I bite her hand.
She makes a pained face, fierce and angry, but she doesn’t let go, just takes the bite and doesn’t move.
“You can scream and shout all you want later, my girl,” she says, “but in two seconds, this place is going to be swarming with soldiers and do you honestly think they’re going to believe you just happened by?”
She waits to see my reaction. I glare at her but finally nod. She takes away her hand.
“Don’t you call me my girl,” I say, keeping my voice low but just as fierce as hers. “Don’t you call me that ever again.”
I follow her down a steep slope, heading back towards the road, sliding on fallen leaves and gathered dew but always down and down. I hop over logs and roots, the canvas bag like a stone around my shoulders.
I have no choice but to go with her.
I’d be captured and god knows what else if I went back to town.
And she took my other choice away.
She reaches a stand of bushes at the bottom of a steepening in the slope. She ducks fast under them and beckons for me to follow. I slide down next to her, my breath almost gone, and she says, “Whatever you do, don’t scream.”
Before I can even open my mouth, she’s jumped out through the bushes. They close up behind her and I have to fight my way through leaves and branches to follow. I’m still pushing them back when I practically tumble out the other side.
Onto the road.
Where two soldiers stand by a man with a cart, all of them looking straight at me and Mistress Coyle.
The soldiers look more astonished than angry, but they have no Noise, so there’s no way to know.
But they’re carrying rifles.
And they’re raising them at us.
“And who the hell is this?” one barks, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and a scar down his jaw line.
“Don’t shoot!” Mistress Coyle says, hands out and up.
“We heard the explosion,” says the other soldier, a younger one, not much older than me, with blond, shoulder-length hair.
Then the older soldier says something else, something unexpected.
“You’re late.”
“That’s enough, Magnus,” Mistress Coyle says, lowering her hands and stepping forward to the cart. “And put your rifles down, she’s with me.”
“What?” I say, still frozen to my spot.
“The tracer malfunctioned completely,” the younger soldier says to her. “We’re not even sure where it came down.”
“I told you they were too old,” Magnus says.
“It did its job,” Mistress Coyle says, bustling around the cart, “wherever it landed.”
“Hey!” I say. “What’s going on?”
And then I hear, “Hildy?”
Mistress Coyle stops in her tracks, the two soldiers do, too, and stare at the man driving the cart.
“Iss you, ain it?” he says. “Hildy hoo’s also called Viola.”
My mind’s been racing so fast, so completely focused on the soldiers, that I barely took in the man driving the cart, the nearly expressionless face, the clothes, the hat, the voice, the Noise flat and calm as the far horizon.
The man that once drove me and Todd across a sea of things.
“Wilf,” I gasp.
Now everyone looks at me, Mistress Coyle’s eyebrows so high it’s like they’re trying to crawl into her hair.
“Hey,” Wilf says, in greeting.
“Hey,” I say back, too stunned to say any more.
He touches two fingers to the brim of his hat. “Ah’m glad to see yoo mayde it.”
Mistress Coyle’s mouth is moving but no sound comes out for a second or two. “There’ll be time for that later,” she finally says. “We have to go now.”
“Will there be room for two?” the younger soldier asks.
“There’ll have to be.” She ducks down under the cart and removes a panel from the underside. She motions to me. “Get in.”
“In where?” I bend down and see a compartment hidden like a trick of the eye in the width of the cart, narrow and thin as a cot above the rear axle.
“Pack won’t fit,” Wilf says, pointing at the bag on my back. “Ah’ll take it.”
I slip it off and hand it to him. “Thank you, Wilf.”
“Now, Viola,” Mistress Coyle says.
I give Wilf a last nod, duck under the cart and crawl in, forcing my way across the compartment until my head’s nearly touching the far side. Mistress Coyle doesn’t wait and forces herself in after me. The younger soldier was right. There isn’t enough room. She’s pressed right up against me, face to face, her knees digging into my thighs, our noses less than a centimetre apart. She’s barely drawn her feet inside when the panel is replaced, plunging us into almost complete darkness.
“Where are we–” I start to say but she shushes me harshly.
And outside I hear soldiers marching fast up the road, led by the clopping of horse’s hooves.
“Report!” one of them shouts as they stop by the cart.
His voice–
It’s up high and I hear the horse whinnying beneath it–
But his voice–
“Heard the explosion, sir,” the older of our soldiers replies. “This man says he saw women heading past him down the river road about an hour ago.”
We hear the real soldier spit. “Bitches.”
I recognize his voice–
It’s Sergeant Hammar.
“Whose unit you two in?” he says.
“First, sir,” says our younger soldier, after the briefest of pauses. “Captain O’Hare.”
“That pansy?” Sergeant Hammar spits. “You wanna do some real soldiering, transfer to the Fourth. I’ll show you what’s what.”
“Yes, sir,” says our older soldier, sounding more nervous than I’d want him to.
I can hear the Noise of the soldiers in Sergeant Hammar’s unit. They’re thinking of the cart. They’re thinking of the explosions. They’re thinking about shooting women.
But there’s no Noise coming from Sergeant Hammar.
“Arrest this man,” Sergeant Hammar finally says, meaning Wilf.
“We were just doing that, sir.”
“Bitches,” Sergeant Hammar says again, and we hear him spur his horse (yield, it thinks) and he and his men march off at speed.