The Girls’ Own had gathered just behind where the Royals had been. Winter was pleased to see that none of them had kept on running, always a worry in any retreat. She sought out Abby, and to her relief found Jane by her side, winding a strip of bandage around her arm.

“Are you all right?” Winter said.

Abby grinned. “I wasn’t looking where I was going and ran into a tree.”

“Typical.” Jane tied off the bandage, tight enough that Abby squeaked.

“How was it?”

“Hot,” Abby admitted. “But we did all right.”

“They certainly lost a hell of a lot more than we did,” Jane said.

“They had more to lose,” Winter said. “Take another few minutes to rest, then get back into the woods. They may try this again, and in the meantime we should pull all the wounded back here.”

As if to compensate for not being where the fighting was hottest, Winter found herself helping with this latter task, scouring the underbrush and following the cries of the injured. There were, as Jane had said, many more dead and injured in yellow uniforms than blue, but there were plenty of both. Every rock and ditch had been a defensive position to be fought over, and she found dead yellowjackets drifted three or four deep at the base of a boulder. A young woman had climbed a tree to get a better shot, and gotten her leg stuck there when she was hit, so her corpse hung upside down with her arms dangling and loose hair drifting in the wind. A Hamveltai boy with his intestines coiled in a gory pile in his lap calmly asked in heavily accented Vordanai if Winter could please kill him. She drew her saber and cut his throat.

When Bobby found her, they had run out of wounded, and had turned to the task of extracting the corpses. Winter was holding the legs of an older woman while one of the Royals took her shoulders. One of her hands had flopped loose and trailed limply in the dirt.

“Sir!” Bobby said.

“What?” Winter stopped. “Are they coming back?”

“No, sir! It’s Give-Em-Hell!”

Winter waved over a nearby soldier to take up her burden and hurried back with Bobby to the edge of the woods. Yellowjacket corpses covered the slope of the hill, whole mangled rows of them lying where they’d been cut down by canister from Archer’s guns. Scattered bodies in blue lined the edge of the woods, where they’d been caught by answering volleys. The men and women tasked with retrieving them had stopped to watch the drama going on below.