She turned the corner without waiting to see if they followed. A musket cracked, and wood exploded from the ceiling over her head. Another Deslandai, a young man with a downy beard and wide, terrified eyes, stared at her through the cloud of powder smoke from his missed shot. Winter crossed the distance between them in three strides, batted his bayonet away, and sank her sword in his throat.

Abby, coming up rapidly behind her, shouted a warning. Winter looked to her right as the young man crumpled, and found another door leading into a room full of yellow-orange uniforms. There were three of them, two more carrying muskets and an officer, gold epaulets gleaming, in the act of drawing his sword.

Abby’s musket cracked, deafening in the tight space, and one of the soldiers spun away. She charged at the other, and he parried crosswise with his own weapon. Her momentum drove them against the wall of the room, grappling and struggling for the locked muskets. It gave the officer a golden opportunity to plunge his sword into Abby’s guts from behind, so Winter stepped forward with a slash that forced him to back off, raising his guard. He dropped into a fighting stance, weight low, eyes confident.

Winter had never been much of a duelist. It wasn’t a skill that came up in the thick of battle, where opportunities to match skills against a comparably armed opponent were uncommon. Now, doing exactly that, she ventured another thrust at the Deslandai officer and watched him effortlessly flick her blade away and riposte with a strike that she avoided only by dancing clumsily backward. It came to her that she was going to die, right here, in the next few seconds. She could see by the officer’s eyes that he knew it, too.

The red-haired sergeant rounded the doorway, bayonetted musket in hand, paused a moment, then went after the enemy officer. He swept her thrust away, then turned and parried a cut from Winter, shouting what had to be Hamveltai obscenities. Winter gestured at the sergeant to move right, spreading out to get through the officer’s guard, and the woman nodded.

Whoever their enemy was, he was an experienced fighter. Rather than wait to be surrounded, he rushed at Winter, sword cutting downward in a desperate two-handed blow. When the sergeant thrust her bayonet at his back, he sidestepped, pulling his blade back from Winter’s parry and leaving her stumbling and overbalanced. Before she could step back, he lashed out with the hilt, a vicious short jab that drove the heavy metal pommel into her temple.