The fire had burned down to a bed of orange embers by the time most of the camp had gone quiet.
They had chosen an open plain near Regium Lepidi for the night's rest, flat ground that gave a clear view in every direction, the kind of place a soldier picks when he wants to see trouble coming long before it arrives. A small river ran nearby, cold and clear, and the horses had been watered and tied along a picket line at the camp's edge. Two men stood watch, one facing north, one facing south. The rest slept in shifts, wrapped in their cloaks against the chill that always settled over open ground once the sun was gone.
Spurius sat near the embers with a blanket folded across his knees that he never quite used. Decius lay close by, eyes half open, watching the old man in the orange light the way he had watched him for seven years, not because he expected anything to happen, but because watching Spurius had become a kind of habit that outlasted its original purpose.
"You are not sleeping," said Decius.
"I rarely do, the night before something matters." Spurius did not look at him. He was looking at the fire, or perhaps at something further than the fire. "You should. Tomorrow we cross fully into their territory."
"I will sleep when you sleep."
Spurius made a sound that might have been a laugh, low in his chest, the kind he allowed only to people who had earned the right to hear it.
For a while neither of them spoke. The fire cracked. Somewhere behind them a horse shifted its weight and one of the picket ropes creaked.
Then Spurius reached to his side and lifted a bundle that had been resting there since they made camp, wrapped in oiled cloth against the damp. He set it down between them and began to unfold it without ceremony, as though he were simply checking that nothing inside had been damaged by the day's ride.
The armor caught the firelight before the cloth was fully open. The golden eagle on the breastplate. The wide shoulder guards. The dark red cloak with its border of gold thread, folded with the care of something that had been folded the same way a hundred times before.
"I have been thinking," said Spurius, "about how we enter Milan."
"We enter as a delegation. You at the front. That has not changed since Ravenna."
"It has not changed. But I do not want to enter as a soldier. I want to enter as the voice of the emperor." Spurius smoothed a crease out of the cloak with the back of his hand, an old gesture, automatic. "A soldier walking through their gates in full war dress tells Theodore that we have come to threaten. A voice carrying an offer of peace should not look like a blade."
Decius sat up slightly on one elbow. "You are not suggesting you go in plain travel clothes."
"No." Spurius's eyes moved from the cloak to Decius, and something in them had already decided what came next. "I am suggesting that the eagle and the cloak walk in front, and that they are worn by someone whose bearing reminds them this is still Rome they are dealing with. Whether the man underneath the armor is me is not the part that matters to a frightened bishop watching from a window."
"You want me to wear it."
"I want to see how it sits on you."
Decius huffed something between disbelief and a laugh. "Spurius."
"Get up."
There was no argument to be made against that particular tone, the tone Spurius used when a conversation had already concluded in his own mind and the other party simply had not caught up yet. Decius got to his feet, grumbling something about the indignity of being measured like a tailor's apprentice, and Spurius rose with him, lifting the breastplate and holding it out.
Nearby, Lucius the old senator, who had been pretending to sleep for the better part of an hour, opened one eye at the sound of metal shifting. Severinus, the young deacon, was openly awake a few feet away, sharpening nothing in particular with a whetstone simply to have something to do with his hands, and he watched with open curiosity as Decius reluctantly pulled the breastplate over his shoulders.
"It fits wrong in the shoulders," said Decius, shifting under the weight.
"It fits exactly as it should." Spurius circled him once, adjusting a strap here, tugging the cloak straight there, with the same brisk efficiency he brought to inspecting a garrison. "Stand up straight. Not like that. Like you have somewhere to be and no patience for anyone who slows you down."
Decius straightened, mostly out of habit, and something in the firelight caught the gold of the eagle crest and threw a small bright reflection across the grass.
Severinus, from his spot by the fire, let out a low whistle. "Gods. Decurion, you look almost respectable."
"Watch your mouth, deacon."
"I mean it as a compliment." Severinus grinned, the kind of grin that belonged to a man young enough to still find humor in long, cold nights. "I have never seen you stand so straight in seven years."
