He was one of a few in Mrs. Felda’s with the privilege of an actual bed, rather than a bit of cloth spread over the stone floor, but he was still obliged to share it with two others in shifts. As another nod to his standing, he’d been assigned the night shift, which let him try to sleep during the approximate hours of darkness, but he still had to vacate promptly in the morning to let some other poor soul collapse.

The combination of the ever-noisy church and the enforced schedule meant that Marcus spent quite a lot of time lying down, hoping that exhaustion would finally triumph over the shouting of night-owl children or the clink and scrape of cutlery and carry him off to sleep. I never thought being on the run from the law would be so loud. Or, he had to admit, smell quite so bad. The church was developing an odor to rival an army camp.

It gave him plenty of time to think, which was not particularly welcome. The truth was that he felt lost. Ever since he’d first saluted the young colonel at Fort Valor in Khandar, Marcus had found himself swept along in Janus’ wake, acting in his name. That was simple enough in battle—executing orders was what an officer was for—and even command of the Armsmen had made sense, of a sort. But it bothered him more than he’d realized at the time that Janus had left him behind to go off and fight his war.

Now he had, in any reasonable regard, failed in his mission. The Thousand Names, which he had been assigned to protect, had been taken by the enemy; Raesinia, who had been added to his responsibilities, would have been taken as well if not for the intervention of a Khandarai phantom. He had nothing left—one Mierantai lieutenant, recovering only slowly from a nasty wound, and one girl ranker with little respect for his authority.

More important, he didn’t know what to do. On the battlefield, if you couldn’t accomplish your goals when you’d done all you could, you fell back and asked your superior for further orders. Without the flik-flik line, though, he was out of contact with Janus, and the situation had changed radically.

In the event of my death . . . That last set of orders was still chilling. Rumor had Janus still very much alive, but how good was rumor? Marcus felt himself instinctively reaching out for reassurance and not finding it.

And then there was Raesinia, with her insistence that they do something. She’s probably right, damn it. But what if I do the wrong thing? The last time Marcus had been without a commanding officer had been after Colonel Warus’ death, just before the Redeemer rebellion. All I managed to do was run away.