were surrounded by great stones, pale beneath the filth, their age-weathered carving still half visible despite the ravages of the ages. Here was a pedestal, broken and rough, where a statue might have stood. There a doorway still perilously standing, though the wall it had pierced was long fallen. Here she made out three tumbled sides of a house as large as Grammaine, or perhaps one huge room of a mansion fit to shame even Deerlings.

Sixteen of her soldiers were there with them, sitting or standing and clustered close.

‘Sergeant . . .’ Caxton began in a whisper. By her feet a monstrous stone head glared up, half buried. Its blank white eyes were huge, its mouth a lattice of fangs.

‘I know, Ensign. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not on any of the maps.’ Some of the half-demolished walls were still twelve feet high at their jagged crests.

‘Not the place, Sergeant . . . Them.’

Emily followed the other woman’s gaze, and the greenery of moss and weed became, in a blink, a crouching indigene, staring back at her with great featureless eyes that a moment before had seemed mere blemishes, two round fruits or leaves.

After that first surprise she was reminded, of all things, of picnics up on the meadows of the Wolds; how the grass there would seem clean and clear, until she had spotted just one ant. And then, the more she looked, the more of them she saw, until there was not a patch of ground all around that was not crawling with them.

Thus it was here: everywhere her gaze fell amongst the stones, she met the pale eyes of an indigene. They were crouching like gargoyles on the stones, or froglike out on the ground, or like apes in the branches of trees. Tens of them, hundreds. She began to feel a new fear well up in her, because there were just too many. So very many of the beastly little creatures could never bode well. Their colossally multiplied attention intimidated her, for every single one of the creatures was staring at the men and women from Lascanne, and there was real feeling in that massed gaze: hatred, fear, loathing. Emily felt pinned by their inexplicable regard, like a moth under glass.

Details continued dropping into her mind, one by one. It was only gradually that she registered the canes lashed with vines, the woven reeds; the way every standing stone wall had some kind of hovel leaning against it; the shelters and the intricately woven roofs. Eventually she could hold off the thought no longer, and the balance tipped in her mind from ‘city of the ancients’ to ‘indigene village’.

‘Oh, damn,’ she whispered. For of course these folk were under treaty, technically. She doubted whether the colonel would care much if they upset the natives, but Mallen certainly would. They had managed to bring the war right to the indigenes’ doorsteps.

‘Ensign, I think we should leave here,’ she decided but, even as the words left her mouth, one of her soldiers called out, ‘Sergeant! They’re coming.’

‘Cover!’ she snapped automatically. ‘Use the stones as cover. Ready to return fire!’

She found a line of jagged stones where a monstrous carved column had fallen, and put herself behind it, watching the rim of the depression – waiting for the Denlanders to show themselves. Caxton staggered down to settle beside her, breathing harshly.

‘This is really bad,’ the ensign wheezed. ‘This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.’ Her hands were shaking as she readied her musket.

‘I don’t think anyone really planned this.’ The continued attention of the indigenes was getting on Emily’s nerves. She could not shake it. They were behind her and all around her. They had spears, bows and knives. If they turned nasty there would be no chance at all, and surely better to be shot cleanly by Denlanders than cut apart by savages?

There was a disturbance in the trees up above, and one of her soldiers fired instantly. They heard a shout of pain, and a ripple of jubilation went through the Lascanne forces, such as they were. At this stage, any victory was better than none.

For a long moment nothing moved, save for that same red-coated soldier reloading his gun.

Emily glanced at Caxton, who was clutching her musket too tightly. She gave her sergeant a sideways look and said, ‘Is it too late to resign my commission?’

‘Nonsense, we’ll make a major of you before we’re done,’ Emily told her, her voice cracking with the words. She could not manage mere banter with the enemy so close. ‘Tell me, Caxton, what did you do before all this?’

The ensign gave a weak smile at that. ‘A man’s tailor, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘Only one to take over the family business, so I’m used to doing a man’s work.’ And her expression was such that Emily could not help but return the grin.

‘There’s no trade that could prepare you for this,’ she told the other woman, and then fresh movement dragged her eyes back up. She could see from brief glimpses that the Denlanders were spreading out along the edge of the slope in a loose semicircle. ‘How many, do you think?’

‘Two full squads at the least. At least twice our number,’ Caxton replied, eyes narrowing. She settled herself into a more comfortable position, finger poised on the trigger.

‘They’ve got to come down,’ Emily decided. Because we’re sure as hell not going up. Against her will, she found her head pulled round to stare at the indigenes as they lurked against the stones, clutching one another. Their eyes spoke mute accusation at her.

Any moment now, this place will become sheer speeding death. Every missed shot could kill one of them. Why didn’t they run?

This is their place, their home. She remembered Mallen warning the indigenes to flee the Denland camp, before the attack. How bitter he had seemed that Denland and Lascanne had brought their human war into the very homes of these natives.

There will be a lot of dead indigenes before the day is out. He may never speak to me again.

‘Why don’t they come?’ Caxton hissed. There was surely enough cover down the slope to cloak a Denlander assault. Brave one volley to get to us, and then we’d stand no chance. Two squads of them, perhaps more, and only eighteen of us. Which left Caxton’s question: Why didn’t they come? What kept them holding back to the edge of the slope? Sheer craven fear?

She held her breath, because a mad idea had come to her: an idea just as mad as Brocky’s pistol frenzy, though far less likely to succeed.

But what if . . . ?

Could she put herself in the mind of a Denlander officer? What would he be thinking that would stay his hand?

Is there any common ground at all?

We are dead either way, she decided. They will get reinforcements soon enough. They will have enough men to surround this entire village, and kill everyone and everything in it. Hiding here behind the stones won’t stop us getting shot in the back.

She let out her breath, for still the Denlanders hesitated.

‘God protect me,’ she whispered.

‘Sergeant?’

‘Caxton, have you got on your person a pocket handkerchief?’

The ensign made a wretched little laugh. ‘I wouldn’t be much of a tailor else.’

Under Caxton’s incredulous gaze, Emily knotted the ridiculous little square of cloth about the barrel of her musket.

‘We can’t surrender, sir,’ the ensign insisted. ‘You know . . . Doctor Lam, he does terrible things to our soldiers if he can catch them.’

‘I’m not surrendering, Caxton. I’m going to parley.’

‘They’ll shoot you dead the moment you step out.’

‘They may well do,’ she admitted. Either through malice or sheer over-enthusiasm on their part, the Denlanders could end this ploy of hers within seconds of its start.

She took a deep breath, but her courage failed and she could not bring herself to stand up. ‘If this fails, Caxton . . .’ Then what? Make a run for it? Hold fast? Die in a blaze of musket fire? ‘If this fails, you have command.’ What a pathetic failure, what a dodging of responsibility, she reproached herself. But if I knew what she should do, I would be doing it instead of this.

She stood up, not allowing herself to think about it further. There was a single shot.

It took all of three heartbeats to convince her she was still alive, clasping the musket to her chest, with her eyes closed like a child scared of the monster. Above her, the flag drooped limply, such as it was.

For a second her voice would do nothing but utter a croak, but she finally forced out: ‘Parley! Parley!’

Her words dropped into the great well of silence that the indigenes had made out of their interlinked gazes. Every one of the damned creatures was looking at her.

‘Step forwards,’ came a voice from the greenery above, and she did so, holding her musket at her shoulder, as though she was drilling at Gravenfield for Master Sergeant Bowler again. She stopped a good five paces from the foot of the slope, squinting upwards. She could make out perhaps half a dozen forms amongst the trees, knowing that there were far more on either side.

‘Parley!’ she yelled again. ‘Someone come down here to talk. I’m not going up there.’

All of which assumed they had any interest in talking but, if they hadn’t, then this had been doomed from the start.

For such a long time, nothing stirred above. She could feel the tension among her soldiers behind her, sighting along their muskets; and the tension of the Denlanders above.

Most of all, she could sense the indigenes and their communal attention.

The branches parted above, and a man stepped out. He had a musket in one hand, and looked anything but happy, but nonetheless he made his way down the slope to her. He was the first live Denlander she had had the opportunity to study for more than a handful of seconds.

He was shorter than she was, a little man of no more than four inches past five foot tall. Short dark hair, she saw, and a pale face, though that could be fear. Now that she had time to examine it, his grey uniform did not look military at all, more like any outdoorsman’s gear: a tough coat down to the knee, with high boots and leather breeches. His collar was turned up against the mist. He had no pistol, no sabre, but there was a short-hafted wood-axe in his belt.

On his way down, he seemed to be studying her with just as much intensity, until finally he stood before her and she was able to look down at him.

His round face was set in a grim expression. His every muscle was clearly waiting for the shot from behind her that would end him. She supposed that, for a man in his position with superior forces at his beck and call, it must have taken some courage to meet her here in the open, before the guns.

‘Sergeant Emily Marshwic,’ she told him. ‘Stag Rampant company, Royal Army of Lascanne.’

He nodded. ‘Provost Dragan Stedter, army of the Republic of Denland.’ She had no idea whether this made him more important than her, or less so, or even whether ‘Dragan’ was his name or part of his rank.

‘I see it’s true,’ he added. His voice had an odd accent, a little like Marie Angelline’s, clipping the consonants and sharpening the vowels. ‘Women fighting for Lascanne.’

She frowned. ‘And so?’

‘So nothing. It was just something I’d heard.’ It was obviously something he had not believed, until now.

She found herself wondering what this man had done before the war. They couldn’t all be career killers in Denland. Perhaps he was a tailor, too, or a printer. Now that she saw him close up, he certainly did not have the look of a soldier. No doubt he thought the same of her.

‘Provost,’ she said uncertainly, ‘we have a problem.’

To his credit he did not correct her by saying ‘You have a problem.’ Instead he nodded. ‘This is no good.’

She blinked at him, waiting.

‘We have a treaty with the autochthons – the swamp people,’ he explained. ‘This . . . we should not fight here.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But what can we do?’

‘Surrender,’ he told her flatly. ‘You have no hope here.’

She forced herself to keep a brave face. She could not let him know that she knew he was right. ‘Provost, you do not have so many men that your victory is certain, and at any rate we would not go quietly. You must know that.’ She put all of her birth and privilege into her tone. She spoke to him as Alice used to speak to tradesmen and labourers: with all that haughty disdain, that assured arrogance.

‘I know,’ he said, quietly, and she deciphered his expression as one of resigned melancholy. He was a soldier with a difficult job, but a job which would have to be done. Her own face must surely have borne that expression more than once.

‘I don’t know what you’re hoping for, Sergeant, but we have you here,’ he went on. ‘We cannot let you go now. And I understand you cannot surrender. God knows I would not, in your place. And we neither of us can fight here. It is a puzzle. I’m sorry.’

His free hand twitched, and she was sure that he had been about to touch her, a little gesture of sympathy, comrade to comrade. In that moment, she and he had more in common with each other than they did with their own men: two people in the same position, with the same problem. And she looked at him and thought, This cannot be a Denlander. This little, worried man in his drab clothes, how can I fear this?

And Sergeant Demaine’s voice came to haunt her, telling her how anyone – a woman, a cripple – could pull a trigger. Little men won wars these days. Giants were simply bigger targets.

And still the problem lay between them. She took a chance and glanced back at her soldiers, all still ready to die for her. She had got this far, she had met the enemy face to face, and still there was no way out. Irresistible force, unmovable object. For all their common ground, they remained irrevocably divided.

‘I’ve never spoken with a Denlander before,’ she confessed, because she had no solution at all. And what did the gentle-born Emily Marshwic do with an awkward silence but fill it with small talk?

He shrugged. ‘We are as you, Sergeant. We have two arms, two legs. We are babies first, then children, then we grow up, and learn about adult games like war.’

She stared at him, and her mouth twitched. Something rose up inside her, from long ago and far away, that made her shake.

The provost stared at her, seeming actually concerned. ‘What?’ he demanded, but it was all she could do not to laugh at the thought that had come to her.

‘Sergeant . . . ?’

She gestured him to silence, almost dropping her musket. ‘Provost,’ she said slowly, for fear of giggling. ‘When you were children, you played child’s games?’

His blank look showed he had not followed her, but she pressed on nonetheless.

‘Did you ever play . . .’ and out in a rush, or she would never manage it, ‘. . . hide and seek?’

The blank look dragged on until she was sure he did not understand her, but then he allowed her a single brittle nod.

Mad, mad, this is so completely mad. ‘Would you allow us a count of one hundred and fifty, Provost?’

‘A count of . . . ?’

‘And we will leave this place and go back into the swamp, where we will not have great stones to hide behind. And we will do our best, of course, to escape, and you will pursue us, as before. And when the fight comes, if we do not run far or fast enough, then at least it will not take place here. There will be no diplomatic incident with the indigenes, the . . . whatever you called them.’

‘Autochthons,’ he supplied, and then, ‘A count of one hundred fifty?’

‘A hundred and fifty would be fair, would it not?’ And, seeing him waver, ‘Or just one hundred, if you insist.’

He looked away, back towards his men, as she had done at hers. Perhaps he was wondering how he would explain this to them. When he looked back at her, something had cleared from his face: a weight of worry had lifted.

‘Thank you for finding a way out of this,’ he said. ‘We have those who would be very displeased if we hurt the native folk.’

‘We have some just the same.’

‘I think a count of one hundred fifty will be fair.’ He put his hand out, just as Angelline had. ‘I wish you good luck, Sergeant.’

His hand was surprisingly small and delicate as she took it.

20.

I shall never know if we actually outdistanced them in our mad, headlong plunge through the swamp, or if they let us go.

I have spoken to the enemy, Cristan. I have had them hold a mirror up and show me my own face. Soldiers are the same everywhere, I think: weary, dutiful and unhappy.

‘How is he, Doctor?’

‘I’m not a doctor.’ Doctor Carling’s wife didn’t even turn round. ‘You can ask him yourself. By my book, that means he’ll pull through.’

She knelt by Brocky’s bed and he levered himself up onto one elbow. He looked pale and greyish, but with sufficient ill temper in his face to reassure her.

‘You’ve got to get me out of here, Marshwic,’ he insisted. ‘I can’t live here a moment longer. That sarcastic witch over there will be the death of me.’

‘Now, Brocky, you exaggerate.’ Emily glanced back at Doctor Carling’s wife, who was studiously ignoring them.

‘She said – listen to this – she said I was the only person she’d ever seen who’d been shot entirely through the fat!’ Brocky hissed. Emily controlled her expression instantly, because it would have been unfair to snigger at him.

‘And I told her that fat was obviously good for something,’ Brocky continued urgently, ‘and do you know what she said? A thinner man wouldn’t have been shot at all! Do you call that sympathy? I don’t!’

‘I am not in the business of giving sympathy, Mr Brocky,’ came the stern voice of the doctor’s wife. ‘And you may leave tomorrow. There will be plenty of time by then to see if you’re going to fester.’

‘Fester? I’ll say I’m going to fester, cooped up in here!’ Brocky declared.

‘I’m just glad to see you well, Brocky,’ Emily told him. ‘You did pick the right expedition to join, I must say.’

‘That I did.’ He chuckled, winced. ‘Ow, bastard! We got back before you, though.’

Emily nodded. A whole day before, in fact. Once clear of the Denlanders, somehow it had taken her that long to navigate back to the camp. Marie Angelline had been one of the first to greet her, and for a moment the two women had embraced each other, a sisterhood of two. Between them they had left thirteen men and women dead in the swamp, once all the stragglers were accounted for, but they had brought back a warning of the Denlander advance. The colonel, apparently, was delighted.

Delighted? Another opportunity for Father Burnloft to slobber through a list of dead names, and the colonel was delighted.

‘And Master Sergeant Angelline?’ she prompted Brocky. ‘I’m sure she was struck by your heroism.’

‘Heroism? Bloody madness, more like. I’d like to see Huill Pordevere match it, though. The whole bloody camp is expecting me to defeat Denland single-handed, as soon as I get up off my deathbed.’

‘And will you?’

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll not go playing the soldier any more is what I’ll do. I don’t take to this being shot at lark, at all. It’ll never catch on.’ His expression shifted to a crafty leer. ‘Besides, if you perform a trick well enough the first time, you don’t ever need an encore, if you know what I mean.’

‘Assume I don’t.’

‘Who do you think was the very first to come and wish me well, eh? None other than Master Sergeant Marie Angelline, kneeling right where you are now. “Are you well, Mr Brocky? Can I get you anything, Mr Brocky? The men are all talking about you, Mr Brocky.” They say a man must needs risk something to gain something.’

‘Well, good luck,’ she told him, privately believing none of it.

*

The night watch was doubled after the news, and junior officers were obliged to stand their turn just like the men.

Emily hated drawing watch duty. It kept her away from the firelight and the cheer inside the headquarters of the Survivors’ Club. It kept her from her friends and from lively company. It placed her out here, staring at a darkness in which anything could hide, waiting for an enemy that could be gathering all around. The few lamps and candles yet alight did nothing but draw vast swarms of milling insects that whirled and whipped about them. The winged multitudes dizzied themselves stupid, and then fell to rest on anything nearby, including Emily. She felt sometimes as though the entire swamp had emptied of flying things. Moths the size of books, great whirring beetles as solid as stones, huge blundering lacewings, roaches, even thunderous nocturnal bees that rattled through the air like locomotives. Every vile buzzing thing that God had made – and made extra large – came out from under the forest canopy to pester her.

Tubal had slipped her a flask of brandy earlier on, but she left it untouched. The warmth of the swamp radiated outwards, doubled and redoubled now that summer was upon them. Despite the clear sky above, there was no hint of cold.

She hated these night watches because they forced her to think, and she had become all too uncomfortable with thinking recently.

Thinking about Mr Northway, for example. His last letter had been concise, abrupt almost. He had enquired about her health, her continued survival. She had read his mockery in it all; that stand-offish, superior attitude which she was starting to recognize as his armour against the world. What gave more food for thought was Penny Belchere’s account of him. A glass of port had seen the messenger girl sniggering over how Northway had slammed all the doors closed and kept to himself for four days after Emily’s last brief missive. Belchere had described how the bureaucracy of Chalcaster had been left to rot while he brooded; how Northway had looked when he finally summoned her in again. There had been the dark rings of sleepless nights about his eyes, and a look of fire in them.

‘Go,’ he had instructed, ‘as fast as you can!’ And Belchere had gone, picking her way from station to station in search of a train still going north and carrying passengers.

Emily crumpled his letter – his cool and distant letter – in her hands, and through it she thought she felt the heat of all the things he did not allow himself to say.

How did I come to matter so much to a man such as Cristan Northway?

But power makes for a lonely man, and who else would dare intrude on him, day or night, whenever she had a complaint to raise?

She searched within herself now, in those small and thoughtful hours of the night, and tried to find there what she felt about him. The hatred had long drained away; the load of grief her father had left her with, the bitter rivalry one generation dead, it was all gone, but what had replaced it?

She summoned his image to mind, shrouded in black and smiling that damnable smile. His dealings with the world had been so cursed and venal that he had put up barrier after barrier, just to shield himself from it. And yet she smiled to think of him. He brought a feeling to her that warmed her more than the swamp ever could, and yet she would not name it – not yet. No more would he, she knew.

And then there was Giles Scavian, wizard and nobleman, kind and gentle. Another man who had not found the right terms to describe his emotions, but he would have a dictionary full of them before Mr Northway found any. There was nothing closed or hidden about Mr Scavian.

And, as she thought it, she heard a step behind her, and turned to see a figure, cloaked and robed against the night, coming close by her.

‘Mr Scavian?’ she asked tentatively.

‘Again you ask for Scavian. A man might become suspicious.’ The voice betrayed his identity, more than the vague shadow in the darkness. Lascari was the wrong wizard for her thoughts.

‘How can I help you, Mr Lascari?’

‘Many ways, no doubt.’ He was heavy with sarcasm tonight. He bundled himself too close to her, almost touching. Lamplight struck sparks from the flints of his eyes. ‘One always wonders what a woman thinks of, alone at night.’

‘Does one?’ she riposted, too quickly. He never failed to unnerve her, did Lascari. The King’s wizards could not read minds, but he had a way of seeing into hers and laying out its contents like an autopsy.

‘Distant sweethearts, perhaps?’ He endowed the words with a wealth of distaste. ‘This war must be hard on you to be away from your home, your family.’

‘No more than on any man,’ she said firmly.

‘You think that, do you?’

There was such disdain hanging in the air that she felt bound to argue with him, for the sake of herself and Angelline – and for all her sex. ‘Have I not served, Mr Lascari? Am I not a sergeant in the King’s army? Have I been of such little use since I came here?’

For a moment he was silent, just a shape in the dark, but then he made a little wheeze of a noise and she realized he was laughing. A flame lanced into life between them, spiralling and spitting between the fingers of his hand. ‘It has teeth, does it?’ His smile was lean and devoid of humanity, a dead man’s strained rictus. ‘It has killed a man or two, and now fancies itself a soldier.’

More a soldier than you. But she did not say it, in the end, biting down on the words. Lascari was dangerous and untouchable. Should he decide to turn his powers on her, there was none who had the rank to stop him.

‘I am glad to see you have fire,’ he told her. ‘It befits one of good name. We must look after our names and keep them shining.’ The burning hand inched closer as he examined her face. ‘You are not as pleasant-featured as I had thought. In fact you are almost plain,’ he observed.

Alice had said the same on more than one occasion, and it had stung. Now, from the lips of this man, it had no power to hurt her.

‘I have something for you,’ he said abruptly. ‘Since you had such recent dealings with them, I thought you would see the Denlander.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No doubt. The colonel wishes news, and so Captain Pordevere and that painted creature’s scouts procured for him a Denlander. Some pioneer, no doubt, less lucky or skilled than the rest. We have him in the colonel’s rooms even now. Perhaps you would like to see him.’

‘Why would I want to?’ she asked him, and his smile grew wider and tauter.

‘To hear what he has to say. He is going to tell us his commander’s plans: when they will attack, and where. Where they camp. How best for us to attack his friends.’

‘I doubt he will say anything of the sort.’

The fire in his hands flared out towards her, making her stumble back, hands raised to her eyes. It twisted and clawed about his fingers, raking the air, hissing and crackling.

‘He will tell us anything and everything that we ask, and more, and more, until he can think of no more to say,’ said Lascari. ‘I thought you might like to come and watch. A wizard’s craft can be a beautiful thing.’

She stared at him, struck dumb by the lack of feeling with which he had said the words. She could only shake her head. She had no idea whether Justin Lascari was mad or just dutiful, but she wanted nothing more to do with him.

‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘You will at least be able to mark the progress of our conversation, no doubt.’

She had cause to be glad later that she had drawn the night watch. Few of them were to get any sleep that night, or the next.

*

No man should scream so much, she thought. The human throat should not be capable of it, and yet the Denlander had shouted himself raw all last night, and all today as well. Those soldiers who had rejoiced most, when the man was brought in, looked haggard now, as though they themselves had been put to the question in his place. The shuttered windows of the colonel’s building flared red and orange and white, as Justin Lascari used his powers.

Evening now, and she found herself wishing for another night watch, because such enforced wakefulness should be put to use. Instead, she merely did the rounds, passing by each pale sentry with a few words of encouragement. Most already had one or two keeping them company, for the first time ever. She even found Caxton standing by one lantern, her long pale face set into its familiar unhappy lines.

‘I don’t recall your being on the roster for tonight, Ensign,’ Emily chided, and the other woman shrugged.

‘I don’t know how much more I can take, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘I mean, how long can a man last?’

Emily had no answer for her. It seemed impossible already that this atrocious business should have gone on so long.

‘Sergeant . . .’ Caxton lowered her voice. ‘I know it’s necessary . . . that we need to know where they are, but . . .’

‘I know, Ensign. I feel the same way.’ There had been those who had even cheered at the first scream, recounting to one another the tortures that Lascari would devise for the prisoner. Even those who hated the enemy most, who would have no compunction about killing Denlanders, and killing them slowly, had quieted down after some twelve hours of it or more. Even sadistic and vicarious glee had its end, and they were past that – long past.

At last she turned her path towards the Stag Rampant hut, to the Survivors’ Club. She guessed there would be scant cheer within.

There they all were, though. Brocky looked a little grey still, with his bare chest and stomach swathed in a mess of bandages at which he scratched and picked absently. Tubal fanned and shuffled the undealt cards, sparing her a weak smile as she entered. Mallen had his head down, shoulders hunched, eyes glinting deep within the maze of his tattoos. And Scavian, Giles Scavian, was sitting there with his eyes red and angry. He flinched at each fresh cry, and his fists clenched tighter. She wondered whether Warlocks ever fought each other, and what such a spectacle would look like if they did.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ she said softly, taking her place at the table.

‘Vile evening,’ Brocky corrected. ‘For the Lord’s sake, someone go pour us a fresh glass of something. Marshwic?’

‘Is it my turn? I thought you were master of ceremonies tonight.’

‘I’m hurt. I have a wound.’ Brocky displayed his disarranged bandages. ‘I’m a wounded war hero.’

Even that raised only a ghost of a smile around the table.

‘I’ll do the honours, then,’ said Emily, because to have something to focus her mind on seemed a good thing right now. As she passed into the next room, she heard Scavian’s chair scrape back, and he joined her as she selected a bottle from Brocky’s stash.

‘Giles,’ she began, ‘I . . .’ Seeing him there, haunted by it all, she asked herself: Has he? Has it ever fallen to him to do that task?

‘No,’ he said, at once, reading the accusation even as it formed in her face. ‘I would not, when they asked me. No loss to Lascari. He enjoys the work. But not I. It’s one of the reasons I took the robes off.’

She nodded slowly, knowing there was more to come.

‘They called me a traitor, of course, but what could they do? They needed me, and only the King or another Warlock could punish me.’

‘Lascari?’

His smile glinted hard and savage for a moment, uncharacteristic. ‘He has not tried it. Emily, in truth you must know – I want you to know – this is not what the King’s service is about, or what the anointing of a wizard should lead to.’

‘War makes monsters of us all,’ she observed.

‘Surely, but so long as we know that we can at least try to remain human.’

Hearing that, and having seen all she had seen, she was forced to wonder whether it was not humanity itself that had claimed men like Lascari or Sergeant Sharkey – men who revelled in their power over others. Perhaps it is our humanity that we must strive to avoid. I will have to ask Mallen about the indigenes. Are they free from our vices or as vile as we?

‘I know that you would not do such a thing, Giles. The King chose wisely when he set his hand on you.’

Her words brought a smile to his face that nearly smoothed out the lines of pain.

‘Thank God, you understand,’ he said, reaching a hand towards her tentatively.

She took it, feeling beneath the skin the same heat that was being put to work on the prisoner. ‘You will always have me,’ she assured him. ‘When you need me, you will have me.’ The words came out oddly martial: a soldier to a comrade, not a woman to a man.

Will I always be thus: a soldier? Grammaine, Chalcaster, her former life – everything before her conscription felt as though it was now in some other room, with the door closing by degrees. Can I ever be plain Emily Marshwic again, with no rank and no uniform?

‘Hey, in there! Drink, damn the pair of you!’ Brocky’s roar broke them apart, and Emily hastily measured out some glasses.

Brocky it was who took it on himself to keep the conversation moving, against the backdrop of a tortured man’s pleas. He seemed able, in his self-involved way, to screen them out just as the linen mesh in the shutters kept out the worst of the insects. His topic of conversation now was, perforce, himself. Himself and Angelline.

‘I seem to recall you all scoffed,’ he said. ‘All except Marshwic, perhaps.’

‘I scoffed,’ Emily insisted. ‘I scoffed with the best of them.’

‘You all scoffed, then,’ he said. ‘And now, you see, just a little daring, a little bravado, and the lady is quite smitten with me.’

‘“Smitten”?’ Mallen queried.

‘I’d only heard that you got shot in the flab, Brocky. I hadn’t heard she’d been shot in the head,’ added Tubal.

‘Well, if not smitten,’ admitted Brocky, ‘then let us say that the lady and I are getting along famously. It’s amazing what a little common experience can do.’

‘“Common experience”? You’re a fast worker.’ Mallen drained his glass and stood up to collect the empties.

‘We’d have overheard any “common experience”,’ Tubal objected. ‘After all, the lady’s voice is famously loud.’ Then he coloured a little and glanced apologetically towards Emily, who met his look levelly.

‘One might wonder where such a voice comes from,’ Scavian mused. ‘What practice has, as it were, honed it.’

‘The profession of the lady in question?’ agreed Tubal.

Brocky’s leer grew deeper. ‘As it happens, old fellow, the lady has been trained in the most demanding of professions. The shout of command, the sweep of the sword, the athletic step, the keenness of memory and sharpness of eye . . . in short, she’s on the stage!’

Mallen stopped in the doorway at that, and there followed an awkward pause. Acting was hardly considered a prestigious business, but Brocky seemed delighted.

‘Actress, is it?’ the scout asked.

‘Actress, dancer, singer. She was with the Lord Castellan’s Touring, don’t you know. And you know what they say about actresses.’ He went into a spasm of winking and elbow-nudging to give them a clue, if they didn’t.

Emily recalled Marie Angelline at war: quick to command, ready to lead, easy to follow. Acting? Who knew? Perhaps, inside, the girl was as unsure and frightened as the rest.

Brocky opened his mouth to add another innuendo, but a particularly harsh scream of agony broke through to derail him. Scavian stood up and swore under his breath.

‘I wish the poor bastard’d break and get it over with,’ Tubal said. ‘This is the third prisoner we’ve had since I came, and none of the others lasted like this. What the hell are they doing to him?’

‘Just the usual,’ Scavian said. ‘Lascari is . . . persistent, that is all.’ The usual rules of the Club seemed to have lapsed.

‘Have . . . ?’ Emily glanced about, wondering what their reaction would be. ‘Have any of you known any Denlanders from before?’

Brocky shrugged. ‘One or two in the city, on business. Denlanders get the pox like anyone else.’

Tubal gave a weak cough of a laugh. ‘We used to get all our paper through a Denlander merchant. Hammell, that was his name. It was cheaper to buy in bulk from him than in bits and pieces from the local mill. That always struck me as mad, but I wasn’t going to question it.’

‘Only . . . I spoke with one . . . when I went out, last.’ In halting tones she recounted her experience in the indigene village. Towards the end of the account Mallen had come back with full glasses, and he hovered in the doorway, listening mutely.

In the end, Tubal spread his hands. ‘What can we say? It’s a revelation to any soldier, but it’s no less true: they’re people just as we’re people. They believe they’re right, and so do we. You have to think it would be a saner thing if the King and his privy council just kicked the hell out of this new parliament of Denland, and left the rest of us out of it. But there you are.’

‘That’s disloyal, Salander,’ Scavian challenged him.

‘You’ll see me leading my men out as usual the next time they send us,’ Tubal replied. ‘But that doesn’t mean I have to think war’s a good idea.’

‘Surely they have to realize they’re wrong, though, in the end. They have to know that we’re in the right, defending our homes,’ Emily insisted.

‘The people up above us love to lie, and people down here love to be lied to,’ Brocky said reflectively. ‘There’s many a way of telling someone he’s doing the right thing. Lascari surely thinks that he’s doing the King’s will right now, and if the King knew about it, he’d have to agree. Us knowing the enemy’s plans is worth one singed Denlander, he’d say. And we sit here and listen to the result of that thinking, and we all cringe inside, but what’s right and what’s wrong? And if you can’t make the call when one man is – let’s face it – torturing the life out of another poor bugger, then how can you do it with wars?’

‘Brocky,’ interrupted Scavian. ‘This is too serious. Club rules, yes?’

He wants so badly to know what he does is right. Emily caught Scavian’s eye and smiled, but got no smile in return, angry and confused as he was.

‘We all used to be like good friends, until the regicide,’ Brocky grumbled. ‘Then some bastards across the border off a king, and we’re all stuck here fighting a fool’s war. You’ll grant me that, Scavian?’

‘I suppose I cannot, in truth, deny it,’ Scavian said. ‘My grandfather fought alongside the Denlanders in the Hellic wars, after all. You’re right, there was no need for this.’

‘A toast,’ said Emily, startled by her own boldness. ‘A toast to the ordinary Denlanders, perhaps. Not to their leaders, but to them.’

After thoughtful hesitation, four glasses were lifted to join hers.

Later on, after three rounds of brandy and a half-dozen hands of cards had failed to quell their unease, Emily excused herself to do the rounds of the sentries again. She was aware that, in making this choice, she was doing exactly what she had chided Ensign Caxton for doing. Her actions were not the mark of a good officer but of someone with time on her hands.

As the impossibly protracted agonies of the captive Denlander wailed out into the night, and as Justin Lascari did his grim duty for king and country, she went from man to man, from woman to woman, skirting the camp’s perimeter.

‘You’d think they’d hear,’ said one, with his eyes fixed on the swamp. ‘You’d think they’d come and rescue the poor bastard.’

‘Perhaps they will, so keep your eyes sharp.’ Emily passed on down the line, holding out no hope that any such thing would happen.

‘I once knew Denlanders,’ came a voice from behind her. ‘Spoke with them. Knew them well.’

‘Mallen,’ she acknowledged, turning to see his spare frame looming out of the dark.

‘Before the war,’ he continued. ‘Back when no one came here. None from Lascanne, anyway: just me. Only other people studying here were Denlanders. We got to know each other. All on the same side, back then.’

‘It must have been easier,’ she observed.

‘Than war?’ He snorted.

‘And your friends, they have fought?’

‘Some.’ He pinched an insect out of the air as it whirred past his face, looked it over and let it go. ‘Hunted them down myself. Had to. They were near as good as me.’

‘I’m sorry, Mallen.’

He shrugged. ‘They understood.’ When he looked at her again, his eyes caught the lamplight briefly and shone. ‘Good job, Marshwic.’

A pause, then she understood. ‘The indigenes? I thought you might be angry. I should have told you before.’

He gave a brief bark of a laugh. ‘You? They told me, day after you left them.’ He shuffled, and she realized she had never seen him awkward before, or anything less than self-assured. ‘I owe you,’ he said shortly.

‘Really? For . . . the swamp people? The indigenes? I can’t say I understand . . .’

His hand had gripped her wrist hard, before she saw it move. He pulled her close, and she was uncomfortably aware of the alien cast of his face, with those tattoos breaking up the betraying human lines and angles.

‘My people, Marshwic – more than you; more than Lascanne. I can’t ever be one of them, can’t live like they do, see the world as they do. Been trying all my life to understand them, though. You did well. Good job.’

He released her just as quickly, stepping back a pace but unwilling just to go.

‘You don’t need to owe me anything,’ she told him.

‘Always pay my debts, understand?’ he said and, thinking of the indigenes and the lengths he went to in order to protect them, she had to admit that he did.

He suddenly tensed all over, looking about him. A heartbeat later she realized why. The screaming had stopped.

‘Perhaps Lascari needs a rest himself,’ she said, but he shook his head, holding up a hand for quiet, just as if they were in the jungle.

‘Dead,’ he pronounced. ‘No question of it.’

‘Well, that’s got to be for the—’

‘No,’ he warned. ‘They’ve got all they can from him. Understand? Questioning’s over, so what happens next?’

Emily frowned at him. ‘They know about the Denlanders . . . or some of it.’ A familiar clutching weight began to form inside her stomach. ‘An attack? They’ll want an attack.’

Mallen nodded, backing away into the night, leaving her heir to the sudden silence of a war being advanced.

21.

My Dear Emily,

I find you alive and in good health. I would beg you to take a greater care of your well-being, and prescribe no further battles. Might you not find some safer way to conduct this diversion of yours?

You must come back to me; remember that. Make a note that you must not die. It would be a mean-spirited world that did not allow you to return to me after all this. I feel that it would be a signal breach of faith between us, an unforgivable lapse of decorum. You are, after all, a well-brought-up young lady. That should count for something even on the battlefield.

Yours in hope,

Cristan.

And the jungle exploded with gunfire.

A scant moment ago she had heard the shooting: Mallen’s scouts firing into the air or at the enemy, a last desperate chance of warning before the tide swept over them.

‘Cover!’ she had cried. ‘Cover!’ But she had no time to take her own advice. Around her, her squad were just starting to react. Then the trees were alive with the zip and zing of shot, the crackle of musket fire. From ahead and from one side came the flash and the smoke of the Denlander guns. From behind and from all around, the shouts, the screams of the wounded and dying.

‘Cover! A line behind cover!’ she cried, but her voice was lost in the bedlam, being outshouted by the dead. The man beside her was punched off his feet, and then the woman on the other side was sent reeling back with a shot through her arm. Emily dropped to one knee in the shallow water, gun lifted to her shoulder. A breath’s worth of pause and she fired, seeing a grey shape collapse back into the gloom.

Cover! But she was right in the open, midway through crossing a pool. Lead balls ploughed into the water or danced past her, like the insects. She staggered to her feet, stumbling backwards while reaching for the vines and leaves she knew were there.

‘Firing line! Double firing line!’ The orders were Marie Angelline’s, the only voice to cut clear through the chaos. ‘Double ranks and fire! Second rank, fire!’

Emily heard the concentrated roar of three score of muskets discharging as one, but saw none of it. She might be the only one left of her entire squad, of her entire company.

Her hand touched leaves, and she scrabbled at them, pulling herself up the bank. Her empty musket was still directed at the enemy in idiot threat.

‘Got you, Sergeant!’ A hand tucked itself under her armpit, lifting her up. She caught a glimpse of a burly man in red, the Bear Sejant on his sleeve. Where the hell are my own men?

He was halfway through lifting her up when his hand left her and she looked back to see him slumped back, red pooling on his chest.

She was struck a massive blow to the side of the head, sending her helmet awry, the force of it knocking her over the bank and into cover.

I’m shot! Shot in the head! Her eyes refused to focus, and her head was ringing from the impact. She lay on her side in the mud, hands wrestling with the helmet. One finger found a long, shallow groove ground into it: some almost-spent musket ball’s last act.

Too close! And the Denlanders could come over the bank at any moment. She fumbled with her musket, reloading as quickly as she could simply by touch. Her vision swam: sharp and blurred, sharp and blurred.

Someone hit the ground beside her without warning, and she nearly hit him with the gun before she saw the red uniform. He fired a shot over the bank and ducked back to reload.

‘Sergeant,’ he said briefly. Her eyes locked onto the stag emblem on his jacket but she could not place his face.

‘What the devil’s happening?’ she gasped.

He fired a second shot, eyes narrowed. ‘Bastards jumped us, Sergeant.’

‘Where’s Tu— the Lieutenant?’

‘Don’t know, Sergeant.’

She had reloaded by then, and if her eyes twitched, it was from pain and not panic. Her head still rang with the shock of impact. She pointed her gun over the bank and looked out to see the Denlanders moving off from their cover: a staggered line of grey-clad executioners coming her way, firing and then dropping behind to reload.

She pulled the trigger: spitting into the storm. ‘God help us,’ she said. ‘Time to fall back.’

‘Right you are, Sergeant,’ the soldier acknowledged, but then they heard Mallen’s whistle above the firing. She counted the blasts desperately, but could not keep her mind on them.

‘How . . . ?’ No time to worry about looking a fool. ‘How many? What was that signal, soldier?’

‘Attack, Sergeant.’

Just the two of us? He must have misheard. But there was Marie Angelline’s voice, distant but clear, ‘Forward! Forward! Charge! For the King!’

‘For the King!’ Emily cried along with her. No choice. Stupid way to die. She charged forward the moment her musket was reloaded, with the Stag Rampant soldier beside her. She pulled the trigger and the smoke of her gun obscured the Denlanders for a moment before she had pushed onwards, drawing forth her sabre.

All around her there were men and women in red surging forward. She saw the Denlander line ahead break up and fall away, each man to his own, dashing back under cover and beyond, until they were out of sight and still running.

Mallen’s whistle came again, and this time she counted ‘Regroup’.

‘Come on,’ she told the soldier beside her. He was no longer beside her. Looking back, she could not tell which fallen body was his.

*

Two days before, Tubal had hauled her once again to the colonel’s cramped war table. All the usual suspects were there. Stapewood handed out brandy as the colonel talked heartily with Captain Mallarkey about the upcoming festivities. Slender Lieutenant Gallien, Mallarkey’s second, looked as though he would rather be anywhere else. Pordevere smiled his oh-so-very-white smile at Emily while, behind him, Marie Angelline gave Emily a friendly nod. Bear Sejant was still down their lieutenant from the Big Push.

Justin Lascari and Giles Scavian were at opposite ends of the table, reserving their glowering for each other.

‘Now,’ the colonel said, ‘listen here. Got some intelligence that won’t surprise most of you. Had a Denlander scout here, the last night or so. You may have noticed. Anyway, fellow died on us before he gave too much away, but what we got was damned alarming. They’re taking it all back. All that good ground we gained, they intend to contest it, you see?’

Good ground? A few festering acres of swampland grown lush with the bodies and bones of countless dead men. She remembered the Survivors’ Club: the observation that one could not fight a proper land war here. She wondered if the Denlanders realized that, for surely Colonel Resnic did not.

‘Taking ground, sir?’ Tubal asked, his thoughts running alongside hers.

‘They’re on the advance, Lieutenant. That’s all you need to worry about,’ the colonel said. ‘Fresh troops coming in alongside the chain lakes. Got to stop them or they’ll have the whole place sewn up, yes?’

‘A quick, solid slapping should teach them a lesson, sir,’ Pordevere suggested. ‘You know Denland: no stomach for a real man’s fight.’

‘Absolutely right, Captain. I’m mustering all companies. Scare the damned wretches away. Let them know that what we take, we keep, you hear?’

‘What’s the order of battle, sir?’ said Mallarkey, his voice nearly steady.

‘I’m giving Bear the centre again. You’re still under strength, Captain, so don’t get too far ahead.’

‘Tell the others to keep up, then. Your men are getting fat, Mallarkey.’ Pordevere grinned around the table. ‘Speed, gentlemen. A quick strike. Send them reeling. Like a punch to the jaw at the start of a bout. Wins the battle then and there. No sense getting bogged down in it all.’

Emily caught Angelline’s expression, and it told her succinctly enough that she did not find her commanding officer’s opinions reassuring. Brocky doesn’t need to worry about any competition from that direction!

‘How many of them are there, Colonel?’ Scavian asked.

‘Well . . .’ The colonel tugged at his moustache. ‘Damned fellow didn’t get that out before he gave up, Mr Scavian. Kept giving different figures. We think perhaps a company – or a company and a half.’

‘You think?’ Scavian asked.

‘Oh, hush now, Scavian,’ Lascari told him. ‘This is war. Uncertainty is all part of the game. You shouldn’t have accepted the King’s mark if you weren’t ready for it.’

Scavian scowled at him resentfully, but said nothing.

‘What about their guns?’ Emily asked.

She received a decidedly frosty look from Lascari – from Pordevere and Mallarkey even – but the colonel just shook his head amiably.

‘I’m afraid there really aren’t any magic guns, Miss Marshwic.’

Sergeant Marshwic to you. ‘But, Colonel—’

‘We even took a look at one,’ Mallarkey said. ‘We took it apart. Wasted time doing so, Miss Marshwic. They’re no different to our own.’

That’s not true. She said nothing; what would be the use? She had already made sure that at least all of Stag Rampant knew that the Denlanders had a new trick.

‘Well, now, Captain Mallarkey,’ the colonel said. ‘As Leopard is the largest company, I’m using you as the other pincer of the . . . the other half of the pincer. Move in on the west; keep a little behind the others. Once they engage, I want you to swing round like this . . .’

*

She found Tubal crouching low in a stand of reeds with some twenty or thirty soldiers about him. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ The crackle and bang of muskets sounded all around like green logs on a fire. ‘I’ve lost sight of Fat Squirrel altogether.’ He looked around, biting at his lower lip. ‘I’m . . . going to need some scouts. We need to rejoin the others.’

A circle of grave faces met him. Nobody was volunteering.

