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No. No. No no no no no no no. She's only barely recovered from last time they took her; she can't let them take her again.
If she draws her saber, she'll die. There's no doubt in her mind about that, outnumbered as she is and with her master right there. There's nothing she can do; he knows it, they know it, she knows it. They wouldn't do this any other way.
The flash of inspiration is more like a memory; the floating, disconnected kind that sometimes linger after... whatever it is that they do to her. It's never been quite like this before, but - she reaches into the Force, nudges it just so...
The burst of feedback - fear and rage and terror - overwhelms her; she reels, barely keeping her feet, distantly aware of the shouting, of her droid stepping forward to steady her. She ignores it as best she can, and continues nudging at the Force, carefully, carefully...
And then, suddenly, she's elsewhere.
Merra accepts this without blinking — she's a practical person — and nods toward the gate. "There's a path. Mostly solid ground. I'll show you where it stops being reliable."
Merra leads them out through a smaller side gate, one Deskyl probably hadn't seen yet — a sally port, kept clear for exactly this kind of small group movement. The path beyond is real, if narrow: raised ground winding between the worst of the standing water, marked in places with stakes that have seen better days.
The marsh in daylight is a different thing than the marsh at dusk. Noisier — birds, insects, something splashing distantly. The fog has mostly lifted. The stand of trees from last night is visible to the northeast, maybe a quarter mile off the path.
Merra walks like someone who has done this many times and stopped finding it interesting, eyes moving constantly.
Deskyl takes the rear, with DZ in the middle; the chance of them being attacked is negligible but she wants to be able to catch the droid if she slips.
"Can you tell us more about what kinds of supplies the fort would find useful, ma'am?"
"Meat, mostly," Merra says, not turning around. "We have grain still. Salt. What we can't get is fresh anything — greens, fruit. Piral says people will get sick without them eventually." A pause. "Game is thin. I don't know if something's driving it off or if we've just hunted this stretch too hard."
"Hm." Merra considers this, then gestures ahead to where the path narrows and the water on either side gets deeper. "This is where we usually turn back unless there's a reason not to. Past here the ground gets unpredictable."
Merra settles into a waiting posture that suggests she's done a lot of waiting in this marsh — weight back, eyes moving, comfortable with stillness.
After a moment: "She always move like that?"
Merra watches without comment. A heron crosses overhead, slow and unhurried, headed roughly the direction Deskyl went.
"Piral will want to know what she found," she says eventually. "About the game being overhunted. He worries about the supplies."
Merra is quiet for a moment.
"There's a pond there," she says, mostly to herself. "We didn't know that."
"Mm." Merra watches Deskyl work with the focused attention she probably gives most things. "How large an area can she sense?"
Merra absorbs this with the stillness of someone doing arithmetic. Several miles covers a significant portion of the marsh. She doesn't say anything for a moment.
"Kiril will want to know that too."
The marsh is quiet except for the ordinary sounds. Merra watches, patient, and doesn't try to fill the silence.
The heron has landed somewhere in the middle distance, which is probably its own kind of confirmation about the pond.
Merra takes the fish with the matter-of-fact air of someone who has carried stranger things, and turns back toward the path.
"Marsh samphire, when we can find it. Cattail roots. Some mushrooms, but Brytha's particular about which ones." She pauses at a clump of vegetation at the path's edge and points. "That's samphire. There's less of it close to the fort than there used to be."