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who, alone of all his family, was still alive. Word came daily of the resistance in the west and her part in it.
    If his mother, who was dead, despised him, Valerius had no difficulty imagining the undiluted loathing with which his sister would view the man he had become. There were moments in the darkest nights when Valerius wished her dead and himself free of the consequences of her continued life—and hated himself for wishing so. More than anyone or anything else, it was to escape the living reality of the Boudica that Julius Valerius had first offered himself to the Infinite Sun.
    Valerius continued to chant, not trusting silent prayer alone to keep the phantoms at bay. When he was calmer and could see only Mithras and the bull in the worlds beyond the one around him, he levered himself carefully away from the oak upright and continued to feel his way down the corridor. At the far end he found the door and pushed it open.
    Outside, there was snow. He had known there would be from the cold but the depth of it surprised him. It came to his knees, with a crisp skin on top that crackled under his weight.
    If he had slept without dreams and woken free of memories, the beauty of the night would have left him silent with awe. The vast area of the fortress and the land around it had been brought together under a bear’s pelt of unmarked snow so that Roman land and native land were one. Above, the sky had emptied itself and the clouds had gone, leaving the god’s arc purest black. A million scattered stars reflected snow light so that, even without the moon, he could see clearly theoutlines of the barracks stretching in all directions. On the eastern horizon a finger’s breadth of not-black presaged the dawn. For an ordinary man in ordinary times, it would have been a night to find a hound and go hunting, to take a spear with a good blade and seek out the wry-tusked yearling boar that had evaded the best of the legions’ trackers all through the summer, a night to fire the blood and pump the heart and remember what it was to live.
    Were Valerius younger and still in love, he might have done exactly that, deaf to the responsibilities of rank. Youth and passion had protected him once from the realities of life, but he was no longer in thrall to either of these things and his promotion to duplicarius was a recent one, long sought and much cherished. Now he ignored both the beauty and the potential for joy in the world around him, and looked instead for the many and varied chances of disaster.
    He did not have to seek far. The pipes leading to the latrines had frozen; he found that almost immediately. He used them anyway, knowing that what he deposited would sit and stink until the flow of water could be restored. He was not the first; someone else had risen early and had the same need. They, too, had come after the last fall of snow. A pair of boots had left clear prints and Valerius followed them for a while until the two paths separated: the boots to go left, to the eastern gate and the annexe beyond that housed the latest wing of cavalry to arrive from Rome; Valerius to go right, to the horse lines, where his duty lay.
    The lights at the stables had not gone out overnight; two men would have been flogged had they done so. By their pooled light, he could see that the mounts of his own command were quiet and none of the stable roofs had collapsedunder the snow’s added weight. That had been his greatest fear and he was grateful not to find it realized. He took a fistful of corn from the feed room and walked down the line, doling it out sparingly. At the end, separated by a gap from the other mounts, stood an oddly marked pied horse, all black with streaks of white running down from poll, withers and croup as if the night sky had been laid on its hide and then the gods had splashed it with milk, or shards of ice.
    This one horse did not lean out and lip at his palm for the corn as all the others had done but plunged forward,