Oh, damn it. ‘I’ll go,’ said Emily.

‘No—’

‘Then who, Tubal? I want one more with me.’

A soldier she vaguely recognized put her hand up then, shamed into it perhaps.

‘Then let’s go.’

As she stood up, the firing started, shot whipping past her and into the reed stand.

‘Back! Fall back!’ Tubal raised his gun and fired almost at random, and led them all in a retreat towards more solid cover. Even as they put tree trunks between them and the source of the shooting, another four or five squads of Lascanne redjackets – almost a hundred in total – came into sight, pausing to aim and fire. Five or six dropped instantly, but the rest discharged their guns, shredding the foliage and the ferns before them, then crouching to reload. Without hesitation Tubal led his band to join up with them.

‘Who’s got command?’ he shouted, as he recharged his gun.

‘Me, sir, but you’re welcome to it.’ A Bear Sejant ensign hopped down next to him. ‘I don’t know where the captain is. My whole division got separated. The Denlanders are everywhere, sir.’

‘Hell, someone tell me which way’s east.’

There was a brief consensus, and directions were given.

‘We’ll head forward but slant eastaways, try to get ourselves back with the pack,’ Tubal announced. ‘Everyone loaded and ready?’

Nobody said otherwise, so they made their break: jogging through the swamp, the mud and water, keeping their guns trained on the Denlanders’ last position.

They had another brief skirmish with a small band of Denlanders who fired and retreated before them, three rounds of musketry before they were driven away. Then they were out in a clearing, where a battle was in full sway.

Must be the bulk of the Bear. All Emily caught was the idea of a solid body of men that was punched full of holes, with individual squads in their own cover, firing defiantly into the trees. She thought she heard the voice of Marie Angelline, but the woman’s words escaped her.

‘Sir, behind us!’ the Bear ensign called out.

‘They’re trying to flank. Every man take a firing position. We’ve run far enough.’ Tubal knelt and readied his gun. ‘Where the hell is the Leopard?’

A moment later the Denlanders were coming out of the trees and, for once, it was them walking into the ambush, as nearly two hundred guns of the army of Lascanne roared out simultaneously and scythed through them, casting them down and strewing their bodies about in the pools, over the banks and the mounded roots.

‘Reload!’ Tubal ordered, but Emily heard the command of Captain Pordevere from behind them, exhorting his men to charge.

‘We’re about to lose our back,’ she warned. There were shots punching past them now, as the Denlander flanking party pulled itself back together. In the clearing there was a fearful noise. She would never forget it: the sound of three hundred men and women running forward into the swift, accurate guns of Denland.

Oh, Marie. Be safe, Marie.

Her own division fired again, but their targets were now hidden and well spaced.

‘Ensign,’ Tubal ordered, ‘take your division. You’re going to have to clear them out. There can’t be more than forty still on their feet.’

The Bear Sejant ensign nodded. There was a stunned look on his face: the look of a man who had walked his way into hell and couldn’t find the way out.

‘Come on, Em.’ Tubal finished reloading and stood up in a half-crouch. ‘Pordevere needs support. He’ll wipe out the whole company if he has the chance.’

The Bear ensign visibly counted to three, and his squads ran forward to new firing positions. Three men were picked off even as they moved.

‘Now,’ decided Tubal. ‘Let’s spend as little time in the clearing as we can.’

And then he was up and running, and they all ran with him, even as new Denlander snipers started on them, shots whizzing out of the foliage without warning.

The harsh sun of the clearing dazzled her. Her feet pounded through the mud, vaulting the gnarled roots of the swamp giant whose rotting death had made this place, and vaulting the fallen redjackets too. She kept moving, refused to look at them in case she recognized the faces.

The man ahead stumbled, a flower of darker red suddenly in the centre of his back. She jumped that body too, knowing that to hesitate would see her lost.

Then she was into the dense air, the blessed gloom and cover of the treeline. There were Bear Sejant soldiers ahead of them. She could hear Angelline giving the order to fire, hear the massed discharge of the guns. And to her left there was a flare, a sudden flash of light and heat that must be from one of the Warlocks: Lascari or Scavian. No time to tell which.

In a brief moment she took it in: a retreating line of Denlanders stopping to fire, falling back, then stopping again to reload. More crouched in the trees: sharpshooters pot-shotting at the advancing red.

If we’re advancing, does that mean we’re winning?

She had not heard Mallen’s whistle in a long time.

No sign of Mallarkey or the Leopard, either.

‘Forward!’ Captain Pordevere’s triumphant cry. ‘They’re on the run, men! Forward! For the King! For the King!’

And her legs responded, her hands too busy with the gun, her mind too numbed. Forward she went with the others of the Stag and the Bear. Ahead, the Denlanders began to retreat faster, no longer firing. They were breaking, she realized. Breaking! At last! She picked up her pace, as the others did.

She saw a Denlander stop and fall, clutching his stomach, trying to keep up over the ragged ground. The insistent thought nagged her like a fly: I’ve seen them break before and it was not like this. There was still order to the Denland line as it fell back into thicker cover. Tubal was ahead of her, sword catching stray light as he drew it from its scabbard. The air rang to Pordevere’s insistent ‘For the King! For the King!’

Not breaking. Pulling us in.

‘Ambush!’ she shouted, wishing for all the world for a voice like Angelline’s. ‘Slow down! Pull back! Ambush!’

A few of the soldiers nearest looked her way, started to drop back. Tubal was still ahead of her and she desperately increased her stride, all the while yelling ludicrously, ‘Pull back! Slow down!’

He glanced back, and she pointed past him. ‘Ambush, Tubal! God’s sake! Ambush!’

Realization dawned on his face, a look of utter horror. He skidded in the mud, trying to stop.

She saw the Denlander line ahead stop running, turn and kneel. Behind them, more guns glinted in the shadows between the trees.

‘Down!’ she shouted, and at last let herself fall forward, knocking her knee on a root but bringing her gun up to fire.

She must have pulled her trigger at the exact same time as the Denlanders, because they fired together, she and they. Of her shot, she could not say, but their combined fire was blow enough to stop the Lascanne advance dead, ripping through flesh and bone, hurling soldiers back, doubling them over, casting them to the ground.

She saw Tubal hit, his legs swept from under him, the musket flying from his hands.

*

That morning before the attack, she was watching the troops assemble in their companies, fewer now than for the Big Push of recent memory. There she was, watching the redcoats muster, searching for her courage and finding little enough of it.

The day had been a bright one, the summer sun no more than a shadow of the heat under the trees, but a healthy heat, a dry heat. Bear and Stag were all assembled, with Leopard still falling into place. She had seen Captain Mallarkey and his lieutenant come out from the colonel’s headquarters, with Mallarkey looking worried and unhappy, a peacetime career officer caught out by the war.

Mallarkey stopped for a few words with Pordevere, the younger man making some jest, laughing out loud. Beside him, Marie Angelline cast a look over Emily’s way, saluting wryly.

‘Morning, Em.’ Tubal had greeted her with a smile on his face. ‘Ready to face the music?’

‘I should be,’ she said to him. ‘I’ve done this before. Why do I feel like this still, Tubal? Shouldn’t I be . . . numb to it by now?’

His shrug. ‘Useless bloody business, really. Hell, it all still makes me want to wet myself, Em, every time. Morning, Mallen!’

The master sergeant loped over towards them through the camp, with two dozen or so following in his wake: his picked men. ‘Don’t like this, Salander. Denlander scouts are getting good. Better woodsmen than this lot. Going to be a heavy day.’

‘Every day is,’ Tubal had told him. ‘Neither you nor I can change the colonel’s mind when he’s set on something, you know that.’

Mallen spat, shaking his head, and said to his scouts: ‘Let’s go earn a living.’

Emily looked at Leopard Passant, now almost in place. Her thought then was: Not long to go now. Her thought in retrospect would be: What was I in such a hurry for? From the inside pocket of her jacket, she took out the letter that had come to her only half an hour before. She had been given no chance to answer it. Glancing backwards, she could have seen Penny Belchere still standing with Brocky, beside the store.

‘Remember that. Make a note that you must not die.’

I will do my best, Mr Northway . . . Cristan. For the first time, in her mind she was Emily and he was Cristan, without qualification or equivocation. Unbarred emotion, at last, from Cristan Northway? From herself?

She had felt the weight inside her rise up, as if to choke her, her shirt too tight, her jacket restricting, the helmet clenched around her head.

And she wanted to weep. But she was a sergeant and her men were watching.

If I die, he will weep for me.

If I die, I will die loved.

She heard the shout come from Mallarkey’s master sergeant, calling out their readiness.

‘Time to put on a good face, Em.’ Tubal’s hand was light on her shoulder.

Together they had marched to the head of the company.

*

She crawled her way over to him through the mud, her musket forgotten behind her.

Be alive, Tubal! What will I say to Mary if you are not?

There were two soldiers crouching just ahead, each one firing as the other reloaded, their minds gone to that soldier’s place that revolved only around the present moment. Then Tubal was before her, not stretched out and lifeless as she had feared, but clutching weakly at his leg, breath emerging raggedly through his teeth.

‘Tubal!’

‘God, Em . . . I . . .’ His eyes were closed, face screwed up in pain. ‘How is it?’

She choked when she looked at the wound, a hole punched bloodily through his knee. But not fatal – not yet. ‘We need to get you out of here!’

He tried to say something, tried to smile, but the effort was too much. He looked whiter than she had ever seen a living man.

‘Stay with me,’ she told him. ‘Can you . . . ?’ She saw he could not walk or even stand. She needed more men, men to delegate to get him away from here and back to the camp somehow.

All around them the battle raged, with the Lascanne forces desperately returning fire into the Denlanders’ double line. The air was smogged with gunsmoke, flecked with flying shreds of leaf and branch.

She got a hand under Tubal’s shoulders, another tugging at his belt, and dragged him a few paces, but it was more than she could do to haul him any distance like that. She did not have the strength.

‘Tubal . . .’ He could not hear her. His face was locked in an agonized grimace, his fists shaking.

The crackle of musket fire was almost constant now but she heard, through the roar of it, one of the soldiers say, ‘Sir, they’re coming.’

She risked a look. The Denlanders were advancing, their rear line moving through the fore, taking up new positions, the front line passing forward again. Closer, closer.

Tubal sat up, the movement wrenching a gasp from him. ‘Musket,’ he said. It was clear he would never be able to fire one.

‘Sir!’ the soldier repeated, more urgently.

She drew her pistol. Not cheaply. I will not sell myself so cheaply.

‘God damn it,’ Tubal coughed out. ‘Didn’t think . . . end like this! Stupid bloody way . . . earn a living!’

Emily looked up, levelled her pistol, seeing the grey of the enemy getting close now. One of the two soldiers arched backwards, mouth open but silent, and collapsed. She fired, saw a man fall because of it, then turned her attention to reloading as swiftly and cleanly as she could.

The swamp turned bright white for her, every thing in it searing into fierce and blinding light. She screamed, covering her face with her free hand. The one thought in her head: I am dead. This is it.

Then a wave of heat – heat as dry as the desert – blistered across her, and she knew.

She looked up, and a single figure in a white shirt was striding across baked hard mud, wreathed in steam. His hands were outstretched and fire blazed and lashed about him, roaring forward to force the Denlanders from cover and to drive them away, flames crackling about him in a frenzied halo. She barely recognized the face of Giles Scavian, so racked was it by the power that he was channelling.

She had never seen the glory of the King’s Warlocks before, not so close, not so fierce.

Scavian strode towards her. The Denlanders were firing at him directly now, and his mantle of fire spat and crackled, glowing white droplets arcing and dancing all around him.

God help us, that must be molten lead!

She fired her pistol – a meagre weapon it seemed now – and reloaded it again. The Lascanne line was advancing once more, or at least it was where it was near Scavian. The Leopard Passant was still not to be seen.

‘Help me!’ she called out to Scavian, and he dropped down beside her. He looked exhausted, his face drawn and lined, ten years older.

‘Tubal, he needs . . .’

Scavian just nodded. On either side of them were red-clad soldiers pushing forward, the enemy shot still tearing through them.

*

The night before, at the Survivors’ Club.

There was an attempt at a few hands of cards, but the real play had been in the looks thrown about the table. Brocky sat with haunted eyes, thinner now than he had been, the wound taking its toll out of him. He played with abandon, seeming most cheered whenever he lost, handing over the money like a man making his farewell gifts.

There was Tubal, making jokes, his grin broad, taking needless risks with the cards, losing and winning with equal equanimity. His laughter pealed across the table: ‘Hell and fire, what’s a tomorrow for, anyway?’ And then, more soberly: ‘Tomorrow’s for others to worry about.’ And in his mind, surely, were Mary and his son.

Emily herself was calculating, playing like a professional, as if each hand meant life or death to her. No second chances, she told herself; no time to correct any mistakes. Everything had to be right – and absolutely right first time over. She won but took no joy in it. There was always another hand to stake everything on.

Daffed Mallen was curiously relaxed: his fear, his trepidation, all lying dismantled inside him. Perhaps he had sacrificed to whatever swamp gods he really worshipped. He played as though the outcome of each hand was known to him. He showed no disappointment, no triumph, no surprise at all.

And Giles Scavian was angry still: angry with Justin Lascari, and angry with the war, and with himself. Each hand he lost – and he lost often – only served to fuel the fires inside him. Emily half fancied she could see the King’s handprint glowing out through the covering of his shirt.

Later that evening, Brocky excused himself earlier than usual. ‘I promised Marie I’d . . .’ Leaving the sentence unfinished, he shambled away from the hut.

‘Not like Brocky to go while there’s still wine in the bottle,’ Tubal joked, grinning hard.

Mallen poured out the dregs into their glasses. ‘To tomorrow.’

Scavian shook his head stubbornly. ‘To the King.’

‘To the Survivors,’ came from Emily, and they drank, the wine tasting like ashes on the tongue.

*

The redjackets advancing past them now had Stag Rampant patches sewn on their sleeves. The Denlanders had pulled back, but she could hear a fearful slaughter going on, out of sight within the murk and the trees.

‘Hey! You there – soldiers!’ she shouted, and yanked a couple in to help. ‘The lieutenant’s hurt. You’ve got to get him back to camp.’

Their expressions told her eloquently enough that they would like nothing better. They hoisted Tubal between them, and at that moment the Denlander counterattack began. Enough enemy guns fired at once to set the water rippling across all the pools they could see, and she heard the calls for retreat and cover going out, all around.

‘Get him up!’ she snapped. ‘Move it!’

‘Musket . . .’ Tubal gasped. ‘Need to . . . fight!’

She cursed him savagely and pressed her pistol into his hand. He looked at it dumbly.

‘Don’t lose it,’ she warned. ‘It belonged to—’

‘I know that,’ he said. The soldiers around them were now firing, spotting grey between the green. Scavian took a deep breath, and then his hands flared with fire.

‘One squad with me, one with Mr Scavian,’ Emily said, taking a musket from the ground. The Warlock threw her a sudden frightened look and she knew he would rather have stayed with her. But this was war and she had an officer’s job to do.

‘Forward, forward to reinforce the Bear!’ she ordered.

Firing, they stepped out into bright day, the sun held briefly between Scavian’s hands before he cast it into the enemy. His screaming fire scorched across the Denlanders, burning and shrivelling them, torching the plants and exploding the pools about them into steam.

‘For the King!’ she heard him bellow. ‘Victory! For the King!’

She fired into the enemy massed Denlanders, feeling the reassuring kick of the musket butt against her shoulder. There were too many of them now, trying to advance into the defending fire of the Lascanne lines. They were packed too close, impossible to miss. Their own overwhelming numbers were working against them. She dropped to one knee to reload, letting her squad move ahead. Away and to her left, Scavian was spinning fire into the enemy, and she knew that all guns would be turning towards him.

Tomorrow’s for others to worry about. Quite. At least Tubal stood some chance of seeing home again.

The musket fire whistled past her as she forced herself into a run to keep up. Into the dense trees, with the Denlanders falling back before her; soldiers were dropping left and right. There were Denlanders up in the branches, firing down at them with cool, impossible accuracy. She dropped one from his branch and stopped to reload. The swamp was mad with gunfire, and it seemed as though it had always been that way. The fight had gone on for so long, and now she had no picture of it, no image of how the battle went, who was where or who was winning. No whistle from Mallen, no shout from Angelline. No sign of the Leopard Passant. Where the hell is Mallarkey?

There were grey uniforms passing to the left of her. She had turned and shot one dead before she realized what that meant.

Cut off.

She backed away but they had seen her, and a shot grazed her thigh, another stung her ear. She turned and ran off between fern fronds already made into ragged sieves by the musket balls. Distance, must get distance between us.

Where am I heading?

She risked a glance over her shoulder, saw the enemy there, keeping pace. No time to reload. Every step took her further from the fighting and from her comrades.

Perhaps I can get to the Leopard. They should be this direction.

She literally ran into three Denlander soldiers, scattering them like ninepins and falling over them. She was up as fast as possible, smashing the closest with her musket, watching her gun fly apart, stock separating from barrel with the force of the two-handed blow. Another grabbed for her, but she got her sabre out quickly and opened up his hand in the process.

They were all around her now, a good half-dozen. She brandished her sword. At least four still carried their muskets and, magic guns or not, they could not miss her at this range.

Their faces were the worst, still so wonderfully composed. No anger there, no hate or fury; simply the faces of tradesmen doing a demanding job.

‘Go on, then!’ she shouted at them, slashing her sabre through the air. ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ She made a clumsy lunge at the closest, and he backed off again. A moment later something solid struck her between the shoulder blades and tumbled her to the mud.

Only a musket butt. Get up! Get up! She lurched onto her hands and knees, sabre still in her grip, lashing out at the legs of her enemies.

Another gun butt smashed her across the side of the head, driving the rim of her helmet into her scalp. A third hooked under her ribs and she was on the ground again, the sabre sliding from her hand.

She looked up to see a dark man in grey standing over her, his gun raised up and then descending. She saw no more.

22.

Dear Mr Northway,

This nice young girl explained her role to me, because there was only so long she could wait.

Ill reading for you, I’m afraid, and the handwriting should tell the story. No sign of the Marshwic woman.

The survivors have been trickling back for three days now, and there’s nobody here who’s holding his breath for more.

I cannot think she is alive. I’m sorry.

Yours sincerely,

John Brocky, Quartermaster.

Light. White light.

It sheared into her skull and she bucked and writhed against it. Someone was prising her eyelids open.

A moment later it was gone, but she was left with the realization that she was awake, and that she had not been so for some time.

She felt firm fingers touching about her face, outlining dull pains that arose within the darkness of her head like red and purple flowers. Bruises.

‘Skull all intact,’ said a voice indistinctly. ‘Can you hear me, in there?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She tasted dried blood on her lips. ‘What . . . ?’

‘Try not to strain yourself.’ The voice was strange, but there was a reassuring familiarity to it as well: a doctor’s calm mannerisms. ‘Tell me, can you hear this?’ A sharp click at one ear.

‘Yes.’

‘And this?’ The other ear.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Patient’s directional hearing is adequate.’

‘Is . . . ? What’s . . . ?’

‘Try not to strain yourself.’ She felt her hand being prised out of the fist it was apparently clenched in, the fingers moved one after another. Some were tender, but none seemed broken. ‘Good,’ the doctor said again. There was something about his voice that was starting to make her uneasy.

‘Now I am going to ask you to open your eyes, one at a time,’ he said. ‘Left first, please.’

She tried to obey, but the light – the drilling, searing light – was too intense. The unseen doctor gave a little sigh and her eyelid was rolled up again with precise care.

‘Follow my finger, please.’

‘I . . . don’t see . . .’

She saw a movement, a blur of a blur, and tracked it automatically. The doctor said, ‘Good,’ again, and let her slip back into blessed darkness. Then the other eyelid was forced up, in the same procedure. This time she started to see the finger properly, started to focus through the shocking brightness.

‘Doctor, I—’

‘Try not to strain yourself.’

But she did, clenching herself against the pain in her chest and side to try and sit up. She could not; there were restraints about her wrists.

‘Doctor, what . . . ?’

‘Please, young lady, you must remain still.’

‘I don’t know you, do I?’

‘You do not, no.’

She screamed briefly as he pressed at her side, but he did not stop, just explored his way across her ribcage with a methodical efficiency. When he left off, she felt weak and ill in the stomach.

‘A slight crack to the fourth rib, left side, I think.’

‘Slight?’ she hissed through her teeth. ‘Where am I?’

‘Please stay calm.’

‘Are you . . . ?’ A ghoulish thought as his cool, dry fingers explored the bare skin of her leg, so professional as to be sexless. ‘You’re not Doctor Carling are you?’ Remembering the dead doctor’s wife. Where am I?

Is this it? Death is a doctor’s surgery?

The doctor’s hands had withdrawn sharply as she spoke that name, and so she knew it must be true. She fought to open her eyes, so as to look him in the dead face at last. The light was not so intense now, or perhaps her eyes had become more accustomed. What had seemed the sun shrank to the distinct flares of lamps, past which moved the shadow that was the doctor. She fixed her gaze on him, craning her neck, trying to focus.

‘Am I Doctor . . . ?’ he asked her slowly.

‘Doctor Carling?’ she whispered.

‘Ah, I am afraid not. My name is Doctor Craulen. I misheard you, for a moment.’

Seeing his pale clothes swim slowly into greater clarity, she mumbled, ‘Craulen? But that’s a . . .’

His grey clothes: not a doctor’s smock but a grey jacket, bisected by a baldric hung with a powder flask, just as hers was.

That’s a Denlander name . . . A Denlander accent and a Denlander name.

Then she fought. She wrenched at the coarse ropes at her wrists and ankles, feeling every joint and muscle cry out, every bruise and cut awake into shrieking life. The interior of the lean-to wheeled around her, and she felt whatever she was tied to creak and complain, but she had not the strength, not yet. She could not break it, or break free of it. Doctor Craulen had retreated from her and was staring at her with concern.

‘Please,’ he insisted. ‘You will only injure yourself further. Your rib—’

‘Get me out of this!’ she rasped at him. ‘What are you going to do to me?’

It was a frame built of canes, splaying her out like a rat ready for dissection. They bent and groaned as she yanked at them, then snapped back straight, wrenching her shoulders. Doctor Craulen left the lean-to hurriedly as she continued to strain furiously, then she sagged back, dizzy and exhausted.

In the aftermath of her striving, she realized that she was near-naked, and must have been completely so not long before. The shirt and undergarment she was wearing now must be Denlander issue, ill-fitting and definitely not her own. Had they—

She froze with the horror of the mere thought. Had they . . . ?

She felt no specific pain down there; no sense that she had been violated, but would she know?

A trembling started inside her, threatening to burst forth into outright panic. She fought it down. She had to remain in control, remain calm.

The flap of the lean-to was pushed open, revealing only darkness beyond, and then a pair of soldiers stepped in, remarkably cautiously for armed men confronting a bound woman. They regarded her suspiciously, and she stared back at them with as much venom as she could muster. She saw Doctor Craulen bobbing behind them, a small man with a receding hairline. But, then, they were all small men.

‘She’s ready to travel?’ one of the soldiers enquired.

‘She mustn’t be beaten any more,’ Craulen told them. ‘Don’t handle her roughly. You laid a heavy hand on her in the jungle.’

The soldier looked sour and muttered something that she translated a moment later as, ‘I didn’t realize she was a she.’

‘Bloody Lascans,’ the other man said. ‘We’d better get her out of here. Fetch her down, Doctor.’

Craulen obviously didn’t like the sound of that. ‘You bring her down. She was going mad just a moment ago.’

‘No real surprise, is it?’ said the first soldier, approaching her. For a moment, she was going to go for him, to bite him or something, but she got herself under control. He was going to cut her loose. That would leave her in a better position. She could fight or run then. She could do something.

She expected him to take out a knife and just cut through the ropes, but instead he fiddled with the knots until they came loose about one of her wrists. The other soldier had moved in as well, and was standing outside of arm’s reach. He had a musket slung across his back, a hatchet at his belt.

Maybe I could grab this one, hold him hostage. He was on to her other wrist now. Wait until you’ve got use of your limbs back. Be ready to make your move.

The cane frame was leaning at an angle, so that her weight had not been strung on her arms. She leant back in it, trying to look helpless, bruised and pliant, bringing her arms down to her sides slowly, feeling the bruises. The soldier moved on to her ankle, briskly tugging and teasing at the knot until it came free. It was all she could do not to tense, not to tip the Denlanders off before she struck.

The rope around her other ankle came loose, and she kicked the man in the face.

Or that was the plan. Her leg barely moved, merely tapping his shoulder limply. She heard him laugh wheezily. ‘She’s a real terror, Doctor. I can see why you keep your distance.’

Doctor Craulen muttered something and the soldier stood up, looking her in the eyes. He was almost as tall as she was.

‘Now, you listen,’ he told her, without malice. ‘Two lessons. One is that I took you in the forest, and I can do it again, especially with you all beaten up. Right? No tricks, Lascan.’

She glared at him and very deliberately pushed herself forward, out of the frame.

He caught her just as her legs buckled and, if she had been ready, perhaps that would have been her moment to strike at him. She was too shocked by her own weakness. Her legs felt loose, alien. A moment later she was suspended between both soldiers while the doctor looked on with a worried frown.

‘Should she be able to walk, Doctor?’ the first soldier asked.

‘She’s just been off her feet a while,’ Craulen said. ‘Give her a moment.’

‘How long?’ Emily whispered.

‘We really went to town on her, didn’t we?’ said the second soldier.

‘Wasn’t all one way.’

‘How long?’ she said, louder.

‘How long since the fight?’ Out of her vision, the soldier obviously looked between his companions before answering. ‘Three days . . . Three days since the fighting.’

They tried to move her, but she refused to cooperate, and in the end they just supported her while she got her legs back under her, felt her strength seeping back in individual drops.

At last she left the lean-to, on her own feet but with her arms draped over the two soldiers in an unwanted parody of camaraderie.

‘Lesson two,’ the first soldier told her.

There were Denlanders all over, a whole camp full of them. She guessed at sixty, then a hundred, perhaps two. A division at least, making temporary camp here by a lakeshore, tucked in and out of the trees.

‘You start any trouble, there are more than enough lads here to give you trouble back,’ the soldier explained.

‘Provost, please . . .’ started Doctor Craulen but the provost cut him off.

‘She’s a soldier, Doctor. She understands me. You understand me, don’t you?’

She nodded wearily. The sight of so many enemies all around her had drained the fight from her. She had hoped for a handful, at the worst a squad. They were so quiet, though, sitting at small fires, boiling water or stew, talking in low, murmuring voices. So many little dark-haired men in grey with their muskets close to hand, those extraordinary muskets.

The heat of the swamps was pressing on them all, but she felt chilled by the sweat sticking the thin shirt to her back. The soldiers helped her forward insistently, herding her slowly through the camp. The fighting men looked up at her with mixed expressions: hatred from a few; fear; curiosity. None seemed to gloat or particularly enjoy her captivity. They were of all ages, she saw, from barely more than boys to men of Grant’s age, grey and lined.

They were the Denlander army of the Levant front; the enemy.

She was being shepherded towards a tent that was the only free-standing structure she could see. It was perhaps twice the size of the one she herself usually slept in. ‘What’s in there?’ she asked. Surrounded by all the little grey devils, the darkness inside it was becoming sinister for her.

The soldiers did not answer, but simply pushed her in and then ducked in to join her. She went down on her hands and raw knees, and put some space between herself and them, in case something nasty was about to happen. The inside was mostly bare save for a very low table, no more than a foot off the ground, and a lamp that one of the soldiers lit. His hands manipulated the flint and steel, using the same patient care as he had undoing her bonds, that same concentration with which these Denlanders seemed to live all their lives.

‘So who won?’ she asked them. ‘You can tell me that. Who won?’ Keep them talking. They can’t do anything worse if they’re talking to you.

The lamplight swelled out as the flame caught, and the soldier’s face looked surreal, floating in the near-dark. ‘Hard to tell, isn’t it?’ he said tonelessly.

‘Do you know a . . .’ For a moment the name escaped her. ‘Provost Dragan Stedter?’

His expression was suspicious. ‘Why?’

‘Because . . . I met him.’ She wondered how much Stedter had actually told his superiors about their meeting.

‘He’s dead,’ the soldier said shortly.

‘Dead? But . . .’ Did they execute him because he let me go? ‘Did you kill him?’ she blurted out before she could stop herself.

‘No, you did, you silly bitch. You and yours.’ For the first time real anger established itself on his face and she thought he would lunge forward and strike her, but then a new man had ducked into the tent, and the soldiers snapped into a kind of crouching attention.

‘What’s this then?’ said the newcomer, still lost in the shadow cast by the two soldiers.

‘Prisoner for you, sir.’

There was an exasperated hiss of breath, and the newcomer’s voice said, ‘For Heaven’s sake, get her some clothes, soldier. What do you think this is, a bordello?’

As the junior soldier ducked out of the tent, the man had room to come forward, kneeling down with the low table between them. An old man, she saw. His hair was almost gone, just a silvery fringe about his ears, and his face was creased into dozens of lines. He must have been as old as Poldry at least: far too old to be in the uniform he wore; to be out here in the swamps fighting battles. He had a wide mouth, quirking itself into a smile even as she watched, and his eyes seemed avuncular, even kind.

‘I would never have thought it,’ he said. ‘One of the fabled fighting women of Lascanne. It took us so long to believe women like you even existed. We didn’t quite credit Lascanne with such madness. If I might ask, are there more of you? Many more?’

‘Hundreds,’ said Emily, and then wished she had said ‘thousands’.

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said the old man. The prospect seemed to depress him, and she could not tell whether he believed her or not. ‘Would you fetch us some tea and a little to eat, soldier?’ he asked the remaining man.

‘You shouldn’t be left alone with the prisoner, sir.’

‘Oh, we’re hardly alone. There are “hundreds” of soldiers in earshot, as she well knows.’ The old man regarded her, not without sympathy. ‘And besides, she seems hardly in a condition to do much real harm, even if the spirit is willing.’

‘If you’re sure, sir.’

‘I am, thank you, soldier.’

And then she was alone with him, with just the low table between them. The short walk from the doctor’s lean-to had taken so much out of her that she found in herself no desire to attack him. Not yet. Whilst she had her life and her hands free, she could wait for some ideal moment in the future, and thus spare herself the toil of acting now.

‘Might I know your name, young lady?’ he asked her.

That bit at her. ‘Sergeant Marshwic, Stag Rampant Company. Sergeant, if you please,’ she got out.

‘Of course, of course. Believe it or not, I am pleased to meet you. I seldom have the opportunity to talk to Lascans of either gender. While I am told we hold great numbers under guard behind the lines of the Couchant, you may have noticed that this is not a war that sees many prisoners, here in the Levant.’

A day and two nights of screaming, with the cutting fires of Justin Lascari ripping information away a piece at a time.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

‘The swamp takes all,’ the old man said, in the manner of a proverb. ‘Forgive me. I am Doctor Nathanial Lammegeier.’

Again she nodded. ‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you’ll be sent to Denland as soon as we can arrange the journey,’ he said, almost as though this was a good thing. ‘I’m afraid there will be a little questioning here, but they’ll do the real work there. Yes, no more war for you, Sergeant.’ He genuinely seemed to believe that this was a thing to be celebrated, a prize that he himself could only dream of. She found herself thinking, Poor old man forced out to fight at his age, and then: Doctor Nathanial Lammegeier.

And it struck her at last, and she said, ‘You’re Doctor Lam.’

The silence stretched between them in the tent, and finally snapped.

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, I am.’

If she was going to attack him, then that was her moment, but a crawling fear had seized her by the throat. Doctor Lam, who led the Levant army of Denland; Doctor Lam the torturer, the severer of tendons, the peeler of flesh. The screams of the captured scout were still bright in her mind and she thought, a little questioning, and knew that there was no reason she too should not be put under the knife. They had the drawn-out death of one of their own to avenge, if no other motive presented itself.

‘I see you’ve heard of me,’ he said drily, as she huddled back towards the far end of the tent.

‘You’re a butcher,’ she said. ‘A vivisector. Is that it? Is that what’s to become of me?’

He sighed, and the tent flapped open behind him, the soldier reappearing with a grey bundle.

‘Clothes, sir.’

Doctor Lam nodded towards her, and the soldier threw her what turned out to be a Denlander uniform of jacket and long britches.

‘You may go,’ said Doctor Lam, and dismissed first the man’s protestations and then the man himself. He watched silently as she dressed herself, as she paused to hiss in pain over each wrenched joint and bruise. There was nothing but a faint sadness evident on his face.

The jacket was too broad across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. She felt like a child playing dress-up games, a ridiculous but oddly familiar feeling. She recalled it as she turned to him again: trying on the King’s uniform for the first time, in Gravenfield.

‘You give me a great and personal reason to win this war for Denland, Sergeant,’ Doctor Lam told her, and for a moment she thought it was an observation on her recent near-nakedness. He had been taken up with his own thoughts, though, for he went on: ‘If we lose, that is how history will know me. Doctor Lam, the terror of the Levant, torturer of innocents and eater of children. The truth is I’m not even a doctor of medicine. I’m an engineer.’

She stared at him blankly, feeling the coarse cloth harsh against her skin.

‘I used to teach at Jarengard University and design locomotives,’ he continued softly. ‘I designed no fewer than twenty-seven different kinds of locomotive, although only two ever saw regular use. You may even have ridden on one of mine, to transport you here to this war. Isn’t that ironic?’ He gave a little chuckle, and then sighed. ‘Then the war came, of course, and I felt the need to serve my country, and they decided that I had a good strategic mind. A clear thinker, you see. And they sent me to take over at the Levant, because they wanted a breakthrough. Something to turn the tide. Something to boost morale. And since that date . . . well, you know as well as I do what the war is like here. A war written in mud and won only by the scavengers.’

‘Who won?’ she asked. ‘Who won the battle I was captured in?’

He smiled a little. ‘We did, Sergeant. Against odds of two to one, we turned back the more aggressive half of your force and inflicted fearful casualties, whilst sustaining merely unpleasant casualties ourselves. Meanwhile, your other half was pinned down by a detachment of sharpshooters and never reached the field at all. That will be my report to the Republican Parliament. You and I know things are not so clear cut.’

Mallarkey and the Leopard, she thought, identifying that pinned ‘other half’. They never came. Damn Mallarkey and his cowardice!

‘You’ll never win the war,’ she told him. ‘We’ll always come back.’

‘No doubt,’ he agreed sadly.

‘I have seen your people fight,’ she spat. ‘They are cowards, all of them. They break and run when charged. They’re no true soldiers!’

He was nodding slowly. ‘What can I say?’ His voice was almost a whisper. ‘You tell me nothing I did not know about myself, about my men. We are cowards? Yes, we are. You terrify us, you Lascans. You are huge and savage; you are born warriors. We put up our guns and you charge headlong at them with sword and shot. You have no fear, no care for your own lives. You are true soldiers, a whole nation of soldiers. Even your women take up the musket and fight. What can we possibly do against that? And yet we must fight. We cannot give up our country to the governance of such monsters. And so we take up our guns again and we meet you, face to face. But we fear, Sergeant. Always we fear. And so, you see, perhaps the coward is the bravest of all men, when he goes to war. He must conquer himself even before he goes to meet his enemy. So we are not “true soldiers”, no. We are men who would rather buy and sell, or make, or teach, but we fight anyway. We have to.’

‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why attack us? Why not just stay in damned Denland, where you belong?’ She was aware her raised voice must be audible to scores of soldiers outside.

‘We defend ourselves, Sergeant. We must defend ourselves. What else would you have us do?’

‘You moved first,’ she told him flatly. ‘Your damned Parliament deposed and killed your king, and then you turned on us. You can’t be secure, with a monarchy on your doorstep. You can’t forget your crime of regicide, with another king on another throne so close.’

‘So, that is what they told you, is it?’ said Doctor Lam.

‘It is the truth.’

The second soldier reappeared then, with a bowl of hot tea and some thin wafers, which he set on the table. Emily had the impression he had been waiting outside for the voices to subside. When he asked if he should go, Doctor Lam suggested that he should stay.

Here it comes. Emily watched the soldier kneel down at the doctor’s shoulder. She had no doubt that he could overpower her, in her present state. She imagined herself splayed out across the table, dissected, raped, burned . . .

‘What?’ she asked savagely. ‘What now?’

‘Now . . .’ Doctor Lam poured two small cups of steaming tea with meticulous care. ‘Now we come to the balancing point.’ He took one cup, sipped gingerly at it. ‘I do not expect you to believe what I am about to say, but I feel that I must say it nonetheless. Will you not try some tea? And there is hard-tack if you like. At the moment it is all we have for provisions.’

She took the other cup, sniffed at the acrid liquid, and then drank. It tasted as it smelled.

‘The regicide of King Dietricht of Denland, second of that name, was not at the order of those who would later become the Parliament,’ said Doctor Lam carefully. ‘The deaths of that mild-mannered and rather simple-minded man, his wife and newborn son were, however, crimes of ambition. I ask you, who could benefit from their demise?’

‘Those who replaced him,’ she replied promptly. ‘Your precious Parliament.’

‘The motive is correct. Shortly after the death of King Dietricht under the assassin’s knife, we received a royal proclamation, whose writer announced that, by right of blood, he had inherited the throne of Denland to add to the throne of Lascanne. A proclamation, of course, by King Luthrian the Fourth of that nation. He did not know that we had caught the assassin’s handler, and had from him, before he died, the great secret: the man who employed him.’

She just stared for a heartbeat, as if not quite hearing him. The words trickled into her, until they touched some red-hot core of loyalty she had not known she possessed. Then she exploded.

She went for him across the table, scattering wafers and tea, clawing for the old man’s throat. The soldier intercepted her but even so she raked one nail across Doctor Lam’s face before she was wrestled away. ‘Liar!’ she screamed at him. ‘Liar!’

The soldier twisted one arm behind her back and tightened his hold until the pain crushed her rage, and all the while Doctor Lam merely watched her, his mournful expression ever deepening.

‘Is everything all right in there, sir?’ someone asked from outside, and the doctor assured the questioner that it was.

King Luthrian IV. She saw herself back in Deerlings House, before all this madness. The ball and how wonderful it had felt to dance with him and bask in the glory he shed like sunlight. And now this decrepit creature was telling her that her king was a murderer, a thing of plots and assassins.

‘You lie. Every word of it, you lie!’ she told him.

‘You will believe what you wish,’ said Doctor Lam. ‘As for me, my tale is near complete. We had no king, and our country had been claimed by the man who paid the killer. What could we do but muster what forces we could, just to hold off the armies of Lascanne? If only it were that simple. But we cannot simply work to keep your soldiers off our soil, like a man who shuts his gate against a mad dog and never leaves his garden again. If we are to win this war we will have to win it. To cross into your land and place our soldiers on your soil. What a stupid thing to have to do. What a terrible point to come to, for two nations once such allies.’

With hands almost steady he reset the teacups. ‘It is always worst,’ he said, ‘when brothers fight.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘Our King is a man of honour, a good man.’

‘No doubt you believe so,’ said Doctor Lam. ‘I think we have finished our talk for this evening. I hope you will think, at least, on what I have told you, Sergeant.’

They took her out and back to the cane frame. It took five Denlander soldiers to resecure her there, but they gave the task their customary careful concentration, and wrestled her onto it.

When they were done, four of them returned to other duties, with only the provost who had brought her in left looking at her. In the darkness she could not read his expression.

‘So what now?’ she challenged him.

‘The doctor will decide. Don’t try to escape. There is no way that you can escape here. Not at all, but especially not in your condition.’

‘Provost?’

Her use of his rank obviously startled him, reminding him of their positions.

‘Yes, Sergeant?’

‘Did anyone . . . ?’ There was no way to ask the question other than to ask it. She would have to be soldierly about it, forthright, despite the horror of it. She forced that soldier part of herself into her voice, beat down the great wash of fear that told her not knowing was better than hearing the most likely answer.

‘When I was brought in, was I raped, Provost?’

He stepped in closer, his face still in shadow. ‘You were not,’ he said emphatically, in a tone that seemed to wonder how she could ask.

‘What?’ she demanded. ‘You think it’s such an unreasonable question?’

His expression suggested it was, but at last he shrugged. ‘Apparently for you it is not. We cannot get used to fighting women. We cannot begin to see you as a woman. Perhaps that is a good thing, from your point of view. But we would not. I would not.’ He put a hand to the canes beside her head, and she knew he was studying her face in the faint light of the lamps. ‘I wonder what would happen to some woman of Denland, captured by your people,’ he said, and for a moment there was quiet between them, so she could hear his breathing. ‘The same as to a man, I imagine, and then worse.’

‘Provost . . . the Warlocks . . .’

‘What about them?’ He stepped back, all business again, a whipcord of anger running through him. ‘Yes, we know about their way with prisoners.’

The way he said it told her a lot. She knew that the Denlanders killed the King’s wizards whenever they had the chance, and she had assumed it was simply because of their power on the battlefield, or their symbolizing the King’s service. Now she saw a third reason. A Warlock’s fire might not sway a battle as much as she had thought, but they had a way with torture like no other.

Giles would never do that, she reassured herself, with the inevitable companion thought: but Lascari loves it.

‘Did you kill any, in the battle?’ she asked. If Scavian or Lascari had fallen, the Denlanders would know. They would celebrate it.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Please, I must know,’ she said.

‘It’s not my place to answer your questions,’ he told her, and stepped off into the darkness. All around, the Denlanders were shuttering lamps and bedding down. The utter black of the swamps at night washed over her, leaving her alone, utterly alone, amidst a sea of enemies.

Had any of them survived? Every time she closed her eyes for awkward sleep, she saw the bodies: Tubal, Scavian, Marie Angelline, Mallen. Sometimes she saw her own.

Something moved nearby and she opened her eyes uselessly.

‘Who’s there?’ she asked.

There was another slight sound, and she sensed more than one person, very close, very quiet. She even felt the breath of one on her hand.

This is it, now. Now they take their sport. ‘You keep away from me,’ she hissed into the night. ‘Don’t think I’m going to let you . . .’ She strained at the frame, creaking and twisting it. The ropes rubbed her wrists and ankles raw.

Someone said something, quiet and extremely close, and she stopped instantly, straining her ears. She had made no sense of it.

‘You . . . just back off,’ she warned.

The same man, or another, whispered something, and she felt as though she had gone mad, or gone deaf. There were no words, none at all.

‘Listen, you . . . what do you want?’

Another meaningless utterance, but she heard it, suddenly in a different context. Babble from a man’s lips became something else entirely.

Indigenes! What are they doing here?

But of course they provided their little services for the Denlanders as they did for the army of Lascanne. Mallen had said as much.

‘Can you . . . untie me?’ she whispered to them, hoping no Denlander was close enough to eavesdrop. ‘Please, untie me. Bite through the ropes or something.’

There was a little hissing between the two or three indigenes, but nothing that suggested they understood her. Mallen had always spoken to them in their own tongue. She did not even know if any of them spoke a human language.

‘Please . . .’ she said, but it seemed utterly hopeless.

But there had been one word that seemed common to both races, she recalled. One solitary word with a world of meaning.

‘Mallen,’ she said to them. ‘Mallen. You understand me? Go and get Mallen, please. Tell him I’m here. Mallen, Mallen, Mallen.’

They made little noises at each other, but she did not hear the word ‘Mallen’ or anything close to it, and eventually they moved off. She could not say whether they had any comprehension of what she had tried to communicate.

And she had no knowledge of Mallen’s fate either. Even before she had been taken, it had been some while since she had heard his whistle. The swamps he loved so much could have reclaimed him at last. It would be, she guessed, how he wanted it. No gravestone and church plot for him.

She sagged back against the ropes and tried desperately for some semblance of sleep. Tomorrow would bring its own trials, and she needed all her strength for those. She might break eventually, but she was damned if she would break quickly.

