To the south-west, the Royal Road ran up from the great ford at Southford and up to the south gate of Albinkirk, and then west out the west gate and on the north bank of the Cohocton. The north road—often a pair of wagon ruts—joined the Royal Road almost a half a league out from Albinkirk’s walls, where the flooded waters of the Canata ran south from the mountains and poured under the three stone arches of the ancient bridge, which the prosaic inhabitants called Troy, a hamlet of nine houses and a fortified tower.

Out on the Royal Road beyond Troy, a party of three people on horses—or perhaps donkeys—ambled in the clear spring air. The downpour had swept the sky clear and the wind had driven the clouds south. The heavy downpour had flooded the streams, but it had stripped the last ice out of the shaded corners of the fields.

“They must be damp,” Alcaeus said. He turned to young Mark, who shrugged.

“Sometimes I think of killing myself,” Mark said suddenly. His voice was flat.

Alcaeus looked at him carefully. He had things to do, and plots to weave. But this was a man who’d faced the wave of monsters with him.

So Alcaeus leaned casually back against the cold merlons of the curtain wall and tried to look nonchalant. “Why?” he asked quietly.

The young man looked out over the fields. “It’s all I think about.” He shrugged. “There’s no time before it. The attack. It is just… dark.”

Alcaeus nodded. “You think that perhaps this is not the best job for you?” he asked. “The same piece of wall?”

“They all died,” Mark said. “Everyone I knew. Everyone but me.” He turned and looked out over the fields. “I think that I died, too. Sometimes that’s how I make sense of it. I’m dead, and that’s why—” His voice had begun to rise in pitch.

Alcaeus had seen all the signs before.

“That’s why you should be dead, too, but you aren’t—” Young Mark stepped in close and went for the baselard at his waist, but Alcaeus, who had seen men broken by war and terror since he was a child, stripped the weapon from him and put the man down on the catwalk as gently as he could.

“Guard!” he called a few times.