Even Lucius, propped up now on one arm, allowed himself a dry chuckle. "Praefectus, if Theodore mistakes him for you and offers him better wine at the table, I expect a full account of the vintage afterward."
"If Theodore offers wine at all, I will consider the journey a success regardless of who is wearing what," said Spurius, but the corner of his mouth had moved, just slightly, the closest thing to a smile that ever crossed his face in public.
Decius turned, awkward in the unfamiliar weight of the shoulder guards, and caught his own shape thrown long and strange across the grass by the firelight. For a moment, just a moment, he understood what Spurius meant. It was not about becoming another man. It was about what the shape of the armor told anyone watching, regardless of who stood inside it.
"Well," said Spurius, looking him over a final time. "That will do."
"Do for what, exactly?"
Spurius did not answer right away. He reached out and straightened the cloak's clasp at Decius's throat, an unnecessary adjustment, the kind of small motion a man makes when he wants his hands busy with something other than the words coming next.
"You have known how I work longer than anyone left alive except the emperor himself," said Spurius, quieter now, the joke gone out of his voice though not entirely out of the moment. "You know what matters in a command and what only looks like it matters. If the day ever comes that my position needs filling and I am not there to choose who fills it, I want it to be you. Not because you are the most senior. Because you know the difference."
The fire popped. Severinus, sensing the shift in the air, suddenly found something urgent to attend to in his pack. Lucius lay back down and closed his eyes, granting them what privacy could be granted around a shared fire.
"That is not something to decide tonight," said Decius.
"It is not a question, Decius. It is a request from someone who does not have unlimited time to make it."
"You have plenty of time. You are insufferable enough to outlive all of us out of spite alone."
That earned a real laugh this time, short and low, gone almost as soon as it arrived. Spurius clapped a hand once on Decius's armored shoulder, the gold eagle cool and solid under his palm, and said nothing further on the matter. He stepped back to where his own bedroll waited, leaving Decius standing alone in the firelight in another man's armor, the cloak heavier on his shoulders than it had any right to be.
Decius did not take it off right away. He stood there a while longer, looking down at the eagle on his chest, before finally unfastening the clasps and folding everything back the way Spurius had taught him to fold a uniform years ago, corners square, creases sharp.
He set it within easy reach for the morning and lay back down.
Sleep came slow and shallow. The fire dropped to its last coals. The two men on watch paced their small circuits, north and south, and the plain around the camp stayed dark and silent and, for the length of that hour, entirely deceptive.
The first arrow came without warning a little past midnight.
It took the southern watchman in the throat before he could make a sound. The second man at the north post had time for one short cry, cut off by a second shaft a heartbeat later, and that single cry was enough to tear the whole camp out of sleep at once.
After that there was only noise. Horses screaming against their tethers. Men fumbling for swords in the dark. Shapes moving in from two directions at once, wearing the colors of Nepos's legion, shouting in a deliberate confusion of Latin and Gothic meant to sound like an army rather than ten men.
What happened in the chaos that followed would not be fully known in Ravenna until a battered, fevered survivor was carried through its gates many days later.
***
The convoy reached Ravenna at midday on the nineteenth of April, thirteen bodies wrapped for burial and one living man who had spent the journey drifting in and out of a fever that had only just begun to break.
By evening, Decius could stand. Not well, and not for long, and only with a cane that one of the garrison carpenters had cut and smoothed for him that same afternoon, but he could stand, and when word came that the emperor wished to see him, he refused to be carried into the room.
The chamber adjoining the Strategy Hall was smaller than the hall itself, meant for closer conversations than the wide table and the map of Italy could accommodate. A single long table stood at its center, a few oil lamps burning along its length, throwing soft light against stone walls that had absorbed too many difficult conversations to remember any single one of them clearly.
Romulus sat at the head of the table. Gisela stood near the wall behind him, arms folded, her eyes already on Decius the moment he entered. Vitus stood at the table's far side, hands resting on its edge, his expression arranged into the careful neutrality of a man who had perfected the art of appearing to listen without revealing what the listening cost him. Marcellinus sat near Vitus, a stack of unfinished reports pushed aside in front of him, his face paler than the lamp light alone could explain.