23.

Dear Mr Brocky,

I have turned Ms Belchere back as soon as her feet brought your missive to Chalcaster, and I was able to scratch out this reply.

Mr Brocky, you seem to me a reasonable man. I am a wealthy one. My private fortune is large, my access to public funds far larger.

I promise you, if you are able to locate news of Sgt Marshwic, then neither you nor the man who finds that news will be the poorer for it. If I were a hero, I would set off myself. If I were a soldier, I would take up a musket. If I were a wizard, I would spark fires enough to burn the forests to the ground until I found her. I am not. I am a man of finances. I use the tools at my disposal.

Find her, find my gratitude and largesse.

Yours sincerely,

Mr C. Northway, Mayor-Governor of Chalcaster.

The undersea light penetrating beneath the canopy woke her by degrees, aching and still spreadeagled across the frame. All around her she heard the muted sounds of several hundred Denlanders packing up camp. Few of them spared her a glance, each engrossed in his own tasks.

She saw then that this was a larger proportion of the Levant army of Denland than she had realized. Parties had surely arrived here during the night. Others were already setting off. This was their headquarters, but it was mobile. Every few nights, Doctor Lammegeier must find some new spot for his soldiers to billet in, to make the Lascanne task that much harder. He had learned some lessons from Colonel Resnic’s Big Push.

And what would today hold for herself? One thought stayed with her from Doctor Lam’s lies the previous night. In the midst of his story had been a solitary nugget of truth, but she would take no comfort from it. The assassin’s master, he had said, had been made to tell of his employer. How so? By sitting down at a low table and offering him tea? Emily did not think so. For all their civilized talk, the Denlanders were a people at war. She dreaded to think of that care and attention to detail being applied to the business of forcing knowledge from her. They would not be malicious, perhaps. They might not enjoy the cruelty, as Lascari had done. They would do it, though. They were a practical people. They would not let mere scruples stand between them and the things they needed to know.

The next time they came for her, they would probably not even remove her from the frame.

But they did, half a dozen of them taking her down with practised precision, and she realized the whole camp was on the move. There was nothing, even Doctor Lam’s table, that could not be disassembled, packed up and made ready to move. Squads and detachments of men were already moving out on their own, providing an advance screen against any enemy they might encounter.

The provost she had spoken with before had obviously been given long-term charge over her. He ensured that her hands were tied behind her, and a noose put about her neck, and he held her on a lead, like an animal. She realized she had better watch her footing. One slip and she could hang herself, and these Denlanders seemed to set a fearful pace.

‘What’s the hurry?’ she asked.

‘No questions,’ the provost replied. ‘Just move.’

She fell into step with them as they headed deeper into the swamp. The entire camp had broken into squads, each squad keeping sight of the next, the company of several hundred thus moving like a swarm. Ants, that was what they reminded her of. She remembered Mallen showing her a breed of ant out here in the swamp that lived like this: camping by night, then moving by day in a great loose carpet of insects.

And she recalled her dream: the Denlanders as a devouring swarm.

They kept moving, too, determined and careful, not slowed by pools or high banks. Even when clambering and splashing, they were surprisingly quiet. She had to keep craning around to remind herself how many of them there were.

If I could make a noise, attract someone’s attention, let our people know they’re here . . .

Anyone investigating, however, would get themselves shot or stabbed and, like every other hopeless plan, she needed to wait her moment out. No sense shouting into the wilderness and having them gag her.

She nearly drowned mid-morning, skidding over on a bank and knocking two soldiers down with her into a pool that was far deeper than it seemed. The rope skidded through the provost’s unsuspecting hands, and then he tried to pull her out with it and came close to strangling her before she was righted. When she had been dragged, coughing and choking, to the pool’s side, she kicked out at him as he approached.

‘For God’s sake, give me my hands!’ she snapped. ‘Keep me on a leash if you have to, but I’ve no wish to die because I can’t catch myself.’

He grimaced and then, to her surprise, undid the knots about her wrists. ‘Everyone keep a knife out,’ he told the men around them. ‘Don’t hesitate to use it. Kill her if she tries to escape, or if she goes for you.’

She stood, clenching and unclenching her fists, and saw them back off a little. Cowards. She remembered all that Doctor Lam had said. They were frightened of her. She was taller than most, even broader at the shoulder than some, and she was a savage Lascanne warrior woman. They had no idea what to do with her.

Only the provost looked unimpressed. He had his hatchet in his hand, and she guessed he would have no qualms about using it. Give me an opportunity and I will take that from you, she vowed. ‘Thank you, Provost,’ she said instead.

‘Move on,’ he told her, and then to his men: ‘Come on, catch up! We’ve wasted enough time.’

For an hour and more he was right behind her, but just out of reach, and he was weathering this forced march better than she was. He had not been beaten half to death and strapped to a frame all night, after all. She was sure her moment would come, but not so far.

‘So,’ she asked him, ‘am I a special enemy of yours, or is it just because I’m a Lascan that you hate me?’

‘I don’t hate,’ he said. ‘I don’t hate Lascans or you. You’re enemies, that’s all.’

She had not been expecting an answer at all, and she was thrown for a moment. ‘You seem to have some grievance, Provost. More than you did last night, even. You were almost civilized last night.’

‘Civilized,’ he said. ‘Last night I was living in hope, Sergeant. I had a brother fighting in the battle. We were hoping he’d come in with the stragglers. I have not had that luck.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Emily. He picked up his pace a little until he was alongside her; until she could see the anger on his face, as painful as the bruises on hers.

‘What do you have to be sorry about? One less Denlander to worry about, isn’t it?’

‘I had a brother, Provost,’ she said simply. ‘He died here before I even arrived. I had a brother-in-law who may be dead now, for all I know. Do you think that only Denlanders have families?’

She saw her words strike home, freezing his features. After a moment he spat into the waters.

‘Brother-in-law,’ he said. ‘God and Heaven. What sort of a country lets its women fight? What sort of a woman wants to?’

She bit back the words that came first to her. They do not know about the draft. She had suspected as much previously. The Denlanders thought the women soldiers of Lascanne were volunteers.

‘Are we not allowed to defend what is ours?’ she asked.

He cursed wearily. ‘It’s going to be a long war,’ he said, and she knew he was thinking of some hypothetical future when the Levant and Couchant fronts were broken, and the armies of Denland went on to take Lascanne itself. A future where they were opposed by every man, woman and child left in that country, all fighting like maniacs to the very last. The weight of it, the thought of that fight, lay heavy on him. So much the better. Let them think it is so. She had no sympathy. It was her home that they wanted to invade, and she knew that if either front broke, then Denland would find no opposition beyond.

There was an all-too-brief pause for a mouthful of hard biscuit and a few swallows of water, and it heartened her, it strengthened her to see that they were reduced to that. Supplies must be hard to come by, she supposed, if they moved about so much.

Time was a slippery thing to judge, here under the canopy, but she guessed it was two hours after noon when they stopped for good and made camp again. Surrounded by her ring of armed guards, she watched as bands of Denlanders melted in and out of the shadows. The actual camp was a loose network of squads that must extend for some distance all around. She seemed to be in the very centre.

They reassembled the frame in front of her, not out of cruelty but practicality, leaning it up against a knotted tree broad enough to support it.

‘Is there no other option?’ she asked the provost.

‘If we left you a muscle to move, would you not use it to escape?’ he asked.

‘I can’t fly. I can’t work miracles. I’m surrounded by your soldiers.’

‘And all Lascans are mad, blood-mad. Who is to say that you would not free yourself and kill Doctor Lammegeier, or spoil our provisions? I cannot trust you in anything. You are my enemy. You are duty bound to escape and to oppose us, just as I would be if I were your prisoner.’

She had no answer to that, and there were enough of them laying hands on her that she did not struggle when they roped her back into the frame. She felt as though she was getting to know the ropes that they knotted and unknotted. They waste nothing. It means they have little. But they use it well.

‘How are things back home, Provost?’ she asked.

‘War drains a country,’ he said. ‘Three years so far, and I’m sure both our nations run short. Food, materials, people.’ He shrugged.

‘Well said, Provost.’ She recognized Doctor Lam’s genial tones as the old man stepped up alongside. To her surprise, he had kept up with them through all the swamp-slogging. They had not carried him, or even helped him along. The old man was clearly tougher than she had guessed.

Perhaps I could not have managed to kill him, had I even got my hands on him.

She looked into his slightly smiling, slightly melancholy face and asked herself if she would kill him, given the chance. He was the enemy, after all. He was the infamous Doctor Lam, but he was an old man, a philosophical, humorous creature full of odd talk. Someone’s father, someone’s grandfather even.

Let him torture me, then I shall have no qualms.

With that thought, she shrank back as he approached.

‘What now?’ she asked him. ‘Will the doctor operate?’

‘As I explained to you, Sergeant, I am an engineer, not a physician, but if it becomes necessary, then I have those who will make the cut on my behalf.’ There was only sadness in his voice as he spoke, no threat at all. It was all the more intimidating for that. ‘Perhaps we should speak a little first. Perhaps you will tell me what little you can.’

As easy as that . . . to avoid the knife and the fire. ‘I am no traitor, Doctor,’ and only the tiniest flinch in her voice.

‘No doubt.’ He seated himself at the foot of her cane frame. ‘But what could you actually betray? The location of your camp? We know it. Your leader’s plans? After the battle we have had, they will all be thrown out of alignment. You cannot know them.’

‘So what do you want from me? Something worth . . .’ – no sense cushioning the blow – ‘torture?’

Doctor Lam sighed. ‘Personalities, Sergeant. Your thoughts on your leaders. How they act and react, what they are likely to do.’

‘Oh.’ She thought of what she could say to damn Mallarkey and Pordevere, the colonel, even Tubal. ‘Well, then, I am afraid I cannot oblige.’

‘National character even,’ the old man continued. ‘Let me into the Lascanne mind. Let me understand you.’

‘I thought you already did,’ she said, almost goading. ‘You know we’re all war-mad killers, don’t you? That we bring our children up on blood and bonemeal? Surely you’ve all heard that.’

She looked about her at the soldiers within earshot, and was a little shocked to recognize belief in some of their faces.

‘I cannot let myself acknowledge such stories. You are human beings, as we are. There must be some give in you, some compromise!’ Doctor Lam threw his hands in the air, startling her. His mildness fell away from him for a moment. ‘Sergeant, I am a man of peace – you may scoff, but it is so. I fight wars so that others, less able, less moderate, do not do so in my place. I need to find a way, Sergeant: a way to conclude this war that does not end in . . . genocide.’

She let the new word fall into place inside her head. ‘Geno . . . cide? The killing of – what? Of a family?’

‘Of a race, Sergeant. Of a nation. Of . . . everyone in it.’ He let his anger go, in one long sigh. ‘I cannot let Denland lose the Levant front. I cannot let my country lose this conflict with yours. The war must be won but . . . what will we destroy, of our way of life, in order to save it? Will we become cursed by history for all time, because of what we did to defeat the stubborn Lascans?’

‘You would . . . ?’

‘If Lascanne fights to the last man, the last woman, child even, what option do we have?’

It will not come to that. There will be a surrender. But when – and would it be in time? At what point would this genocide the old man spoke of gather such speed that it could not be stopped?

We will have to win this war, for this reason.

‘I must leave you, for now.’ He held a hand out, and one of the soldiers helped him to his feet.

‘Doctor Lam?’

‘Sergeant?’ He turned back to her with a raised eyebrow.

‘Doctor, you said this war is over for me.’

‘Quite over, no doubt of it.’ Again that suggestion that he considered her, for that reason, profoundly lucky.

‘I’ll be sent to Denland?’

‘There are camps there for such as are captured. A great many of the original Lascanne invasion force were cut off and taken to them, you understand. You will be one of few women there, I fear.’

‘There’s no harm in telling me then . . . what makes your guns so good?’

Doctor Lammegeier stared at her for a moment, and then cocked his head back and laughed, a scholarly, dry sound. ‘The spirit of Lascanne,’ he observed. ‘And you will teach the message to some bird you will send back to your camp, or you will carve it, unnoticed, on the bark of trees. No, Sergeant, I am a coward, as you say. I will not underestimate a warrior woman of Lascanne. If you have not puzzled out our secret, then I will not tell you. Instead, think on what I have said to you. Today and tonight, I organize my scouts and receive my reports. Tomorrow we will talk again. I am afraid I will discover what I need to know, Sergeant. I make no excuses. This is war.’

She thought long and hard on what he had said, but came to no further conclusion than: We will have to win this war.

Night grew on them, leaching the colour from the swamp in a few scant minutes, as the distant sun crested the Couchant mountains. She saw the Denlanders settle down, huddling on every piece of dry ground around her, roosting like birds. Still the camp was not settled: latecomers caught up with them and established their billets further and further out from the centre. Scouts returned with news, or set off on their errands. There was little talk, no music or laughter, no roll of dice, nothing but a dedication to what they were doing: the subtle, constant movement of determined men fading into the susurrus of the swamp.

And she could not sleep either, for sleep would bring the morrow that much quicker, and she was in no mood to meet it.

Can I lie to them? Would they believe me? I am no easy liar able to spin webs like . . . well, like Cristan, for one. He would not be at a loss, here. He would have talked his way out of it by now. He would have them at each other’s throats.

She tried to construct some falsehood that might satisfy Dr Lam. What could she tell him, though? A lie was that the men and women of Lascanne would fight to the last breath, since the truth was that they would not. Either way was damning for her.

We cannot yield the Levant. If the army was smashed by Denlander efficiency, the country would crumple. Who was left to defend it? Greybeards and old women and children, and a few public servants? Old Poldry with his outdated memories?

She tried not to think about his condemnation of her King. All lies, she knew, but she could tell that they were not his lies. He had been told them by his Parliament, and he believed them. In such a way must all these men believe that their cause was right, or from where would they draw the strength to prosecute it? And so, as we also are right, where is the give? Where will his middle ground come from; his future where we do not fight each other to the very death?

She thought further about Dr Lam’s words. Even if we win, who will till the fields? Who will trade and manufacture and labour? This war must end soon, either way.

Hanging there from her frame, beset by darkness and with the morrow’s sun promising only interrogation and torture, she found that she could see no hope, for herself or for Lascanne.

Emily was not a godly woman. She had gone to the church perhaps once in a tenday, often just once a month. She had relied on her own strengths to keep her and Grammaine going and not sought to lean on supernature.

Now she prayed, a soldier’s prayer as old as war itself: Give me a death with a musket in my hands. Not like this. This is no end for a soldier.

Something clamped about her mouth, stifling her instant cry, holding her mute in a vice-like grip. She pulled at the frame instantly, making it creak but getting nowhere. Some thing of the swamp, some serpent or nightmare had hold of her—

Some man.

‘Quiet,’ said the smallest possible voice, right in her ear. She felt his breath ruffle her hair. His hand still gripped her jaw, digging into the bruises. For a long while neither he nor she moved.

Then he released her, and she whispered, ‘Mallen?’

‘No more talk now.’ She could not see him. It was dark all around, but she could not sense him either, or hear any movement of him. He was not there – nowhere around her – yet she felt the chill of his knifeblade as it severed the rope about one wrist – a strange feeling of sacrilege to cut what had been tied and untied so dutifully.

One small victory over the Denlanders.

He sliced through the bindings about her other wrist, and she bit back a squeak as he nicked her with the keenness of the blade. For a second there was a pause, and then the hilt was pressed into her hand, and she bent forward to free her ankles.

She took this chance to feel all around, at arm’s length. He was nowhere. She was now ready to believe that he had gone native in some significant mystical way. What powers had been given to Mallen by unhuman gods?

Free now, and with a knife in her hand, she straightened up. Straight away, she felt his breath against her neck.

There was movement out in the camp. Instantly she put her arms out and stretched herself across the frame as before, trusting Mallen to shift for himself. A sentry came padding between the groups of sleeping soldiers, a lantern in his hand. He cast a suspicious glance her way, and she pretended to sleep, watching him from beneath one eyelid as he passed on, stepping softly through water and mud.

She risked a glance towards Mallen – or rather Mallen’s breath – and she saw nothing.

And then he moved. He was hanging upside down from the branches of the tree behind her frame. He was stripped to the waist, his chest and back and arms daubed with darkness, either paint or dirt, to mimic the patterns of his facial tattoos. Lost in the shadows of his face, his eyes met hers.

‘We cannot get out. They are everywhere,’ she said, her mouth to his ear, and all the while wondering: How did he get in?

He took a deep breath, and put his hands under her arms. A jerk of his chin made her look upwards.

But . . . There was no time. Abruptly he was lifting her, thrusting her upwards towards the twisted boughs above. She heard him grunt with the effort, his legs locked about a branch, and she reached up into the darkness desperately, terrified that whatever she caught hold of would snap off.

One sound is all it will take. There are hundreds of guns, hundreds of men.

Her hand latched about a branch and she flailed with the other one until that, too, found a secure place. The wood bent alarmingly as her weight dragged on it, but it held. In a moment, Mallen had jackknifed upwards, taken hold and ascended into the tree as bonelessly as a serpent. His hand caught hold of her arm as she struggled to raise herself further. Between their joint efforts, she gained the canopy.

It was cramped, and she lay at a crooked angle, trying to catch her breath. The splayed branches of the tree came out every which way, turning, writhing, seeking their way upwards through the maze of their brothers in their quest for light. The darkness was complete: not a spark made its way in from above or below. The sounds of the swamp, of the tree’s own myriad inhabitants, covered any from Mallen, so she had to take it on trust that he was still with her.

And where to go from here? Are we to wait until the Denlanders move on, and hope they do not guess where we have gone?

‘Rested?’ came Mallen’s soft-voiced query. ‘Ready?’

‘For what?’ she breathed. He must be very close, crouching spider-like amidst the boughs. She was beginning to wonder whether he was entirely human, whether he had not some indigene in his blood, to let him do the things he could.

‘To move, understand? Can’t stay here.’ She felt him shift slightly, the movement gently swaying all the branches of the tree.

It was an effort for her to keep her voice low. ‘Where?’ she demanded.

‘Follow.’ In the pitchy dark his hand found her wrist without trouble, and then he tugged her: upwards, upwards and away.

She had no more questions to usefully ask, so she went with him, feeling like a blind thing, like an insect fumbling through grass-blades, handhold to handhold, one foothold to the next. The first few movements made her weak, the beating and her time hanging on the frame bringing a weakness to each limb. She wanted to stop; to rest; to give up. She did not allow herself the luxury, pushing her body remorselessly, barking parade-ground orders at herself inside her head to keep herself moving. Every so often she would become convinced that Mallen had escaped her, in her snail’s progress, and then she would catch hold of his hand or his bare ankle, as she continued moving painstakingly between the branches.

But soon they must run out of tree, she guessed. Surely we cannot go like this, branch over branch, all the way to the edge of the swamps. I will go blind.

Light suddenly assailed her: a white lantern flooding her world with pale, washed-out illumination. She shielded her face, rocked backwards and nearly lost her grip. Not bright, but . . .

She stared at it for a long moment before she would admit to herself that it was the moon. The moon in a sky scudding with solitary and secret clouds, and freckled with the stars she had known forever. She found she could not move; she could not speak. The sight of it, after all she had been through, clutched at her heart.

And, eventually, she turned to look at Mallen hunched in the treetops beside her, as savage a creature as ever claimed Lascanne as its home. The wan moonlight danced unevenly across the painting of his chest, the markings on his face, so that he swam in and out of sight even as she gazed at him. His eyes remained hooded but, when he smiled, the moon caught the gleam of his teeth.

‘I’ve not shown this way to many,’ he said. ‘A few of the scouts, no others. Count yourself lucky.’

‘I do, but . . . we cannot go over the treetops all the way home, surely.’

‘The sky road, they call it,’ he said, and she knew they must be the indigenes. ‘Can’t move an army by it. Can’t move a squad by it. One man, though. One man, one woman. Get us clear of the Denlanders at least.’

‘They have scouts out. They must range quite far,’ she warned him, but his unconcerned nod said that he already knew this.

He unfolded his limbs. ‘Go where I go,’ he said, and then looked her over. ‘You hurt?’ It was impossible to tell whether concern touched his expression or not, but it touched his voice. ‘Not easy, the sky road, understand?’

All around them, she was seeing the swamp from above, the great undulating plain of the canopy, broken here and there by the ragged gaps of lakes or clearings. It was silver in the moonlight, like a field of waving grass perhaps, or a meadow below the Wolds.

‘I will manage,’ she told him.

He did not doubt her, but was moving right away, using hands and bare feet, branch to branch, spidering sideways, following the sturdiest boughs with such ease that it really did seem like a road to him. Determinedly, she took off the boots and stockings the Denlanders had given her, stowed them in the fork of two branches, and followed Mallen across the indigenes’ sky road.

‘They found you,’ she addressed his retreating heels. ‘They told you, the indigenes.’

‘Right.’ He looked back to check, but she was following, unsteadily but gaining confidence, and he grinned again. ‘Remember, we owe you.’

‘I thought they didn’t . . . take sides.’

He made that little sound that passed for laughter with him. ‘They’re only human,’ he said.

What surprised her was how easily this came to her, who had not climbed a tree since she was a girl. Bruised and battered, tired and aching, barefoot with a day of walking behind her, she felt almost half-indigene herself. Her hands and feet seemed guided by spirits, here in the moonlight. Each branch she clutched bowed under her weight but bore her; each time Mallen looked back, she had gained a little on him, until she had to slow down to dodge his feet.

‘Is it . . . ?’ She did not quite voice the question. Mallen’s glance at her was shadowed, secret. More magic in this world than the King’s, it seemed to say, but she never did quite ask outright, and he would never say.

All around them, like a cloud-castle city from a storybook, the magical silver landscape slumbered and murmured with life, and she began to finally understand Daffed Mallen. Who could not love this, and want to stay with it always? She had never seen the like, and knew with a deep sadness that she never would again. She would not become one of Mallen’s scouts. She would not inherit this world as her own. She was gifted this one night, to walk across the roof of the world and see what so few human eyes had ever seen.

*

Later, much later, Mallen signalled a halt, just when her weariness was catching up with her, at last. Her grip was no less sure, but her arms ached fiercely, and she had splinters in her hands and feet. It made her feel a little better to see Mallen now settle back, obviously glad of the chance to rest as well.

‘Are we clear of them?’ she asked him. ‘The Denlanders?’

He nodded. ‘We’ll drop down soon. Did you a favour, giving you some of their clothes. Grey’s better than red for hiding.’

Settling back in the crook of a tree, half submerged in foliage, she found herself looking at him as a man rather than a near-mythical rescuer. Some pinch of her old propriety awakened at the sight. Really, he was no company for a civilized woman! She giggled at the thought: barechested, painted and savage. What would Alice say about her choice of companion these days?

‘Mr Mallen, you are a disgrace to the uniform,’ she said.

His vulpine grin came back. ‘Master Sergeant to you, Marshwic.’

‘You know, the girls in 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 doctor, after all.

‘I should be able to get up today,’ Emily argued. ‘I need to go back to my company.’

‘Your entire company has been here to see you almost every day,’ the doctor’s wife remarked drily. It was true enough; Emily was a hero, apparently, although she had thought simply escaping was something short of a hero’s traditional trials and deeds. The attention had been tiring mostly. Men and women she barely recognized had come bustling in to offer their congratulations. How do they all know me? she had wondered, as her hand had been shaken, as admiring girls of seventeen told her they wanted to be like her. Two men had even proposed marriage, and she had been forced to have Doctor Carling’s wife evict them.

And the colonel had come, of course – he had come to her the first day she was awake. He had tired her out just by his being there, filling the infirmary with his chatter, the one well-wisher the doctor’s wife could not send away.

And he had come with questions, dozens of questions about the Denlanders, their camp, their kit, their leader. She had answered them as truthfully as she could, and watched Captain Mallarkey write it all down. From the first few words, she had been able to tell that the colonel did not quite believe her. In his opinion she was a woman recovering from a terrible ordeal, her mind not quite right, that sort of thing. The Denlanders she described did not fit with those in his imagination, and so he had reworked her answers to fit his preconceptions.

‘Jolly well done, though,’ he had told her. ‘Splendid boost for the men, Marshwic. Couldn’t have asked for better. A real war-hero. There’ll be a medal for you, I shouldn’t wonder, back home. The King himself’ll put it on you.’

‘That would be . . . nice, sir.’ Her reply had been a weak one. He had worn her out more than the Denlanders during their forced march, not with his interrogation but his constant praise. The bonhomie of Colonel Resnic was not what she had wanted to wake to, her first day back to life.

‘Can’t have you just a sergeant, of course,’ he had gone on to muse. ‘Dashed shame that Mallen chap won’t be promoted. Irregular, but he’s a useful sort. Have to keep him around, I suppose. Even though he looks like such a fearful creature.’

‘A very useful man, Colonel,’ she had said, with feeling.

‘What? I suppose so, suppose you would say that. Still, what I’m trying to say, Marshwic, hero and all, going to have to make you lieutenant. Can’t have more than one master sergeant in a company, you see.’

He beamed at her, but the breath had gone out of her. She had felt as though she had been shot, after all, in the swamp, and not known until now. ‘Sir . . .’ had come her croak, but she had been unable to get the sentence out.

‘My dear girl, what’s the matter?’ The colonel was all bluff frowns and incomprehension. ‘Can’t turn down a promotion, surely?’

‘Colonel . . . my . . . Lieutenant Salander, Colonel? He’s lieutenant of Stag Rampant. You . . . can’t have more than one lieutenant in a company either.’

The colonel had looked at her blankly for a moment, before understanding dawned at last. ‘Oh, yes, your cousin or something . . . ?’

‘My brother-in-law, Colonel.’

‘Ah, well, bad business that,’ he had said awkwardly, then, at her horrified face, he had hurriedly added, ‘Not dead, Marshwic. Not dead. Thinking of making him up to full captain, now that Goss isn’t coming back. Just won’t be doing any real commanding outside camp. You’ve got the company on the field.’ He was human enough that he could not look her in the face, but when he had tried to busy her with other topics she would have none of it, and had just stared at him until he found a pair of soldiers to take her to visit Tubal.

Tubal had been moved from the doctor’s hut to the clubhouse, lying up there in a bed Brocky had set for him. It had been his face she saw first: the same face that she knew, undamaged, with two eyes and a grin – full of joy at seeing her. Only afterwards had she noticed the crutch propped up at his bedside, and only then the leg he had lost from just above the knee.

‘Oh, Tubal . . .’

‘Hell, could have been worse,’ he had pointed out. ‘You got me out of there, remember? I’d never have had the pleasure of the amputation if you hadn’t.’

She had wanted to make some brave, clever remark to match his, to show that she was a soldier and a woman of the world. Then everything had caught up with her: the horrors and confusion of the battle; her capture; Doctor Lam’s insinuations about the King. Her eyes had filled with tears and she had knelt beside the bed and hugged Tubal close, despite her bruises, and wept into his chest for all the blood and innocence that had been lost.

In the midst of the busy throng who came to visit her at the doctor’s hut, there had been at least a few moments with friends. First of all, Giles Scavian, who had somehow survived the shots of the Denlanders, and who had then screened the Lascanne retreat with fire until his eyes had bled burning tears. While she was lashed to a frame in the Denlander camp, he had lain collapsed on a bed right here in the infirmary, drained almost to death. She was more glad than she could say to see Giles Scavian again.

And yet, as he sat by her, her hand resting in his, something stood between them. She had a world of things she wanted to say, and she could not say them to him. She could not tell him about the Denlanders, how they had really been. She could not tell him that the dreaded Doctor Lam was just an overwrought engineer with a moral dilemma. She could not tell him the lies of Denland against his beloved King. He would rage, he would go mad. He was a King’s wizard, and she did not want to see that anger. The silences between them were calming, healing, but her words were bottled up inside her, and she could not let them out.

Later there was Sergeant Caxton, the female man’s tailor with her new crown patch sewn crooked on her shoulder. It had not made her any less pale, any less worried. The added responsibility weighed hard on her, and she obviously wished that, with Emily returned, she might return to obscurity herself. Emily had laughed at her for that, mocking her, asked her what sort of a soldier was she, that she could turn down extra pay.

‘When they ever get round to paying us,’ Caxton had grumbled. ‘Besides, Lieutenant, you don’t look so happy with yours. You haven’t even sewn it on.’

Lieutenant Marshwic. It did not sound quite real to her. What fool would make her a lieutenant? The colonel would take it back before she left her sickbed, surely.

And at last, after it seemed that everyone from all three companies had come to tell her what a hero she was, there came John Brocky and, on his arm, Marie Angelline.

‘Well now,’ he said, trying a smile. ‘Look at this treatment. I never got this treatment when I was laid up here.’

‘The quality of the treatment is inversely proportional to the quantity of the complaints, Mr Brocky,’ came the sharp voice of Doctor Carling’s wife.

‘Listen, Doc—’

‘I am not a doctor, Mr Brocky. Carry on endearing yourself to me like this and you’d better hope you never end up here again.’

‘I have a bottle of whisky here that’s asking for you to go into the next room and not eavesdrop on us,’ Brocky suggested, dangling the contraband at his fingertips.

Doctor Carling’s wife approached him suspiciously, then pecked the bottle from his hand and left without another word.

‘God-awful woman,’ Brocky remarked, sitting. He still looked thinner than he had been when Emily had first met him. The loss of a layer of flab left him looking somehow more vulnerable than before.

‘I hear congratulations are in order,’ said Angelline. ‘Marshwic, you should count yourself lucky. Fat Squirrel’s second spot is empty, but they won’t give it to me. Pordevere won’t have a woman as his second, and I’ve not the clout to catch the colonel’s eye.’ She caught herself hurriedly. ‘Not that you don’t deserve it, but . . .’

‘I know. The name, the family. It helps,’ Emily acknowledged. She had no wish to be a lieutenant – to be in charge, for heaven’s sake – when the next assault came. She would gladly have shed her name, to dodge it.

Brocky wrung his hands anxiously. ‘Marie, could you . . . ? There’s something I need to run by Marshwic, a private something.’

Angelline clasped Emily’s hand. ‘See you on the line, Marshwic.’ And then she was gone.

‘What is it, Brocky?’

The big man grimaced. ‘Right, well . . . I reckon I’m probably not supposed to show you this, but I don’t know the man, so it doesn’t make a pox of difference to me. I thought you’d want it, anyway.’

He handed her a folded letter, the wax seal on it broken. She recognized the handwriting immediately and looked up at him in surprise.

‘Oh, we’ve had quite a correspondence on, your Mr Northway and I,’ Brocky confirmed. ‘That messenger girl of his’s been running herself ragged up and down the line from Chalcaster to Locke.’

She opened out the letter and read it carefully, and then again.

If I were a hero, I would set off myself, he had written. If I were a soldier . . . ‘Oh,’ she said.

Brocky shrugged. ‘You, er . . . Your man, is he, this Northway fellow . . . ?’ and she knew he was thinking about her and Scavian.

‘I don’t know, Brocky. He and I used to . . . I used to hate Cristan Northway more than anyone alive: history, family history. But since the war, things have been different.’

‘War does that,’ observed Brocky sagely.

‘It’s difficult,’ she said.

‘Your life, your choices,’ he said. ‘Besides, all bets are off in wartime. After all, there’s no guarantee you’re going to see this Northway again, and all the letters in the world aren’t going to change that.’ At least Scavian’s here, followed the unspoken words.

‘You and Angelline seem to be . . .’

A broad, lewd and automatic leer split his face. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes indeed. I’ve no complaints there; her neither, for that matter.’ The leer stayed put, most of it, but something retreated behind it. ‘I’ve my eye on a little practice in the capital, if it all works out. Or maybe I’ll go travelling with her players. You make plans, you know . . . despite everything.’

‘You’ll be well set up for whatever you do, you and Mallen both,’ she observed. ‘Cristan – Mr Northway is good, I think, for his promise.’

‘Not that Mallen would know what to do with the money. He’d probably try and eat it or something, damned savage.’ Brocky stood up at last, stretching, then wincing as he felt his scar pull. ‘You get some rest now. Your country’ll be calling on you soon enough.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘I won’t say anything about the letter to . . . well, you know what I mean.’

‘I’m obliged, Brocky.’

*

And now here she was, one day away from enjoying the freedom of the camp again; just one day standing between her and the war.

She took out Mr Northway’s letter and read it again; she had lost count of how many times she had done so.

Too long, too late, too far. It was all wrong, she knew. There must have been a point where she could have relaxed into the idea of his love. Perhaps that point had occurred before she left for Gravenfield. Certainly it was before she had left for the front. All that time, slowly stripping herself of her hostility; all that time under his careful, sardonic wooing, and he had come close, so close. She had overshot his love, somehow. She looked back on it from her current vantage point, looked back into her past. What I might have had.

Perhaps that moment had come and gone while she was Doctor Lam’s prisoner. Perhaps if she had returned with the others, been present at camp for it, she would have met the moment and embraced it. But now . . .

Mortality was at her shoulder now. Her brush with the enemy had brought it into focus, where before had been just a blur. She stared down at his neat handwriting, seeing in it a tremor, a hurry, that had not been there in his earlier communications.

What would he have done, had I not returned? Such a calm man, such a clever man. Had she not seen this letter she might have believed he would turn his affections elsewhere, and gone on with the cold precision of his life. Now . . .

There was a fire inside him. He was not master of it, or of himself, any more.

If I die . . .

If she wrote back now, acknowledged his love, accepted his love, and then some Denland sharpshooter made an end of her the next day . . . She would have given him the world and then snatched it back in one swoop. She recalled – so vividly! – his face when she had gone to him, and her brother’s death had stood between them. How much worse for him to have her and to lose her forever, all at once. She herself would not place such a value on her own person, but every line of his letter, every character that he sketched out, spoke of his mind.

Previously, the thought that he might mourn for her had comforted her. Now it distressed her. The man she would once have gladly killed was now someone whose throat she unwillingly held a knife to. The world was upside down and it had all gone wrong.

Perhaps I should not write again.

Perhaps I should disabuse him of his affection, just to save him when the . . . end comes.

*

She had expected to be moved out of the infirmary by now, but there were no fresh wounded to take her place, and the colonel had impressed on Doctor Carling’s wife the importance of Emily’s well-being enough that she had yet to be discharged. The walking wounded had been returned to duty, the most hopeless cases sent to Locke, to come back when the surgeons decreed. Or not, like Captain Goss, who had finally let go, accepting death as the lesser evil. So it was that she found herself spending another night there with the sickbeds all to herself, as though she was royalty who could demand a seclusion not granted to lesser mortals.

If there had been others there recuperating with her, it might never have happened.

Doctor Carling’s wife bedded down in the back room, while Emily slept surrounded by the emptied beds of the dead, the ghosts of old wounds. For a long while now she had not dreamt. The havoc of the days, her fearful imaginings, had quite drained that part of her that looked into the future or examined the past. Now, though, some little part of it was again set free.

In her dream she was at Grammaine, and it was a good dream for once. She came downstairs to speak to Cook, talked of all the usual things with Alice, watched Mary feed little Francis. There was no war in that dream. Not even the spectre of it hung about them and when Tubal came indoors to embrace his wife, he had two feet to carry him.

But she knew. Watching them, she knew, and she was waiting for the stain of the swamp to discolour the walls, the heat to begin wilting her, the crack of muskets to break the peace.

And on and on trudged the dream, the happy little scenes. Shopping at Chalcaster, evenings by the fire, visits to friends, and always in the back of her mind she was looking for the greycoats of Denland to come creeping in, as she knew they must.

And then there was a dance, held not at Deerlings but at some friend’s townhouse in Chalcaster, and the band struck up a merry tune and she looked around for a dance partner. But of course, there was one man cutting through the crowd towards her, and she could dance with no other because he was her mate, her lawful husband. She knew, if she but looked up a little, she could see his face clearly, resolve him as one or the other of them, but in the dream she did not dare.

Then she was startled awake, clutching at her sheets and listening to her own breathing – and to the sound of someone else in the room.

‘Who’s there?’ she asked. She heard a man moving with quiet patience between the beds, not making much noise, but not trying overmuch to be silent. Was it the Denlanders come to finish her? An assassin would have had her by now, or would have frozen to stillness once she spoke. A friend, then; a nocturnal visitor?

Her heart skipped and she whispered, ‘Giles? Mr Scavian?’

The intruder stopped and let out a long sigh. ‘Always the same, is it not? What do you see, between us, that makes you take me for him, or is it just that it is always he you really wish to see?’

‘Mr Lascari?’ she hissed. A light was kindled in the dark, guttering low about his fingers, revealing his hawklike features to her. His eyes flared, reflecting back the flame as they fixed on her.

‘What are you doing here, Mr Lascari?’ she asked him. ‘Why are you here?’

‘For you.’ He approached her bed with stalking strides. His face was devoid of expression save for a need that burned deep within it.

She sat up as quickly as she could, despite her bruises. ‘Mr Lascari, what do you mean?’ she asked more urgently. The doctor’s wife slept in the next room and a single shout would fetch her.

To her surprise, he sat down at the foot of her bed, hunching there like some carrion bird, a raven indeed. ‘Look,’ he said, and rolled up one sleeve, illuminating it with the fire from his other hand.

She saw a long, shiny scar there, raw and ill-healed: a graze from a musket ball that had come close, but not close enough.

‘My first,’ he explained hollowly. ‘How long I have fought in this war – three long years and no scratch until now. I have seen Warlocks die out here, Marshwic – die and rot, extinguished in the waters of the swamp.’

He frightened her. It was nothing in the way he sat or the way he spoke, but there was a sense about him that scared her deeply. The fire inside him was loose and blazing, as though he were a house and it was consuming the furniture, peeking out through the windows. If she shouted for help now, the whole edifice might become an inferno.

‘I will die here,’ he told her. ‘It has come to me at last, this realization. We keep it at arm’s length, do we not? But at the last we know it. The path of our lives will take us no further than here.’

She could only nod.

‘I have been remiss in my duty, Marshwic. I must remedy it while I can.’

Is he apologizing? Confessing? ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘I am my father’s only son. I was made Warlock at nineteen – younger than your Giles Scavian, that is! I have always prided myself on my devotion. I have been the King’s good servant.’

The unsaid ‘but’ hung in the air between them.

‘Continuity,’ he explained. ‘In that only have I failed my king. I have no family. I have not continued the Lascari line. No son lives now to carry on the bloodline, to serve the King in turn.’

‘Mr Lascari . . .’

‘Marshwic!’ he hissed, and clutched at her through the sheet, seizing hold of her thigh. She yelped in surprise and pain, for his fingers were bony as a dead man’s.

‘Marshwic, you are a good servant of the King,’ he pressed on. ‘You came here. You did not have to.’

‘The draft—’

‘Damn the draft!’ he snapped. ‘The draft doesn’t count for people like us. We serve or we do not serve. We are not forced to. Of all the camp, Marshwic, no woman here but you has any blood of note. Servants, farmers’ daughters and tradesmen’s wives. No gentlefolk, no nobility. They all stayed at home and sent the maid, the cook, the housekeeper – never their own precious blood, no. But you! You knew your duty, Marshwic. You came here to serve your king.’

‘Mr Lascari—’

He leant over her, pinning her tightly to the bed with that one skeletal hand. ‘You must do your duty, girl. A woman’s duty, not this soldier’s game you play at. I have a duty for you. It’s my last hope, Marshwic. My last hope for a child.’

And she bucked him off with all her strength, rolled out of bed and onto the floor away from him. He loomed over the mattress, fingers screwing up the sheet.

‘You keep away from me!’ she warned, scrambling to her feet, rolling over the next bed and putting space between them. Looking left and right, she saw nothing that might serve as a weapon.

He stood up slowly. ‘This is your duty,’ he insisted.

‘No duty I ever signed up for,’ she spat at him.

‘We all must do distasteful things in war. Do not think that I will take pleasure in this business. It is a duty, nothing more.’

‘I will not let you touch me. It’s no duty of mine. Let the Lascaris die out this very night, if they must!’

Fire flared about him, outlining him, dancing in his eyes and mouth, lighting the whole room as he stalked across the floor towards her. He was between her and the door.

He cannot kill you. That would defeat his purpose. That fire could not be turned on her.

She waited until he was closer, and then tried to make a break for it across the beds, clearing the closest in one giant leap, stumbling over the second but falling on the third. A hand like a vice clasped her ankle and hauled her back, and she kicked frantically at his face. All around her the infirmary was flickering, light and dark, as his limning fires coursed high and low about him.

She twisted in his grip. His face was slack, almost vacant, as he dragged her towards him. She kicked him a glancing blow to the chin, and she felt his grip on her ankle suddenly sear. She screamed.

‘What is going on here?’ Doctor Carling’s wife appeared at the door to her chamber, wrapped in a sheet. Her face was white and utterly aghast.

‘Get out.’ Lascari spat the words at her. ‘I will not be troubled.’

‘You will leave here at once.’ The doctor’s wife advanced on him, and he sent a jet of fire across the room, singeing her hair and eyebrows, driving her back.

‘Out!’ Lascari shouted at her, giving another tug on Emily’s leg, and the doctor’s wife fled, leaving the stench of burnt hair behind her.

‘You can’t hope to get away with this!’ Emily raged at him. He jumped forward like a toad, one hand finding her throat, the other fumbling for her wrist.

‘No man rules me but the King. No man here has authority over me but the King,’ he panted out. ‘If I set my heart on a thing, not even the colonel can say me nay.’ He had wrestled her halfway onto a bed, and she struck at him with hands, knees, elbows and feet, feeling him as hard as bone inside his robes.

‘Be still!’ he demanded, and then the fire coursed across her chin and neck and she screamed and clutched at his hand.

‘Be still,’ he said again. She stared up at him, feeling the welt beneath his clutching hand burn and sting. ‘Oh, you will live to bear my child, but – by God, woman! – not so any man will ever wish to look upon, unless you are still.’

‘You cannot mean to do this.’

‘Duty,’ he ground out, and fumbled for his belt with his free hand.

‘I will not bear your child,’ she told him. ‘I will take herbs. I will miscarry it.’

‘Women say such things,’ he said dismissively.

‘I will not bear whatever spiderish thing you might grow in my womb!’ she threw at him. ‘I swear, as I am a soldier in this army, as I am a woman and as I am a servant of the King, that I will strangle any child of yours, with my own damned hands if I am forced to bear it. I will dash the bastard creature’s brains out, Lascari, and end your damned dynasty myself if I have to.’

He had stopped moving. The dwindling fires that still outlined him showed her a face hanging open and empty as the mind behind it absorbed her words.

‘No woman could mean such a thing,’ he declared hollowly.

‘I have been fighting the King’s war long enough to have meant worse things than that,’ she said. ‘What would you have me swear by, Lascari? God? I so swear. The King? I so swear! All my hopes, for now and the future? Consider it sworn.’

His hand slackened at her throat and he sat back, looking dazed, as though awaking from some strange dream.

‘I cannot believe it,’ he whispered.

‘Kill me now,’ she told him. ‘Kill me now or leave. I killed the last man who tried to force himself on me.’

And I had a pistol then, and he was no wizard.

But Lascari stood back, still staring wonderingly at her. ‘You unnatural creature,’ he said. ‘Have the Denlanders cut out those parts of you that made you female? What has been done to you?’

That, coming from him, after what he had been about to perpetrate: she almost laughed at him. Something in his words stuck, though; some dart stayed lodged. The dream came to her of her old life, and her not being able to live it. Has something been taken from me really?

‘Go,’ she said, and he might indeed have gone, had not Giles Scavian thrown back the door of the infirmary with murder in his eyes and fire in his hands.

25.

A century ago, when the King kept a company of a hundred Warlocks at the capital at all times, such differences of opinion were not uncommon. But not since then. So many died heroically in the Hellic wars, and even before Denland’s attack their numbers had not recovered.

But now? How few Warlocks remain. Two at the Levant, perhaps a dozen at the Couchant. There is no luxury now for such spectacles.

