Janus hadn’t come through, not for everyone. Not for Adrecht Roston, whose bleached bones were lost somewhere in the Great Desol. Not for all the men they’d lost on the trek to the Desoltai temple, in pursuit of the Thousand Names. Not for Min, or Chris, or all the rest of the young women who’d died thus far following Winter and Jane. There are going to be more names on that list, whatever I do now. Can I really ask them to keep going, with no food, no shelter, and maybe a battle at the end of it all?

Drums rolled an hour before dawn the next morning, tearing the soldiers of the Third Regiment from their all-too-brief slumber. The rain had slackened but not stopped, so the rankers rolled their blankets and assembled their sodden kit under a gray, drooling sky.

The officers, meanwhile, assembled in a semicircle in front of a flat boulder, where Winter could stand and be heard. Sevran and Abby were on either side of her. True to his word, Sevran hadn’t flinched when Winter told him of her decision, only nodded and calmly issued orders for the continued march.

The lieutenants and sergeants, thirty or so in all, milled about in a loose crowd. She could see Folsom, standing stolidly in the center with Graff hunched to one side and Marsh, Bobby’s lover, on the other. The noble lieutenants of the Royals, Maret and sur Gothin and the rest of Lieutenant Novus’ erstwhile friends, kept to themselves in a sullen group, as did Becca, Winn, and the rest of Jane’s older Leatherbacks. In between were the rest—long-serving, hard-bitten sergeants from the Royals mixed women from the Girls’ Own who had largely been promoted by Winter herself or elected by their own companies. Their expressions were downcast, the recruits affecting the cynicism of the veterans, but underneath it Winter could feel an almost childlike need for reassurance. She coughed, and swallowed hard.

“You’ve probably heard by now,” she said, voice thin and reedy in her own ears, “that a bunch of bargemen turned traitor and made off with the supplies we were counting on. We’ve got fifty miles to go before tomorrow night, and that’s going to mean some empty stomachs. There’s no way around it.”

There was a chorus of low groans and whispered comments.

“We’ll be lucky to get half that far,” a woman said. The Girls’ Own hadn’t had the grin-and-bear-it attitude toward orders ground into them like the regulars. “The mud is sucking the boots off my rankers’ feet.”

“We’ll keep going as long as we have to,” Winter said.

“Why?” the woman shot back. “What good is one more regiment going to do, out of a whole battle?”

“I have no idea,” Winter said. “But Janus told me it was important, and that’s good enough for me.”