Decius lowered himself into the offered chair with effort he tried and failed to hide. No one moved to help him. It was, in its own way, a kindness; nothing in the room suggested he was being treated as fragile.
"Tell it from the beginning," said Romulus. His voice was even. Not cold, not gentle. The voice of a man who had decided, somewhere over the last days, that there was no longer any value in softening what needed to be heard.
Decius told it.
He began with the camp at Regium Lepidi, the fire, the bundle Spurius had unwrapped that night. When he described the armor, when he explained why he had been wearing the eagle and the red cloak instead of the man it belonged to, something moved very slightly behind Vitus's eyes, a flicker gone almost before it registered, the kind of motion a man makes when a plan he built with great care suddenly reveals a consequence he had not accounted for. His hand, resting on the table's edge, closed once and opened again. No one but Gisela seemed to notice, and she said nothing.
"He wanted them to see the rank before they saw the man," Decius said. "He believed it would matter more, walking into Milan, than which of us stood inside it."
He described the first arrows. The screaming horses. The shapes coming out of the dark wearing Nepos's colors. He did not soften the account of Severinus falling with the offer still clutched in his hand, or Lucius cut down where he stood too slow to run. His voice did not break across any of it, though it thinned, once or twice, into something that needed a breath before it could continue.
Then he reached the part that mattered most, and the room went very still.
"I lost sight of him for one moment. One moment, and then I heard him fall." Decius's hands, folded on the table in front of him, tightened around each other. "I got to him. He was alive. His shoulder was bleeding badly and his horse was gone, so I carried him. Toward the trees, away from the worst of it. He was heavy in a way I had never noticed before, not in seven years of knowing exactly how much that man weighed."
No one spoke.
"Then the weight changed. Not lighter. Heavier, suddenly, in a way that does not happen to a man who is simply walking. I looked down and there was a spear through him, thrown from somewhere I never saw. He went to his knees. I lowered him to the ground. His eyes were still open."
Romulus did not move.
"He was conscious long enough to speak." Decius looked up, directly at Romulus now, because there was no kind way to say the next part and no use pretending there was. "He said, watch over him. Two words. Then nothing."
The lamps hissed faintly. No one in the room filled the silence that followed, because there was nothing that belonged in it.
"Three torches were moving toward us through the dark," Decius continued, quieter now. "I could not carry him further and I could not fight three men alone. I set him down. I did not decide to leave him the way a man decides anything calmly. I set him down and I ran because there was nothing else left to do, and I have hated myself for it every hour since, whether or not that hatred is fair."
Romulus sat without speaking for a long moment, his hands flat on the table in front of him, his eyes somewhere between Decius and the lamp flame nearest him.
"He knew what wearing that armor meant," Romulus said finally, not quite a question. "He knew it would be you who lived through whatever was waiting for us on that road. Not him."
Decius did not answer, because there was no answer that would have added anything true to what had already been said.
Romulus stood. The chair scraped once against the stone floor, the only sharp sound in a room that had otherwise gone soft with grief and exhaustion.
"You did not abandon him," Romulus said. "You did what he asked of you, that night and every night before it. Watch over him. That is what he meant. Not only that night. After it."
He looked around the table once, at Vitus, at Marcellinus, at Gisela, at Decius last.
"Rest," he said. "All of you. The funeral will be held tomorrow. I am declaring seven days of mourning, beginning tomorrow, for Spurius Maecenas, Praefectus Praetorio of this empire."
No one in the room offered an objection, or a comment, or anything beyond a silent nod. Romulus turned and walked out, the Praetorian guards who had waited outside the door falling into step around him as he made his way toward his own chambers through corridors that had gone, like the rest of the city, unusually quiet.
***
That same night, while the council chamber in Ravenna still smelled of lamp oil and unspoken grief, a different company of soldiers moved through the dark some miles to the north.
Centurion Aulus Vettius led them, thirty men in full battle dress, swords drawn and shields slung rather than carried, moving without torches along a path his scouts had marked two days earlier. He had received his orders directly from the Magister Militum's seal that morning, brief and unambiguous: a band of raiders responsible for the slaughter of the Milan delegation had been traced to a meeting point east of the Via Aemilia, where they expected to collect payment for services rendered to persons unknown. They were to be found. They were to be ended. No prisoners were required, and none would be taken.