But for just one night, for such a short space of minutes even, the past was resurrected. We were treated to a true duel of wizards.

The pause stretched like a taut wire between Scavian and Lascari, crackling with coals and embers. The younger man, his hands crooked into claws, eyes surging and blazing with a power he could barely keep inside; his senior hunched like a crow, sour as vinegar, bitter as gall. No words were said, and Emily felt the heat radiate from them both so that the air shimmered and sparked all about them.

‘Get out of my way, boy,’ Lascari ordered flatly. Defeated, robbed of his desires by Emily’s sheer bloody-mindedness, he had no wish to stay in her presence any longer. He stomped towards the door, but Scavian still blocked it.

‘Move, boy,’ Lascari commanded him.

‘I will not,’ Scavian said.

‘Giles,’ Emily said, scrabbling off the bed, ‘please, don’t do anything foolish.’

‘You had best do what I tell you, boy,’ Lascari snarled at him.

‘You have no rule over me.’ He seemed so calm, did Scavian. The fury was visible in every line of him, in his face, his stance, the very tilt of his head, but his voice was as mercilessly calm as a cloudless sky.

‘Giles, just let him go,’ Emily urged him. He spared her only a brief glance. His fierce expression brought tears to her eyes.

‘Listen to her,’ said Lascari, and moved to push Scavian away. Fire leapt between them, and the older man flinched and hissed.

‘Defy me, boy, and you defy the King.’

‘I am the King as much as you are,’ Scavian replied.

‘Get out of my way!’ At last Lascari broke and physically threw himself at Scavian, knocking him out of the doorway as flame seared out across the both of them. It flashed across Emily’s face and she drew back, then rushed forward again to see them roll to the ground, and break apart. When she herself got to the door they were each kneeling on the damp earth outside, random quirks and snakes of fire dancing over them.

‘You do not want to make more of this,’ Lascari warned. He looked tired, terribly tired; hopeless and empty.

Scavian just stared back at him, and the older man broke eye contact first.

‘How can you invoke the King’s name?’ Scavian demanded. ‘How do you hide behind his name to do such things?’ He rose and went to Emily, as she stood in the doorway in nothing but her nightgown. He turned his back on Lascari fearlessly and the older man did nothing, just watched. ‘Did he hurt you?’

He would have raped me. How much more hurt is there? ‘No. No, he did not.’ She could have taken revenge, willingly and without guilt, but she did not want to risk Giles on a throw of that coin. He meant more to her than did any retribution exacted on Lascari.

But his hand lifted to touch at her throat, and she felt the sudden pain, the tenderness there in the shape of Lascari’s hand, like her own anointing. There was a burnt patch, too, over her thigh, that showed a similar mark. Scavian’s face adopted a calmness even more dreadful, for there was cold-blooded death in it.

‘In the King’s name,’ he said again, fixing Lascari with a look. ‘The very thought would sicken him. Assault of a woman, attempt at rape – are those the deeds you were anointed for?’

Around them there was quite a crowd now, fractious and whispering. Emily saw Doctor Carling’s wife there, saw Caxton’s pale and nervous face, and Brocky’s bulk.

‘Giles, please, don’t do anything rash,’ she said, as softly as would still carry to him.

Scavian looked straight at her. His face was set, brave and terribly young. ‘I believe in the King,’ he told the world at large.

‘Then go away.’ Lascari levered himself to his feet. ‘Walk away.’ He looked old in the lamplight, old and sick of it all. ‘I have no liking for you, but no quarrel.’

Scavian said simply, ‘You are not fit to wear the King’s mark.’

A deadly quiet descended on the watchers. Emily felt her heart lurch with the look of old, sour hatred that descended on Lascari.

‘I have worn this mark for twenty years, boy. How long has it been on you? Two seasons? Three? When were you made a wizard? After all the real Warlocks had already fallen? Why did the King touch you, save there were no others in arm’s reach.’

‘Anointed for one day or a hundred years, I am a king’s wizard,’ said Scavian reasonably. ‘No man may take that from me, unless I am dead. Do you want to try your hand, Mr Lascari?’

‘Giles, he’ll kill you,’ Emily hissed at him.

He touched her hand briefly, his fingers hot and dry. ‘Do not fear for me. You know I must do this.’ She remembered the torturing of the Denlander scout, and Scavian’s distress as he tried to reconcile it with his duty, with his king. He had been a loaded gun from that moment, and Lascari’s assault on her was nothing more than the trigger being pulled.

Scavian’s eyes flicked to Lascari, glinting cold and regal as an emperor’s. ‘I have suffered you ever since I came here. I have borne your ill humours, your tortures and your cruelty, and passed over it, saying that you merely did your duty. Now I unmask you. You are unworthy of your office. You are a disgrace to our order. You put truth into the mouths of the Denlanders when they curse us.’

Lascari looked, in that moment, not at Scavian but at Emily, and she read in his face the long book of his losses, his bitter debtor’s account in life. Long years of misery, of enforced and hateful service. Sent here to die, thwarted in his last and most desperate scheme to secure continuity. And now this: insulted by a youngster before the entire camp.

‘What’s all this?’ demanded the colonel’s slightly befuddled voice, as he pushed through the crowd that had gathered. ‘What’s going on? Lights and shouting?’

‘A personal matter, Colonel,’ said Lascari, ‘between Scavian and myself. Go back to bed.’

‘Called you out, has he?’ the colonel said, rubbing at his eyes and not quite understanding. ‘Good heavens. Now, look, we can’t have that. Bad enough with the enemy trying to kill us. No, no, completely out of the question.’

Lascari eyed him coldly, and Emily saw how he had no respect for the old man whatsoever, any more than he did for anyone around him. How alone he is. ‘Keep away, Colonel. This is none of your concern.’

‘Now listen here, I forbid it!’ Colonel Resnic insisted. ‘Can’t have this. Bad for discipline, Lascari.’

‘Forgive me, sir, but you have no authority,’ Scavian reminded him. ‘In truth, we are ruled by the King only, and we cannot be stopped.’

It was that ‘in truth’ that brought a lump to Emily’s throat: that little quirk of his; his insistence on truth to cover his own uncertainty about the world. She had seen the set of Lascari’s face, and she was very afraid for her friend. Giles Scavian, who she surely loved, had roused a serpent.

‘Giles, please, I’m asking you not to do this,’ she said, knowing that he had set his course and would stay on it. He put a hand on her shoulder and his lips twitched as if to say something, but then he looked past her, at Justin Lascari.

The older man stood, surrounded by a circle of bare ground that none of the onlookers would encroach onto. ‘I would have avoided this,’ he declared, the words almost lost. ‘I would have walked away – as you could have walked away. But now I see that I have wanted this. I have wanted it since . . .’ He waved a hand idly and an errant spark of fire danced across him, making those closest jump back. ‘You will never know, Scavian, of what you have. You will never value what is freely given to you. As I am likely to die any day, I will die with one comfort left me, that never more will she mistake me for you. For one or other of us will be gone.’

Scavian would have said something more but Lascari thrust his hands out without warning, and with them came a vast boiling sheet of flame that lashed across the younger Warlock and half a dozen others. Emily felt the battering heat of it, but Scavian had thrown her to one side even as Lascari moved, and it only singed her hair and gown. Several other men were down, beating at their burning clothes, but Scavian – he stood where he had stood before, a faint steam rising from him, and unburnt, untouched. He splayed a hand out like a man fanning cards, and a claw of fire raked at Lascari, to be fended off by an errant gesture. The two wizards stared at one another as all around them men and women scrambled back to give them space.

‘This is terrible. What a thing to happen!’ The colonel was abruptly beside Emily, sounding as though some social gathering had been rained off. Before she could reply, the real fight was on. Lascari lanced a spear of fire at Scavian, who sidestepped it, blasting fistfuls of flame back. The searing heat slid off both men, not even smouldering their clothes. But they were only starting. Emily remembered Scavian on the battlefield, tired and drained by his exertions, and she knew that this battle would be one of stamina, which of them could shoulder aside the other’s attacks for the longest, holding back enough in reserve for the final killer blow.

She watched as they circled, the flash and roar of their parries and ripostes lighting up the camp, singeing the nearest tents. Lascari was backing up now, running and hopping across the camp, hurling blazing handfuls at Scavian, who pursued ferociously, driving him forward.

‘Water! Someone draw some water!’ Emily shouted. ‘Three buckets at least! Caxton, come here!’

As the new-made sergeant ran up, a wave of heat washed over them, sending them both crouching to the ground. She could hear the colonel calling out something, still trying to reason with two men now beyond it all. In her mind’s eye was, all too clearly, the image of Scavian faltering. Lascari was older, more experienced; all Scavian had was the knowledge that he was in the right. How could that prevail against the skills of a man like Lascari?

Damn fool, Giles! How could he . . . and for me? Am I worth his life, or is it his own honour he’s fighting for, or the King’s?

‘Here, Lieutenant.’ Caxton crawled closer to her.

‘Get your musket, load and prime it,’ she told her and watched her eyes widen in the leaping, spreading firelight.

‘But . . .’

‘Damn his honour,’ Emily hissed. Scavian and Lascari were further away now, moving out towards the edge of the camp, still trading bolts and balls of flame that would have roasted any ordinary man in a second. Caxton ran off for her gun and Emily ran to keep the fighting wizards in view. All around her, men and women were staring in fascination or fear, or hurriedly putting out newly started fires. The colonel kept shouting at the pair, but they were beyond hearing him. She caught a glimpse of Scavian’s face, all bemused concentration like a man wrestling with a riddle. Lascari’s was a mask, untenanted save for the eyes. He shrugged off the firestorm Scavian sent against him, shoulders hunched like a man in a high wind. He was shepherding his strength, letting Scavian’s best efforts slough off him. Still, they battered him, though, rocking him on his feet as he retreated and retreated. Scavian fought to press home the advantage he saw, trying to crack Lascari open with the force of his onslaught, beating repeatedly at the older man’s iron resolve. He was overextending just like a fencer, so that Lascari’s counterattacks came in beneath his guard, a succession of near misses to be read in his gritted teeth and wincing eyes.

She had to do something to separate them. She saw Scavian falter for a second, as another vast sheet of fire enveloped him. His eyes were narrowed now and he gave ground as Lascari stalked forward. The older man kept pushing his attack, conjuring arrows and scythes and great shapeless masses of incandescence to pummel Scavian, over and over, until it seemed there could not be so much burning in all the world, and yet there was always more. Scavian’s counterattacks glanced off his rival’s dark robes, or vanished into them and were extinguished. The younger man lost a step, then half a dozen steps, as Lascari drove him along the perimeter of the camp. It seemed all too obvious to Emily that Scavian was getting the worst of it, and yet his face never lost hope or the belief in his own right.

He put both hands together and directed them at Lascari with a great yell, bracing himself on feet wide apart. The thrust of fire thundered into the robed man’s defences and rocked him, almost spun him round with the force of it. Fires sprang up and were extinguished across the darkness of the Warlock’s robe. Scavian tried to follow up, to batter him again, but Lascari was lunging closer, sending a great fiery ram into Scavian’s chest that knocked him back and sent him sprawling across the ground, spilling one of the boundary lanterns over to spread a pool of burning oil. He retaliated from the ground, and Lascari caught it awkwardly but kept his feet. His face looked haggard and half dead, but he advanced on Scavian with a gleam of triumph in his eyes.

Caxton was now at Emily’s side, frantically priming her musket, then ramming the ball home.

Scavian tried another attack but it only rolled over Lascari, whose robes were scorched now in a dozen places. The older man smote down on him, and Emily saw sparks in the younger wizard’s hair before he hid his face with his hands. Time stood still as Lascari paused for breath, the future strung between him and Scavian, between Emily and Caxton with her ramrod.

Lascari gave a great, mad cry, the shriek of a bird as it stoops on its prey, then raised his arms to heaven and made fire boil from the air between them.

He screamed some word or insult that was so hate-twisted and tortured by fatigue that Emily could not hear what it was. His voice seemed to join with hers as she screamed at him to stop, joining the colonel’s futile pleadings.

He sent the fire against Scavian, and a shot rang out. Lascari lurched and went down on one knee with the force of it. Emily could see a dark mark on his temple, where the ball had gone in. She looked round for Caxton, instinctively assuming the sergeant had done it, but Caxton held the now-loaded musket in her hands and just stared.

And, besides, the shot had come from the wrong direction. It had come from outside the camp.

Even as Lascari’s last fires guttered and died, and he pitched over onto his side in a tangle of robe and limbs, she was shouting at the other soldiers, ‘Get to cover! Fetch your guns! Move! Move!’

The shooting took up then, isolated musket flashes from the darkness. Men and women lit bright by the remaining fires were being shot off their feet, falling in astonished death across their fellows. The others scattered frantically, behind tents, behind the Leopard Passant command hut, or sheltering in dips in the ground. Some were shot as they ran for their weapons, and some as they stood staring in utter bewilderment.

Emily, crouching alongside Caxton behind a tent, was trying to count the enemy, but they remained utterly invisible in the darkness, announcing themselves only by flashes of fire. She heard Caxton’s gun discharge as the sergeant tried to sight on one muzzle-flash, and the colonel was shouting something, somewhere.

Damn me, there can’t be more than a squad of them out there!

A few more guns were now firing from the Lascanne emplacements, and more being brought up, but the colonel was bellowing to every soldier within earshot, ‘Attack, you cowards! Get up and drive them off. Don’t just lie there getting shot at, you fools!’ He had found a sabre from somewhere and whirled it about his head, before directing it at the darkness. ‘That’s an order!’ he bellowed. ‘Attack, damn you!’

‘Sir!’ Emily shouted at him, but he had already taken a half-dozen steps out towards the enemy, obviously in the belief that he was being followed. The shot that took him ripped into his groin and he somersaulted forward and fell onto his side, where a second bullet passed through his chest with a little spurt of blood and fragments of his shirt. She heard him cry out, ‘Oh God! Oh God! I’m shot!’ and then he choked and, even across the ground between them, she heard his wretched, racking whimpers.

The firing had stopped. No more came from the darkness. All the defending soldiers were now behind cover, and the end of the Denland shooting meant the Lascanne gunners were also deprived of their targets. In the matter of a few seconds the only sound was the cries of the wounded, amidst them the colonel’s wheezing, trembling voice as he curled round his wound.

‘Someone go and get him, for heaven’s sake,’ Doctor Carling’s wife said. ‘Someone go pull him back.’

Nobody was volunteering, though. The colonel cried out as he tried to move, clawing at the earth. He was out there in full view of any Denlander sniper, under the guns of the enemy.

It does not have to be me. I’m damned if it’s me again that takes the risk. The thoughts came too late. She was already ducking out from behind the tent and scurrying towards the wounded officer at a crouch. She heard Caxton call after her, and then a voice call, ‘Emily, don’t go!’ In the moments before the anticipated bullet a bizarre spark of happiness kindled within her, because Giles must still be alive to worry about her.

And then she was on the ground beside the colonel, still miraculously not hit. He forced himself to look up at her, and she tried to get her arms underneath him to haul him away. Every wrenching movement forced another scream from him, the firelight catching a mist of blood from his lips. She paused, waiting; waiting for the final shot.

‘Sir . . .’

‘Marshwic . . .’ he got out. ‘Don’t want to . . . leave . . .’

‘Sir, I’ve got to—’

‘Good stock, the Marshwics . . .’ He reached out, clawing at her shoulder. ‘Help . . . Carry me . . .’

‘I’m trying, sir . . .’

‘God!’

He dragged her to the ground, fingers biting savagely into her shoulder. For a moment she was face to face with his tormented, bloody features.

He was dead.

She hunched over the body. Now that she was here, she did not want to head back in case she tempted the enemy guns still further. It was only after a long count of a hundred that she finally realized that the Denlanders must have fled back into the swamps.

They had lost only four soldiers, she discovered, with several others wounded. She guessed the Denlanders had been firing at some considerable range in poor light.

And, of course, they had lost Justin Lascari and the colonel.

Brocky came out to help her retrieve the colonel’s body and, that done, she watched as the soldiers tried to restore order to their camp, re-erecting tents and helping carry the wounded away.

‘What a bloody mess,’ the quartermaster remarked. ‘What are we going to do now?’

‘Keep better watch,’ she replied shortly.

‘Emily.’ She turned to see a white-shirted figure getting up from the ground, where he had been lying since Lascari’s last vicious attack.

‘Giles! My God, how are you?’

The face that he turned to her was pink and shiny with burn tissue. Across his front his shirt was charred to ash and one arm was ridged skewbald with blistered skin.

‘Oh, Giles . . .’ She felt herself recoil as he held out his burnt hand, and hated herself for it. ‘Oh, God, no . . .’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, against all the evidence. ‘Don’t fear for me.’

‘But . . . you’re . . .’ You’re ruined, was what she nearly said.

‘There is only one burn that ever lasts, on a wizard’s hide,’ he replied lightly. ‘Give me two days, and I shall have shed this like a snake loses his skin. So long as I live, I cannot stay burnt for long.’

She looked to Brocky for confirmation, and the big man nodded. ‘Won ten pounds off me when he first arrived. Extinguished my pipe with his little finger, bloody fool. All true, though.’

‘I’ve been shot,’ said Scavian, in mild surprise. She turned to see him fingering a hole in one sleeve. He rolled his shirt up to the shoulder to reveal a shallow graze across one shoulder. ‘I had no idea.’

‘Call that being shot?’ Brocky scoffed. ‘You want me to show you what shot is, Scavian, old lad?’ He began tugging his shirt out of his trousers until Emily stopped him with a gesture.

‘So what happens now?’ she asked.

*

Tubal looked so unchanged, sitting there at the table in the Survivors’ Club clubhouse. She could barely believe he had one foot less beneath it. It was late, gone midnight and long past, but there they all were: the entire Club plus Marie Angelline. Nobody in the Lascanne camp was sleeping much tonight.

‘Scouts,’ Brocky decided. ‘Opportunistic buggers, but just a squad of scouts.’

‘Hell, they’ve probably been studying us for nights now,’ Tubal agreed.

Mallen was shaking his head. ‘Assassins,’ he said, ‘sent to take out the top men. You and Lascari.’ He pointed to Scavian. ‘If you hadn’t already been on the ground, you’d be dead now, I wager. The colonel, he was shouting orders, made himself a target. Makes sense, if you’ve got their guns.’

‘Then they’ll be back,’ Emily said, ‘with more snipers.’

‘Maybe.’ Mallen drained his glass. ‘Or maybe not. How long’ll it take, getting a new commander appointed? They don’t know. If I were them . . . attack in strength now. While we’re down.’

‘Now?’ Brocky’s voice was suddenly hoarse.

‘Tomorrow, day after. Soon as they can get the men together.’ Mallen shrugged.

‘That will be soon,’ Emily said, and Marie Angelline nodded emphatically.

‘One thing they are, they’re organized,’ she said. ‘We have to get some defences up.’

‘Command meeting first thing tomorrow,’ Tubal decided. ‘Whoever’s left of us, anyway. You’ll tell Huill Pordevere, Angelline?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘No “sirs” round this table,’ Brocky reminded her.

‘Yes, Salander, then.’

‘Emily, you go get Mallarkey soon as the sun’s up. We’ll need all the time we can scrounge.’

‘It’s . . . a strange thing,’ began Scavian softly. His burn-shiny skin was already peeling back from his face in ragged strips, revealing his familiar features underneath as though he were just an actor removing his disguise. ‘To have a man try to shoot you – to shoot you, specifically.’

‘But Scavian, you’re a Warlock. They’ve been trying to kill you ever since you got here,’ Brocky reminded him.

‘I know but . . . in battle it’s less personal. After all, I’m trying to kill them as well. There’s a . . . a what?’

‘A mutual understanding,’ Emily provided for him.

‘Exactly so. But, in truth, it makes one fear that one is . . . marked now.’ He lapsed into silence. ‘I am the last of the King’s wizards here at the Levant. As there have been none to arrive in half a year now, to join me, it seems that none are ever to come. No doubt the King sends them to the Couchant, seeing there his best chance at achieving victory.’

‘You can’t mourn for Lascari,’ Emily protested.

‘I mourn for the man he should have been.’ He stood up from the table, wandering over to the window to look out at the night.

‘There is grey over the sea, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, after a moment’s sad reflection. ‘I fear the dawn has crept up on us as we talked. An hour off, at most.’

‘And tomorrow – today! Today they’ll come for us,’ Brocky predicted.

‘Or the next day,’ Mallen corrected him with equanimity. ‘We knew this day would arrive. We all knew.’

And out there, in the dark behind the treeline, the Denlanders massed and readied their magic guns for the onslaught: this day, or the next . . .

26.

My dear Cristan,

I am resolved not to write to you. You see, I am to die soon, or so my heart tells me. I want to let your memory of me cool. I hope you might forget me. I wish my death may not hurt us both.

And yet I have set pen to paper again. And why? It seems to me that I will have no chance to send this letter, so I may write it with impunity. I have grown used to this liberty, of setting out my thoughts on paper. I felt incomplete when a sunset came, and I had no words written down.

I sit here and I scribble, and I am speaking to you, confiding in you. I imagine your cold smile, the way your eyes blink when you are trying to be sincere. I have devised a long catalogue of your faults and vices, Cristan, and I cling to them. They are all I have left of home.

Tubal had not yet mastered the business of walking on crutches. He made a heavy labour of the brief journey between the Stag Rampant headquarters – alias the Survivors’ Club – and the central hut that had once housed the colonel.

Stapewood met him at the door, his eyes red and his face puffy. ‘Captain,’ he said to Tubal, and, ‘Lieutenant,’ to Emily, then he opened the door for them formally, like a steward.

Emily helped Tubal up the few steps and got him ensconced at the great table. No map this time, for the battleground was known to all concerned.

‘I don’t think I could bear the walk back if nobody else comes,’ he said, ashen and sweating.

‘They’ll come.’

‘Will they? I’m a prole and an upstart, Em. My grandfather wasn’t even born in this country. Mallarkey’s of decent family, and Pordevere’s actually a Knight of the King’s Court. Who am I to be summoning them here and there? They’ll ignore me. They’ll be over in Pordevere’s hut, talking about hunting and shooting.’

‘They’ll come,’ she insisted. ‘Mallarkey’s scared to death; you know him. He wants someone else to take command. And Pordevere wants command, of course, and he can’t very well have it while hiding in his hut. They’ll be here.’

Sure enough there were footsteps outside, and Stapewood opened the door for Captain Sir Huillam Pordevere, with Marie Angelline following in his wake.

‘Salander,’ he said, taking a seat at the table. There was no sign of condescension there, just the will to get down to business. ‘Mallarkey’s close behind me. Let’s get everything done double time, shall we?’

‘Absolutely,’ Tubal agreed, biting off the ‘sir’ that almost edged in after the word. Mallarkey did indeed arrive just then, with Lieutenant Gallien come to second him.

They gathered around the bare table and an awkward pause extended, before Stapewood filled some glasses and miserably passed them round.

‘Well, then,’ Pordevere said. ‘What the devil comes next?’

‘I’ve sent a messenger to Locke to let them know what’s happened,’ Tubal explained. ‘I assume that we’ll be sent a new commander as soon as the war effort permits.’

‘Or a promotion for one of us,’ Pordevere said – meaning ‘me’. ‘Until then, I think I can safely claim seniority and put myself in temporary command.’

Tubal exchanged glances with Emily. With Tubal a mere tradesman with a purchased commission, it was Pordevere or Mallarkey, and neither were ideal custodians for the collective lives of the Levant army.

Mallarkey was obviously not going to raise an objection, though, and so Tubal nodded tiredly.

‘What are your thoughts then, sir?’ he asked.

Pordevere grinned his infectious grin. ‘Glad you asked me, Salander. As it happened, I rather had the idea of an attack: drive them back into the swamps, keep them away from the border here.’

Tubal closed his eyes briefly, no doubt seeing in his mind the expanse of open ground between the camp and the treeline, and thinking what five squads of Denland sharpshooters could do to any number of red-coated men advancing against them.

‘I had a word with your man, the scout, before I came here,’ Pordevere said.

‘Master Sergeant Mallen.’

‘Right. I had him go with a few of his lads to see what the situation was.’ Pordevere’s grin slipped a little.

‘And?’ Mallarkey said, alarmed.

‘Four of them went out, and got into the trees unseen, but they couldn’t get more than ten yards further in. The place is crawling with Denlander soldiers, apparently. More of them are turning up all the time.’

‘Oh, my God,’ whispered Mallarkey.

‘An attack,’ declared Tubal. ‘They’re going to bring the fight to us.’

‘It has to be,’ Pordevere agreed. ‘And your man Mallen says they’re not to be taken napping, either. They’ve got guns pointed at us and ready.’ He bared his teeth in frustration. ‘I want to take eight squads of good men in, and clear them out, gentlemen, but, as God is my witness, even I can’t see a way to it.’

Tubal blinked at him, although Mallarkey only looked relieved.

‘So I’ve found the next best thing,’ Pordevere said. ‘They’re going to make their move on us; that much is for certain. We need to fend them off when they arrive, drive them back. Then we’ll attack. While they’re falling back in a rout, we’ll drive straight into them, scatter them and push them into the trees while they’re still disordered. They won’t have a chance to form up, and we’ll have them. Sound like a plan, gentlemen?’

Tubal and Emily exchanged another yet glance. Emily shook her head slightly, remembering the exquisite discipline of the Denlanders. Any such pursuers would be running into covering fire from both sides.

‘We can’t just let ourselves be picked apart, bit by bit each night,’ Pordevere said, challenging anyone to speak against him.

Tubal shrugged and held his peace. Pordevere nodded, reasonably happy. ‘What about the defence, then? Not my area, that. Mallarkey?’

Captain Mallarkey jumped at his name. ‘Well, I . . .’

‘How about you, Salander?’

‘Actually, sir, Lieutenant Marshwic and I have had a few ideas,’ Tubal explained. ‘Firstly, we’ll have lanterns spaced out, twenty yards from the camp perimeter, come nightfall, so at least we’ll see them coming if they plan a night attack.’

‘Good.’

‘And . . .’ Tubal glanced helplessly at Emily, who took the up baton.

‘The Denlanders have better guns than we do,’ she said flatly. ‘Is there anyone who still doesn’t believe that?’

Mallarkey looked as though he would speak, but he glanced at Pordevere first. The Bear Sejant commander looked troubled. ‘To be honest,’ he confessed, ‘I’m far from convinced . . . but the evidence is mounting, Lieutenant. I think we will have to assume it is true.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Emily gratefully. This was a new side to Pordevere, and it surprised her. The death of the colonel, the one man who could overrule him if he went too far, had planted at least a seed of caution within him. ‘If we assume that, then all the Denlander army needs do is get within range and shoot at the camp until nobody’s left moving. They can fire accurately at a distance over which our best shot would have almost no chance of scoring a hit.’

‘Well, if that’s the case, Lieutenant, why the hell haven’t they killed us all already?’ Mallarkey shot back at her.

‘Well, sir,’ said Emily, without the faintest trace of malice, ‘I think it’s because they are naturally cautious, cowardly even, and they don’t want to rush things or take unnecessary chances.’ It was perfectly true, but she looked into Mallarkey’s eyes as she said it, and he couldn’t hold her stare but dropped his gaze to the table.

‘What do you suggest, Lieutenant?’ Pordevere asked.

‘Gather every single piece of moveable wood, sir: every crate, barrel and box, the doors from the huts, everything. We make a barricade across the north side of the camp. If the material and time allow, we’ll take in the east, too. We could even dig a trench, if we have time. When the Denlanders come, we’ll have assembled enough cover that they won’t be able to simply shoot us down. They’ll have to come to us. They’ll hate that. They prefer to kill from as much of a distance as possible, or from ambush. We’ll make them come to us face to face. We’ll have the advantage, sir.’

Pordevere stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘You’ve obviously made good use of your time in the enemy’s hands, Lieutenant,’ he told her. ‘By God, but that’s a plan. Master Sergeant?’

‘Yes, sir?’ Angelline said.

‘Get some men started on it right away. The barricade and the trench. Double time, Master Sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Marie Angelline ran from the building, and moments later her clear tones could be heard shouting orders.

‘Today, do you think?’ Mallarkey asked, hands clasped together. Emily wondered why he had even joined the army. Just a family tradition? A fetish for parade grounds? His father buying his way in because there was nothing else fit for him? She found she could muster scant sympathy for the man. She still remembered the battle that had seen her captured, where Mallarkey’s company had not turned up at all.

‘Master Sergeant Mallen reckons tomorrow,’ Pordevere said. ‘If these Denlanders are as Marshwic says, they won’t be hurried into it.’

‘I’d say no later than tomorrow,’ said Tubal. ‘They can’t know for sure we won’t have reinforcements coming from Locke.’

Pordevere sighed. ‘It’s a bad business, gentlemen, but it’s on all of our shoulders to bear it. We’ll see out their charge because we are the army, or at least all the army that Lascanne has in this place right now. And then we’ll drive them back and break them, because we must. Make sure your men know what’s at stake, and what the plan is. Does someone want to take an order to the quartermaster for me?’

‘I will,’ Emily volunteered.

‘Good.’ Pordevere’s grin had returned, ready for blood. ‘Tell him to break out every sabre we’ve got. And anything else that’ll take an edge, or that you can get a good swing with, for that matter. Pikes, standard-poles, wood-axes, mallets and picks . . . anything. Arm as many of our men as possible with something you can get in close with. It’ll come to that, before we’re done.’

*

They came the next day, at midday, with the trench still unfinished. One of the sentries started shouting bloody murder, and the labouring soldiers downed tools hurriedly and ran to get the guns that were stacked ready nearby. Emily bolted out of the Stag Rampant hut to take a look, and saw a line of grey-clad figures emerging from the treeline and advancing cautiously forward.

‘We should have laid mines,’ Caxton declared from beside her.

‘They would have seen us digging from the trees.’ Emily advanced to the camp’s perimeter, as much to give the other soldiers heart as to see better. The Denlanders kept coming, a company’s strength at least, spreading in a great grey stain across the grass.

‘Everyone take cover behind the barricades,’ she shouted needlessly, for most of the soldiers were already down, either behind the stacked wood or just into the trench, their guns directed towards the enemy.

The Denlanders advanced with care, a few steps at a time, but wonderfully disciplined. There was no milling, no straggling. They moved as a disciplined body but, despite that, Emily sensed an unwillingness in them.

They were still beyond effective musket range when they stopped, and she saw the first rank drop to its knees, and then two ranks of guns were directed at the Lascanne camp. Emily crouched back behind what had once been the colonel’s old oak table, before necessity had cannibalized it. There was not a piece of wood left in the camp, and tents had been taken down to stuff empty crates with canvas. Pots and pans and any spare metal goods filled other boxes, so that they would stop a musket ball. There was no camp any more, in fact. This barricade and the trench and the huts were all.

‘What are they waiting for?’ Caxton asked. Emily risked poking her head around one of the gaps they had left in the wall for the trench party. The Denlanders were standing exactly as before, waiting. She saw several figures forward of their lines, watching the enemy, and caught the glint of what might have been a telescope lens in the wan sunlight.

‘I think we’ve surprised them,’ she announced. ‘I think they made a mistake attacking us, night before last. That gave us a chance to prepare.’

She wondered how things would have turned out with the colonel still in charge. Would they be where they were now, or would they be out in the swamps again, trying to fight a conventional war, and dying for it? How surprising that Pordevere in charge was so much more moderate than Pordevere the dashing subordinate.

She could see a few men she took for officers having a hurried consultation in front of the Denlander army. The Denlander soldiers had stood down their guns, and were waiting patiently. Did she detect some agitation amongst their ranks at the idea of charging the enemy lines? She was sure it was there. She had begun to be grateful for that quirk of fate that had put her into Doctor Lam’s hands. It had given her an insight: they were a nation of clerks, and not easily moved to action.

And, despite all that, they have us caught here in our own camp.

She hoped Locke would send reinforcements soon. She hoped there were any troops to send.

Surely the King’s generals must see that if the Levant falls, the Couchant will be flanked and must fall too.

‘Sir!’ Caxton exclaimed. ‘They’re going!’

Emily looked again, and saw the grey uniforms filing back into the swamps in an orderly fashion, without ever a shot having been fired. A ragged cheer went up along the barricades.

‘Trench party, get back to work!’ she yelled. ‘I want it finished before nightfall.’ Her words struck them cold, and the cheers died. We have won nothing yet.

‘Nightfall?’ Caxton echoed. ‘You think they’ll attack then?’

‘They’re having to deal with a reversed world,’ Emily said thoughtfully. ‘If they were in our position, we’d never take them. Their guns would slice us down without mercy. But they’re out there and we’re in here, so they have to deal with the problem they usually throw at us. They have to get close enough to winkle us out. Darkness is the best way of achieving that.’ She leant back against the barricade, exhausted from lost sleep. ‘If we had the chance then, yes, mines, pits, anything . . . but this is all we have.’

‘Right, sir.’ Caxton gripped her gun tightly and Emily realized the girl was scared, and did not blame her. If she let herself pause for a moment, then fear would grip her too.

‘I want you to make sure all our perimeter lanterns get lit. We want to allow ourselves as much warning as possible,’ she said, to give the other woman something to think about.

‘Yes, Lieutenant . . . Lieutenant?’

‘Yes, Sergeant?’

‘You’ve been a good officer, Lieutenant.’

Emily stared at her, and the sergeant looked down at her boots.

‘When you were promoted to sergeant, a lot of the others didn’t like having a woman over them – even some of us women didn’t. They said it was just because you were Lieutenant Salander’s sister, or something. But I wanted to say, I think you do a really good job, sir. Everyone says you’re the best thing that’s happened to this company for a long time.’

Emily felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She wanted to shake Caxton, to shout at her, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Instead, she said, ‘All I ever did was what I had to do. Or what someone had to do, and I was closest.’

‘If anyone can get us through this, you can,’ added Caxton loyally.

Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. I don’t want the responsibility. ‘Thank you, Sergeant. That’s kind of you.’ The old reflexes of politeness kicked in without being looked for. She clapped the slender woman on the shoulder and went on her way.

*

The sun was sinking behind the Couchant cliffs now. Emily took a look at it from the window of the Survivors’ Club clubhouse, before returning to the table. Her musket rested in a corner, along with those of the other soldiers, and John Brocky had two pistols thrust alarmingly into the waistband of his trousers, hooked around his braces.

‘You can’t keep the sun up just by wishing,’ Scavian said to her with a slight smile. He was completely healed now: save for the handprint over his heart, one would never know he had been burned.

‘I should go and walk the perimeter again,’ she suggested, hovering about her chair.

‘Sit,’ Mallen said. ‘Time for that when they attack. We’ll all be sick of it before dawn. Also, a shilling in the jar.’ He seemed of them all the calmest, but then Mallen’s emotions never did show much.

Brocky stood up, dug into his pockets and dumped two entire fistfuls of silver coins into the jar and its immediate environs. ‘Consider I’m covering everyone’s bloody tabs for tonight. Anyone want to join me in another toast?’

‘Don’t get too reeling,’ Tubal warned him. ‘When I go out there, I don’t want you shooting me by mistake.’

‘You can’t go out there,’ Emily said, shocked. ‘How could you fight?’

‘Just prop me up and I can shoot Denlanders as well as the next man,’ he replied, as if chair-bound Sergeant Demaine was with them for a moment. ‘And you’ve provided me with a hefty barricade for propping purposes.’

‘And when the barricade is overrun?’

He smiled. ‘Hell, then it’s all a little academic, isn’t it?’

‘I wish they’d get on with it,’ said Scavian.

‘We all do,’ Tubal assured him. ‘Or, actually, I wish they’d just go home for good. That would get my vote. However did things come to this pass? That’s what I want to know.’

‘Bit late for that question,’ remarked Mallen.

‘Oh, I know, but still . . . Three years ago I was just a halfway successful printer who’d never held a gun in his life.’ His smile was rueful, now. ‘And now I have much gun-related experience here in my second career, and one foot less than when I started. And . . . why? What was it all for? What did the King of Denland and I ever have in common that his death has stuck me here? Where was my foot mentioned when they drew up the requisition lists for this business?’

In Emily’s mind arose the treasonous assertions of Doctor Lam, and she fought them down. She could not even think them to herself, let alone voice them here.

‘Dietricht was a bookish type, I hear,’ said Brocky with studied carelessness. ‘Maybe you killed him with a typesetting error. Maybe I brewed something up that poisoned the poor bastard. Maybe he disagreed with Mallen’s research, or saw one of Angelline’s plays on a bad night. Maybe young Marshwic here broke his heart at a gala reception. History, my friends, is vast and unfriendly. It—’

There was a shout of surprise from outside, and then someone was banging on the doorless entrance, shouting for Tubal, for Emily, for someone to come and take charge.

‘It’s started.’ How needless were the words, Emily reflected, even as she said them. She snatched up the guns from their stack in the corner, passed them out to the others. Mallen was first out of the door, Marie pausing only to kiss Brocky’s unshaven cheek before following.

‘Brocky, give me a hand,’ Tubal said. ‘Em, you go ahead, take charge.’

‘Good luck,’ she wished him desperately, clutching his hand for a moment before taking her leave.

She heard a single shot as she came out into the dusk air, and went running for the barricade, expecting any moment for the line to explode in gunfire. Instead a second lonely shot ran out, and still no great assault.

‘Caxton! What’s happening?’ She hit the barricade at a run, virtually bouncing off it. Caxton merely gestured out into the gathering darkness. There were a few shadows visible out there that might be men and, as she watched, she caught a muzzle-flash from one, and one of the perimeter lanterns exploded even as the sound of the shot reached her ears. Then she saw the gaps already evident in the lit perimeter, like missing teeth.

‘Oh, clever,’ she acknowledged. The Denlander snipers were well outside of the defenders’ range. There was nothing for it but to wait and watch each light being snuffed violently out by well-placed gunfire.

‘So much for that idea,’ she murmured to herself, and then, at the top of her lungs, ‘Everyone into positions: trench and wall! Stay in cover as much as you can but make sure you can see to fire!’ All around her, men and women squatted down behind the barricade, resting their muskets atop it or poking them through holes between its sections. Before the barricade, the trench party would similarly be hunkering down, taking aim. They had drawn the short straw: the first to take the brunt when the Denlanders finally plucked up the courage to attack.

‘What’ll it be?’ Mallen sloped up beside her. ‘Volleys at their range, or will they try and sneak up as close as they can?’

‘Or both. They’re probably asking themselves the same question.’ She glanced at him. ‘Your night vision must be good; your scouts’ too?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Get your people spread along the line. The sun’s almost down past the cliffs, and once it’s dark we’ll need all eyes to tell us when the enemy’s coming.’

Out there, the Denlanders were moving out from the swamps and forming into companies. She wondered how they had spent today, what oaths had been sworn, what hands clasped in friendship and farewell.

The front lines, their ranks as broad as the entire camp, began moving forward in the gathering gloom, but stopping well out of range of the Lascanne guns. Emily strained her eyes, trying to make out individual figures in that mass of shadowy grey.

‘Are they into two ranks?’ she asked and then, before Mallen could reply, yelled, ‘Brace! Brace for a volley!’

She ducked back behind the barricade, and the double rank of Denland guns opened up, almost in a single thunderclap of sound. She felt the wood of the barricade twitch under the impact, saw splinters and dust showering up and all around. There were one or two screams, shots punching through the wood into the flesh, but even with their magic guns the Denlanders could not destroy the barricade with just one round of fire – nor, Emily hoped, with many.

‘Stay down,’ she called. ‘They may try another.’ She peered out at the enemy again, despite her own best advice, and could barely distinguish them. Their uniforms blended in with the all-pervading dusk, the gunsmoke and the wood dust, until she could barely make out even the great mass of them.

Beside her, Mallen let out a long breath. ‘Moving,’ he told her. ‘Moving in.’

Emily nodded. ‘Caxton, send a runner to Pordevere and Mallarkey. Let’s get two rounds at them as they come in. Let Mallen’s scouts call the first round, as close to long range as they can.’

‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

Emily sat down, her back to the barricade. ‘Your call, Mallen.’

The master scout leant on the crate in front of him, shielding his eyes from the lantern light behind him. ‘Taking it slow. They want us to fire too soon.’

‘Then don’t let us fire too soon,’ she told him. She imagined the great mass of Denlanders inching forward, the men at the front sweating and terrified, waiting for an eruption of firing from the fortifications. ‘How many, do you think?’ she asked.

‘Still coming out of the woods.’

‘Still?’

She felt Mallen tense beside her, put his musket butt to his shoulder. She scrambled up. The sun was fully eclipsed by the cliffs now, and she could see virtually nothing of the enemy. She could only trust that Mallen’s better eyes were good enough.

‘Ready,’ the scout said softly, more to himself than her, then took his whistle between his teeth. He peered into the falling night. ‘Ready . . .’

She put her own musket up to the barricade, finger poised on the trigger, letting her entire being wait on Mallen’s signal.

Which came, with a high, clear blast and, an instant later, all down the line his scouts were giving the call to fire. Her finger twitched on the trigger; aiming was immaterial. The entire north wall of the barricade became a fireworks display of musket fire, lighting up in a blaze of gunpowder and reeking smoke, as the soldiers of Lascanne riddled the night with lead balls.

And hit. Invisible in the night came the screams of injured and dying Denlanders, and Emily could only imagine what damage that concerted fire had done to their careful lines. Now came the sporadic flashes and bangs of their return fire, and she knew that they would be running at speed across dark ground towards the camp, in a desperate gamble that they would get to the enemy in time.

‘Reload!’ Emily shouted, feeling her voice grate hoarsely. ‘Reload! I want a second round before they get here. Reload!’ Her own hands were already going through the drill: powder, ball, wadding, ramrod. How many times had she done this before, in practice or for real? Beside her, Mallen’s movements were as easy and automatic as her own.

In amidst the occasional shot from the running Denlanders, she could hear the drumming of their boots upon the ground. Close, getting closer.

She was now reloaded, and she had to assume that her men were as well. The Denlanders were just pale shadows in the camp’s lamplight. A musket shot splintered the crate beside her, as she brought her gun up.

‘Ready!’ she called, hearing other officers yelling the same order all along the line. ‘Fire!’

At virtually point-blank range, the salvo of gunfire from the trench and the barricade stopped the Denlanders dead. Their entire front line was scythed down in a hail of shot and smoke, and in the aftermath they were fleeing, running away, desperate to get out of range before the Lascanne soldiers could reload again.

She heard herself give out a great whoop of triumph, and saw some of her men start to move forward to fire again. ‘No, no! Stay behind the barricade!’ she bellowed at them, even as shots started to fall amongst them, taking down half a dozen of the boldest.

‘Back! They’ll come again!’ she shouted. So much of war involved shouting at people.

‘They’re coming now,’ Mallen told her, squinting into the dark. ‘Skirmish order.’ Even as he said it, the shots started, scattered but regular, punching into the barricade four or five at a time, and encouraging the Lascanne soldiers to keep their heads down.

‘Everyone reload, if you haven’t already,’ she called out. ‘Ready for another round.’

‘Now,’ Mallen said. Her voice echoed his whistle, giving the order to fire again and feeling her throat ache with it. The Lascanne soldiers put their guns to the barricade and fired en masse, even as three or four of them were hit by the Denlander sharpshooters. She hoped these shots had done as much damage as the last, but the advancing Denlanders were coming in as a staggered, scattered body, and she knew many of her soldiers’ shots would have passed between them. Again she was shouting for the reload, desperate for that second shot.

‘Going to be tight,’ Mallen observed. She tried to concentrate on her musket, but she was holding her breath, watching her men out of the corner of her eye as they primed their own guns with shaking hands. The staccato rattle of the Denlander weapons was still sending splinters spraying all around and, even as she looked up, one incautious soldier was slammed back from the barricade, clutching his shoulder. Another man grabbed him beneath the armpits and hauled him roughly away, which made him scream far more than the shot had.

