He stood in the queue for a bowl of soup and a bit of bread, dunked the one in the other, and ate without thinking hard about what precisely had gone into either. When he’d finished—handing the bowl off to be quickly washed and given to the next hungry party—he climbed the staircase up to the balcony. Raesinia was already waiting by the ladder leading up to the attic, with Sothe beside her. So, to Marcus’ surprise, was Feor, looking paler than usual and with dark circles under her eyes but definitely upright.

“Good morning,” Marcus said in Khandarai. “Are you feeling better?”

Feor nodded. “I am, thank you.”

“She asked to be involved,” Raesinia said quietly. “You don’t mind?”

“I think,” Marcus said, looking around to make sure no one was listening too closely, “that anyone who knows anything about magic is going to have something to add.”

That was what this amounted to, Marcus realized. The “council of people who know magic is real.” Andy, who had actually seen one of the Penitent Damned, seemed to have convinced herself that it had been some kind of chemical trick, and Marcus wasn’t yet sure if he should force her to confront the fact that most of what she knew about the world was a lie. That left himself, Raesinia, Sothe, and Feor.

All women, Marcus realized with a sinking feeling as he climbed the ladder. He wished Janus and Ihernglass were here, to even the odds a little. The others were sitting in the small clear space in the attic, dust dancing in the light of the candles they’d brought up, and Marcus closed the trapdoor and sat between Raesinia and Feor. Sothe, having traded her beggar’s garb for more comfortable linens, stared at him for a long moment before looking away.

“All right,” Raesinia said. “We have to decide what to do next.”

Just by coming here, Marcus realized, he’d made the decision that Raesinia was right. They had to do something. In the end, he couldn’t stand by and watch the people of the Docks suffer, any more than he’d been able to fire on the crowd at the Vendre. Whatever Janus’ orders might or might not have been was no longer the issue.

In a way, he was once again under a commanding officer. That it was a woman a decade younger than him, and a civilian to boot, was taking some getting used to.

“We know Maurisk is digging in,” Raesinia said. “He can read a map as well as we can. He’ll defend all the approaches, but this is the hardest one to block, so he has to assume this is where Janus will make his main effort.”