Vettius did not know who had hired them, and it did not occur to him to wonder very hard. Soldiers who ambushed a peace delegation wearing the enemy's colors did not require an elaborate motive beyond gold, and gold was a motive Vettius understood without difficulty.
They found the ten men waiting in a shallow hollow shielded by a stand of old oaks, exactly where the scouts had said they would be, gathered loosely around a small fire and arguing among themselves in low voices about a payment that had not yet arrived. Whatever they had expected to ride out of the dark that night, it was not thirty armored soldiers closing the hollow's only easy exits before a single one of them had time to reach for a weapon.
The bearded man who had spoken for them once before, in a different forest, under different torches, rose slowly when he understood what surrounded them.
"We did our part," he said, his hands open at his sides, his voice pitched to carry calm rather than betray the opposite. "Whoever sent you, tell him we did exactly as we were told. The one in the eagle armor rode away alive. We left him as ordered."
Vettius did not lower his sword. He drew a sealed parchment from beneath his cloak instead, broke the wax with his thumb, and unrolled it by the light of the dying fire that was no longer theirs to tend.
"I was given this to read to you before the sentence is carried out," Vettius said, and his voice, trained for parade grounds and battle lines, carried easily across the hollow. "Spurius, Praefectus of the Praetorian Guard, is dead. You killed him. For your folly, you will answer with your lives."
The bearded man's face went through disbelief, then something closer to fury. "That is a lie. We let him live. The armor, the eagle, that was the order, and we followed it to the letter."
"The Praefectus is dead," Vettius said again, folding the parchment closed, because the words written on it were not his to argue and not his to amend. "Your orders are clear to me. They do not require your agreement."
The other nine men were already moving, some reaching for blades half drawn before they understood there was nowhere left to run, the hollow's slopes lined on every side with soldiers who had been waiting in silence for exactly this moment. A few tried to fight. Most did not have the chance.
It was over before the fire had burned low enough to need feeding again.
Vettius stood over the bearded man's body a moment longer than the rest, the only one among the ten whose face he had bothered to look at twice. Then he turned to his men.
"Dig the pit. No markers. Be finished before the sky lightens."
The soldiers set to work with the same quiet efficiency they had brought to everything else that night. Vettius walked a short distance from the hollow and stood with his back to the digging, looking north toward Milan and south toward Ravenna, neither of which he could see from where he stood, and waited for his men to finish a task that, as far as he understood it, restored some small measure of justice to a world that had taken a great deal more from Rome than ten hired criminals could ever repay.
He did not know what the parchment in his pocket had actually meant. He did not know that the men dying in that hollow had, by the letter of their own grim instructions, done precisely what had been asked of them. He only knew his orders, and he had carried them out, and in the morning he would ride south and report that the matter was closed.
***
The funeral was held the following morning, the twentieth of April, beneath a sky the color of old iron that threatened rain but never quite delivered it.
There had been no time, and no need, for elaborate ceremony. The bodies had been out of the ground too long already, and what dignity remained to be given them was given quickly, in the eastern burial ground of the city beneath two cypress trees that had stood there longer than anyone living could remember.
Bishop Paulus led the rites, his black vestments the only true black among a crowd otherwise dressed in the dark reds and muted grays the city had adopted without official instruction. He read the twenty-third psalm in a voice that carried without strain across the gathered soldiers and the small crowd of citizens who had come to stand at a respectful distance, watching a kind of grief they recognized even if they had not known the man personally.
Romulus stood at the head of the row of graves. Gisela behind him. The Praetorian Eleven flanked them on either side, heads bowed. Decius stood as well, leaning on his cane, refusing the chair that had been quietly offered and just as quietly withdrawn when his expression made clear it would not be accepted.
When Paulus finished and turned to ask whether the emperor wished to speak, Romulus looked down the line of thirteen graves for a long moment before answering.
"No," he said. "They do not need more words than the ones they were given while they lived. Close the earth."