Steady. And, as she glanced towards Mallen, men along the line started firing, not in unison but piecemeal. ‘Hold!’ she called, but her men had caught the disease and their shots speared into the Denlanders in twos and threes, killing individual men but letting the advance live. Emily cursed and fired her own shot as the ghostly shapes of the Denland men emerged out of the night. Even as she fired, she saw flickers amongst them, then the sudden flare of shuttered lanterns opened at half a dozen points.

What in the world are they doing . . . ?

‘Get down!’ Mallen was shouting, but for once she did not heed him, for her attention was taken with the slow-spinning sparks that the Denlanders had hurled forward, whirling in tight loops as they coursed in long arcs towards the trench and the wall. The lamplight caught one and she had a brief glimpse of something metal with a trailing, burning cord.

Then there was an explosion that she felt through her feet and something struck her an almighty blow, picked her up and lifted her off her feet, casting her to the ground behind Mallen. Her head rang and for a moment she was seeing double. There were further explosions down the line, shattering crates and boxes to splinters and ripping into the men beside them.

‘Get up!’ Mallen urged her. He fired over the barricade and then dropped to reload, his hands moving swift and sure. She wasn’t sure that she could, just then. There was a ragged cut across one arm, and her questing fingers found a dent in the side of her helm that must have been from a piece of one of those bombs.

Grenades! she realized. But we never use them. She knew that they would never stay lit in the swamps. But, of course, we are not in the swamps.

Mallen was aiming again, but something was terribly wrong now because his line of fire put his target inside the barricade. She hauled herself to her feet to see a ring of grey uniforms pouring through a jagged rift in the defences, spreading into a tight semicircle and firing outwards, even as new men came in to help expand their stolen ground. She reached for her musket and fired it from the ground, seeing the man she was aiming at pitch backwards, and two more take his place. She levered herself up, crying, ‘Hold them in! Hold them in!’ or trying to. The words came out as a feeble croak. A soldier stepped between her and the Denlanders, aiming down the length of his gun, but was shot down before he could even fire. She lurched forward, snatched his musket and loosed it herself, but such sporadic resistance was not keeping the Denlanders in. Their semicircle was expanding outwards as more of them flocked through the breach to fire and reload, fire and reload, like machines.

‘Sabres! Sabres and clubs!’ she heard a high voice calling out, Marie Angelline at her best. ‘Close with them. Drive them out!’

Emily leant heavily against the barricade, feeling splinters jabbing through her jacket, making an effort of getting her sword from its scabbard. Somewhere down the line came a sustained explosion that was of no Denlander’s making, but was the sorcery of Giles Scavian washing over the Denlanders even as they hazarded another breach. She would have prayed for him, except resisting the advancing Denlanders now monopolized her prayers.

A handful of squads from Bear Sejant ran into the fire of the Denlanders and vaulted over their own casualties, swords and pikes and table legs upraised for the assault. The orderly formation of Denlanders disintegrated, men ducking out of the way of the onslaught, and yet others moving in to confront it. Suddenly there were men in grey running towards Emily, and she got her sabre clear with one final effort. She only hoped she had the strength to swing it.

The closest attacker went down before some anonymous Lascanne gunner. She lurched into the path of the next with a clumsy sweep of her blade that flashed past his face, bringing him up short in shock. He fumbled for a knife, and she slapped him across the face with the flat of her sword on the backswing, and managed to punch him in the head with the hand-guard. He reeled back, clutching at the wound, and she put all her strength into a thrust that took him in the stomach. His convulsing weight ripped the sword from her hands, but she grabbed his musket out of the air and fired it. Magic? It felt like any other gun she had ever held.

She reclaimed her sabre, messily, and another man was upon her in that instant, lashing out at her with his hatchet. He missed, and her parry went wild, and for a moment they traded blows with the air before she stepped in, trying to use the sabre’s leaden weight to split his head on a down stroke.

He caught her wrist with his free hand, and she fell against him, almost mouth to mouth. His wide, panicking eyes were all she could see, as he brought the axe clumsily down across the back of her helmet. Her world exploded in a shattering kaleidoscope of light and darkness and she fell to her knees, clutching her head, even as Mallen knifed her assailant, three stabs in and out, delivered faster than she could follow.

It had been the weighted back of the enemy’s hatchet, not the blade, or she would be dead, but she staggered as she got to her feet, her concentration fragmented. The entire battleground reeled and swam before her.

Time separated out into distinct slices, into distinct images. She lost the power to string them together into any coherent story.

She saw a Denlander soldier putting his gun to a Lascanne woman’s back and then firing, even as the same woman was triggering her own weapon at one of his comrades. Emily tried to run at him, waving her sabre, but he was already gone so she swept up the dead woman’s musket and fired after him. The trigger clicked uselessly, the weapon already empty.

A Bear Sejant trooper swung a pike in great red-slinging arcs all about him, hacking down any Denlander within his reach. His face was splashed with blood, his mouth open in a scream that was silent beneath the roar of shot and the howling of the injured. She saw the front of his jacket jerk as a musket ball ploughed into it, but he swung on, blind and raging.

She caught sight of Tubal sitting on a box beside the ruined barricade, sighting up on a Denlander like some country gentleman on his veranda, pot-shotting at birds over breakfast. She tried to make her way over to him but a grey-coated soldier collided with her, falling over her in a tangle of limbs and spinning her sabre from her grasp. She felt his hand scrabble for her throat, but hers found the hilt of his knife and she yanked it from its sheath and buried it in him. Tubal did not even notice her.

She was surrounded by musket smoke. Shots zipped past her as she lurched towards the wall of the Stag Rampant hut. She had her pistol in her hand and levelled it at the first grey uniform she saw, but it clicked hollowly. When had she fired it?

Through the cordite air came the searing, savage beauty of Giles Scavian. Clad in burgeoning flame, he walked through the fray and his touch, his very look, scorched the enemy, boiled out their eyes and blistered their skin and exploded their powder flasks and the breeches of their guns. He was an immortal. Their shots melted in leaden spray all about him.

Reaching the wall of the storehouse, she saw John Brocky appear at the window, fire off four pistols, one after the other, then retreat to reload whilst a soldier poked a musket barrel out to take his place.

Her head was now clearing. She had no idea if she had skipped across minutes or hours of the battle, but the Denlanders seemed to have a solid wedge inside the camp, and everywhere she looked there was utter chaos, women and men – men of both sides – shooting each other in the back or hacking each other down as they ran. She could not have said who was winning. Everywhere she put her feet, there was a body.

‘Lieutenant!’ Even as rattled as she was, Emily reacted, turning smartly and coming back to herself enough to find her hands filled with pistol and sabre. Captain Pordevere came out of the smoke, grabbed her roughly and shook her.

‘Listen to me, Lieutenant!’ he bellowed, and she thought he must have had a pistol discharge right next to his ear or something similar. His voice was at top volume, ringing in her head like a bell, and he had blood all across one side of his head. ‘Can you hold here?’ he boomed.

‘I don’t know, sir!’ she tried to match him in volume, but she saw no immediate comprehension on his face.

‘Hold here, Lieutenant! That’s an order! I’m taking some squads, sabres and pikes! We’re going to flank them! Take them in the side. They’ll run, then! I hope they’ll run!’

She nodded vigorously, which was enough to reawaken the pain in her head, and it made her feel weak. Pordevere was already off, with the best part of two hundred men and women following him.

‘Hold on, Emily!’ she heard and, amongst Pordevere’s picked fighters, she saw Marie Angelline, beautiful and bright as an angel, barely touched by blood or bruise but with her sabre shining like fire in the lamplight.

‘Marie!’ Emily called after her. ‘Marie, be careful!’ And, even as she said it, she knew it was a fool’s thing to say. There was no being careful in this battle.

Then the Denlanders were upon her, a line of them on the advance. She loosed her pistol at them, and it flashed in her hand, loaded this time. Then she found herself alone against them, with only a sword between her and their guns.

But only for a moment. Then suddenly there were shots punching into the Denlanders from behind her, and a wave of 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 and his brave few were all dead.

‘Oh, Marie.’ She felt a shuddering grief overtake her. ‘God damn you, Marie!’ As sobs forced their way from within her battered ribs, she hugged herself to suppress them, recalling in her mind’s eye poor Marie Angelline’s face as she had last seen it: so full of courage and fire, so gallant, so proud.

27.

I am picked apart.

Each day, some new scrap of me is pecked out. I am losing those things that make me human.

Take me away from this place before it devours me, piece by piece.

But, of course, you cannot come here, and I cannot leave.

‘Here, Lieutenant.’ How faint the voice that finally answered her across the field. The cries of the other wounded nearly drowned it, as their comrades manhandled them back towards the barricade, but Emily caught it, like the voice of a ghost.

‘Marie?’

‘Emily . . . I’m here . . .’

She crawled over the bodies – the red-jacketed ones, the soldiers who had died in Pordevere’s desperate flanking attack. ‘Marie, I can’t see you,’ she rasped, her voice raw from all the shouting. ‘Please, help me find you.’

‘Here,’ came a voice almost from beneath her, and she looked down upon Marie Angelline. The woman’s jacket and breeches were slick with blood. There was a shot wound below her collarbone, and the sweep of a hatchet had laid open her leg. Her left hand was crooked awkwardly about the hilt of a knife that was still buried deep in her side.

‘Emily . . .’ she said, her great voice shrunk to a shadow of itself. ‘Emily . . .’

‘I’ll get you back. We’ll get Doctor Carling’s wife to . . .’ To what? And how many of the wounded will there be?

‘I fought . . .’ Marie said. ‘You have never seen such fighting. The crowds would have loved it. Always . . . I was always good with a sword . . . but there are so few parts for a woman that allow you to . . .’

‘Please, Marie, save your strength.’ Emily braced herself for the effort and called to the nearest soldiers. ‘Hey, you over there! Stretcher here, now!’ The last word turned into a racking cough that set every tendon on fire.

‘Tell John . . .’

‘Tell him yourself. I swear to you, you’ll have the chance,’ Emily replied. Marie’s hand was weakly on her arm, her bloodied lips curving into a smile.

‘Tell him I was magnificent,’ she said. ‘Tell him I love him, please.’

‘You can tell him. He’d want to hear it from you,’ Emily insisted. Two soldiers reached her, still flinching from an imagined new attack from the darkness. Mallen’s scouts were out, keeping an eye on the treeline.

‘Get her up,’ Emily told the stretcher-bearers. ‘For God’s sake, be gentle.’ She saw that they were looking as battered and haggard as she felt.

They lifted free the dead who were lying across Marie and put their hands upon her. With nothing more than their eyes, they counted three together and then lifted her, in one lurching movement, onto the stretcher. She gritted her teeth about a gasp of pain, but her hand was momentarily strong as a vice on Emily’s arm.

When they carried her back towards the camp, while the rest of the wounded were found and fetched, Emily stayed slumped on the ground amongst the dead, trying to find the strength to follow them.

*

The headquarters hut seemed so empty now, and those that survived were not the people they had once been. Emily had looked at her own face in Tubal’s shaving mirror that morning, and seen it colourful with bruises that rivalled Mallen’s tattoos. Her hair had been matted with blood where the grenade shrapnel had dented her helm, and blood from her cut lip had smeared her chin with a red beard. Even after she had washed it and washed and washed it again, the face in the mirror looked more like the faces of those lying cold and still out on the battlefield than that of any living thing. She walked stiffly, every muscle aching, and her right palm was raw where the hilts of a succession of sabres had rubbed the skin off it.

Looking around the table, she could only think that she had got off lightly. Last night she had seen the Denlanders blow gaps in their defences, and now those gaps were mirrored among the commanding officers of the army. The colonel, dead. Justin Lascari, dead. Captain Pordevere, for his sins, dead. Lieutenant Gallien, Mallarkey’s aide, was wounded, unconscious and not expected to recover. Master Sergeant Marie Angelline was clinging still at the border of life and death, with John Brocky weeping silently beside her in the infirmary.

And here was Tubal, one leg gone and a bandage about his head where a Denlander musket butt had knocked him off his perch. Here was Giles Scavian with his hand stuffed into his shirt to hide the loss of two fingers that a sharpshooter had taken from him during the height of the fighting. Here was Captain Mallarkey, miraculously unharmed. No man would testify that he had hidden himself away in the Leopard Passant hut, but there was none who were able to say that they had seen him amidst the fighting last night. His hands twitched on the tabletop, clutching at one another, and his lip trembled. He would not meet the gaze of his peers.

Mallen came in just then, fresh from scouting, and gave the assembled a lazy salute. Save for minor scrapes and powder burns, he too had come through the fighting unscathed, though in his case not for want of the enemy trying.

‘Well, man, what’s the situation? Report!’ Mallarkey ordered him.

‘Soon as we pulled back with our wounded, they set a cordon just within the trees,’ Mallen said. ‘Plenty of men and plenty of wounded. They’re acting like men waiting for reinforcements.’

‘Reinforcements,’ Mallarkey echoed. ‘God help us.’

‘Don’t think they’ll come through today, but soon enough,’ Mallen finished. ‘More than that, couldn’t get close enough to see.’ He stood back to lean against the doorframe. It was his first concession to how tired he must feel.

‘Well . . .’ Mallarkey glanced around for Tubal, and then flinched under the man’s stare. ‘Look, it seems clear enough what the lay of the land is.’

‘Does it, Captain?’ Tubal replied.

‘Well, look, you’re new to a captain’s rank, Salander, but, let me tell you, we’re in a bad spot here.’ Mallarkey was working his way towards where he wanted to go. ‘It seems to me . . . it seems very much that in this situation there would be no dishonour in a . . . strategic withdrawal. To Locke, for example. We could reinforce there and then take stock, so to speak. I’m sure you can see what I mean.’

Tubal exchanged glances with Emily. ‘Captain, this is the choke point. At this camp we control the entire Levant front. They could get some scouts past us, but no substantial body of men. Hell, that’s why we’re here.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘There are a hundred ways around Locke, even if we could find reinforcements there. They could have two companies of men up behind the Couchant army before we could do anything about it.’

‘If we retreat from here, we’re not just conceding them the Levant, Captain,’ Scavian added. ‘We’re giving them the war.’

Mallarkey again clenched his fists on the table. ‘Well, what . . . I ask you, what in God’s name do you expect us to do?’

Tubal hesitated before speaking, and Emily knew it was because he was taking the lives of them all – of every soldier in the camp – in his hands. ‘Hold out,’ he said at last.

‘Hold out? My God, man, is that it?’

‘I don’t see there’s anything else left to us.’

Mallarkey stood up suddenly. ‘Now, you listen to me, you tradesman. I have seniority here. My God, I was an officer before you were ever drafted, Salander. I’ve told you what else is left to us. There’s no dishonour in leaving. It’s a military necessity.’

‘Dishonour?’ Scavian said. ‘We would have failed the King. We would have lost the war. If we, here in this room, make a decision to abandon this camp, we would be betraying Lascanne. We would be betraying His Majesty. Our names would go down in every history book as the greatest villains of the age.’

Mallarkey bared his teeth unhappily. ‘Well, yes, but . . .’ He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Emily recalled that Scavian, as a Warlock, might be said to outrank him.

‘Captain,’ Tubal said, ‘do you want to return to Locke?’ It was something he had discussed with the other Survivors, and they all watched Mallarkey for his response.

‘I . . . You’ve already heard what I have to say,’ Mallarkey replied uncertainly.

‘No, not us. You,’ Tubal said. ‘Do you want to go back to Locke.’ He took a breath before reciting the words that they had hammered out, that he had rehearsed like an actor. ‘It would be useful to have someone with authority to go and explain our situation to them, there. They need to know how badly we need the reinforcements. You could go and get us resupplied.’

Mallarkey’s eyes dodged between them, from Tubal to Emily, Emily to Scavian. They had put only the thinnest varnish of pretence on this offer. He was being given the chance to run away and he knew it, and knew that they knew.

He drew himself up, and for a moment they thought he would rise to the occasion and decide to stay, but then he said, ‘I . . . think that would be . . . a wise course of action. Yes, I’ll go today . . . No sense in waiting. After all,’ he gave them a smile that was a ghastly rictus of self-knowledge, ‘we need those reinforcements as quickly as possible.’

After he had gone off to pack his meagre possessions, Mallen came to join them at the table.

‘Good work,’ he said. ‘One less thing to worry about.’ His voice had been the most vehement in speaking for the plan. ‘That makes you the colonel, Salander.’

Tubal shrugged. ‘I’m open to suggestions. I wonder how many more grenades the Denlanders have.’

‘Enough, I’m sure,’ Scavian said. ‘Who knew they would use them?’

‘They must have been husbanding them all the way through the swamps just for this,’ Emily guessed.

‘We’re lucky they didn’t think to bring a cannon,’ Mallen said gloomily.

*

She found the quartermaster sitting at one edge of the barricade, beside a sharp-toothed hole the Denland grenades had made, picking at splinters and staring out at the swamps. The sun was crawling behind the cliffs to the west, the dusk creeping in by stages along with the swamp-exhaled mist.

‘Brocky,’ she said. He looked up, and she saw his face was blotchy with tears.

‘Marshwic.’ He shuffled sideways along the wood to give her a place to sit, and she joined him.

‘I’m sorry about Marie.’

He sniffed. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘To be . . . so full of life, to shine so bright. You’d never have thought . . .’ He choked, then continued as best he could. ‘She never thought she’d be hurt. She thought she was immortal.’

‘Or she acted it, for the others,’ Emily agreed. ‘She was right in the thick of it, they said. She was right beside Pordevere when he led them in. There were so many wounded then, and she was . . .’

His shoulders began shaking and she trailed off, not sure of what else to say.

‘I . . . never had luck with women,’ he got out. ‘They never looked twice at me. Who would? That one I told you about, when I was engaged . . . she robbed me blind when she left. Just after the money – and precious little I had of it. More than that . . . beyond that . . . my whole life with no female company but the whores my purse would stretch to. I had no hope. Bachelor-born, that was me. Then . . . her. She was my sun, Marshwic. She was my bloody sun from the moment I set eyes on her. She lit up my whole bloody world. How did I come to find her? And how did she come to like me? Not that mummery in the swamps, acting the fool and getting shot, she saw right through that. She saw . . . God only knows what she bloody saw in me.’ He sat hunched over his balled hands, pressing his grief into his belly. ‘And I will never ever have another woman like her. How could I? There’ll never be another like her.’

She wanted to put her arms around him, to comfort him in some way that did not involve the painful business of putting words to it, but his pain was so intense and private that she did not dare touch him.

‘She . . . she might still recover, Brocky. She’s strong. She’s stronger than any of us. If anyone can pull through, it’s her.’

He looked at her then, and she could not at first identify the precise emotion that twisted his expression, but he put a hand out and covered hers with it. She realized then that it was compassion – for her – that moved him.

‘I thought you knew,’ he said. ‘I thought you must have known. She’s dead, Marshwic . . . Emily. She’s dead this hour gone.’

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 grave-pit, 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 dawn had broken on her like the dawn itself. Am I alive? I am alive! It was as though the hour of her death had come and gone, and the grim spectre himself was overdue. In such moments, when the world held its breath, anything might happen.

He had come to her at her tent: Giles Scavian, Survivor and King’s wizard, his ripped shirt hanging loose from him. They had both been weary from the fighting and the waiting, dirt-smudged and worn, but she had taken his damaged hand in hers and kissed the cauterized ridge of his missing fingers. In turn, he had put his lips to the bruises across her face. She was a gentlewoman of Lascanne, and he was a gentleman, polite and proper in all things. Death made a third, though, in that tent, and in that presence their social niceties finally seemed as distant and unreachable as Deerlings House.

She had lain down, and pulled him down beside her, and they had unbuttoned each other’s shirts without hurry. They had at least until the dawn before matters of either Denland or Lascanne came back to trouble them.

He must have known that it was her first time. She guessed that it was his.

Once only. Afterwards, the Denlanders still stayed away and stayed away, and she and Scavian touched hands and exchanged looks, but somehow each felt it would tempt fate too much to seek a second union. Their one moment of grace had been all they had, all they would have. Emily would not have exchanged it for any other.

*

Now they had reinforcements. Were matters looking up? Emily watched as the master sergeant from Leopard Passant drilled the shabby newcomers in the use of the rifle, and knew that it would make no difference.

Mallen was the great killer of Denlanders these days. On odd nights he went out with his scouts, and they hunted down their opposite numbers and taught them how to fear. They used knives, to be silent and secret at night and, with Mallen to lead them, they killed far more than they lost. What they discovered was news worse and worse with each expedition. The Denlanders, too, were being reinforced. They had new men come in every other day, a few squads at a time. He estimated that they now outnumbered the besieged garrison by more than five to one, even after all their recent casualties.

And even Mallen could not kill them all. As his supply of scouts diminished, one by one, the Denlanders’ numbers only grew. There must be many enemy agents plotting out the road to Locke now, for when they would have the liberty to walk it in force.

And still the enemy sat and waited, and Emily knew why. Her insight into the Denlander character now became a curse. She knew that they were careful, meticulous and pragmatic men, and they did not much value qualities such as honour, courage or luck. They valued instead solid plans and favourable numbers. They were waiting until a victory on their part was certain before essaying towards the camp again.

And so both sides wait for the same thing. One day the Denlanders would come back, and this time it would be when they would be sure to win. Without a doubt, the Lascans would exact a heavy toll from them, but there was a limit to how much damage the defenders could do before they were all shot down.

She had in her hand her incomplete and undeliverable message to Mr Northway, her suicide note, as she thought of it. She wondered, if Penny Belchere were to appear before her, whether she would give it to the girl, or hide it. The question seemed academic.

The Survivors’ Club was all that was left to her now. Its members kept each other sane. Whatever the Denlanders may value, we have courage, friendship and honour here, which translated into evenings of joking and drinking, gambling and arguing. She was more a soldier than she knew, now. Would Mary or Alice even recognize her? She was shocked to think how long it had been since she had thought of either of them. How long since they have thought of me?

Grammaine was just a distant memory; like some place they had gone to when she was a very young child, half remembered and half imagined. It was like a place she had seen in a painting somewhere. She had no belief in it. It was not possible that she could ever return there.

*

She leant on the barricade, looking out at the shadowed swamps. There was a little movement there, but not much: not an attack, not yet. The sun overhead had them boiling in their jackets, but the Denlanders were confined in the damp and constant heat of the swamps. Did that wear them down? Did they lose their will to win? It seemed they did not. She remembered their quiet determination to endure anything for their country. They had made themselves at home in the swamps, like fish in water, whilst the Lascanne soldiers could only hold their breath and count the moments until they emerged.

And still the enemy held off. What had happened now? Were the Denlanders waiting for even more reinforcements, or for more intelligence? Perhaps they had spies out who were expected back with vital word. Mallen had only two of his picked scouts left. He no longer went out hunting the Denlanders. Their agents moved unmolested, save where they came within musket range of the camp.

Tubal hobbled out from the camp to join her in staring out over the barricade, over the trench, over the fence of sharp stakes they had put up after tearing down the colonel’s command hut.

‘Today, do you think?’

She shrugged. ‘In their place, I’d have moved already. They’re patient people, Tubal.’

He pushed himself up to perch on the barricade, leaning his crutches against it carefully. He had a Denlander gun slung over his shoulder by its strap: one never knew when the hammerblow would come.

‘You and me together out here, it’s like a family outing,’ he said. ‘Damnedest thing, but I never really knew you back at Grammaine. You were just Mary’s other sister.’

‘Other sister?’

‘Well, yes,’ he said, without apology. ‘Hell, if I’d known you were like this, I’d have been scared to death of you.’

They both glanced over at the sound of footsteps and saw that Scavian was coming out to join them. His maimed hand was concealed by a black glove he had found somewhere, the empty ring and little fingers pinned back onto the palm.

‘Good morning,’ he said.

‘Good afternoon,’ Tubal corrected him. ‘Come for the view or for the healing waters?’

‘The company,’ replied Scavian firmly. He put his intact hand on Emily’s shoulder and squeezed, and she covered his fingers with her own. The look they shared was private, filled with secrets. He had given her one thing that she could not reveal even to Mr Northway – even to the Mr Northway who would never receive her final letter.

‘Heads up,’ Tubal warned softly. ‘They’re coming.’

Emily’s heart lurched and she scrabbled for her gun, but her swift glance at the treeline registered only a small party of about a dozen, leaving the shelter of the trees. They held before them a flag of blank white, somewhat greater in size than Caxton’s purloined handkerchief.

Parley? They wanted to talk.

‘Truce?’ Scavian frowned. ‘What is there to talk about? In truth we’ve both sides made our positions clear over the last three years or so.’

‘Unless . . .’ Tubal’s eyes met Emily’s.

‘Something’s changed,’ she said. ‘For them, something’s changed.’ A keen edge of excitement began cutting into her. ‘It’s been so long since we’ve had any news. Do you think . . . ?’

‘Hold your fire!’ Tubal shouted out, as some of the men at the barricade sighted down their guns. ‘Don’t you recognize a flag of parley when you see it?’ Of course, some of the newer recruits probably didn’t.

‘The Couchant front, of course,’ Scavian exhaled. ‘With our cavalry up there, in the passes and the high plains, how long could it be, really?’

‘Don’t get too confident. It could be something else,’ Tubal warned him.

‘Such as what? What can you think of that would drive them out here to talk to us? The state of the weather?’

‘It has been unusually sunny, even for summer.’ Tubal gave a strained smile. ‘They might just want . . . to take back the bodies of their dead, or something.’

The Denlander embassy had halted now, somewhere halfway between treeline and camp, and were waiting patiently.

‘You need to go and talk to them,’ Emily told Tubal.

He kicked one shoe idly against the barricade. ‘That isn’t going to happen,’ he said philosophically. ‘Em, I think the momentous duty is yours.’

‘Mine?’

‘You’re my second. Hell, you’re actually the second-ranking officer in the entire camp right now. Also, you can have a go at running for it if things go wrong.’

She glanced between him and Scavian. ‘But I . . . What will I say?’

‘That’ll depend, I imagine, on what they say first. If, by some freak chance, they say, “We surrender!” then I suggest you accept.’

‘I’ll go with you, Emily,’ Scavian said.

‘That you won’t,’ Tubal told him evenly.

‘But—’

‘I’m not having our one and only Warlock putting himself in the line of fire. For all we know, this entire exercise is aimed solely at killing you,’ Tubal continued, maddeningly logical. ‘You know how they feel about men of your profession. Choose anyone else, Em, but not Scavian. He stays here.’

‘But if things get ugly, I’m the only hope she has of getting clear,’ Scavian protested.

Tubal looked between them, a sad smile on his face. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘I truly hope that nothing gets ugly, or even slightly ill-favoured. Em, you can refuse this duty. I’m not forcing it on you. I can send one of the sergeants or something. But you can’t take him. I won’t risk the both of you in one errand.’

Emily looked at her brother-in-law again, and she knew Scavian must be having the same thought: how Tubal’s captaincy had grown on him. He was the commander of the camp. He had to make the difficult decisions.

‘Then I’ll take Mallen,’ she decided. Tubal winced but nodded.

‘Mallen and . . . ? Take at least two men or you’ll look cheap.’

‘Mallen and Caxton, and ten of the Rabbit,’ she decided.

Tubal nodded and waved a hand. ‘You’d better go and collect them then.’

So it was that, a few minutes later, she was picking her way across the barricade, the trench and the stakes, with Mallen and the pale and sweating Sergeant Caxton at her heels. The ten soldiers behind them had been hand-picked by Caxton, who knew the individuals better than she did these days. All of them carried their muskets, and she had her sabre and pistol to hand. If this was some trap of the enemy’s, then the defenders would be ready to take their share with them as they died.

‘You reckon they’re really going to surrender?’ Caxton whispered, her eyes locked on the little group of drab-uniformed men ahead of them.

‘I have no idea, but something inside me says not . . .’ Emily halted, peering ahead and frowning.

‘Problem?’ Mallen murmured.

‘I . . .’ There were a dozen, no – thirteen of them. The parties matched each other, number for number. Her attention had been caught by the Denlander in their midst. His white hair blew in the light breeze; he leant on a stick and was without a musket. She recognized him just from his self-effacing pose.

‘God preserve us, it’s Doctor Lam,’ she said.

Mallen signalled a halt, fingering his musket thoughtfully. ‘Want us to take him from here? We’d be back behind the barricade before they try us. Got to be now, though, understand? Any closer and we’re dead for sure, in the return fire.’

She paused for a long, strained moment before saying, ‘No.’ Doctor Nathanial Lammegeier, who had spoken such treason to her, who had spoken of the sorrowful necessity of the fight and how his own people hated it; Doctor Lammegeier, who would surely have had her put to the question if Mallen had not rescued her.

‘Maybe . . .’ Her voice trembled a little. ‘Maybe they do want to surrender. I can’t think what else would bring him out here.’

‘God be praised,’ Caxton said, as they started moving forward again, Emily adding a new spring to her step that passed itself on to the others.

She narrowed the gap to twenty yards before she saw that the Denlanders had a prisoner, head bowed but red jacket all too visible. One of Mallen’s scouts? No, they went about in dark colours. Some straggler or deserter snagged by the enemy, then?

Do they want an exchange of prisoners? We have none to offer, and Doctor Lam would not concern himself personally with such a thing.

Perhaps it’s a goodwill gesture? Her heart sped. How better to convince an enemy you want peace than to return a captive?

Doctor Lam was watching her as they approached, and she saw him raise his eyebrows, a slight smile tugging at his mouth.

‘Sergeant Marshwic,’ he called out, as they drew to a halt with five yards still between them. ‘You are a remarkable woman. I confess myself baffled as to how you escaped my camp. Mind you,’ he added sadly, ‘I never could understand women.’

‘It’s Lieutenant Marshwic now, Doctor Lammegeier.’ She allowed him the honour of using his full name, not the abbreviation so vilified amongst her fellows. ‘You have asked for a truce. You have it. What news do you have for us?’ She glanced at Caxton, beside her, and said, ‘Have you come to offer your surrender?’

Doctor Lam’s eyes wrinkled with remorse, and he too spared a glance for his fellows. Following his eyes she saw the man behind him, the man holding the prisoner, was the same provost as had captured her.

‘No,’ the Doctor said simply, ‘but I have come to ask for yours.’

Emily sensed a tension amongst her fellows, and the guns on both sides that had been pointing not-quite-anywhere were suddenly closer to being in line, each with its opposite number. She held out her hands to calm her companions, and felt them unwillingly lower their weapons.

‘We do not surrender, in Lascanne,’ she said flatly. ‘You have not taken us yet. What do you have to persuade us now?’

Doctor Lam looked over his shoulder and motioned for the prisoner to be brought forward. ‘She will tell you,’ he said, and the red-jacketed figure was pushed forward past him, the provost tilting her head up to show her bruised face.

Ice coursed through Emily’s veins. It was Penny Belchere.

28.

Seeing her there in that moment, in spite of all it meant, I thought of you.

‘Penny!’ Emily took an instinctive step forward and guns were levelled again on both sides.

‘Keep order!’ Doctor Lam instructed his men. ‘Remember why we are here.’ There was no triumph on his face as he turned back to Emily. She saw none of the satisfaction of the conjuror revealing his final trick, only an urgency about his eyes that surprised her.

‘Soldier Belchere,’ Emily said, with more control of herself. ‘Have you been mistreated?’

Penny’s responding gaze was full of mute appeal. ‘Not yet,’ she got out. Get me out of here, was the unspoken plea. She was chalk-white with fear, and Emily belatedly remembered that she was only a messenger, and had never been in battle or fired a gun.

‘What is this, Doctor?’ she asked.

Doctor Lam looked at his feet, biting his lip as he came to a decision. ‘Would you walk with me, Lieutenant? You and my captive, and the provost here. Let your men and mine retire to some distance where they are less danger both to us and to each other, and I will speak candidly to you.’

‘Candidly?’ she queried cautiously.

‘Words best spoken to you alone, as de facto leader here, rather than openly where they might trigger excesses of, shall we say, national pride.’

‘Don’t do it, sir,’ Caxton whispered. ‘It has to be a trap.’

She looked at Doctor Lam, then at the provost. ‘Just you and me and the prisoner, Doctor. She’s a non-combatant, and bound.’

She saw the provost shake his head and knew it was in fear for his commander, and that reassured her. Doctor Lam nodded reluctantly, though.

‘I will trust you, Lieutenant Marshwic. Someone must make the first move.’

Under their combined direction, the two groups of soldiers backed away from each other, until each was too far to readily taunt the other, although the trio in the middle remained within easy shot of either.

Emily folded her arms, surreptitiously checking on the position of her pistol. ‘Doctor Lammegeier, you have my attention.’

He smiled almost nostalgically. ‘You really must tell me how you escaped my camp, Lieutenant Marshwic. I’ve been losing sleep over it.’

She sensed he was speaking only to put off the inevitable. ‘You didn’t come here just to play Twenty Questions. I thought the only thing you were asking was for our surrender.’

He sighed. ‘Ah, well, so much for idle curiosity. Your surrender, yes, Lieutenant. The surrender of all Lascanne forces in the Levant. Does that sound absurd to you?’

‘Not at all,’ she told him. ‘If I’d been beaten back three times, as you have, I’d try a new tack myself. But it isn’t going to happen. We can’t surrender to you, and you know why. We’re the last line of defence for Lascanne. You need to move past us to reinforce your armies in the Couchant. We can’t surrender.’

She saw him take a deep breath and ready himself. ‘A valid conclusion, no doubt, if your premise was correct.’

‘Don’t riddle with me, Doctor.’

‘I have imagined this conversation a score of times before coming out here, yet now the words escape me. Lieutenant, when did you last hear from Locke?’

The words sent an uneasy chill through her. ‘Twelve days ago, or so.’

‘I have heard more recently than that.’ He braced himself. ‘We hold Locke now.’

She almost failed to understand what he was saying, and then burst out: ‘That’s impossible! You couldn’t have got so many men past us without us knowing. A few scouts, yes, but—’

‘Lieutenant.’ His voice was steely now. ‘I have not captured Locke. Locke is in the hands of Denland because the Couchant front has been won. Won by us, Lieutenant. The war is over.’

She felt her hand twitch towards her pistol and restrained it by main willpower. Over? The war isn’t over. We’re still here, aren’t we? ‘I don’t understand.’

‘The Denland army of the Couchant has broken your Lascanne resistance, Lieutenant. The war is over. We are even now sending soldiers into Lascanne itself. The only part of the Lascanne army currently armed and in open resistance is under your command.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t believe a word of this.’

‘You would not,’ he acknowledged. ‘That is why I have brought my witness. This woman was captured by my scouts even as she left Locke. And she left Locke when it fell, Lieutenant. Take her, she’s yours, but listen to what she has to say, please.’

‘Penny . . . ?’ Emily gestured for Belchere to come closer, and the girl needed no second invitation, almost knocking her over with her eagerness. Emily severed the ropes about the prisoner’s wrists with the edge of her sabre, only drawing the weapon part way from the scabbard so that the Denlander soldiers would not mistake the gesture. Still the girl had said nothing.

‘Penny, talk to me,’ Emily demanded. Then, when nothing came: ‘Soldier-at-Arms Belchere, report. That’s an order.’

Penny Belchere turned a tear-streaked face to her and said, ‘It’s true,’ in a voice so soft that Doctor Lam could hardly have heard.

‘What’s true? Tell me exactly what you saw.’

Penny hugged herself miserably. ‘I was in Locke. I had just got off the train. I was going to . . . I don’t know . . . eat, clean up, see some people, before I came to you . . . There were soldiers there; they were coming off the high passes. Everyone was shouting. I thought it was just . . . I thought it was just soldiers being soldiers. I didn’t understand. Then the shooting started. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. There were all sorts of people running about with guns. I could hear fighting . . . people being hurt. Then . . . I looked out onto the main square, and there were so many soldiers still coming down, and I knew there were never so many soldiers in Locke . . . and I saw that the ones arriving all had grey jackets . . . and I knew. They were fighting, fighting and shooting at people, everyone who tried to stop them. They were just . . . like a machine, Miss Marshwic. I’d never seen fighting before . . . not real fighting. I was never supposed to be there! I was just a messenger. You and bloody Northway – I’d never have seen it, if not for you two!’ Tears sprang anew from her eyes as her voice choked off. Emily realized that she had never appreciated how young this girl really was. She felt a hundred years old herself.

‘A compelling story, Doctor,’ she said, her mind racing, ‘but it’s open to interpretation. An attack on Locke doesn’t mean it’s been taken. We had all of Locke’s spare soldiers sent here twelve days ago. A small force could have overrun the town. We won’t surrender, I’m afraid. You’ll have to come and get us.’ Feeling full of patriotic duty, she turned to go.

‘Wait!’ Doctor Lam’s face twisted into something that was part anger and part grief. ‘Listen to me and please consider all that I say. I know you Lascans. I know you, even. I know how damnably stubborn you are, but even you can’t fly in the face of all reason. The war is lost, and you can never prevail. You have only two choices: to surrender or to die. Surely you must see that. I am urging you . . .’ He stopped to compose himself, then continued in a calmer tone. ‘I am not urging you, Lieutenant. I am not threatening you. I do not demand. I am begging you to surrender.’ He looked suddenly far older even than Emily felt. ‘If you surrender, then all of you will be able to go home free. You will go back to your families, what is left of them, and pick up whatever pieces of your lives still remain. You will go down in the history of two nations as the Lascan army that was never defeated. And I? I will be the man who failed to defeat you. A footnote in the history books, a name for schoolboys to forget and misspell.’

‘And if we do not?’

He managed a single bitter burst of laughter. ‘Then you will face an attack from both north and south, and you will all die, every last one of you.’

‘Your concern for our health touches me,’ she said drily, then took a step back on seeing his change of expression.

‘Your health? Lieutenant, I have with me seventeen hundred men, many of who have been fighting you here for years in these godforsaken jungles. You cannot imagine how it is for them. They have had their comrades killed on every side. They have had their quiet lives destroyed forever. Their trades, their homes, are all as alien now to them as the depths of the sea. They have been made warriors where once they were tradesmen and labourers and clerks and lawyers. And now it comes to this, and I must ask them once more to attack the Lascans, who have thrown them back so many times. And do you know what, Lieutenant? When I ask them, they will do it. With fear in their hearts, with cowardice etched on every bone in their bodies, they will advance across this plain into your guns and your grenades and your swords, and they will die. They will die in their hundreds, and in agony, to capture this place. And at the end of it all, when the smoke has cleared, and I look upon the bodies in red and the bodies in grey, I will know that it was my fault, because I could not convince you, here and now, to surrender your guns and go home to your families.’

Emily saw the bright spark of a tear in his eye, and she felt almost embarrassed for him.

‘It should be the easiest thing in the world,’ he continued, his voice shaking ever so slightly, ‘to tell someone to put away a weapon, to step out from the shadow of death, and go home. To turn their back on all of this madness and go home. It should be the most natural, most obvious thing, but here you stand, you warrior Lascans. Will you really tell me you love this war, this death, more than you love your own families?’

For a long, long time Emily said nothing, and she found that meeting his teary, squinting eyes was far more difficult than it had been before he spoke.

‘If the Couchant front has fallen . . .’ she started awkwardly.

‘If it has, then,’ he agreed. ‘An academic exercise, no doubt, but it if has, then would you concede that there would be no point, no earthly use, in your dying to the last man? That you would do better to return to Lascanne and live for your country, than to die here for it.’ He wiped his eyes, with a wretched smile. ‘Surely Lascanne needs every man and woman it has left.’

‘If it has, then I could concede something, but . . . You move me, Doctor. I can hear the passion in your words, but I have never counted myself the best judge of people, and I know that you are a clever man.’

‘Come with me to Locke,’ he told her.

‘I’m sorry?’

His gaze was steady now. ‘Come with me – you and whichever of your comrades you choose – to Locke. See it for yourself, and then return to your men and make your own decision. You have my absolute guarantee of safe passage.’

Emily looked from him to the downcast Penny Belchere and back. ‘You are a pragmatic people. How much is an oath worth to you?’

‘What other assurance can I give you? Do you want to receive hostages?’

Denlanders inside the camp, and who’s to say what mischief they might do? An idea came to her, though, on the tail of the last conversation she had shared with this man. ‘Tell me the secret of your guns,’ she said. ‘If the war’s won, where’s the harm, after all? Tell me the secret and let me return to camp with it, and then I will trust you to take me to Locke.’

She assumed he would refuse. She thought she had exposed his subterfuge at last, and waited for his excuses and his explanations. But no: ‘It is such a simple thing,’ he told her. ‘A matter of how the gun barrel is made, no more. We mill a spiral groove down the inside, you see. So, when the shot comes out, it spins more reliably in flight. The effective range is thereby improved. Science, you see? The spinning keeps it steadier, so the shot is accurate at a much greater range, though they are slower to reload. The shot must be cased in leather to be snug within the barrel, you see.’

She stared at him. ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘That is because you are no scholar of mechanics, Lieutenant. Take the idea to one who is: he will throw his hands in the air and curse that he himself did not think of it.’

So much for the magic guns. ‘That’s all. A groove inside the barrel?’

‘We call it “rifling”, and the guns “rifles”. The musket is dead, Lieutenant.’ His smile slipped awkwardly. ‘Along with so much else.’

*

After she returned to her side, she dismissed Caxton and the ten of the Rabbit, but kept Mallen with her.

‘You should hear this,’ she explained. ‘I think Tubal’s going to want your advice.’

‘Tubal? What about you? You’ve got as much command as he has, the way I see it.’

She let that pass. ‘We’ll need Scavian, and . . .’

‘Brocky?’ he suggested. ‘Get the Survivors together?’

How bleak are the times, when a desperate little gentleman’s club, and one lady, have become the command staff of an entire army? That thought made her laugh. ‘And Brocky. Why the devil not?’

The men were murmuring as she headed towards the clubhouse. They knew important things had been said, but not what. Their future was being decided, they knew. Something terrible had happened. For all they knew, they could be dead in their shoes already, right there. A Denlander assault could be on its way to wipe them out, down to the last man. She would have to trust to the sergeants to keep them all in line. She could not talk openly of what Doctor Lam had said to her: the camp would be torn apart between loyalists and deserters.

She handed Penny Belchere into the care of Doctor Carling’s wife. The messenger girl was still trembling. Emily’s introduction to war had come in steps, at least. Belchere’s had come in one day and all at once.

Tubal was already there as she came in, talking with Scavian; Mallen brought Brocky in almost on her heels.

‘What’s the score?’ Tubal asked her, but she knew she would have to be as careful in the reporting as Doctor Lam had been in the speaking.

‘Someone get us some wine out, will you?’ she asked. ‘Let’s do this properly.’

‘Wine? And cards?’ asked Brocky.

‘Just wine.’

‘That bad, is it?’ Brocky, having just descended into his precious chair, levered himself out of it again. ‘My shout, I think.’

‘Em . . .’ Tubal started, but she upheld a hand for quiet.

‘When the wine comes. This isn’t going to be easy, Tubal. It’s big, really big. None of us had any idea, if it’s true.’

Brocky came out with the glasses, laying them out as ceremoniously as a waiter, before slumping back into his chair.

And after just a sip to fortify her, she told them. She gave them Doctor Lam’s words and his offer, as accurately as her memory could provide. The fate of Locke and the fate of Lascanne; the perilous position they were all now in. If it was true – always if it was true.

God, dear God, let it be a trick. Even if that means we are trapped, and fall, let it still be a trick. Oh, my poor country.

After she had finished, a dead silence reigned for a long time, stilling each tongue with a chill hand. She glanced from one face to the next, and all of them looked stunned by it. It had ripped out the heart of them. Even Mallen’s tattoos could not hide the scale of his feelings.

