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conclusions, but his sleep-fogged mind wasn't cooperating. He shook his head with a growl and forced it to do its duty. "Captain will have the cavalry, the Knights, and the Battlecrows on the road. He'll try to hold the Canim off long enough to get the column into the city's walls." Fidelias turned to his armor and strapped into it, fastening the row of ties down its center front with fingers that flew with the effortless speed of long practice. "Prime Cohort will form up on the earthworks on the far side of the refugee camp. Tell Tribunes Martinus and Kellus that I recommend that they form up the Seventh and Ninth on First Cohort's flanks. We march in five minutes."

    Vilius slammed his fist against the armor over his heart and dashed from the tent.

    Once he was gone, Marcus grimaced and rubbed savagely at the clenching cramp that had formed on one side of his neck. He must have pulled a muscle, sitting up that fast out of a dead sleep, but crows take him if he was letting any of those young men see it.

    Maybe he was getting too old for this sort of thing.

    Five minutes later, the Prime Cohort, double the size of any other cohort at eight centuries strong, moved out of the heavily fortified gates of the town on the northern side of the Tiber. They went out at a run, boots striking hard in unison on the paving stones, then becoming a muffled thunder as the column wheeled out over softer earth. Marcus led the column beneath the wan, cloud-obscured morning sun, running beside the first rank and calling the pace. They passed through the tent-and-shanty-filled warren that stretched for half a mile in every direction around the town of Elinarch.

    The earthworks at the far side of the refugee camp were not the simple packed-earth walls that the Legions had used for time out of mind. Instead, they had been built from clay taken from the bed and banks of the Tiber, then baked into a substance harder than most stone via the use of firecrafting. Those walls were fifteen feet high and twenty thick, and if they didn't have the sheer, obdurate strength of furycrafted battlement stone, they were far more serviceable than standard earthworks or a wooden palisade.

    Marcus led the cohort up onto the walls over the wide-mouthed gate, where the men took up positions with practiced speed. He bellowed at the few who performed with slight imperfections, and had the entire Prime Cohort in position and standing ready before the legionares of the Seventh and Ninth cleared the city walls and came pounding toward them.

    Half an hour passed in nervous silence while, behind them, refugees began a slow, confused retreat into the safety of the city's walls. Overhead, several Knights Aeris went flashing by, driven by torrents of wind, flying to and from the east. Marcus felt the familiar singing tension of fear that always came with preparation for a battle. Defending the city from an attack from this particular flank had been a worst-case scenario, and no one had thought it would actually come to that—but if the Canim had crossed the river, then he and the other men here, at the forward defenses, were about to have a very bad morning. Worse, every one of them knew it.

    So Marcus spent his time pacing steadily up and down the wall, berating troops for an improperly fastened sword belt here, a small patch of rust on a breastplate there. His growled imprecations were creative, gratuitously foul-mouthed—and familiar. They were all the reassurance he could offer his men. They were all he could offer himself, as well.

    Tribune Tactica Kellus, who had himself been a centurion when he first signed on with the First Aleran, paced briskly down the wall from the Ninth's position and nodded to Marcus. "Centurion."

    Though as the First Spear, Marcus exercised command of the Prime Cohort, made up of its finest legionares , Kellus still outranked him. Marcus saluted, and nodded. "Sir."

    "Have you any idea what's going on?"

    He shrugged. "Reports of an