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.