‘It’s a lie.’ Scavian was the first to speak. ‘I can’t believe it. Lose the Couchant? It’s impossible.’

‘Little enough’s impossible,’ Mallen said, staring at his hands.

‘But the Couchant front!’ insisted Scavian. ‘The passes and the plains – everyone knows our cavalry is superior. The only reason we’ve been bogged down here is because you can’t use cavalry in a swamp. I refuse to believe a word of it.’

‘Mallen? How about you? Have your scouts picked up anything?’ said Tubal.

‘What scouts?’ Mallen asked. ‘Few enough left. Can’t get out, these days. Denlander sharpshooters all over. Could be true, for all I’d know.’

Tubal gritted his teeth and looked to Emily. ‘You spoke with the man.’

‘I don’t claim to be an expert in telling truth from falsehood, but he sounded . . . convincing. He wants the war to end, and not to lose any more of his men. It could be true. It could be false.’

‘So we’re left with his deal,’ Brocky summarized. ‘Let’s all go on holiday to Locke to see what the Denlanders have done with the place. If it’s true. If it’s not just an ambush.’

‘What would they gain from an ambush? A handful less of us to fight. There must be more to it than that,’ she told them. ‘But what?’

‘And you agreed to go and have a look,’ Tubal noted.

‘I’ll go alone, if you want me to, but . . .’

‘But?’

‘I asked for them to send a cart here from Locke.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘It’ll be more proof, in a way, but mainly it’s so you can go, if you wanted to see for yourself. See if it’s true.’

‘It isn’t true!’ Scavian insisted.

‘Giles, please.’ She touched his hand across the table. He was flushed, angry. His skin felt feverishly hot. ‘If it is true, then Tubal will be the one to make the final decision. He has rank.’

‘I don’t want it,’ Tubal said wretchedly. ‘I never wanted command. I just wanted not to have to dig latrines. What damned fate put me in charge? Who’d ever have me as an officer?’

‘You’re the first I’ve had that I liked,’ Mallen told him, and Tubal flashed him a painful smile.

‘I will not make this decision on my own,’ he declared, nonetheless. An odd look came into his eyes. ‘Today has gone mad – can we agree on that? What’s normal for any time and place has been suspended. Motley reigns supreme right now. We have an invitation that must be a trap, we have a story about ending the war, only now we don’t want it to end. The world is mad, and us with it. I have a toast, gentlemen.’

‘Toast your toast,’ Brocky invited.

‘To the sights of Locke. Who’ll drink with me?’

‘You’re not seriously considering putting yourself in such danger?’ Scavian demanded.

‘Oh, I am, Scavvers. I won’t let Emily carry this burden on her own, as she has so often before. I intend to review the troops like a good commanding officer. What matter if they be enemy troops?’

‘Well, then.’ Scavian raised his glass. ‘In that case you can have no objection to my coming along with the two of you. If your life is cheap as coloured glass, then why the devil not mine?’ His eyes sought Emily’s across the table. ‘What better company could a man ask for?’

‘Survivors together,’ Mallen said. ‘Made it this far, so why not?’ His glass came up as well. ‘We’ve had some fine times, here. Kept us all together, this hut, the Club. Why not all of us together, at the last?’

‘You are all lunatics,’ Brocky grumbled. ‘Listen to yourselves. This isn’t some . . . grand adventure.’ He stared at his half-empty glass upon the table. ‘The last time I did something mad like this, I got shot.’ He caught himself on that last word, and Emily knew he was thinking of Marie Angelline. She thought that it must have been her memory, what she would have done, that inspired him in the end, for he never was a man of courage. His hand was still shaking as he raised his own glass.

‘To the sights of bloody Locke, be they ever so fine,’ he said. And, as they all raised to drink: ‘You’ve been a bad bloody bunch to fall in with, you bastards, but I’ll not regret it.’ He blinked rapidly. ‘I couldn’t have asked for better.’

They emptied their glasses as though they had all the time in the world. It was a good vintage Brocky had picked; his best, Emily suspected. Something he had been saving.

‘We’ve come a long way whilst going nowhere, haven’t we?’ Tubal said at last.

‘That we have,’ agreed Mallen.

‘And few enough left on the road with us,’ Scavian added.

‘If this is the end, at least we’ll be in good company,’ said Tubal, agreeing with him. ‘Do you think I’ll get my leg back, after I die?’

‘You’re dying as a soldier, man,’ Brocky reminded him. ‘It’ll depend what they’ve got in stores. You’ll probably get some other bugger’s leg.’ He laughed, and they all joined in, more for the release of it than for the humour.

So many, Emily thought, thinking over the roll call of the dead. So many she could not name; so many she could. The colonel, who had died in her arms. Justin Lascari the Warlock, and Master Sergeant Sharkey, attempted rapists both, and consigned to their unquiet graves. Captain Goss, whose living nightmare was finally over. Her dear friend Elise, dead on their first day into the swamps, and beautiful Marie Angelline the brave, the inspiring, whom Brocky had loved, and who had loved him in return, despite his vices.

Rodric. Her brother, still a red-jacketed figure in her mind as he left Grammaine, his death coming as a word from Mr Northway, with no further image and no stone.

And perhaps it would be her turn now and she would die in some Denlander trap. But it would be with her friends and, really, what more could a soldier ask for?

And a cart turned up, from the south, as requested. A cart with a Denlander soldier seated on the driver’s board, but a Lascan military cart for all that.

*

‘God protect us,’ said Tubal, the man of strong churchgoing family. The others kept only a silence between them, just watching and absorbing the enormity of what they saw when they looked upon Locke.

It was the end. The end of everything.

Doctor Lam had come with them, hiking alongside the cart with a handful of his men. When Emily turned to glance at him, she thought she saw a trace of sadness even as he looked upon the site of his victory. He caught her eye and smiled, but there was no triumph in it.

‘The march of progress, Lieutenant Marshwic,’ he said. ‘I am a man of progress, a scientist and an engineer, and yet I look upon this and I ask: what has this war made of us all? My country will never again be the place it was, and no more will yours. Who is the winner, then?’

Locke was bustling. The handful of buildings that had been the original town, first swamped by the military apparatus of Lascanne, was now merely a pinpoint in a field of grey. Ranks of grey tents stood on every side, as though they had been sown in the spring and only now sprouted. Men in grey uniforms drilled, or sat about fires, or arrived or left. A locomotive stood at the station, smoking and steaming, and Emily saw files of Denland soldiers waiting to embark, waiting to advance the war into Lascanne. There were thousands of them – perhaps three thousand or more. These could only be veterans of the Couchant front.

She saw Lascanne soldiers, too, disarmed and under guard: more veterans of the Couchant but on the losing side. She hoped that there were others, more than she could now see. How great had been the carnage there, at the end?

‘What the devil is that?’ Brocky demanded. Coming in down the Couchant road was a . . . thing. A traction engine, Emily realized belatedly, rumbling and steaming as it rolled into Locke under its own power. Iron plates were bolted before it, and atop it was a cannon on a swivel mount, and soldiers with their ‘rifles’.

‘Quite the invention, is she not?’ Doctor Lam said. ‘I had a hand in designing them, before I came to the Levant, but it was not until early this year that they saw any proper use. Mobile artillery, our traction-guns. Lord above, but what we have made of the world!’

‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ Scavian decided.

‘That’s the problem with knowledge, young man,’ Doctor Lam told him. ‘You can’t put it away when you’ve no more use for it. We have them now, and who knows to what uses they will be put in the fullness of time.’ He rested a hand on the side of the cart, looking frankly at them all. ‘Now, is there doubt in your minds, any of you, as to the outcome of this war?’

‘What will happen to Lascanne?’ Scavian demanded. ‘What will you do with the King?’

‘We will capture Luthrian of Lascanne and put him on trial. There is no other way,’ Doctor Lam replied simply. Emily tensed as she felt Scavian twitch, and the heat came off him for a second, like a sudden burst of flame. His hands were balled into fists. She reached out to put a hand to his arm, but he caught it first in his own and, as he did, his fingers were cool again, hope draining from his face. He looked down at the assembled might of Denland, all those well-ordered men, those busy minds. Yes, he could kill Doctor Lam. Yes, he could kill a dozen of them, a hundred – but he could not make a difference.

His eyes met hers. For you, I live. She knew that, had he been alone here, then things would have gone differently.

‘I can’t believe it,’ was all he said finally. ‘It shouldn’t happen like this.’

‘What about Lascanne, Doctor?’ asked Tubal. ‘Are we slaves of Denland now? What of our homes, our families?’

A smile somewhat warmer lit up Doctor Lam’s features. ‘We keep no slaves in Denland, Captain – no more than you do in Lascanne. The Parliament will decide ultimately, but I have a voice in it and I know what must be done. The war has all but destroyed us both. So many men dead – and women too! Harvests wasted, skills lost. Any man that will go back to his home in peace and take up where he left off will be free to do so.’

‘Denlander soldiers in the marketplaces, garrisons in all the towns,’ Brocky rumbled.

‘No doubt,’ Doctor Lam agreed. ‘For we must have peace, and you Lascans are such a volatile breed that, left to yourselves, you might find a return to war easier than the effort of rebuilding. There are those, among my countrymen, who say we should just pillage from Lascanne all we need to rebuild Denland, but thus far they are a minority. Those of us with wider vision can see that our nations must rise together, live together – as we always have. To impose an iron fist on Lascanne now is merely to invite strife and rebellion in a generation’s time. This war was madness, however it started. It must never be repeated.’

Tubal glanced around at his fellows there in the cart. ‘I almost believe you, Doctor Lam.’

‘I believe him,’ said Mallen. It was the first time he had spoken since they started out for Locke, and now he had their full attention.

‘I know you keep your promises,’ he told Doctor Lam. ‘I’ve got you to thank that the indigenes weren’t dragged in; that the peace was kept with them. Clever, you Denlanders: you use anything that comes your way, but never the autochthons. I understand you: you keep your promises.’

‘I did my best,’ agreed the old man. ‘Who knows, we might have forced them to serve us, but . . . I can find it in me to be glad that our madness has not infected them. I am . . . fond of them in my way. You are the one called Mallen?’

Mallen nodded guardedly.

‘My men are terrified of you. You are the killing ghost that walks abroad on dark nights. If a man is missing, it is Mallen’s doing. But I read some of your writing, when I prepared myself for this task. So perhaps we understand each other.’

‘So do we surrender now?’ Emily asked. Scavian looked away bitterly but merely shrugged. ‘What happens?’

‘Doctor Lammegeier,’ said Tubal. ‘As acting commander of the army of Lascanne in the Levant, I hereby formally offer the surrender of my men and position, on the condition we are treated well and are not harmed.’

29.

Emily studied the creased and folded sheets of paper in her hands: her abortive, undelivered words to Cristan Northway.

The thought that in two days, three, she might see him again, made her feel exceedingly strange, more ill at ease than excited. She took the sheets between both hands, ready to tear them up.

But you haven’t seen him yet. She relaxed her pressure, folded them again and slipped them into her inside jacket pocket.

The air was clouded with steam. Alongside the station at Locke, a locomotive was waiting, its carriages filling with dejected and defeated Lascanne soldiers. Still, they were going home. The enemy had provided a deliverance that their own side could not. Some still wore their red jackets, as Emily herself did. Many were down to shirtsleeves, or even civilian clothes looted from Locke. The Denlanders had confiscated all the muskets, but some officers still wore their sabres. Emily still retained her pistol, her metal companion all through this bleak war.

Denlander soldiers watched over them, ready for any kind of resistance from the fiery, violent Lascans, but there was no rebellion in the air, only the steam of the train due to take them home. The fight was gone from them.

Even so, Emily could tell her own Levant men and women from those who had fought at the Couchant. Their heads were held higher; their stance suggested yet a touch of pride. They stood like soldiers, not prisoners, and she was glad for that. They were the undefeated ones. The war had washed past and over them, and they had held firm. They had only ceased the fight when there was nothing left to fight for, after their brothers and sisters at the Couchant had buckled and broken. She was grateful – more grateful than she could say – that Doctor Lam had left them with that much dignity.

There was a scattering of navy men too, put ashore by Denlander ships who had hauled them out of the water. Emily understood that the sea war was still dragging itself out, with the Denlander fleet scouring the seas. The surviving warships of Lascanne had scattered or taken refuge in the ports of foreign lands still ruled by kings.

News of home: she was filled with it today. Doctor Lam himself had sought her out in the impromptu prisoner-of-war camp the Denlanders had set up for their defeated enemies. She had felt strange: was she truly meeting him in peacetime, and with nothing more to fear from him? They had shared a glass of brandy during a few minutes of conversation. He had told her of how the home front was going.

‘They do not fight,’ he explained. ‘Our men push deep into Lascanne, and they are almost unopposed. A few local pockets of resistance, nothing more.’

‘I don’t think there’s anyone left to fight them,’ Emily confessed.

‘No doubt,’ he agreed. ‘But I had feared for the worst: children, women, old men, even babes being put under arms by your King.’

‘And what of the King?’ She recalled that golden man at Deerlings House, who had danced with her, and still felt the echo of what had thrilled through her then. Some feelings are hard to forget.

‘He has fled, they say,’ Doctor Lam replied. ‘The capital is taken and the streets were almost bare. The palace is staffed by our men now, but the King has fled along with some few of his supporters. We will find him.’

‘No doubt,’ she had conceded, but was left wondering.

Now the train beckoned her. She would leave Doctor Lam behind and see what might be pieced together of her home and her past. Grammaine. What would it look like, now? Would she recognize it? And her family and the servants? Or would it all seem as strange as a fever dream, after the swamps of the Levant?

‘Tubal,’ she said, ‘do you want a hand up?’

‘I’ll manage.’ He levered himself upright, stubbornly. The other three were a little way further down the platform, and Emily matched Tubal’s pace as they rejoined them. Brocky was the only one who wore a smile. Scavian’s frown had stuck itself on his face the day they surrendered, and had never healed.

‘How far do we go together?’ Brocky asked.

‘Five stops, I think. Then Em and I have to change for Chalcaster.’

‘Giles?’ Emily said, breaking him from his distracted, unhappy mood for a moment.

‘I . . . you invited me to Grammaine, a long time ago now it seems. If that invitation is still open I will take it . . .’

‘Of course it is. Please—’

‘I have to see my family first. I have to see what’s left,’ he continued. ‘I hope . . . I think they may have fought when the Denlanders came. It would be the proper thing to do. The brave and noble thing to do. The thing my family has always done.’ He clenched his fists. ‘But I hope that, this once, they turned their backs on tradition.’

‘Come soon,’ she urged him.

‘As soon as I can.’

‘Enough time for partings later,’ Brocky insisted. ‘Let’s get ourselves underway. Come on.’

‘Time for partings now,’ Mallen pointed out.

‘You’re not staying here, surely?’ Brocky was genuinely surprised.

Mallen’s expression remained perennially unreadable. ‘This is where I live, Brocky. My home. Where else?’

‘But . . .’ Brocky grinned incredulously. ‘I couldn’t stay another day anywhere near those swamps, and I hardly saw the inside of them, anyway. I mean . . . come on, Mallen.’

‘Home.’ Mallen shrugged. ‘The swamps are home for me. I love them. Nowhere I’d rather be.’

And his woman, his Denlander love, she’ll come looking for him there, Emily knew. ‘I’m going to miss you, Mallen. You saved my life more times than I can remember.’

‘The backbone of the company,’ Tubal agreed. ‘Hell, man, at least come visit sometime. I . . . don’t think I could visit you. For a number of reasons.’

‘You’re always welcome in Grammaine.’ Emily wondered what Alice might make of the lean and tattooed Daffed Mallen, and she smiled involuntarily.

Mallen nodded. ‘Maybe.’ He clasped Brocky’s hand, and then Tubal’s. ‘Hope everything’s where you left it when you get back. Hope the peace lasts. God knows, we need it.’ He took Scavian’s hand. ‘Don’t do anything mad.’

The Warlock smiled sadly. ‘They say our days of madness are over. I’ll believe that when I see it.’

The hand of Mallen went out to Emily next, but she was suddenly struck by the realization that she did not need to be a soldier, not any more. She was free to rediscover the threads of her civilian life. Impulsively she hugged herself to Mallen’s chest.

‘You look after yourself,’ she told him. ‘You never know, we might need you to look after us again, sometime.’

*

The train was full of soldiers, packed in shoulder to shoulder. Many of the carriages had been converted from stock cars, by which side Emily did not know. The four of them ended up sitting on a splintery wooden floor, their backs against a wall, in a carriage crammed with other soldiers and their meagre possessions.

There was little conversation at first. Everyone was waiting to see if the Denlanders would change their mind. How easy it would be, arose the thought, for them to stand at the carriage entrance with guns, and shoot us all. She saw the same thought written on other faces. Those practical-minded Denlanders would be capable of just such an act. Without malice, and even with regret, but they would do it if they felt it necessary.

There was an audible sigh of relief as the train started moving, but it was not until several hours had passed, and the first stop had been reached, that people began to loosen up. A handful of men and a woman got out there, with a look in their eyes that Emily would never forget. She saw a kind of blinking, stunned stare. Home, that look said. As they squinted out into the daylight, it was home they saw, and it transformed them.

Emily wondered whether her own face would acquire such a look, or had she been in too deep, and for too long? Had she been spoiled for life’s ordinary happinesses?

After that, a little idle conversation spread about the carriage, in the extra space left by those who had disembarked. Brocky started a card game on the wooden floor and he set about winning some small change, while Tubal closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She was left with Scavian leaning up against her. He had not said a word since they had left Mallen behind, just stared up at the slatted ceiling.

‘Will you manage?’ she asked him.

‘God alone knows,’ he said. ‘However did it come to this, Emily?’

‘It could be worse,’ she replied with some force. ‘You could be dead. I could be dead. They might not have let us surrender at the end. They might have wanted to make an example of us. Ask yourself, what would we ourselves have done, on the brink of victory, with one camp of Denlanders still defying us?’

‘We would have treated them honourably,’ he said stubbornly. ‘We’re not monsters. We’re better than them.’

And Emily held her peace, knowing that to speak her mind truly would be to provoke him. He let the silence sink in and then added reluctantly, ‘But it could have been worse, in truth.’

Just before one stop, a familiar slender figure bustled from the crowd and crouched down before her: Caxton, with the third crown for her master sergeant rank sewn newly onto her jacket. Bear Sejant had needed one, after all, and Tubal had made this his final act as commander of the Levant, before setting out on the cart ride into Locke.

‘Lieutenant,’ the woman addressed Emily.

‘Call me Emily.’ A weak smile. ‘I’m thinking of quitting this soldiering business.’

‘Emily.’ Caxton stumbled over the unfamiliar name. ‘I . . . This is my home town coming up and I just wanted to say thank you. For being there for all of us. You were a . . . a damn fine officer . . . Emily. I don’t think I could have lasted without you.’

‘You lasted because you were able to,’ Emily told her, frowning. ‘I only . . . I was nothing special.’

‘I only know that I was scared to death the whole time, and it was you that got me through,’ Caxton said. ‘I’m not the only one. We all think so – all of us in Rabbit.’

Emily didn’t quite know what to say. ‘Well . . . thank you. I . . . That’s quite something to think about, Caxton.’

‘Ruth, please.’

‘Ruth,’ Emily confirmed. ‘You were a good second. I should tell you that. I knew I could rely on you.’ The train had shuddered to a halt by then, soldiers already lining up to step out. ‘Back to tailoring, is it?’

‘To whatever needs doing,’ Ruth Caxton said. ‘A lot of things got left unfinished when the draft came through. Someone still has to do them.’

And she left, with Emily concluding that this was a different woman, a wholly different woman, from the pale conscript she had first known.

Five stops along the line, she helped Tubal off onto some tiny station platform, some little village she never knew the name of. Brocky and Scavian were continuing on, but Tubal and Emily would be catching the Chalcaster train from here.

‘For my part, I’m bloody glad it’s over. I’ll be putting it all behind me. There’ll be work for a skilled dispenser,’ Brocky explained. ‘Damn and bugger the soldiering lark, I say.’

‘Good luck, Brocky,’ said Tubal.

‘And am I welcome at Grammy, or whatever the place is called? Only everyone else has had an invitation.’

‘Of course you are,’ Emily assured him.

‘Not that I’ll come. Far too busy, you’ll see.’ He shook both of their hands briefly, obviously feeling awkward, and withdrew back into the carriage, leaving Scavian alone in the doorway. They could hear the train stoking up, ready to move.

‘Be well, Giles,’ she told him. ‘Come visit soon. And don’t worry, I’ll – we’ll be there if you need us.’

Scavian smiled, but it was one of pain. ‘This isn’t over, Emily, I can feel it. There is worse, worse to come.’ He embraced her, hugged her tightly to him, and she put her arms about him, seeking his strength and warmth. Neither wanted to be the first to let go. It was only when the carriage floor shuddered under his feet that he allowed himself to loosen his grip, and even when the train moved off they touched hands until he was pulled away.

‘You could do worse,’ Tubal told her, smiling at first, but then he saw her face, and hopped forward to hold her close, crutches bundled awkwardly between them.

They sat there on the platform for what seemed the best part of an afternoon. Emily eventually found someone willing to sell them some hard bread and cheese, but at prices that did not bode well for the future. Then they sat gnawing reflectively, along with the two hundred or so other soldiers in the same position.

Eventually the next train hauled itself in and they embarked, tired and homesick, and caught between worlds.

*

That night, as Tubal managed an uneasy sleep, Emily went looking for other insomniacs. How like the journey to the front, she thought. The nervous energy that kept her from sleeping then had been fear of the war. What was it now? Fear of the peace? Of what she might find when she got home? She had received no word for a long time. Wars had been won and lost in the interim.

She found a band of soldiers playing cards and elbowed her way into their circle with a display of rank and assurance. She had wondered if, after Tubal, she held the highest rank on the train, but one of the men turned a major’s badge towards her along with his broken-toothed smile as he dealt her in.

She told them who she was, and the man’s eyebrows leapt up.

‘God, I’ve heard of you!’ he got out, his voice a little slurred through his ruined teeth. ‘You’re the one they couldn’t beat.’

She felt herself blushing for the first time in a long, long while. ‘It wasn’t like that. That’s just . . . the war overtook us, is all.’

‘That’s not what they say,’ the major replied. ‘Damn it, I heard this from the Denlanders themselves. They’ve no reason to build you up.’

I gave them a war that did not end in blood, she thought, but spared her companions the details, only shrugging and deflecting them with, ‘You’re from the Couchant?’

‘For the most part. A couple of the support from Locke, but that’s the size of it.’

‘May I ask . . . ?’ She didn’t know how to ask the question. It had hung about her since Doctor Lam had emerged from the trees with his flag of truce, but now it choked her. The major nodded, though, and clearly understood.

‘You want to know what happened? What went wrong? You’ve a right to ask that, I think.’

And, as they played hand after hand of cards with no real tally of gains or losses, she heard about the fall of the Couchant front and how the Denlanders had won the war. The major recounted how the Lascanne army had thrust into the heart of Denland during the first month of the conflict, only to overextend and meet furious resistance on all sides. She heard how the Denlanders had simply not fought as soldiers were supposed to, using all sorts of dishonourable measures to slow the advance, and then turn it back. Then the war had separated into its two fronts. On the Couchant the army of Lascanne had regrouped and gone on the offensive once again. Superior in numbers, they had advanced at a snail’s pace, being ambushed at every canyon, beset by sharpshooters, mines and traps, so that by the end of two years of fighting they had still not quite regained the Denland border.

And then the war had changed, for the Denlanders had brought in their new inventions. They had hauled in more artillery, of improved design. They had brought in their rifles, too: that simple idea that had revolutionized the war for them. From a grudging retreat they began to retake ground. The Lascanne soldiers were cut down at range, before they could even get close enough to fire, and when the Denlanders melted away before their charge, it was only leading to an ambush of more riflemen.

And it became clear to Emily that in the Levant they had been blessed. The swamps, the cloudy air and tangled trees, those were no gunner’s ideal ground. Instead, there had always been the close engagements, when the Denlanders had broken and run rather than stand. The open spaces of the Couchant front were a gift for the cavalry charge that Lascanne was so proud of, but they were an even greater gift for a steady rifleman. The Couchant army of Lascanne, the great hope of the nation, had been steadily cut away by a Denlander force one-third of its size.

In the end, the Lascanne soldiers had been ordered to take on the Denlanders in one final great battle, rather than lose man after man to the nipping teeth of the Denland rifles. They had come together in one great host – in numbers that made the whole Levant front seem trivial: a huge hammer intent on cracking the far smaller nut that was the Denlander army of the Couchant.

The major himself told her about what the Denlanders were calling the ‘Golden Minute’. It had taken place on what had been, for all purposes, the last day of the war. The Lascanne forces had spread themselves out on a plain of the Couchant, advancing forward into the Denlander artillery, into the thunder of their fixed guns and their horse-drawn guns, and the terrible, rumbling traction-artillery that ground their way about the field like monstrous beetles, musket balls springing uselessly off their armoured plates. The Lascanne advance had begun to falter, and it had been Lord Deerling himself who had ordered the Lascanne cavalry, every mounted man available, to break up the Denland firing line and charge their big guns.

It had been a glorious sight, the major recounted, with a tear in his eye. Nigh on a thousand men on horse, every last steed saddled and ridden, and they had arrayed themselves in perfect order before the infantry. Lord Deerling, on the lead mount, had given the order and they had set off at a leisurely canter, to start with. How fearsome they must have seemed to the Denlanders, all flashing cuirasses and helms, lances and sabres and horse-pistols. With the dignity of princes, they had advanced towards the enemy lines.

The major said that, through his glass, he had personally seen Lord Deerling’s sabre raised to signal the charge. Then the old man was shot from his saddle, at a range quite incredible. The cavalry had taken that cue to pick up speed, though – to build momentum and thunder down upon the Denlanders, till the dust had risen high and the ground had trembled. The Denlanders, from all accounts, had bunched themselves close, and they had looked frightened and ready to break.

But they had not broken. They fired and fired again, twin lines kneeling and standing, then letting the next pair of lines advance into place ahead of them. The hammer of rifle shot into the charging horsemen was almost continuous, whilst here and there, across the mass of galloping riders, the plumes of cannon shell burst and scattered the carcasses of men and horses alike.

The major could not tell for sure if the charge had slowed, or if it was just that the front ranks of riders were being scorched away so fast that it merely seemed so. For the Denlanders had held firm, and just fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded. They had gone on slaughtering men and slaughtering their mounts until dust was all that moved in the air, and not one man, not one mount of all the cream of the Lascanne army was left standing.

And through it all, the Denlanders had not paused in their advance, rank after rank, nor did they pause even when the riders had fallen, but still moved forward as inexorably as a press or a mill, as steadily as the rumbling traction-guns that crushed dead and wounded beneath their massive wheels while they lurched towards the soldiers of Lascanne.

There had been, the major said offhand, some other fighting that day. From his face Emily guessed at a hard-fought struggle, a desperate attempt to hold the foe at bay on open ground, before those withering guns. He dismissed it, though, and laughed off his own efforts, merely remarking that the day had been lost from the moment the last horse died.

And Emily knew in her heart that the Denlanders called it the Golden Minute, not in honour of the doomed splendour of the cavalry but for the discipline of their own advance into the teeth of Lascanne. They were celebrating the orderly firing advance of their shopkeepers and clerks and tradesmen, which had destroyed the finest professional soldiers of the age.

Towards dawn she encountered a navy man and listened to his story, too: his wild tales of Denlander ships clad in iron, of Denlander ships driven by engines against the wind. He was a sailor, though, and, knowing his type, she did not know whether to believe him.

*

And the time came when the station the train slowed for was Chalcaster, and at last she had come full circle. She had helped Tubal down, but it became obvious that he was in no position to walk to Grammaine, or even to his printer’s shop in town, and there was no cart or wagon to be had.

‘I’ll go to Grammaine and get Grant to fetch you,’ she decided, and then smiled despite herself, because it was the old Emily speaking, who she had thought was lost. ‘No, I’ll come and fetch you myself.’

The thought then came to her that she could far more easily seek out Mr Northway in his offices, and call on him for whatever aid she wished, but Scavian was still in her mind, like a bright fire. She did not want to have to lie to Cristan Northway, certainly not as her first action back home from the war front. And to stand before him now, and make no mention of ‘Giles Scavian’, would be a lie in all but name.

As she left the station, she looked back, and immediately wished she had not. The soldiers stepping off the train were so few compared to those who had set out from this same station. She suffered the sight of a great crowd of mothers, children, grandparents and sisters all pushing forward, past and around her, anxious for a glimpse of one familiar face amongst the new arrivals. All too often they did not find it, and she was prompted to think about Doctor Lammegeier’s words, his sadness concerning the future of both nations after the war’s close. So many had died, on both sides. Lascanne and Denland must lean on each other or fall, he had predicted.

When she had still been a lady of leisure, she would never have even thought of walking all the way to Chalcaster. The miles of rutted roads, the disdain of those riding past, why, no lady would ever consider such a demeaning practice.

When she had been fresh from Gravenfield, she and Elise had made this walk, from Chalcaster to Grammaine, and it had seemed a bit of fun, an adventure, a bold way of showing off her new uniform and her new status.

Now she faced the miles stoically, and covered them with a soldier’s steady, metronomic pace, and she did not think about the journey itself, only the destination. The summer sun was strong above her, but she would call nothing hot now, save the steaming of the swamps. She bore it all without thought or complaint.

So she slogged along the road, and then the narrower track, seldom looking much ahead of her. She felt oddly unbalanced, shorn of something, and only when the gate of Grammaine was in sight did she realize that it was the comforting weight of her musket that she missed.

First the gate, and up the hill beyond it was the house. Grammaine’s grounds were modest: once she reached that gate, there was no hiding from the house itself. It overlooked everything. The sight of it struck her: the sheer nostalgia of it. How small it seemed! How long ago it was, half a year and yet forever, since she had last laid eyes upon it. The fear she had experienced in the war was nothing to this moment. What if the door should open and some strange face look out at her? Was her family still there, or had some bandit king or Denlander conqueror seized it as his residence? What if it has all changed? This place had been her rock, her anchor in the storm. What if it had not held, but shifted, as everything else had shifted. Where could she go, if not here?

There are always other options: Giles; Mr Northway . . . Think like a soldier, woman! Stop fretting and go find out.

She passed through the gate and made for the house, looking for signs of life and feeling oddly like a scout approaching enemy ground.

In the yard she paused, seeking some movement in the windows, but there was none. Her heart had already begun to fail her. She was not sure she dared discover what had happened here since she had left. Her hand sought out the pistol at her belt, and she wished she had loaded it.

Then a face at an upstairs window, looking down on her, in just a pale flash. She began to raise a hand and wave, but it was already gone. It might have been Jenna, the maid, though she could not swear to it. She gathered up her courage as best as she could, and made for the door.

‘Stop right there!’ bellowed a man from the stables. ‘You just hold there, soldier! Put your hands up where I can see them, and all.’

She stopped dead, but she was smiling and tears pricked at her eyes. She knew that voice, and knew therefore that she was home. She turned carefully, hands extended, and looked towards the burly old man advancing from the stable block with a musket in his hands.

‘Right, now,’ he said. ‘You give me your business here . . .’ and he tailed off into speechless wonder.

‘Hello, Grant,’ she said.

‘God bless me,’ he said, lowering the musket in such a way that she knew it had not been loaded. ‘Miss Emily, it’s not you?’ His eyes passed back and forth across her face, seeing the bruises, the lines of pain and strain that the war had put on her.

‘Hello, Grant,’ she said again, voice trembling. He was so much as she remembered that it was unbearable to simply stand and look at him. She found herself running over to him, throwing her arms about him and just holding him, feeling his strong, supporting embrace about her. ‘I’m back,’ she whispered. ‘I’m back.’

‘Steady now,’ he said, and then added the ‘Lieutenant’ after a glance at her shoulder. ‘We never knew you were coming back. Is that the end of it then, ma’am?’

‘Oh, I hope so,’ she said, heartfelt. ‘Listen, Grant, Tubal’s still at the station. I have to go back for him.’

‘Oh, no, ma’am. That’s my job. You need to see your sisters now, and they need to see you. I’ll go fetch Mr Salander.’ He let go of her, shaking his head as he gazed at her again. ‘Soon have everything back to normal.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Not ever again. Tubal will need the buggy, Grant, not just a horse.’

‘Is that right, ma’am?’ There was a wisdom in Grant’s nod that told her he understood what she meant. ‘I’ll harness it up right away.’

Heading back into the stables, he left her at the kitchen door and, after a moment’s hesitation, she knocked. She did not feel equal to simply walking into the place that had once been her home.

It was Jenna who came to the door, staring at her blankly until Emily smiled. Then the girl shrieked with surprise and ran off into the house, leaving Emily to step in like a tinker and glance about at the kitchen, noticing how little food there was, but how Cook had kept it neat all this time. Feeling unutterably weary, she sat down heavily at the table and waited, dumping her helmet and the pistol before her.

She heard footsteps on the stairs, not jubilant but cautious, and did not look up until a shadow fell across her.

‘Hello, Alice,’ she said.

Her sister stood wide-eyed, open-mouthed, a woman who has just seen the dead come back to life.

‘Emily? Emily? But we heard . . . the war . . . we thought you all must have died!’

‘You’re always so melodramatic.’ Emily tried a weak smile. ‘Some of us got out.’ And some of us did not.

‘Did you escape the Denlanders? Are you on the run?’

Emily did not know whether to laugh or cry. ‘We surrendered, Alice. Does that disappoint you?’

‘But . . . we thought they’d kill everyone . . .’

The politics, the details, Doctor Lam’s philosophy, it was all far too much to explain, and she found that she had no energy left to even begin. ‘I’m here, Alice. They let me come home. I suppose they’re not as bad as you’ve heard, when it comes down to it. Let that be enough.’

‘You . . . you look terrible,’ said Alice. ‘You’ll have to grow your hair back.’

Emily coughed out some incredulous laughter. ‘Alice, I’m back from the damned war and you’re complaining about my hair?’

Alice pursed her lips. ‘Well, it does need looking after. Have you brought . . . a man back, from the war? A soldier . . . ? Why are you laughing at me?’

‘Because you haven’t changed.’ Emily levered herself up from the table then, hearing footsteps.

Mary came in, with Jenna crowding behind, and stopped dead. She looked so much older than Emily remembered, so much more worn. It had been hard on her, all this time, even though she had stayed at home. ‘You’re . . . alone,’ she whispered.

‘He lives, Mary,’ Emily told her. ‘Grant’s gone to fetch him. He’s . . . hurt.’

‘Oh, God, as long as he’s alive, I don’t care,’ Mary burst out, and was in Emily’s arms the next second, hugging her tight. ‘We’d given up hope. We’d given up hope for either of you. Oh, God, I thought I was a widow, Emily! I thought I’d lost you and Tubal, as well as poor Rodric.’

And Emily held her, and wondered how many other families were having such tearful reunions today, and how many men and women would be at the train station, waiting, waiting, until there were no more soldiers to come, and no more trains, and they had still not seen the face they sought.

*

She slept until noon the next day, and was still weary when she awoke. Opening her eyes, she at first could not work out where she was. What was this room, this sunlight, this bed? Where were the cramped confines of her tent? Where were the sounds of the camp, and the smell of rot drifting off the swamps? When Jenna opened the door, she jumped, scrabbling for a gun that was not there.

‘Miss, are you all right, miss?’ the maid asked nervously, for the look on Emily’s face had taken her aback.

‘I’m . . . I’m sorry, Jenna. I overslept.’

‘Mrs Salander said you should be left to sleep as long as you wished, miss,’ Jenna explained. ‘Only . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s a gentleman here to see you, miss, if you wanted to rise. Otherwise I can tell him to go away, if you want.’

‘A . . . Is it a Denlander?’ Where’s the pistol? Don’t tell me I left it in the kitchen. No, there was the hilt of it, protruding from beneath her crumpled jacket.

‘No, miss. It’s Mr Northway, from Chalcaster. Shall I tell him you can’t see him?’

Mr Northway, the same name that had dogged her family, had ruined her father, had once tormented her. That ill-omened name she had come to hate, before. The name at the foot of so many letters clandestinely delivered, secretly read. The only words from home, the repository for her hidden thoughts, the name that had been custodian of her sanity in the madness that had been the war. Oh, God, what can I say to Mr Northway? What on earth will I say?

She found her heart beating even faster than it had when she was fighting. She repeated his name to herself, and it brought no memories of his well-ordered office in Chalcaster. Just as the smell of cordite would forever mean only the war for her, washed of its association with her father’s death, so his name took her to the front, and the moments she had been given to read his letters. His name brought to mind that he, selfish and corrupt, had taken to breaking laws on her account, not on his own; that he, avaricious as he was, had promised money for her rescue when she had gone astray. What kind of man had she brought out that had been so well hidden within his drab clothes?

For such a long time she had touched him only by messenger. Now here he was and she had not the first idea of what she might say.

And Jenna was offering to send him away.

‘Miss?’

‘Don’t . . . I’ll see him. Have him wait in the drawing room.’

After Jenna had left, Emily felt her heart skip, nervous as a young girl.

30.

In the end, after deliberating over her old wardrobe, holding dresses up to the light and wondering how it would feel to wear one after all this time, she had Jenna bring her some of Tubal’s clothes. She felt that she needed the freedom of movement. Today was not a day to feel constrained.

And, after all, what do the clothes matter? She had worn the uniform of both armies in her day.

She met Alice coming down the stairs.

‘You’ve heard who’s here?’ she said. ‘That wretched man.’

‘It’s all right, Alice. I don’t mind seeing him.’

‘You always did want to argue with him. I can’t count the number of times you rode off to Chalcaster in high dudgeon, to give him a piece of your mind. Will you speak sharply to him this time, do you think? Could I watch?’

‘Alice, please . . .’

‘He has been here a dozen times since you left, oiling his way around Mary, trying to pretend he’s not a villain. He’s brought us food, as though we can’t make do for ourselves. He even brought a dress for me, when there were none in all the shops in Chalcaster. But I don’t care if I had nothing but my undergarments, I’d never wear anything of his. He’s been trying to buy our gratitude like some petty merchant.’

‘Then perhaps we should be grateful,’ Emily snapped, before she could stop herself. Alice halted at the foot of the stairs, looking hurt.

‘But Emily, he’s Mr Northway.’ She put a world of dislike into those two syllables. ‘You know what he’s done to us – and who knows what other bad things he’s done that we haven’t heard about. And, anyway, you must know what he is become now.’

Emily paused with her hand on the drawing room door. ‘No, Alice. What is he now?’

‘The Governor of Chalcaster, of course!’ replied Alice, exasperated.

‘But he was always that, Alice.’

‘Yes, for the King! But now he’s governor for the Denlanders!’

Emily stared at her, the pieces falling into place, and found the smallest smile creeping onto her face at how little things had really changed, beneath the surface. How very like him: he always knew which way was up. I wonder when he offered them his services?

Mary was already present as she stepped into the drawing room. She hovered behind Northway’s chair as though intending to clean it as soon as he got up, and Emily knew she was attempting to make the man feel unwelcome. The acrid smell of his pipe drifted through the air, and he had settled back as comfortably as ever Brocky had in his old armchair, mockery and insolence evident in every line of him. When Emily entered, though, he sat up sharply, blinking at her through the pipe smoke.

Had he changed? Study him as she might, she could not tell. Still the same undertaker’s clothes, the piercing eyes, the broad and thin-lipped mouth, and an indoor pallor that would have made even Caxton look healthy. Perhaps there were more lines on his face, from having to play to more sides than he was used to. Perhaps there was a knowing look behind his eyes, at the written confidences the two of them had shared, and in which they were equally incriminated.

Looking on him, she felt a knot of emotions within her, but she could not untangle it. Was she glad to see him? Was she guilty for having lain with Giles Scavian? Was she angry that he had capitulated as easily as she had to the enemy?

‘Mr Northway,’ she said formally.

‘Miss Marshwic.’ He rose but did not move to take her hand. ‘And Miss Marshwic,’ he added, as Alice entered. The sharp glances from her two sisters pinned him like crossfire, Emily thought. The room was fraught with their disapproval.

‘I am delighted to see you back, hale and healthy, Miss Marshwic,’ Northway remarked, with one of his sardonic smiles. ‘My congratulations. I hear you have made quite a name for yourself. Midnight escapes and daring attacks, and the like.’

He wants the letters kept a secret, she realized. It suited her just as well.

‘That’s . . . kind of you to say, Mr Northway.’

An awkward pause developed, before Mary said, ‘You may have heard, Emily, that the governor confiscated the contents of Tubal’s shop. For the Crown, he claimed. What the Crown might want with paper and printers’ blanks is beyond me, but I think most tradesmen that return will find the same situation.’

Mr Northway seemed unconcerned. ‘Royal decrees, Mrs Salander, are not for a mere mayor-governor to argue with – as I am sure everyone in this room understands. Miss Marshwic . . .’ And for a moment, just a moment, the next words failed to come to him, leaving him openmouthed and exposed in the presence of his enemies. For how could he say anything of what he would need to say to her, here? His eyes sought out hers.

‘Mr Northway, it is apparent that much has happened in my absence that I might take issue with,’ Emily said. ‘I feel I ought to take you to task for many things, but I have been too active, and too much out in the weather, to relish doing so indoors. We have some few days left of summer, after all. Will you ride back to Chalcaster? I will ride with you, and we shall talk on the way. After all, your office in town has always provided the place for a reckoning before.’

Mary and Alice exchanged uncertain glances.

‘Emily, are you sure . . . ?’ Mary started.

‘Mary.’ Emily realized that the smile she turned on her sister was as tight-lipped and sharp as ever Northway’s had been. ‘You have already made it obvious that he is not welcome here. Well, then, he should not remain here longer to incur your displeasure. I will escort him back to Chalcaster. That should suffice.’

‘And make sure you get something out of him,’ Alice said, at her shoulder. ‘An apology.’

For what, Alice? How deep into history must I rake?

Mr Northway made a terse little bow to each of her sisters, his smile still in place, and then retrieved his hat from Poldry in the kitchen. ‘It has of course been a pleasure,’ he said to the closed-faced Mary. ‘Please give my regards to your husband, when you next see him.’

Outside in the yard, Emily beckoned Grant over.

‘Grant, would you saddle me a horse. I am to ride to Chalcaster with Mr Northway.’

The old man nodded, but as he went into the stables she followed him, leaving Northway alone to be gawped at from the house.

‘Grant, Mr Northway has been here many times, I understand?’

‘That he has, and we’ve milked him well, ma’am. Cheese, wine, bacon and salt beef, bread, fruit. Nobody in this house has felt a pinch of hunger.’ He heaved a saddle from the wall and approached her favourite mare.

‘And . . .’ She gritted her teeth. If she could not speak to Grant about it, what hope with the man himself? ‘Why has he done so, in your opinion?’

He laughed gruffly as he saddled the horse up. ‘Well, ma’am, what’re the army words for it? Permission to speak freely, Lieutenant?’

‘Always, Grant.’

‘He’s sweet on you, has been for years.’

‘I . . . suppose I knew that. Knew that since before I departed, anyway.’

‘He brought us word of you, too, whenever you sent it. We’ve not done bad by him, these last two seasons.’

‘What do you think of him, Grant?’

He turned to face her. ‘I served your father, you know.’

‘So you hate him too.’

‘I didn’t say that, ma’am. Permission to speak freely again, ma’am?’

‘I said always, Grant.’

‘Then you should know that your father wasn’t always pure white linen himself. Oh, Northway was always the darker villain, which was why the man’s done so well, but there was an ounce of the villain in your father, too. When you were very young, the pair of them were to be found in each other’s company more often than not, deep in some scheme or other, before they fell out. All hush-hush, but I saddled a fair few midnight horses for one or other of them. It was never all one way, with your father and Cristan Northway. And any woman could do worse than a man that’s rich and clever, and that has enough in him to make sure her family’s looked after when she’s away.’

