Amara frowned at him and glanced around the room. “Your Highness? Where is Sir Ehren?”

Attis’s cheekbones seemed to become even starker. “He died on the wall this morning, while stemming a vord breakthrough.”

Amara felt her belly twist. She had liked the young man and respected his skills and intelligence. She could hardly bear to think of him lying cold and dead on the stones of that wall. “Oh, great furies,” she breathed.

“Did you know, Countess,” Attis said, “whose idea it was for me to present myself as a target back at Riva? Alone and vulnerable to draw out Invidia or the Queen?” His exhausted smile still had a leonine quality to it. “Of course, he didn’t phrase it like that.”

“Was it?” Amara said quietly.

“Yes. Put forward so diffidently I had to think for a moment to recall that it hadn’t been my idea.” He coughed again, though it had no energy to it. “No one will ever be able to know for certain, of course,” he said. “But I think the little man assassinated me. Barely a fury to his name and...” He coughed and laughed as he did it, both sounds dry with exhaustion. “Perhaps that was why he insisted on watching what would happen this morning, when he sent Antillus and the others out to be a bellows for the fire. Because he knew that his suggestion had such power.” He waved a hand down at his own shattered body. “Perhaps because he felt guilty to see the results of his actions.”

“Or perhaps instead of being a manipulator and assassin, he was simply a loyal servant of the Realm,” Amara said.

A wry, bitter smile tugged at his lips. “The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, Countess.”

“He shouldn’t have been there. He was never trained as a soldier.”

“In a war like this, Countess,” Attis said very softly, “there are no civilians. Only survivors. Good people die, even though they don’t deserve it. Or perhaps we all deserve it. Or perhaps no one does. It doesn’t matter. War is no more a respecter of persons than is death.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “He was more than I have been. He was a good man.”

Amara bowed her head and blinked sudden tears away. “Yes. He was.”

He lifted a weak hand and waved it at her. “Go. You have much to do.”

* * *

The vord arrived perhaps a quarter of an hour after Amara emerged from the steadholt’s hall. Trumpets sounded. Legionares stood ready as engineers finished closing the gates that had been crafted into the walls, until the walls presented a single face of solid granite, its front smoothed to a gleaming finish. She stood beside Bernard upon a tower ten feet higher than the wall. Defensive towers had been spaced every hundred yards down the length of the wall, here a little less than three miles long.