“Yes,” Amara said quietly. “She is.”

Bernard inhaled slowly. “What are we going to do about it?”

The room, Amara thought, felt positively cavernous without the presence of the High Lords there. She bowed her head and closed her eyes and tried not to think too hard about what she had to do. “We,” she whispered, “are going to let her.”

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 44

Tavi awakened smoothly, naturally, and free of pain. He was floating in a tub of warm water, his head and shoulders supported on an inclined board. He was naked. His toes poked out of the water at the far end of the tub. He lifted his head, which was an effort. There was an angry red puckering of his skin over his belly, to the left of his navel, where the vord Queen’s weapon had stabbed him. Little, angry veins of red spread out from the injury.

Tavi looked blearily around him. A healer’s tent. One of the ones that hadn’t been destroyed, obviously. Furylamps lit it. So he’d been unconscious for hours, but not many of them. Unless it had been more than a day.

He hated being unconscious. It always interrupted everything he had planned.

He turned his head to the left, and found the tub beside him occupied. Maximus lay in it. He looked awful, though that was mostly bruises beneath the skin of his shoulders, neck, face, head... There seemed very little of his friend that was not bruised, in fact. And his nose had been broken—again. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing.

Tavi leaned up a little and eyed the next tub over. Crassus occupied it, in the same condition he and Maximus enjoyed. The young Tribune stirred, though he looked like he felt even worse than Tavi did.

“Crassus,” Tavi rasped.

Though he blinked his eyes open, the young man was still clearly in pain. He looked at Tavi and lifted his chin very slightly in acknowledgment.

“Crassus,” Tavi croaked. His throat felt dry. It hurt to talk. “Report.”

“I hurt,” Crassus said, his voice slurring and weak. He closed his eyes again. “End of report.”

Tavi tried to get the young man to open his eyes again, but there was no rousing him. He sank back tiredly into the tub.

“He’s very tired,” said a quiet voice. “It’s better if you let him rest, Your Majesty. The attack on the headquarters tent was defeated and most of the attackers slain. We lost twenty-two, all of them from among the guards stationed around the command tent.”

Tavi looked up to see Dorotea sitting quietly on a camp stool near the tent’s entrance. She looked terrible, her eyes sunken, her cheeks bloodless. The collar on her throat threw back the subdued light of the lamp with a silent, malevolent gleam. She held a blanket wrapped around her though the night was not cold.