‘Mary and Alice haven’t taken to him,’ Emily observed.

‘That they haven’t, ma’am, and it’s no place of mine to say a word against them. They have their reasons, which bite them sharper than mine bite me, it’s clear. But . . . they ate his food, ma’am. And they took his news when he brought it. You can’t have it both ways.’ He checked over the horse tack one last time. ‘Ready for you, ma’am.’

*

With Northway at her side, Emily rode out of Grammaine’s gate in silence. It had been a long while since she had the chance to ride, but she had lost none of the feel for it. She rode astride of course, like a man.

‘They don’t understand,’ she told him, once they were clear of Grammaine and its attitudes.

‘I don’t expect them to,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know. I feel as though I should be very angry with you, for working with the Denlanders.’ She raised a hand to forestall his reply. ‘But I know I have no right. When their Doctor Lammegeier came to Tubal and me and asked us to surrender, to save the lives of all the soldiers on both sides, what could either of us do? The only way that I could serve my country then was to abandon its service, so that its sons and daughters could get home.’

She glanced across at him, and his smile had abandoned mockery. It opened a window onto his soul.

‘I am . . . very glad to hear you say that,’ he confessed. ‘I am most profoundly glad that you surrendered in the end. If asked to place odds on your decision, I am not sure that I would have bet on that.’ He shook his head, and she realized how tired he must be of it all. ‘When the Denlanders stepped out at Chalcaster station – which was almost the first word we had that the war had been lost – they took the town with their soldiers, and everyone thought they would loot the place and shoot every man, woman and child. As Mayor-Governor, I waited in my office for the end to come. Instead, what arrived was a little bespectacled man, a clerk in a soldier’s clothes. He offered me my job, if only I would account to the Parliament of Denland instead of to the King. That way, he said, there would be the minimum of trouble: Denland would leave a skeleton garrison, and the country – or at least this part of it – would continue to plod on along its way with the minimum of disruption. They do love efficiency, these Denlanders. They took a look at my ledgers and were suitably impressed.’ He coughed out a dry laugh. ‘And I knew that, if I took his hand on it, Chalcaster and its surrounds would be spared whatever rod the Denlanders saved for more recalcitrant boroughs. At the same time, the Denlanders would be spared the time and expense of wielding it here, and in fact only one man would really lose out in this deal.’

‘And that would be you,’ she finished for him. ‘A whipping boy for the Denlanders and an arch-traitor for the people of Chalcaster. And yet you did it. Are you sure it was not just that you would be loath to vacate your office, with all its pleasures and profits?’

‘If any man has ever made such a momentous decision for one reason only, I am not aware of it,’ he replied. ‘Do you blame me, Emily?’

‘I do not,’ she admitted.

‘So.’ He reined his horse in to better look at her. ‘Here you are, back at last.’

‘And here you are, who has never lied to me in his life.’

‘You acknowledge that now?’

‘I do.’

She looked into his eyes, and a minute of silence stretched by between them, while the horses stamped and cropped at the grass edging the road.

‘How was the war, Emily?’ he said at last. His voice, speaking her name, grabbed at her. ‘Tell me, if you can. Tell me everything. You cannot conceive the scenes, the thoughts that have bedevilled me, since you left for the front. You cannot imagine how I have pored over every word you wrote, and how I have racked myself when no word came. Please, Emily, I have to know how it was.’

She swung herself out of the saddle and led her horse to one side of the road, confident that he was following.

‘Sit,’ she suggested. ‘Let us sit and feel the sun, and know that it is all over, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you more than you could ever want to hear about that damned war – and every word of it true.’

So he sat down beside her under the shade of a beech tree, and she told him it all. She told him about Gravenfield and the Levant, Resnic and Pordevere and Mallarkey. As the afternoon moved on, she spoke with feeling on the Survivors’ Club, which had kept her sane, and she heard her voice waver as she described Marie Angelline; her bravery and her end. She told him of the Denlanders’ savage assault on them, the grenades, the sacrifice, the piling bodies of the dead on both sides.

She told him about everything except Giles Scavian, and she wondered if he could not guess that story, too, from the gaps she left. He made no interruption though, injected no sarcastic commentary. He let her tell the story in her own words, at her own pace.

She told him about her capture, and how she had really felt and what she had feared: all those things she had told no other.

And she paused there, because it was something she had to know and, of all people, he might have the answer.

‘Doctor Lam said something to me then,’ she explained. ‘I don’t know what to make of it still. He said that the war wasn’t started by the Denlanders overthrowing their king . . . He claimed that . . .’

‘That we did it?’ he suggested gently. ‘That our sainted Luthrian the Fourth had his men hire worse men to kill his cousin, and so expand his realm by claiming himself to be the rightful heir of Denland’s throne? Did he say that to you, Emily?’

‘He did.’ This was her last chance to remain ignorant, but she swallowed her qualms and continued. ‘You’ve always, always been truthful with me. Tell me, Cristan, is that true?’

He was smiling at her, which seemed quite out of place, and it was a moment before she realized that she had spoken his name – his personal name – to him for the first time. ‘Cristan,’ she repeated, carefully, surprised at how natural it sounded. ‘Tell me, Cristan, please.’

His face grew sombre. ‘I cannot be sure beyond all reckoning, Emily. I am not privy to the royal court. And even if I were, there’s no guarantee I’d know. But . . . I have many people who tell me many things. Yes, this I have heard, and I do believe it, that our grand and glorious king, by the grace of God, is a murderer. I’m sorry.’

She remembered that golden-haired and laughing man she had danced with at Deerlings House. With his face in her mind, she could not believe it but, looking on Mr Northway’s altogether more ordinary features, she found she could.

‘Did you know before I enlisted?’

‘Emily, I knew it before war was declared.’

‘But . . . ?’

‘Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I say anything to you? What on earth would you have done, Emily, had I made such an accusation? Why, you’d probably have shot me dead.’

‘I suppose I might have done.’

‘I notice that you are not currently reaching for your gun,’ he added.

‘My . . . ?’ She realized with a start that she had her pistol thrust through her belt, a decision while dressing that she had not even thought about. ‘No. I have fought so hard not to believe this. Ever since I heard it, I have been furiously telling myself that the King of Lascanne is a man of honour, and that we have been in the right all this time. And yet . . . and yet part of me knew that Doctor Lam was telling me the truth – or at least that he himself believed it. He never knowingly lied to me, either. You and he should meet one day. I think you’d like him.’

‘Emily . . .’ He clenched his hands in front of him. ‘Emily . . . I have something to discuss with you. A matter of some great import, to me at least. I have had the chance to raise it before, and have not done so, and regretted it. Ever since you left, I have cursed myself for lacking the courage to speak . . .’

‘Cristan, please . . .’

He was as pale as ever she had seen soldiers on the eve of battle, his fists clenched so tightly that the knuckles had gone white. ‘Emily, I have conceived an affection for you.’

His unwieldy turn of phrase almost made her laugh, but she kept quiet.

‘Emily,’ he said again. ‘I have found for some time now that you, of all the women of my acquaintance, are . . . most possessed of all those qualities that I value in any human being: intelligence, strong character, good – if sharp – conversation. Before you enlisted, I had commenced a . . . campaign of my own, so to speak, to sound you out – to provoke you, I think, into seeing me as some man other than . . .’

‘Other than the man that ruined my father,’ she finished drily.

‘Quite,’ he said, without shame. ‘Indeed. You see, I thought that you interested me, and that you would make a fine companion for me, and all manner of other nonsense that men of middling position think when once they begin to court.’ He looked glumly down at his hands. ‘And then you left to go to war, and I realized the most abject thing, a revelation that quite spoiled my enjoyment of life. I found that my bargains, my rumour-mongering and my oh-so-very-clever dealings quite failed to bring me any happiness and that, left to my own devices, all I did was brood on you and wonder what you might be going through, with me not there to lend an underhand helping hand. In short . . .’ He paused, and she thought that, after all, he would not be able to actually say it. ‘In short,’ he continued, more quietly, ‘I realized that I was utterly and dismally in love.’ The words, now said at last, seemed to roll out towards the distant Wolds and come echoing back.

She found that it was she herself who was speechless. Somewhere between the blustering and the slyness, he had struck a vein of sincerity. Now his eyes were fixed on his hands as he waited.

‘Cristan . . .’ And if I do, I lose my sisters, unless I can bring them round. And Scavian. I have already given my love to Giles, haven’t I? And what will people say, who knew my father? Can I spend my life with a man such as this, so venal and devious?

‘Please,’ he said, as soon as a heartbeat had elapsed without her answer. ‘Do not . . . answer too hurriedly. Please take time. Please think of what we have shared, if only on paper. Please think.’

She reached out and took his hand, held it between both of hers, feeling his skin surprisingly cool despite the sun and his embarrassment. Thinking – she could not help herself – how it was such a contrast to the heat that had flowed from Giles’s body.

‘I need time,’ she told him. ‘Believe me, I need time to think. I owe you so much, but I cannot allow myself to be bound just because of that. I need time.’

‘I understand.’ His voice betrayed only intense relief that finally he had at least been able to speak the words.

*

Try as she might, she could not have her life back. Each day she felt as though she were trying to find it again through a labyrinth, winding and turning, dead end after dead end, and never any sight of the comfort and ease of mind she had once known when the worst to trouble her had been her feud with Mr Northway or a shift in the weather.

As she observed Alice and Mary go about their lives, she felt as though she was watching them from behind thick glass and, pound as she might, she could not break through to join them. Alice would corner her and share the gossip from the local farms and the town: who was in, who was out, which war widow had already found a new match, which newly reunited man and wife could not live easily with his wounds or her experiences. It all washed over Emily like a torrent, but left her dry. All she could think about, as Alice babbled on, were the men and women who had fought and died with her, and was just it for this? To serve as titbits to alleviate Alice’s boredom? What was the point? She had lived with death and, having had that presence at her side, this peace and calm seemed trivial and meaningless.

She would watch Mary play with Francis, who was now crawling energetically, getting everywhere he shouldn’t if not watched closely. There was meaning, but it was not for her. She could not subsume herself in those minutiae of life which had once been her entire world of experience. And she frightened Francis: the boy would not go near her unless his mother was close.

Tubal adapted better than she had, and she wondered what secret he knew, or whether it was that he had simply thought less about it, all the while the war lasted. He was busy trying to rebuild his printer’s business, with unexpected help from Mr Northway and his Denland masters. He had been commissioned to produce a book about the war, compiling and collecting stories from both sides. The Denlanders were working to knit the countries together, to draw close the jagged-edged ravine that separated them.

Emily had no faith in it. None.

She could stay in the house until perhaps midday, but by then her patience would be spent. In her man’s attire, she would go riding out across the Wolds, seeking absolution through action. She would carry her pistol with her, perhaps even Grant’s old musket, and she carried both of them loaded. She told herself it was a habit she would grow out of as the peace set in, but inside she knew that she herself perpetuated it. She could not let go.

Coral. She remembered once learning how sea-corals grew; how they built shells upon shells to protect themselves, growth after growth of hard armour, until the creatures that had started the mound suffocated and died deep within, and it was the outer shell only that survived. She was like that. The war had callused her all over, had given her tough armour to wear against its blows both physical and mental . . . and now that she came to take the armour off, she found it hollow and empty.

Every other day, at the very least, her horse took her to Chalcaster, and she would slope into the Mayor-Governor’s office. Whether he had people watching out for her, she did not know, but somehow he was always free to talk with her. She would settle down in his office and converse about the war, about the future, about her doubts and fears. She had nobody else in the world with whom she could speak so freely. He mocked her, to be sure, argued with her, danced words around her, but she needed that – needed the opposition. She was so used to being opposed.

And he would talk, as well. He had a whole life of iniquity and equivocation behind him, and he told her of it frankly, polishing nothing. He told her of the demands the Denlanders were making of him, and of the complaints from the people of Chalcaster. He explained his subtle dealings that kept the town supplied with flour, with beer, with livestock. He told her the latest rumours concerning the King, still at liberty and driving the Denlanders mad as he flew about the country, rallying rebellion. She was fascinated by it all.

To his credit, he never pressed her by raising the subject of his feelings again. He had put them away neatly, as he did with all things. He made gifts, on occasion, but they were practical and not romantic: simple things that were hard to find in the shortages after the war. Sometimes they would walk through Chalcaster in the fine summer weather. She saw the sour looks he gathered as they passed, but she noticed the looks she herself received as well. There was a kind of reverence there. Sometimes men or women, strangers, would approach her, and take her hand and congratulate her. Merchants would stop haggling when she came by, and smile at her. Shopkeepers would give her things and refuse to accept payment, poor as everyone was these days. Once a man had approached her, a little drunk, and told her, ‘I am with you, if you do it. Say the word and all my family will back you.’ Another time, Northway had taken her to a restaurant one evening, newly reopened, and the owner had refused to take any money from her. ‘My son,’ he said, ‘fought at the Levant.’ His son had died at the Levant, yet still he idolized her.

She was a hero. She had cause to wonder precisely what Doctor Lam had said about her, and how it had changed in the telling before it reached Chalcaster, but she was known as the last commander of Lascanne, the one who had not been defeated. Why her and not Tubal, she could not say. Was it her birth? Perhaps it was more heroic for this honour to go to a woman. Perhaps the odds defied seemed greater that way. Nobody seemed to remember that the Levant forces had surrendered. Everyone knew how they had stood out to the very end.

She made no attempt to correct them. She wanted to. She wanted to stand in the market square and shout out the truth so loud that it would be heard in Denland itself. Each time she was tempted to curse down some well-wisher, to brush off some well-meant gesture, she instead looked in their eyes. There was hope there, hope flowering because she was the sun that looked upon it. Lascanne was short of heroes now, and she gave them something of their pride back, just by her walking the streets.

There were Denlander soldiers everywhere, of course. It almost seemed that there was one on every street corner, save that she knew they moved constantly to keep an eye on her, or perhaps to protect Mr Northway. They were cautious about her, deferential even, and in time she realized that they, too, held her in high esteem, almost in awe. She was the Lascanne warrior queen who had never been beaten. She was the merciful commander who had saved their own comrades’ lives by not prolonging the fight to the bitter end: life and death in one frail body. She wondered if, in an earlier age, there would be cults and mystery sects arising out of her footsteps. She seemed to have become something that she herself could not control.

*

This morning she lay in bed, watching the sun creep through the shutters piece by piece like an army escorted by its scouts. Below stairs, she could hear the sounds of the house as it readied itself for the day ahead. Cook was getting a fire started and complaining to Jenna. Grant was outside cutting wood. Mary and Poldry would be scratching little marks against the meagre household accounts, and making a list of what they might need from neighbours or from the town. It amazed her that the purpose of all this industry was not to gain something, to win or to keep something, but simply to go one more day before the whole circle turned and put them back in their starting places again. It’s not war that’s hard, but life.

She felt the tension in herself, still. Thirty days of peace had done nothing to remove it from her. She put her hand out to touch the butt of the pistol and its cool metal reassured her. No matter what, she would keep herself armed. Let the Denlanders come; let rebellion set its fires. She would be ready.

Then Jenna screamed from downstairs and she found the gun automatically in her hand, her body halfway out of bed without her ordering it.

She slid her feet to the bedroom floor, listening to the commotion below. Jenna and Cook were shouting at someone, loud enough to drown any reply, and soon Emily heard Alice’s voice joining in as well. She could not make out the words, but some visitor was trying to impose on them and they were having none of it.

And then came Grant’s gruff bark, and a pause, and a murmur as the newcomer explained himself. Emily edged over to the window and pushed the shutters ajar a little, but by then the visitor had been let inside and she could see nothing.

She began dressing hurriedly in her white uniform breeches and shirt, and a dark coat of Rodric’s. The pistol was thrust through her belt without thought. By the time Jenna rapped at her door, she was already standing before it, unconsciously at parade-ground ease.

‘What is it?’

‘There’s a man here says he needs to see you,’ Jenna said, half opening the door. ‘But he looks something awful. I think he slept in a ditch or something, like a tramp. He doesn’t look like the sort of man you’d want to meet, if you take my meaning, miss.’

‘I don’t suppose he gave his name, did he?’

‘Oh, yes, miss.’ Jenna paused for a moment, trying to recollect it. ‘It was . . . He said he was a Mr John Brocky, miss . . . Miss?’

For Emily had pushed past her immediately and was heading down the stairs, calling behind her, ‘Wake Mr Salander, Jenna. Wake him now!’

She burst into the drawing room so fast she almost took the door off its hinges, and very nearly bowled Alice over. The man who slumped there, his bulk overwhelming the chair, was indeed none other than John Brocky.

There was not so much of the tramp about him. Still, he had looked better and his clothes were travel-worn, and torn at one knee. There were grey rings under his eyes that spoke of little sleep in the last several days, and he was monstrously unshaven. Mary and Alice were watching him suspiciously from across the room, as if waiting for him to try and steal the silver.

‘Brocky,’ she said, and his face lit up to see her.

‘There you are, you bloody woman!’ he said, oblivious to the horror on the faces of his other listeners. ‘Have you any idea how hard it is to find this wretched place?’

‘Emily, do you know this person?’ Mary asked stiffly.

‘Mary, Alice, this is Mr John Brocky who was quartermaster at the Levant with Tubal and me. Brocky, these ladies are my sisters, Alice and Mary.’

‘Charmed, charmed,’ Brocky muttered to the women, who looked anything but. ‘Listen, Marshwic – Can I call you Marshwic here, or must it be this damnfool Emily nonsense?’

‘Call me whatever you want, Brocky. Why are you here?’

He looked up at her without cheer. ‘It’s Scavian, Marshwic. He’s in trouble. They’ve got him.’

31.

With a glass of wine to fortify him, Brocky told his story:

‘You see,’ he started, ‘when Scavian’s time came to get off, I rather thought I’d go with him. Peacetime and all, and he’s good family, you know. I thought I might introduce myself, gain some patronage. It was always going to be hard picking up the pieces. You know what I mean.’

Tubal, present now, nodded sympathetically. He had found just the same.

‘Anyway, his family were on a list. They hated the Denlanders and, the way I saw it, the Denlanders hated them right back, but it wasn’t swords drawn yet. They knew a bad thing when they saw it. They were lying low. That part of the country, there’s a lot of old family stuff. Estates and family trees. A lot of people holed up and waiting for the King to come round, you know. Bloody dreamers: they should know when they’re beaten, is what I say.’

‘Mr Brocky, that’s terribly disloyal of you!’ Alice objected.

‘Disloyal?’ He bristled at her. ‘I fought at the bloody Levant, excuse my language. There’s no man can call me disloyal.’

‘Go on, Brocky,’ Emily prompted.

‘Right, well . . . Old Scavian and his father don’t get on, by the way. Being a friend of his is no way to get into that family’s favour, so no advancement for poor old Brocky. That was a fun time of it. Scavian thought his old dad would be delighted with him for getting anointed by the King, but all the old man could do was complain that Scavian hadn’t died like his brother – how dare he come back alive with the war lost, and all. I got the impression this older brother of his had been something of a favourite, if you see what I mean.’

He stopped to sip at the wine, wrinkled his nose a bit, and continued. ‘Anyway, just a few days ago, Denland soldiers turn up, a whole squad, at the house and they’re asking for Scavian junior. Bastards’ve come to arrest him – ’scuse my language – and it’s just as well I hear them arguing with the doorman, and I go and fetch Scavian. Him and me chuck some stuff into a bag and get going because it’s either that or get locked up. Or fight it out which, to be honest, is Scavian’s first plan. He could have done it, too, with the fire and the whatnot. But I wouldn’t have given a pin for the chances of me or his old dad or the servants, or anyone really, when they sent a full company of riflemen after him the next time. So we run for it. Only choice, really.’

‘So where is he?’ Emily asked impatiently.

‘I’m coming to it. We think of where best to head, you see, and it’s here. Where the bloody hell else – ’scuse me – can we go? But he knows you’ll cover for him, hide him out, and so we try to make it here. You have no idea how bloody difficult – pardon me – that turned out to be. Denlanders are hot on our trail. We change clothes, buy hats, change trains, and all the while we keep seeing those bloody grey uniforms at every turn. They are most exceptionally keen to catch Mr Giles Scavian. It takes us four days just to make it to Chalcaster, and most of our money’s gone by then – on bribes mainly, so people don’t see us when we’re moving. I mean him with his red hair, and I’m hardly the least conspicuous person you ever saw. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you.’

He shook his head. ‘And we pull in at Chalcaster, ready to hotfoot it for here, wherever here turns out to be, and outside the station there’s a squad of them, and they know him as soon as they set eyes on him. Anyway, he tells me to run, and I thought he was going to take them on, fire against the rifles. God knows how many bloody people he and they would have killed between them, doing that. You’d have seen the lights and heard the noises all the way out here, believe me. But then he just . . . gives up. Trusting me, the silly sod, to find you. Trusting you, more fool him, to do something. He just holds his hands forward for the manacles, and they come at him like he’s death incarnate, I can tell you. They were terrified of him, and I reckon if he’d so much as looked at them funny, they’d have shot him.’

‘So . . . ?’

‘So he’s locked up in Chalcaster,’ Brocky finished. ‘And I am here telling you all this.’

‘But what has this Mr Scavian done?’ Mary asked.

‘He’s a Warlock,’ Tubal replied at once. ‘They must be rounding them up. They must be worried about a revolution.’

‘They must really be worried,’ Emily agreed. ‘They’ve been trying to mend fences since the war ended. This is going to stir people up. They must really think Giles and the others are a threat.’

‘So?’ Brocky asked her.

She blinked at him.

‘So do something,’ he hissed. ‘You’re the only chance the lad’s got. You must know the way things work around here. Go help him.’

Emily looked from him to her family, and nodded. ‘I can do that,’ she decided. ‘I have some influence, I think.’

‘Emily, be careful of what you ask that man,’ Mary warned her. ‘You must not play games with Mr Northway. Do not put yourself in his debt.’

Emily smiled at her. ‘Mary, I am already in his debt, so much so that I may never be rid of it. I will explain to you sometime, but now I must go to Chalcaster to free Giles Scavian. Brocky, Tubal, you’re with me?’

‘Certainly.’ Tubal levered himself to his feet with Mary’s help.

‘Now don’t you do anything foolish, Tubal,’ she warned him. ‘I don’t want to find you in the next cell to this Mr Scavian. Remember you have a son.’

‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll take care. Besides, Emily here’s the one for doing mad things.’

‘Me?’ Emily demanded,

‘He’s got you right there,’ Brocky agreed. ‘Please God, tell me there’s a cart or something to take us back. My bloody feet hurt every bloody way.’

‘Dispenser heal thyself,’ Emily remarked unsympathetically.

‘Besides, you’re not leaving me behind,’ Tubal pointed out, ‘and I’m hardly going to be walking to Chalcaster.’

By that time, Emily was leading the way into the kitchen and out into the yard.

‘Grant! Have the buggy ready!’ she called. ‘I’ll drive it.’

‘I wondered how long it would be before the Denlanders started throwing their weight around,’ put in Tubal, from behind her. ‘All too good to be true, until now. All sweet as you like.’

‘They’re not an evil people,’ said Emily simply. ‘I don’t like them, and we’ve all lost friends to them. But had we won, how well would they be faring, do you think?’

They considered that, and Brocky nodded glumly. ‘You’ve got a point, Marshwic.’

‘However, they are careful and they are pragmatic,’ Emily continued. ‘And they will do anything, if they feel it must be done.’ In her heart weighed a cold stone from thinking about the future of Giles Scavian.

*

There were enough soldiers in Chalcaster to cause all of them alarm. Emily counted at least two squads, of a score of men apiece, formed up in the marketplace, and the same number in individuals and pairs, on corners and walking down streets. There were a half-dozen outside the governor’s offices, instead of the usual two, and they looked decidedly askance at the three visitors, noting how they stood, their scars and signs of battle.

One made a move to stand in Emily’s way as they ascended the steps, and she glared at him imperiously. ‘I am here to see the Mayor-Governor,’ she told him. ‘Have you any reason to stop me?’

He looked beyond her at Tubal and Brocky. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Are you going to give me one?’

‘Emily, you go in, see what you can do,’ Tubal suggested. ‘We’ll stay with the buggy.’

‘Does that meet with your approval?’ she asked of the soldier and, after a glance at his colleagues, he shrugged and let her pass.

She went straight to the man’s office, ignoring any soldiers and clerks who cast worried looks at her, and when she got there she found Mr Northway waiting for her. He had his hands splayed across the papers in front of him, and there was something in his look that she did not like.

‘Giles Scavian,’ he said, in a crisp, clear tone, and she felt her world contract to just this: to this office, this man, her beating heart. Oh, I have been playing a dangerous game, and never known it until now.

‘Cristan . . .’

‘Giles Scavian,’ he repeated. ‘Warlock and servant of the King. Veteran of the Levant. I don’t recall you mentioning the name.’

She licked her lips, waiting, but inside she knew that she had met a kind of justice. She had somehow believed that she had escaped undetected in her divided affections. Some part of her had thought itself very clever, while the rest had simply not thought at all.

‘Of course, I realize there was a sort of gloss that you put on your memoirs,’ he went on crisply. ‘A sense of something unspoken that, seen from the right angle, looked uncommonly like a man. A man you were taking some pains not to talk about. But a man left behind in the Levant, along with the war. Not a man here, now.’ His eyes were fixed on hers like the gaze of a serpent, pinning her in place. ‘Which was what I assured myself, when you spoke. For I would have had to be . . .’ his hands twitched ever so slightly ‘ . . . blind, not to see that there had been someone else. And that was your prerogative, in the heat of battle. Or maybe that someone was a someone whom you had already met, at Deerlings let’s say, even before the Women’s Draft. I am very good at remembering names. I recall the dashing young Giles Scavian.’

‘Cristan, listen to me.’ In the face of this interrogation, her words seemed ridiculous now. Still, what else had she? ‘I need your help.’

‘And who do I find amongst my papers,’ he continued, as though she had not spoken, ‘but Giles Scavian, Warlock and veteran, whom the Denlanders put in my cells after dark last night, and over whom they deliberate even as we speak.’

He stood up and hunched his way over to the back of the room, giving the plasterwork a cursory examination. When he turned back to her, his face was wiped clean of emotion. ‘And now you need my help?’

‘Yes, Cristan . . . Please.’

‘On behalf of Giles Scavian.’

You always did make me play your damned games. ‘Yes, Cristan.’

‘Whom you . . . knew well at the Levant.’

‘He is a close friend of mine, a good friend of mine. I owe him my help.’ She could not tell whether his face was going to freeze in place or cave in. He held it masterfully somewhere between the two.

‘Truth,’ he said simply. ‘Our association, Miss Marshwic, is built on it. I say this too often, I’m sure, but I have never lied to you. Perhaps it’s because there is none other with whom I could be so truthful.’ He came back to his desk, hands gripping tight to its edge without his apparent knowledge. ‘So then, why don’t you tell me about your friend Giles Scavian?’ He had tensed himself, ready for whatever she said, and she knew that to tell the truth would wound him, to lie to him would wound him more.

Could she deny her feelings for Scavian with a straight face? Could she make him nothing but a comrade-in-arms? Could she lie to Cristan Northway, so that he would not know it?

God forgive me. For, after all this time, she knew that she owed this man the truth. She had been living her two separate lives, thinking that a single shot would end both of them soon enough, and now they had come together, tangled like old ribbon. Giles, forgive me.

‘More than a friend,’ she whispered.

He swallowed, and she thought he swayed slightly, still clutching at the desk that was his livelihood and support. He repeated her words soundlessly to himself and then said, ‘And you come to me when the worst kind of chance has put him in my cells, under my roof, and you ask that I defy the Denlanders and set the man free?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And this Scavian, he is so much more than a friend that my hopes for you are dashed, Emily? So much more that, even before I asked, I had no hope or chance of you? I must know.’ Quite matter-of-fact, his voice now, but she could see him holding shut a great floodgate of emotion with all the strength he possessed.

‘Cristan, I don’t know. I can’t see my way to the end of it. I need more time. Please.’

‘You offer me that bait, at least, as an incentive to free him?’

‘Cristan!’ she snapped, catching his attention. ‘I will not lie to you, nor have I.’

He nodded wearily. ‘I cannot release him.’

‘Cristan!’

‘Emily, I can’t. He’s not mine to release. The Denlanders have him, and I’ve no authority over them. They have three soldiers down there in the cells with him, night and day, guns trained on his every move. The first flash of fire from him and he’s a dead man. They’re terrified of him. You already know what they do to things they’re scared of. They’re hunting down every surviving wizard. While the King’s at large, they’re too much of a risk, too dangerous, too much of a flag to rally to. I cannot order him released. I do not even have the keys to his cell under my control.’

‘What will they do to him?’

‘Why, they will kill him, of course,’ said Northway simply. ‘What did you think?’

‘You know that for certain?’

He made an airy gesture. ‘They don’t know it themselves yet but, when they’ve held their Parliament and their councils, they’ll come to that decision. You cannot take a wizard prisoner – not for long. It has always been so. With wizards, you must kill them or avoid them; there is no middle ground.’

‘Cristan, you’re talking about my friend!’ she yelled at him. ‘I can’t let them kill him! I won’t! I’ll damn well shoot my way in and rescue him myself – and let them kill me if they dare!’

‘Which they would, without a thought,’ he confirmed. ‘Shall I say I’m sorry? I’m sorry. It would have been a fine wooing gift to free your lover for you, but I cannot make it happen.’

‘Will you do what you can? You have influence. I know you, Cristan. You always have ways of getting what you want.’

His lips twitched. ‘We have learned to compromise, have we not, you and I?’

‘For God’s sake!’ she exploded. ‘What do you want from me? What must I say to make you do this for me?’

He stared at her, and there was a lean hunger in his eyes that brought her up short.

‘Is that it?’ she said. ‘Are you holding him to ransom now. Is that what you want, for me to pledge myself to you in return for his safety?’

He made as if to speak, and she knew that he wanted that very much, more than anything. He wanted to have the coin to buy her, to make her his own. He bared his teeth like an animal at the thought, feeling the desire rise inside him. In the end, though, the words that hissed out through his teeth were, ‘No. I will not take you at such a price, for how long would I keep you, then? If you are to come to me, then come freely or not at all.’

‘Then you will not help me?’

‘I will help you.’ The fire had gone out of him, like a candle snuffed. ‘I will pull such strings as I have, bend such ears as are mine to bend, mislay papers and invoke the demons of bureaucracy. But, Emily, it will not suffice.’

‘I have faith in you,’ she told him, wondering if those words were perhaps the cruellest of them all; wondering if she were not lying to him, after all.

As she turned to go, he caught her out again by asking, in a normal everyday tone, ‘Did you truly give yourself to him?’

She had her hand on the door and, were she still the lady of leisure she had been before, she would have been justified in storming out at the indelicacy of his question. Neither she nor he were the people they had been once upon a time, though.

She turned back to him and saw he was waiting: for the lie or the truth, the truth or the lie; waiting to see if he could tell the one from the other.

‘I did,’ she told him, and his lips tightened and he blinked rapidly, as he always did, but whether out of habit or to cover something else, she could not say.

It was only as she was halfway out of the door that he added, ‘I suppose you’ll want to see him.’

The cells lay underneath the governor’s offices, a hall’s length of squalid little rooms normally packed, three or four to a cell, with pickpockets, drunks, brawlers and vagabonds. Now they were empty of such petty concerns. Wherever Northway and the Denlanders were now keeping the regular offenders, this place had been set aside for a more serious purpose.

There were five soldiers there, as she descended, with Northway at her heels. One glanced back as they approached, while the others had their attention, and their rifles, fixed on a single man. The door of his cell was wide open, but manacles held him spreadeagled against the wall, with barely two inches of play for each wrist. It reminded Emily of nothing so much as her own captivity at the hands of the enemy, strapped out across the cane frame. They took no chances with dangerous prisoners, these Denlanders, and none was more dangerous than Giles Scavian, Warlock to the King.

He wore nothing more than soldier’s breeches and a grimy shirt torn open down his chest, revealing the livid handprint of the King in all its indelible glory. She remembered, so vividly, the day he received that mark. Who could have foretold that it would land him here in the end?

‘Emily!’ he cried, and she saw the soldiers twitch but hold their fire. She glanced at Mr Northway, who was watching without expression.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go to him. Why should you not? We have no secrets, you and I.’

She had no further time for his games and went dashing past the soldiers until she was face to face with Scavian. He was bruised and cut; they had not been gentle with him, a brutality built on fear. Even this close, she could feel the heat of his calling.

‘Oh, Giles,’ she said. ‘Giles, how did it come to this?’

‘Brocky made good, then.’ Scavian managed a smile. ‘I’d all but lost hope. That man has no sense of direction. Mallen would despair of him.’ He was desperate to show her that the Denlanders did not frighten him. ‘Emily, I’m sorry to bring this on your head. I had no one else to turn to.’

‘No, no,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll . . . get you out. I’ll have you freed, somehow.’

His smile was wistful. ‘Do you know, I have never seen you lose heart, ever. Even in the blackest of it, even when they broke through the barricades, that night. When you say you will free me, in truth I almost believe it.’

‘I don’t care what it takes, Giles, I will,’ she promised, and rounded on the nearest soldier. ‘This is barbaric. You can’t keep a man strung up by his wrists like this. Can’t you at least cut him down, give him some freedom?’

‘We cannot,’ said another of the guards, wearing a provost’s insignia. ‘You know what he is, ma’am. He’d burn us all to cinders if it pleased him. Why else is he here?’

‘What if he . . . gives his word. I’ll vouch for him. He’s a man of honour.’

‘No, ma’am. Orders are orders,’ said the provost and, from Emily’s shoulder, Scavian added, ‘And I could not promise to give that word.’

‘What?’ she demanded.

‘Emily, the country is on a knife-edge. The King is still free and gathering supporters. There will be rebellion, revolution.’

‘More blood, more death,’ she said bitterly.

He nodded. ‘I am sworn to the King, Emily. If he calls, I can do nothing but answer.’

‘But we’ve lost. What will an uprising do except kill hundreds more men, women and children, on both sides? You can’t want that.’

He grimaced. ‘Ask me that a season ago and I’d have told you yes, better to die fighting in order to be free, than to live in a shadow.’

‘And now?’

‘And now . . . now I think about Colonel Resnic, and Pordevere, and Marie Angelline, and I wonder who else will join the roll of the dead when the guns are taken up again. If I had the bugle and the choice of whether to sound rebellion or not, then I cannot say whether I would blow it – but I do not. If the King asks, I must answer. I made an oath, Emily.’

‘They will kill you for that oath,’ she said bitterly.

‘They are considering it,’ he admitted.

‘Giles, I don’t want you to die.’

‘It has been in the cards this last half year, Emily. Here or at the Levant, how different can it be from some last stray shot of the war finding its mark? Perhaps that is all it is: some long-delayed gun of Denland doing what they had ample chance to do. I left two fingers on the battlefield. Perhaps they’ll send me back to look for them.’

‘Giles, stop.’ She felt that she would begin weeping soon, and she did not want to in front of the Denlanders, in front of Northway. ‘Giles, I can’t bear it.’

‘Strength, Emily.’ His hand clinked in the chains, as though he would have touched her hair if he could. ‘I know you. You can bear anything.’

And she could hardly endure being there, now the world had turned sour again. Had she ever wished for him to seek her out after the end of the war? Had she dreamt of it? For Scavian had finally come for her, all the way from his lonely home, and they were going to take him from her forever.

*

The governor’s office loomed bleak and grey before her, but the guards had learned who she was now, her reputation and her war history. There was a hint of nervous respect as they let her past. She ignored them. She had no time for them.

Time, in fact, was running short and sparse.

She had come here every day, or if not her then Brocky or Tubal. Every day one of them had talked their way into the cells to see Scavian, as if by laying eyes on him each morning they prevented his execution until the next dawn. Emily, though, took a diversion to see the Mayor-Governor. She spoke with him, but only on one subject.

She demanded, she instructed, she requested, she begged him to release Giles Scavian.

And she received his assurances in return: he was doing all he could. He was working on it. He had a favour to call in. He had a contact he would contact. He could not simply order the man’s release, for the Denlanders were his masters and not the other way round. But he was working on it, he assured her.

And each day went by, and the Denland Parliament deliberated on the fate of Giles Scavian and the other Warlocks caught by their soldiers, and time was closing in like a noose.

Last night, for the first time since it ended, she had dreamt about the war. It had been night, in her dream, and the Denlanders were coming against the barricades. She saw the flash of the grenades and felt the ground shake beneath her feet, although there was no sound in her dream save something like a slow tide. Everything was slow: the movements of the soldiers, the spinning splinters of broken wood. The rifle shots coursed past her like tiny insects. She dreamt of firing musket and pistol into the charging Denlanders, and drawing her sabre, whilst white-gold fire seared out from the fingers of Giles Scavian.

And she dreamt that a musket ball, moving no faster than if it had been thrown by hand, pierced his armour of flames, and punched a hole in the imprint of the King’s hand. And he caught her eyes helplessly and fell backwards, his fire guttering out. Without his fire, the battlefield grew dark and darker still until there was nothing to be seen, nothing at all save the knowledge that he was dead.

And she awoke knowing that today was a bad day, and that all the following days would be bad days. She awoke knowing that Mr Northway’s best was not good enough, and knowing, too, that he had no intention of aiding her in this endeavour. Why should he? Perhaps it was true that he could not have Scavian released with a word, but what incentive did he have to work for Giles’s release, or even the Warlock’s simple preservation? Northway would let the deed be done, and then try to take up his wooing where it was left off, his rival put safely out of the way.

She burst into his office, and it struck her that she had come full circle with him. Their relationship, which had expanded to cover all the distance from Chalcaster to the Levant, had contracted back to her haranguing him across his desk.

He glanced up from the single sheet of paper he was reading and, when she slammed her palms on the desk, he flinched ever so slightly.

‘Have you made any progress?’ she demanded.

‘Emily, I am working on the problem,’ he said. ‘It is not so simple—’

‘Damn you and your working!’ she said to him. ‘How much time do you think he has? I know the Denlanders. They’re nothing if not efficient.’

‘Emily, please—’

‘Mr Northway,’ she said, ‘would you explain precisely what you have been doing these nine days?’

‘Emily, my work keeps me extremely busy—’

‘Mr Northway—’

‘Very well then, Miss Marshwic, I shall tell you. I have stalled. I have delayed. I have lost papers and misheard orders. I have done all in my power.’

‘Have you, indeed? And is he saved, then?’

He did not answer, but his eyes flicked down to the paper in his hands, and she snatched it from him. This encounter had become unreal, too close to that other time when he had held in his hands the news of Rodric’s death.

Her eyes skimmed across the details, scantly phrased and no more than she had expected. The Denlanders were terse and economical with words when drafting death warrants.

‘So,’ she said.

‘Emily, please—’

‘This is where your best has led us, is it?’ she asked him.

‘I do not have the authority—’

‘Mr Northway, I suspect your motives,’ she told him, and he sat back and stared at her.

‘Do you, indeed, Miss Marshwic?’

‘Is this the man who could get anything he wanted? Who worked his way from bootblack up to governor in so short a time, and to hell with any who got in his way? Is this him who has ridden the tide of invasion and bobbed back into place like a buoy? And can he not have one man released from his own cells by sleight of hand or legislation or bribery?’

He looked up at her with no hint of any of their shared past in his expression. ‘And is this what you think of me, Miss Marshwic?’

‘Show me what else I can think, from what I have now seen,’ she told him.

He stood, and was round the desk quickly, reaching to capture her wrist in his grip. ‘I have done so much, so much, and this is all I have from you to show for it?’ he burst out. ‘I see you have regained your righteousness. I had thought it a casualty of the war.’

With more ease than she would have believed, she prised his fingers away from her skin. ‘Does he still live, Mr Northway?’

‘He lives. The Denlanders have not seen this yet.’

‘And when will they? How long do I have to say goodbye?’

She had thought that he would storm down there at once and present it to them, but something softened in him. ‘In three days, Emily, they will want to know why they have not heard, and they will send a courier by rail to deliver the orders in person. Three days is all I can give you.’

She could not thank him. She could not muster the words for it, the taste of gall was too strong in her mouth.

As she walked away from his office, she thought, though, of all the hard, hard work he had done to scrub away the stain on his character that had once estranged him from her, and here was the next stain to discolour him, as though these things worked to some exacting cosmic schedule.

In the cells, she could not tell Scavian he was due to die. The guards must not realize the order had come. She held him, though, and kissed him on the lips, and said nothing at all, and she knew that, from that gesture, he understood what knowledge had reached her.

*

She rode back to Grammaine with a dead heart. Brocky and Tubal would have to know. Perhaps the three of them could cobble some last-minute action together. Or die in the attempt. The latter seemed more likely.

She decided that she would be game for it if they were.

She let Grant take her horse, noticing another in the stables that she did not recognize.

‘Is there a visitor, Grant?’

‘Yes, miss. No man I know, but it’s you he’s here to see. Miss Alice is with him now.’

‘Well, I’m sure she can keep him entertained. I’m in no mood for seeing anyone.’

She entered the house and caught an echo of the voices from the drawing room, Alice’s voice, and the man’s lower tones. She knew as soon as she heard it that it was familiar from somewhere: a young man’s voice, a deep voice.

‘But you must have been very brave, to lead the fighting like that,’ Alice was saying. ‘I’ve always thought that I should like to meet a soldier who has actually fought.’

‘There’s no shortage of those, nowadays,’ replied the visitor, and Emily went cold all over. The accent was subtle, hidden, but she knew it too well to mistake it. A voice from Denland.

She had her hand on her pistol butt as she pushed her way into the drawing room, seeing Alice spring up from the arm of the man’s chair. He rose a little more slowly and at first she did not recognize him, dressed as he was in civilian clothes.

The desperate charge through the swamps. The deaths of those beside her. Surrounded by the Denlanders, her gun discharged, hacking and hacking away until they brought her down. Then waking, tied to the frame, and a doctor finishing with her. And behind him . . . this man. This soldier, the man who had caught her. Doctor Lam’s pet provost.

He smiled at her, a soldier-to-soldier smile that admitted a parity, and no quarter.

‘Lieutenant Marshwic,’ he said, ‘good to see you again.’

32.

Do not do anything rash.

‘Alice, please leave us,’ she said.

‘Why?’ Alice demanded. ‘I was having a lovely talk with this gentleman. It’s rare enough to have a man visit us here, let alone a proper soldier.’ Her voice made it plain that she did not count Brocky in that category.

‘A soldier, yes,’ Emily said. ‘He and I met during the war. In fact, I have a very clear memory of him clubbing me to the ground with a rifle butt, although at the time I believed it was simply a musket butt. Then he must have taken me to his camp, for when I awoke I was a prisoner of the Denlanders. Alice, have you not heard a Denlander speak before, you idiot girl?’

Alice froze, mouth open, and then she turned very slowly to stare at the man beside her, as though he was a venomous spider Emily had pointed out on her shoulder. He nodded gravely.

‘Provost Marshal Carl Gottred, formerly of the Denland Army of the Levant, at your service, ma’am.’

‘But . . . but I thought you were . . .’ Alice looked utterly betrayed. ‘I thought you were one of us.’

Gottred shrugged. ‘I must be one of them. Sorry for the mistake.’

‘Alice, please leave. I need to speak to the provost.’

Alice nodded wordlessly, backing away until she found the door, and seconds later Emily heard her footsteps hammering up the stairs.

‘Pleasant girl,’ said Gottred.

‘Hmm. I’ll surrender to the Denlanders but I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one,’ Emily said drily. ‘I never knew your name all that time you were sitting at Doctor Lam’s shoulder. Gottred, is it? And provost marshal? Congratulations.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant. But I’ve left the army now.’

‘So to what do I owe the honour?’ She lowered herself onto the chaise longue facing him. ‘Are you selling something?’

He sat himself down again. He still had the solid, bluff soldier’s bearing, whether in service or not. ‘I tried that, going back to my old ways. Didn’t last twenty days back in the shop. I took on another type of service.’

‘Oh?’

‘I work direct for Parliament now.’

‘I see.’ She felt her stomach lurch. ‘I know what brings you here, then.’

‘I thought you might.’

‘You’re here for Scavian.’

He paused. ‘And who’s Scavian?’

‘Giles Scavian. The Warlock.’

His expression was still quite blank. ‘You’ve a Warlock in chains at Chalcaster, is that it?’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know.’

He shrugged a little. ‘The army’s rounding them up, I know that much. Doctor Lammegeier told me, last time we spoke. They’re too dangerous by half.’

‘The man is a friend of mine. A close friend. It was his word as much as anyone’s that led to the surrender at the Levant.’

He grimaced. ‘Then I’m sorry. He’ll not live. I hear the orders are being sent out to execute them, every one we have in custody.’

She nodded grimly. ‘So now we see the true face of Denland, the reasonable tyrants. The executions have started.’

‘Tell me what you would do in our place? We must have peace,’ he said.

‘At any cost?’

‘Yes!’ He had half stood up, as though to argue it out with her like two soldiers rather than as civilized people in a country house’s drawing room.

‘Tell me, Provost, when the Warlocks are all dead, when poor Giles Scavian is dead, who will you turn upon next?’

He regarded her silently.

‘What about me, Provost? Do you think that once you’ve killed all the Warlocks, there’ll be no one else to rally to? What about the veterans and the war heroes? When are you coming for me?’

He continued watching her silently, and the silence was drawn out longer and longer in the echo of her words, until he forced her to keep on talking. ‘You’ve come for me, haven’t you? That’s why you’re here.’ She was very conscious that he was alone and that she still had the pistol digging into her side. He must have noticed it. Perhaps he had one of his own, concealed inside his jacket.

‘I’m assistant to Doctor Lammegeier now, Lieutenant Marshwic. He sent me to speak with you. This comes direct from him, not from Parliament.’

‘My, is the glorious republic suffering from schisms?’

‘It has differences of opinion, just like any other body of reasonable men,’ he said. ‘The doctor requests that you do not let yourself get involved.’

‘Involved in what, Provost?’

‘Just because I’m not in uniform doesn’t mean I like playing games,’ he told her. ‘Doctor Lammegeier says there must be no revolution.’

She tried to keep her pose casual, resting against one arm of the chaise longue. ‘And why should that concern me? I can’t quell an uprising just by leaning out from my window.’

‘But you could start one,’ said Gottred. ‘The doctor believes that – and so do I after just asking a few questions about you in the town. You are held in very high esteem. The King is still at large. If you were to raise a flag for his cause, they’d come to you, all right. You’d have your revolution.’

‘Some might say it would be my duty, as a loyal subject of the King, to do just that,’ she replied acidly. ‘You seem to misjudge my degree of loyalty to your country.’

He let out a long breath and then reached inside his jacket. Instantly her hand was on her pistol butt, but he drew a piece of paper out and scanned it almost furtively. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Doctor Lammegeier said so many things that I must reread them.’ He looked over his notes and she saw his lips moving. Soldier to soldier, she felt a little camaraderie for this man who, like herself, was trying to readjust to a civilian world. If they were both still wearing uniform, it would be so much easier.

‘There are already some stirrings of unrest,’ he explained. ‘The King’s name has started fires, killed a few soldiers, north of here. When provoked, we are bound to act, Lieutenant. So far there have just been arrests. Parliament is worried, though.’

‘I should hope so.’

‘Parliament is drawing up plans, Lieutenant,’ he continued, ‘to deal with an uprising. Those involved – those that are not killed – will be taken away.’

She bit off a sharp retort. ‘Taken away?’

‘To Denland. There are plans for labour camps. As a deterrent, you understand. There is much work to be done back home. The idea is popular. And if that does not prove sufficient at quelling unrest . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Execution camps have been mentioned also.’ He was putting a great deal of work into keeping his manner military and brisk. ‘I have seen plans and designs. There is something like an abattoir, but one for men. We are told it will be very efficient. Humane, that is another word I have heard used.’

She stared at him, turning this unfamiliar notion over in her mind as he continued speaking.

‘And if that does not prove sufficient, it will be not only the rebels, but their families, their associates, those who hide or feed them . . .’ He crumpled the sheet of paper in his hands. ‘Doctor Lammegeier does not like this. I do not like this. But if we are pushed, if we are hurt, we must react. Do you understand?’

Emily was staring at him, but what she saw now was the Levant: the Denlander camp in all its oiled efficiency; the attack on the barricade; the major from the Couchant telling her about the Golden Minute. She did know the Denlanders, and she knew that what Gottred described was quite plausible. They had no hate in them, no anger or aggression, and they had no honour and no sense of guilt. They would do just exactly what was required. She remembered Doctor Lammegeier’s new word: genocide.

‘I see,’ she said, after a while. ‘So why come to me?’

‘Because the doctor remembers you, fondly. Because your name is spoken even back in Denland. Because your name is spoken in Parliament, and not fondly. You must not let them use you as a banner for rebellion.’

‘Execution camps.’ She tried to imagine the idea, and saw lines of weary men and women, even children, digging their own graves. She saw his ‘something like an abattoir’ in all its polished glory.

‘I am sorry,’ said Gottred, and she found that she believed him. ‘I am sorry for your friend, too. There is nothing that can be done. We are too close to rebellion.’

‘Dear God in Heaven.’ She stood up, wondering what came next. If she and the others made a move to rescue Scavian, that would count as rebellion, wouldn’t it? If she did rescue Scavian, then people would soon hear of it. Would that be enough to spark the fuse? Perhaps it would.

But if she did nothing, then he would be dead, and part of her along with him. Damn them all for putting me in this position.

‘What will you do?’ the provost asked her.

‘I don’t know. I cannot say. I can’t see that I have any options.’ She hauled the pistol from her belt suddenly, and he was out of his chair, clutching inside his jacket for the weapon she had known was there. She waited until the tension had passed, and then said, ‘My father killed himself with this, you know.’

He frowned at her.

‘In his study, late one evening. He took a glass of wine and his pipe, and this gun, to his study. He drank, he smoked, he looked out into the dark beyond his window, then he put the muzzle to his temple and . . . blew his brains out.’ Her voice shook only slightly as she recounted it. ‘Because he could not face what his world had become. Because he could not see a way out. Is that what I myself am supposed to do? Is that the plan?’

‘Why can you not just live in peace?’ he asked.

‘Could you, when doing so would condemn to death someone so close to you?’

‘He is . . . your lover?’ he said quietly.

‘He could have been. He should have been.’

‘Ah, I am sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault.’ She put the pistol back in her belt. ‘I will not be the foil for the sins of my people, why should you be for yours? Will you stay and eat, perhaps?’

‘I must return to Doctor Lammegeier,’ he said. ‘Please consider his warning carefully. He has fought first to save Denland from you, now he fights to save it from itself. Once we have done the unthinkable, it would be too painful to ever turn back to the light again. Once we have made ourselves into monsters, we shall never again be men.’

*

Emily had gone to Chalcaster once more, with Tubal this time, but the soldiers at the governor’s office had kept them outside for almost two hours. They had sat on the steps and waited, patient and stubborn, and told every visitor, every clerk and courier, how they must see Mr Northway. Eventually, through their sheer bloody-mindedness, they had badgered their way inside, but Mr Northway was not apparent. They spent nigh on another hour cutting a path to his office, which route had always been so easy before. When Emily had forced the door open, despite the clamouring of a dozen secretaries, she found the man was gone.

He had fled to avoid her wrath. He had gone to ground, she knew. When the bloody deed was done, he would resurface and set about his campaign for her anew.

Never, she said to herself. Once Scavian is gone, there will never be another. And not him – never him.

They waited there for some time, but Cristan Northway was nowhere to be found. Instead, they went to see Scavian. The prisoner was an easier man to visit than the mayor.

It was painful, that visit. For all she knew, it could be the last, and yet she could think of so little to say to him. He bore it bravely, gaunt from his captivity. In the end she just sat at his feet, glaring at the guards, as Tubal shared with him reminiscences of the war: people he and Scavian had known before she joined up, expelled members of the Survivors’ Club.

‘What did happen to the money?’ Scavian asked wryly. And then, ‘You’d better keep mine in the pot, I suppose.’

In mid-afternoon they travelled back to Grammaine, because the time had come. There would be no outside assistance. Plans had to be made.

*

It was in the yard at Grammaine that they found Penny Belchere hitching up her horse.

‘Emily!’ The girl started in surprise as the buggy drove in. ‘Why I’ve just come to find you.’

‘You’ve not looked too hard then,’ Tubal commented. ‘I think you rode past us on the road. At least I assume it was you.’

‘Oh, Lord, did I?’ She put a hand to her mouth. Emily barely recognized her out of uniform save that, like Emily herself, she still wore breeches and rode like a man.

‘How can we help you?’ Emily asked, and Belchere fumbled in her saddle pouch, drawing out a sheet of paper.

‘Same as usual,’ she explained gaily. ‘You’d think we’d have stopped meeting like this when the war ended, but here I am again.’

Emily took the message. Her name was on it, in a hand she knew well.

‘He gave you this, did he?’

‘For your hands alone,’ Penny confirmed. ‘He didn’t look happy about it. Mind, he’s not looked happy these last days, at all. I heard you and he had a row.’

Emily frowned at her. ‘Did you?’

Penny shrugged defensively. ‘I’m just saying—’

‘Open it,’ Tubal said. ‘See what he says. Hell, it could even be good news. The chance is remote, I admit.’

Emily broke the seal and saw a single line of crabbed, hurried script.

‘“Do not do anything rash”,’ she read aloud, looking at Tubal. The same warning as Gottred had brought her. They goaded her and they intimidated her and they mocked her, all of them, but by God they feared her. They feared what she could do, even while they drove her to it.

Do not do anything rash.

‘Strange. Sounds like he’s telling fortunes now,’ Penny said. The tension between them was lost on her.

‘You can go now, Penny. Thank you for doing your duty,’ Emily told her.

‘Will there be any reply?’

‘No.’ Emily said it with an air of finality.

*

They commandeered the drawing room, herself, Tubal and Brocky, and tried to devise a way to release their friend. At first they considered peaceful solutions, and then stealthy ones – but in the end they were three soldiers, and violence was always fated to intrude on the conversation.

‘How many guns do we have, do you reckon?’ Tubal voiced the common thought.

And after that they knew that, if it was to be done, it would be done in blood, and tomorrow.

They had been conspiring for some time when Alice let herself into the room.

‘Emily, so there you are—’

‘Alice, this is not a good time,’ Emily said. ‘We . . . cannot be distracted.’

Alice sniffed. ‘Well, I suppose you don’t want your message, then.’

‘What message?’

‘That was left under the door. If you don’t want it, why ask for it?’ Alice made as if to go.

‘Alice, I’m not in the mood for this just now. Give me the message and go.’

Alice’s eyes went wide. ‘Emily—’

‘Alice!’ Emily stood, for a moment every bit the officer facing insubordination. She put a hand out for the message, and her expression had no hint of sisterhood in it. Alice handed the paper over with trembling fingers and fled, and they heard her running all the way up the stairs to complain to Mary.

‘More from your Mr Northway?’ Brocky asked.

‘More of the same, most likely,’ agreed Tubal.

Emily looked at the message and shook her head, seeing first and foremost that it was simply not of the grade of paper that Mr Northway would use. When she cracked it open, the writing inside was neat but strange to her.

‘Well?’ Tubal prompted.

She looked it over a second time, before passing it to him wordlessly.

To the esteemed Lieutenant Emily Marshwic, heroine of the Levant.

Good men and women lie idle in their beds, while Lascanne suffers under the oppressor’s hand.

Did they not know that, whilst they may crush our armies with their machines, they cannot crush our Spirit?

The folk of Lascanne shall arise. The menace of Denland shall be driven out, in the name of our most worshipful monarch Luthrian IV.

Lascanne shall be free!

We write to you in confidence for, in these dark times, you hold a lamp aloft for the faithful to rally to.

Past nightfall this evening, a man shall come for you. Go with him. You shall meet your fellows: those who also hold faith to King and country.

Long live the King!

‘Unsigned,’ Brocky noted. ‘They’re not fools.’

‘A trap?’ Tubal wondered. ‘The Denlanders, wanting to see if you’ll bite?’

‘Anything is possible.’ Emily accepted the letter back and perused the lines again. ‘And it’s not as though I want to stir up revolution. All the things that Provost Gottred said to me are true . . . surely true?’

‘But . . . ?’ said Brocky.

Long live the King. ‘I feel as though I had more control over my destiny when I was still in the army,’ she said. ‘Since I came back to Grammaine, I’ve been every man’s puppet. Every malcontent sees me as a saviour. Doctor Lam thinks I’m a firm hand on the rudder. Mr Northway . . .’

‘Quite,’ Tubal agreed.

‘And now they want to make me queen of the rebellion. And what would happen then, when the Denland army arrives here in force, rather than just some four score guardsmen? When they burn down Grammaine because it was mine, and they take Mary and Alice because they are family? When they shoot you, Tubal, because of who you are, and take your infant son away in case he leads a revolution from his crib? What the devil happens then – when their damned traction-guns are buckling Chalcaster’s streets? Will the people rise up? And what will they rise up with? Pitchforks? Staves? Grandfather’s antique matchlock? Can you imagine what the barricade would have been like, if not one of our men had been taught to fight?’

‘And yet . . .’ Brocky scratched at his belly. ‘And yet . . .’

‘And yet,’ Emily agreed, knowing that the situation was slipping beyond her even as she said the words. She felt she had fallen into a river and was being drawn under by the current, her hands clutching at the grasses of the bank but sliding, always sliding away.

‘These rebels might free Scavian.’ Tubal finished the thought for her. ‘You could convince them to help. They will have the weapons – some at least – and the manpower.’

‘If it isn’t a trap,’ Brocky reminded them.

‘If it’s a trap, let them take me,’ Emily decided. ‘I will go. Not for love of rebellion and not for love of Lascanne, but for Giles Scavian I will go.’

33.

He came after nightfall, as promised, slipping into the yard of Grammaine alone with the deepening dusk.

Emily had been waiting in the kitchen, feeling thoroughly on edge. Was this a Denlander trap? What on earth would she be led into? Across the kitchen table she played cards with Tubal and Brocky, in remembrance of old times.

She had decided this would be a night for symbols. If she needed to raise a mob to save Scavian, she would require symbols. She had told Jenna to lay out her uniform in all its battered glory, and now she felt the comfortable wear and tear of it as the cloth found its long-accustomed folds. The pistol was in her belt, her sabre hanging from the back of her chair by its baldric. Her helm sat atop the table.

‘Are you sure you don’t want someone to come with you? Or you could ask Grant to follow you. They’d not see him,’ Tubal asked, for the hundredth time.

‘I’ll risk nobody on this but myself,’ Emily assured him. ‘I am the one they sent for. Why? God knows. You were in command.’

‘A pretty face makes a better figurehead than a cripple,’ Tubal said without rancour.

‘Just you be careful, woman,’ Brocky told her gruffly. ‘No call to get yourself killed. And if it’s a trap . . .’

‘Then I’ll be on horseback, at night. Even their rifles can’t make a man see in the dark.’

And there came a knock, almost a scratching, at the door.

Emily stood up, heels sharply together, military fashion, and clasped her helm under her arm before walking to the door.

There, out in the dark, was a small man whose clothes of hardwearing cloth and leather were threadbare, even a little ragged. His thin face flinched back from her, as though this scene of house, cards, friends and uniform was too glaring to look at directly.

‘You’re the Marshwic. I know you,’ he said softly, appraising her in his sidelong fashion. ‘You’re a picture, and no mistake. I can see why there’s all the talk about you. You really fought, did you, at the Levant?’

‘Do you doubt it?’

He shrugged with first one shoulder, then the other. ‘Oh, you know. Precious few of the posh families sent their own out to fight, but I reckon you went. I believe it now. You’re to come with me, Lieutenant, if you will.’

Emily glanced back at the others and saw Tubal spread his hands. What else can I do? she reflected. I am committed now.

‘Your name?’ she asked the little man.

‘Soldier-at-Arms Derry Balfor. I fought in the Couchant, Lieutenant. I saw what those devils did there.’

‘And you’re not ready to give up the fight?’ she said.

‘Got nothing else, Lieutenant. They hauled me out of the jails to fight that war. If’n we’d won I’d be a hero, no more hard times, but we didn’t. We lost, and so what’s for me now? It’s the army or the cells again, sooner or later. So I ain’t giving up nothing.’

‘You’re a credit to your King,’ remarked Emily drily. ‘I suppose you’d better lead the way, Soldier Balfor.’

‘That I shall, Lieutenant.’ The little man scuttled out into the yard, where the light from the kitchen door was catching the first few raindrops. He vaulted easily on to a tall horse that was of far finer quality than Emily would have expected for such a man, and she fetched from the stables the mount she had instructed Grant to saddle.

Balfor was already riding out of the yard and, from his ease in the saddle, she guessed he might have been jailed for horse theft, and that perhaps he was still keeping his hand in.

What else is there? she asked herself. And then: How could it come to this? No answers were to be had, so she swung herself up into the saddle and nudged her horse to follow Balfor’s mount.

It was a slow progress in the dark, even though Balfor obviously knew his way well enough. Oddly, Emily felt she knew it too, for the path that Balfor took seemed familiar even in the darkness. He had turned off into the woods as soon as he could, lighting up a lantern which he held out to one side for her to follow, changing arms every ten minutes or so. The lamp guttered erratically and there was little cheer in it. All around them the rain pattered down on the summer woodland canopy, drops pooling together above to drip down onto them, whilst the horses made patient and cautious progress over ground that was laced with roots. To Emily it was all a minor hindrance. Who could curse the tame forests of Lascanne after enduring the swampy jungles of the Levant.

‘How did you serve at the Couchant, Balfor?’ she asked.

His reply drifted back to her. ‘They had me loading the artillery, Lieutenant. That’s why I reckon I’m still here. Where the horses got cut to bits, us artillery lads knew it was a bad job and most of us pulled out before their bloody muskets got us within good range.’

‘I’ve heard about what happened at the Couchant.’

‘Sure you have, Lieutenant, but, if you don’t mind me saying it, there’s no way you can imagine it unless you was there.’

And, as he led her deeper into the woods, she caught hold of the familiarity that had been dogging her. She had ridden a very similar course to this one, so long ago. Had it only been last year, when the Ghyer was on her doorstep with poor fool Alice in his clutches? She and Grant had taken this path, and she shuddered now to think about the blind risk they had both taken, not knowing a thing about their enemy. Grant was wise enough to have avoided that risk, she guessed, but he had gone along with her when she asked, though. He was more loyal than she deserved.

With all that she now knew, she would be more careful in future about putting others in danger to further her own goals. And, yet, was that not what she was here for? Some band of patriots, desperate and well-meaning, would be waiting for her word, and her word would be, Rescue Scavian. Did she imagine that none of them would die for that peculiarly personal goal of hers?

They make demands of me, I will demand back. How equitable that sounded!

There was a light ahead, even a campfire. She guessed at the distance they had travelled, and thought that she now knew where they were. The Ghyer had chosen this same place. Was it just coincidence? Was there some great attraction in this site that she could not see? Were they aware that Mr Northway knew of this place? He would find them, would be not? Root them out?

It was not her concern. If they joined with her, she would tell them to move camp. If not . . .

If not, to hell with them. I have no time for wooing them.

There were perhaps a dozen men in the clearing, cloaks tugged up against the lightly spotting rain and hands held out towards the fire. She recalled ever more strongly the Ghyer’s sad little band, all he had managed to gather. She had to hope now that there were more in the woods, or in Chalcaster, that would rally to any summons she gave.

She slipped off her horse, as Balfor went out to stand before them.

‘This is her. This is the Marshwic. Not bad, eh? Not a bad show, don’t you think?’

Most of them stood up, pulling back hoods to see her clearly. She looked from face to face: lean men, tough men, desperate men. Most were unshaven, a few scarred. She guessed some as old soldiers, others as court hangers-on who were coping with such deprivation only with difficulty. About half just looked like ruffians to her, the sort that any jail could offer up given the chance. Of course, the jails had been emptied for the war. They could be soldiers too, like Balfor.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ she asked them. ‘You, Balfor?’

‘Oh, not me, Lieutenant. A follower is what I am. He’s on his way. He likes his entrance, he does.’

She looked about her, feeling tense, wanting to get things over with. The nascent rebels looked at her hungrily: her clean, pressed uniform, the shine on her sabre scabbard and the helm she had draped over her saddle pommel. She must look to them like a ghost more than a woman: the very fighting spirit of Lascanne military might before it all went sour.

One of the still-seated men rose, then, and approached her, flipping back his hood.

‘You’re the leader?’ she asked him, and he shook his head.

‘Just another follower, Miss Marshwic. Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me.’

She frowned at him. ‘Not that I . . .’ But she did know him. She had seen him before. Not at the front – she did not have the sense of a comrade here. Almost the opposite . . .

‘You were . . . you couldn’t have been with the Ghyer?’ she breathed.

‘The name’s Griff, Miss Marshwic. I gave it you once before.’ He grinned insolently at her. If he had chosen now to ask her to give his regards to her sister, she would have struck him.

‘This man is a brigand,’ she told the others. ‘He didn’t even fight in the war. What’s he doing among you?’

They did not show any surprise at her news. Some of them shrugged.

‘Leave a man out for that, and you condemn a fair few willing to rise to the cause now,’ Griff explained. ‘Denlanders are a nosy bunch. That’s bad for everybody’s business. Strange that we should have a common cause now, Miss Marshwic. Who’d have thought it, really?’

‘Not I,’ she said, heartfelt. ‘Are we to wait all night for this leader of yours?’

‘He’s coming,’ Balfor assured her. ‘Wait on him. It’ll be worth it.’

And, like an actor on cue, he stepped into the clearing so that the firelight could touch him. Emily, about to rebuke Balfor, felt the words dry up inside her throat and her hand slip from the grip of her pistol. She knew her mouth was hanging open, but could not find the concentration to close it.

He was golden – golden like the sun, as golden as he had been at Deerlings House – and he trod the ground in the manner of a man whose ownership of all he surveyed was undisputed. His clothes were not of the fine cloth she had seen previously, just a traveller’s simple garb of jacket and shirt and breeches, but he wore them as though they were cloth of gold. They shone in his reflected glory.

King Luthrian of Lascanne, fourth of that name, regarded her with a slight smile to his lips.

‘Your Majesty,’ she whispered.

‘It is customary to affect some reverence in the Crown’s presence. Bow or curtsey as you think fit,’ he said, his smile making it only half serious. She realized that all the others were kneeling before him, and she tried a curtsey, and then decided to kneel in turn, as a soldier before her king.

‘All may rise. What little ceremony we are left with is done,’ said the King sadly. ‘Some man fetch us some wine. Let us pretend that we can yet be civilized.’ His face seemed all wry regret for what had been lost. ‘My dear Emily Marshwic, how glad I am to see you.’

‘Your Majesty is too kind.’

‘The Crown, no less than any private citizen, is aware of the debts that it owes, and will repay all in time,’ he said. ‘I remember you at Deerlings, Emily Marshwic. Of all the ladies and the gentlemen I met there, I remember you. Who could have known, then, that you would prove such a faithful servant to me? To hold the Levant until all hope was lost! You are a hero, Emily. You are the greatest hero of the whole war. When others failed, you stood by your duty. You were true iron, Emily, when the rest were exposed as adulterated metal.’

‘There were many others serving at the Levant, Your Majesty,’ she dared to remind him.

‘None such as you,’ he insisted. ‘Had all my soldiers been of your calibre, what an army I could have raised! But we have fallen on dark times, Emily. The Crown is hunted, assailed on every side by foreign enemies and by traitors at home. Now, more than ever, I need men and women like you to take up the banner for me. You will profess yourself, I hope, still a good servant of king and country.’

‘I will, Your Majesty. I am.’ The words were drawn from her like magic as she looked on his beauty. She had no free will in making them.

‘Of course you are. I need to build an army, Emily – an army that will claw at the innards of the Denlanders even as they try to digest us. I have been up and down the land setting fires, since the defeat at the Couchant. I have inflamed the hearts of men and women, and recalled them to their duty. Now I am come to Chalcaster – and to you.’

‘The Denlanders know you are here, Your Majesty.’ Provost Gottred’s visit now made sudden sense. Doctor Lam had clearly been following rumours of the King, plotting his course from one step ahead, as always.

‘Let them know, and let them fear it. I shall be gone on my way before they can gather their strength. I have escaped from them before. The Crown is sacrosanct. The filthy republicans shall not touch it.’

The word ‘republicans’ touched a raw nerve in Emily. She was reminded, for a brief moment, of her talks with Doctor Lam, as his prisoner: his words about the causes of the war. Before the radiance of the King it seemed mean and unimportant, and yet she clung to it.

‘You have met some of my lieutenants, Emily, some of my soldiers. There are many still loyal, willing to take up arms against the enemy.’ The King beamed as his gesture took in the ragged dozen gathered about the fire.

‘I have met them, Your Majesty. Some I have even met before now.’

‘Excellent.’

She took a breath. ‘It is not excellent, Your Majesty.’

His smile broadened. ‘Come now, Emily. It is rather early for you to be quarrelling with your comrades, is it not?’

‘This man I know.’ Her finger picked out Griff. ‘He rode with the Ghyer and avoided the draft. He preyed on those whose menfolk were at the war front. And how many others here are bandits, criminals? Your Majesty, they are not worthy of you.’

‘Well, Griff, she has you square,’ remarked the King to the brigand. ‘Emily, we live in difficult times now. The Crown cannot be so discerning as it once was when choosing its chiefest servants. Those who will come to me shall serve, if they be willing. I shall not turn a man away if he will act for me.’

‘Even if his motives are no more than avoiding prosecution for his crimes?’ She was aware that she had left off the ‘Your Majesty’, but was reluctant to go back and replace it.

‘His motives now are to serve the Crown, Emily, whatever else he may think. He will find his meanest action turned to purest gold if it be in service to his King. If I made it my wish, surely you would not turn from me if I asked you to take him as your brother? I cannot think that a woman such as you places conditions on her loyalty.’

‘Of course not, Your Majesty.’

He smiled again, and all was well.

‘Then we must plan, must we not? When I leave here for Gosthorn, I must leave a plan behind, that you must carry out. The Denlanders must be harried like the quarry of a hunt. They must be chased and run ragged. Tell me what you think would be best for these fellows here. I value your opinion.’

Hanging would be best for them, Your Majesty. Now was the time to make her case, though. She had thought she must overawe some youth or order around some veteran. Now she saw she must convince the King himself.

‘Your Majesty will be pleased, I hope, that I have already put some thought into this matter.’

‘How could I doubt it?’ he said. ‘You are a faithful servant. Surely action against the Denlanders is seldom far from your mind.’

‘Your Majesty may not know, but you have a great and faithful servant in Chalcaster already, and one who would transform your rebellion here from a mere gathering of thieves to a real and savage threat to Denlander occupation.’

The King raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Of whom do you speak? Let us hear it.’

‘The man is Giles Scavian, Your Majesty, and he is one of Your Majesty’s Warlocks.’

The King nodded seriously. ‘Indeed, I recall the man.’

‘Alas, Your Majesty, he is in the hands of the enemy.’ Emily’s words killed outright the murmur of interest that had started about the fire. The King himself nodded gravely.

‘Poor soul,’ he said softly. ‘I was told as much. It’s a wonder they’ve not killed him yet.’

‘They will, Your Majesty. Tomorrow, as I believe. He is held in the cells beneath the governor’s office. I myself have seen the place. He is as faithful a servant of the Crown as you could ever wish for. I’ve never met one more devoted. Surely it’s our duty to free him, in order to join the fight?’

The men about the fire began muttering at that, for assaulting the governor’s palace was hardly in their line of work. Men like Griff and Balfor, they were opportunists forced into outlawry by Lascanne law, then to rebellion by the harsher laws of Denland. She saw on their faces that this was not what they had signed up for, when they took this late-offered King’s service.

‘Your Majesty,’ she said, ‘please . . .’

‘It is a bold proposal, Emily, and I love you for it. It shows the spirit I have been seeking all over this land.’ His smile grew seamlessly apologetic. ‘But I cannot countenance it. We must harry the Denlanders, wear them down, weary them. To strike so swiftly at their heart would expose our strength too fully and too soon.’ There was no suggestion that the King’s will could not accomplish the feat she requested. He simply found other excuses for not attempting it.

‘But, Your Majesty, with a Warlock to fight for you . . . ?’

‘Of course, the Warlocks have always been the principal servants of the Crown,’ he agreed. ‘Once free, this fellow Scavian would be an asset most valuable in the rebellion against Denland. I say again, though, I cannot countenance making the strike to free him. It is too public, too fraught with risk. But your heart is rightly placed, Emily. I must have Warlocks to serve me.’

‘Your Majesty?’

The King grinned at her, so lively and full of fire that she found herself grinning back. ‘Why, Emily, am I not the King? Does not ancient blood run in these very veins?’

‘Of course, Your Majesty.’

‘Why then, where I once had Warlocks, I shall anoint more. The power has not left me because I have been driven from the throne.’

She frowned at him. ‘But . . .’ But Scavian! ‘But from where, from what? What nobles . . . what men of good family?’

‘If only you had been born a man, my dear Emily.’ The King put a hand on her shoulder, sizing her up, and she felt the touch as hot and fierce as the campfire itself. ‘You would have made a fine Warlock, none better. It is true that in the past we trained our Warlocks over long years, and we picked them from the finest bloodlines – those which already bore an answering spark of royalty in them, so that our magicians would be both loyal and potent. Your family has given me good service before. Perhaps your sons shall serve so again. However, in these dark days, I must make do with what fortune has left me. I have few nobles, but of willing men I have a sufficiency.’

‘But . . .’ She glanced around at Griff and the other tattered villains, and to her horror there was a sordid hunger about their expressions. They think he means them.

He does mean them.

‘But these are criminals! These are villains!’ she exclaimed. ‘Surely you cannot think of giving them such power. How would they use it?’

‘In my service!’ The King’s voice, even slightly raised, halted her objections. ‘They will be my new Warlocks, and their power shall be mine to call upon, and no other’s. Let them be weak, let them lack the discipline and skill of the magicians of yore, yet let them be mine. It is meet that I should use every means at my disposal to free Lascanne from under the Denlander boot!’

‘Your Majesty, please reconsider,’ she said. Even to regain his throne, even to protect his own life, will he give such mad power into the hands of any greedy vagabond that swears to him? She thought of Justin Lascari, anointed Warlock, and what he had tried to do before the end. The touch of the King was no guarantee of virtue, and nor was a nobleman’s bloodline. In that moment she came perilously close to understanding the enemy: who could she ever trust with such searing power? Scavian. Only Giles Scavian.

And she thought once again of Doctor Lam’s words, and all his dire prophecies of what would happen if Lascanne rose against its conquerors.

‘Do not worry, Emily,’ the King told her. ‘You will lose no honour by it. You will be my captain here. You will raise the people in my name, become my glorious banner! And you will start tonight.’

‘Tonight, Your Majesty,’ she said heavily.

‘For tonight the first blow will be struck for Chalcaster,’ he explained. ‘Tonight we shall deliver a message for the Denlanders that cannot be misinterpreted.’ He smiled, all warmth and glamour. ‘These are frugal times, Emily. This one thing must serve equally as the King’s justice, as our first blow against Denland, and as my gift to you, for service done and for all the service you have yet to do.’

‘I require no gifts, Your Majesty,’ Emily replied nervously.

‘No man nor woman may require gifts from the Crown, but the Crown may bestow them at the Crown’s own will,’ he declared. ‘You, over in the trees, bring forth your bounty!’

For a moment Emily was waiting for a whole host of men, an army of rebels, to sprout from the darkness, but it was merely two men, as ragged and rough as the rest, and between them they dragged a third, hauling him forth and hurling him at the King’s feet. She saw a man dressed in dark clothes, lying curled up about his stomach. In this place she almost did not know him.

But it was him: Cristan Northway.

‘Your Majesty . . . what is this?’ she asked, her unease deepening. What has been done to him? Has he been stabbed?

‘Know you all that this man is a traitor,’ the King stated. ‘He did not fight, come the war. He cowered in his office and, when the Denlanders came to Chalcaster, he gave himself over to them, to be their creature – to oppress his own people in their name. Here is a turncoat and a traitor, gentlemen.’

Northway coughed and uncurled himself a little. Not stabbed then, but merely beaten. He had a flower of bruises across his face, and one eye swollen shut. The other eye flicked from the King to Emily.

‘This man is corrupt and venal,’ the King continued. ‘His entire history has been one of bribery, embezzlement and crime. He does not deserve to sit in comfort while you, my faithful followers, shiver here in the wilds.’ Luthrian IV’s eyes flashed righteous fire.

‘You never seemed to mind, while I was still in your service!’ Mr Northway wheezed, and Griff crouched down beside him and yanked his collar hard to shut him up.

‘This man, moreover, thought himself to be the one to catch me and hand me to the Denlanders,’ the King announced. ‘Did he not come to us, here in these woods, and lay a trap for us, saying that we should storm the governor’s palace to rescue this Warlock, this Scavian, this bait. I cannot doubt but that he had a squad or two of Denlanders waiting for just such an opportunity to cripple the rebellion, for all that he pretended to be contrite and loyal.’

Gritting his teeth, Northway looked up at Emily, one arm wrapped about his ribs, and she stared down at him and did not know what to think. Did he or didn’t he? I’m so deep in lies, I cannot tell now what is real. I cannot judge.

‘And the Crown’s final charge against this man,’ King Luthrian concluded, ‘is a deeply personal one. Do not think, Emily, that I am ignorant of your grievances and the grievances of your family towards this man. Do not think that I do not know your father’s history, a loyal man hounded to his death by this creature’s villainy. Do not think, my Emily, that I do not know this man to be your enemy as much as he is mine.’

‘What?’ Northway choked out, trying to sit up. ‘Why . . . damn Your Royal Majesty, but that was in your reign, and you knew and made no move to stop me!’

Griff kicked him hard in the back and he cried out, any further accusations stifled. Emily watched him shaking in pain, both hands crooked into claws.

‘Emily,’ said the King, ‘of all my subjects you are the most dear to me.’

She looked him in his beautiful eyes, and still she thought, To how many others have you said those words?

‘This is my gift to you,’ he explained. ‘You are armed, as befits a soldier. He is yours. Draw your weapon and execute this man, in the name of your King. Your family’s honour shall be avenged, even as I too am avenged. Our causes are one and the same. Come, stand back from the accused, friends. Let her see him. Let her have a clear shot.’

‘You . . . want me to . . .’ The darkness of the woods seemed to wheel about her. The world was unreal, a patch of firelight and the awful, star-pricked darkness of the night sky. ‘To kill him?’

‘He is yours,’ said the King sweetly. ‘Have you not dreamt of this moment, to have this man in your power?’

‘I have, yes,’ she whispered, and took her pistol from her belt, staring down at him. He levered himself onto his elbow and tried to look her in the face, but could not.

What now?

She felt the familiar, comforting weight of the gun. How it had carried her through the Levant and beyond: her father’s gun, which carried the deaths of countless Denlanders, of one lusting master sergeant and of her father in its bloody history. One more notch on its grip, and who was counting anyway?

Can I do this?

Was he not a villain, after all? A villain against her family, against the King, against the people of Chalcaster, probably against the Denlanders as well. He was a man who played all sides for his own benefit, and now it had tripped him. He would have let Scavian die!

What was he doing here? What deal had he really been trying to broker?

She checked that the pistol was still loaded, the powder dry, the ball and wadding in place, but it had so seldom failed her before, and it was primed and ready, faithful as always.

Can I? Can’t I?

And would the death of Cristan Northway solve anything? Really, anything? It would not save Scavian. It would not save Chalcaster. Doctor Lam’s grim future reared as she levelled the pistol: women and children taken to the death camps; whole villages levelled just to catch one rebel. The more they were opposed, the more the demon of Denland would be unleashed, until on neither side of the border would there be anything one could still call ‘human’.

I wish Mallen were here now. Or Brocky, or Tubal, or Scavian. Someone to help me out of this. What will happen, if I do not shoot?

They were waiting. The King was waiting. He was letting her take her time. He believed she had been waiting for this moment since her father died. Had he come to her a year ago, she might have pulled the trigger already, she supposed, but she was not that same woman any more. She had pulled many, many triggers between then and now.

After all he did for me.

And if Northway was a villain, then he was in good company here. Griff the bandit, Balfor the convict, and who were the rest, really? Men that had crawled from the same mould, cast from base metal in imitation of the real thing. Thieves and petty criminals who feared the Denland order that the conquest was bringing, or courtiers who had hidden out the war behind the King’s skirts. She could shoot any one of them, and call it justice.

Standing there, her pistol directed downwards at Mr Northway, she had a moment of truth come to her, as calm and still as the moment before a battle charge. In her head, fragments whirled and spun, words and conversations: Mr Northway, Scavian, Doctor Lammegeier. The war was anatomized and picked apart like a diseased corpse – to find the cause, to excise the tumour. Lest it spread; lest the disease claim more lives; lest it claim them all.

Past the lies of the broadsheets, past the history lessons at Gravenfield, past the muted platitudes that were all most soldiers could ever write from the battle front, there was a cause. All those dead men in red and grey rotting and being consumed in the Levant, they had been put there by someone. The butchery of the Golden Minute was no random tragedy, nor was the mass grave of the Denland dead, or Father Burnloft stammering over the latest casualties. She made herself recall Marie Angelline’s agonized face and Brocky’s grief, and what had it all been for? What had made it all? Who was the architect of this house of blood and corpses?

And she felt her finger tighten on the trigger, and this once, this once only, she knew for sure that she was right. Doubt and worry fled from her, and she fired.

The echo of the shot, passing backwards and forwards through the trees. The look on his face would be branded onto her memory for all time to come.

The look on the face of the King, after she had shot him through the very heart. He looked hurt, as though she had rejected some courtesy he had offered. Flame crackled across his face briefly, and from one hand to the other: an aimless, failing discharge.

He fell, toppling to the wet ground beside the low-burning fire.

And silence fell. Silence like the moment before creation. Silence.

The men around her, Griff, Balfor and the others, were staring at her with horror, but it was Northway’s weak voice that broke into the silence with, ‘God Almighty, woman, what have you done?’

She let the pistol fall from her grasp and drew her sabre in a smooth, even arc of silver steel, looking from face to face around the circle.

‘Come on!’ she cried. ‘Come on, you rats. Come take your vengeance!’ and each one gaped at her, and did not dare. Griff flinched and looked aside, and Balfor was already creeping towards the horses, and within moments they had gone, every man of them, repatriated back into the shadows from their moment of glory.

She fell to her knees beside Mr Northway. Only now was she starting to shake with the enormity of it. No more rebellion. No organized resistance to Denland, not without the banner of the Crown. No escalating reprisals from their Parliament; no death camps; no terror. No more war. She had strangled her country’s freedom with her bare hands, in order to save the men and women who lived in it.

‘What now?’ came the faint voice of Mr Northway. ‘What follows that?’

‘There will be rumours,’ she decided. ‘Always rumours, but a dozen men who would not dare face a single sword will not come forward to make accusations. I think you and I will hold the truth of this in the daylight world, and we are both used to keeping secrets.’

‘That we are.’

‘Will you free Scavian?’ she said.

‘I?’ Northway blinked at her. For a moment it seemed as though the question had no meaning for him. ‘Why, they’ll free him themselves, I should think. And joyfully.’

She did not understand, and it must have shown on her face.

‘The King is dead.’ Northway mimed waving a tiny flag. ‘Long live those Warlocks who no longer bear his mark upon them. That was why you shot the royal person surely? To save your man there?’

The mark . . . But of course, just as the Denlander magicians had been stripped of their powers when their king died, so too would Scavian and his fellows be waking up now, no more than normal men, no more or less a danger to Denland rule than any other man.

‘That was why you shot him?’ Northway pressed, but she just stared at the King’s cooling corpse, seeing futures fade away.

‘Were you going to save him? Was that why you came here?’ At last she helped him into a sitting position, though it plainly pained him.

‘I cannot say.’ He managed a strained laugh. ‘I thought I was, but perhaps I was fooling myself. I did not want him free, Emily. I wanted you – and you love him.’

‘He loves me,’ she corrected. ‘But . . .’ She had known this even as she fired. It had been part of the price, paid willingly in the end. ‘I could not ever be with him. He loved his king, Cristan. He was a King’s man through and through. I would be false to him, to accept his love, because in my heart I would know that he would rather have died than I save him by the death of his master.’

Northway was silent for a time after that, waiting patiently, propped up on one arm, until the quiet finally drew more words out of her.

‘I saved Scavian by regicide,’ she admitted to him, and then cut off his resigned nod when she added, ‘but it was you I committed regicide for.’

*

It would be dawn before they finally struggled back to Grammaine, a slow, painful journey on foot since all the horses were gone, but Emily did not care.

The war was over, her war was over, and she had won.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to my advance readers Janine Ashbless, Justina Robson, Tom Jewell, Esther Reeves, Helen Walter, L. M. Myles and of course Annie Czajkowski.

Thanks to John Tams for allowing me the use of his lyrics for the initial quote.

Thanks also to line editor Peter Lavery, my agent the inestimable Simon Kavanagh, and to Julie Crisp, Bella Pagan, Louise Buckley, Sam Eades and everyone else at Tor who made this book possible.

And thanks to the insect-kinden, for being patient.

Praise for Adrian Tchaikovsky

‘Adrian is continuing to go from strength to strength. Magic’

Falcata Times

‘Tchaikovsky weaves together a story that keeps you hooked with breathless battle scenes, well-drawn characters and an uneasy feeling in your gut . . . an engrossing story, beautifully told’

SFX

‘Stories by Adrian Tchaikovsky are always sober, meticulous and carefully constructed. Guns of the Dawn is no exception . . . a story of gravitas, that uses its fantasy premise to hold a mirror to our past . . . Definitely a thought-provoking read’

SFBook

‘Highly, highly recommended’

FantasyBookCritic

‘The whole Shadows of the Apt series has been one of the most original creations in modern fantasy’

Upcoming4me

‘[Guns of the Dawn] is tightly written and plotted, with exquisite attention to every bloody detail . . . Moving, gripping and wonderfully paced, Tchaikovsky has produced a strong standalone book about a remarkable heroine’

TheBookBag

‘Epic fantasy at its best. Gripping, original and multilayered storytelling from a writer bursting with lots of fascinating ideas’

WalkerofWorlds

‘Great plot, exotic locations, believable characters and the trademark Tchaikovsky battle scenes’

SFCrowsnest

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself he subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor, has trained in stage-fighting, and keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind, possibly excepting his son.

He is the author of the ten-book fantasy series Shadows of the Apt and a standalone science-fiction novel called Children of Time. Guns of the Dawn is his first standalone historical fantasy novel.

Catch up with Adrian at www.shadowsoftheapt.com for further information plus bonus material, including short stories and artwork.

BY ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

Shadows of the Apt

Empire in Black and Gold

Dragonfly Falling

Blood of the Mantis

Salute the Dark

The Scarab Path

The Sea Watch

Heirs of the Blade

The Air War

War Master’s Gate

Seal of the Worm

Guns of the Dawn

First published 2015 by Tor

This electronic edition published 2015 by Tor

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

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Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0-230-77005-8

Copyright © Adrian Czajkowski 2015

Cover Images © Shutterstock

The right of Adrian Czajkowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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