It was closed. Spurius lay nearest the larger of the two cypress trees, the ground packed down by soldiers who had performed the same task many times before but never, any of them would have said privately, with hands quite this heavy.
By midday, heralds had carried word to every corner of Ravenna. Seven days of mourning, beginning that day, in honor of Spurius Maecenas, Praefectus Praetorio. No celebrations. No public spectacle. The bells of every church in the city would toll once at dusk, and the red banners above the garrison would fly at half their usual height until the seventh day had passed.
***
On the third day of mourning, the twenty-second of April, four riders approached Ravenna from the north along the road that came down out of Gaul.
Lucius Paulinus had seen the city's towers from four miles out, and even at that distance there was something different in the way they stood above the marshes compared to every other fortified town he had passed in twenty-two days of travel. He had slept in inns that smelled of woodsmoke and in open fields cold enough to numb his hands and once in a barn offered with visible hesitation by an Italian farmer uncertain what business four foreign riders might have heading south.
Now, finally, Ravenna.
He stopped his horse some distance from the outer wall, dismounted, and walked the remaining stretch leading the animal behind him. His three escorts, Verinus among them, a soldier who had guarded Syagrius's household for ten years, slowed and stopped a respectful pace behind their commander without being asked.
Paulinus reached the wall and laid his palm flat against the stone.
It was rough and cold under his hand, the texture of brick that had stood through centuries of weather and repair, each patch of newer mortar a different shade from the stone around it, the whole surface a kind of map of every hand that had ever decided this wall was worth maintaining.
He leaned in and pressed his forehead briefly against it. Then he kissed the stone.
Verinus looked away, not from discomfort at the gesture but because some things were easier witnessed from an angle that allowed a man his dignity.
Paulinus straightened, wiped his hand once against his cloak in a motion that could have passed for brushing off dust, and mounted again. "With me," he said to the others, and they rode the last distance to the gate.
The gatehouse was a low stone building set against the inner wall, with a worn table inside where reports were logged and a rack of ledgers that had absorbed years of names and dates. Two soldiers stood at either side of the gate itself, and an officer stood behind the table when the four riders drew up.
Optio Caelius was a man in his forties with thinning hair at the crown and a carefully maintained mustache that seemed designed to compensate for it. Four years at this post had taught him to read travelers quickly; merchants, couriers, pilgrims, refugees, men with business they preferred not to name outright. These four riders fit none of the usual shapes.
Their dress followed Roman military convention closely enough, but something in the cut of the cloaks, the way the straps were fastened, the way the weapons sat, came from a habit just slightly different from the one Caelius knew.
The lead rider dismounted and stepped forward, a man perhaps in his forties, of average build, with the bearing of someone accustomed to formal rooms without making a performance of the fact.
"Greetings," the man said, in Latin that was nearly flawless but carried something faint behind its vowels, not a barbarian accent, not a distant provincial one either, something closer but shaped by long isolation. "I am Lucius Paulinus, sent by Comes Syagrius of Soissons to present myself before the emperor."
Caelius repeated the word silently in his own head. Soissons. Something stirred at the edge of memory, not from his daily duties at this post, but from some briefing or map shown years ago to senior officers, half remembered now.
Gaul. The north.
The isolated general.
Rome holding on where Rome was not supposed to still exist.
"Welcome to Ravenna," Caelius said at last, his tone shifting, not performed warmth but something with more weight behind it than simple procedure. He turned his head toward the gatehouse. "Hortensius! Bring me my horse!"
Chairs scraped somewhere inside. Footsteps moved quickly.
Caelius came around the table and gestured for Paulinus and his escorts to follow. "I will take you myself."
They rode through Ravenna's streets at an easy pace, Caelius slightly ahead, Paulinus beside him, the three escorts trailing a respectful length behind.
"How long have you traveled?" Caelius asked, more out of professional habit than idle curiosity, the kind of question an officer asks to keep a measure of the road conditions and a stranger's reliability at the same time.
"Twenty-two days. The pass through the Alps was still half frozen at the edges. We lost a day waiting for a guide who knew which crossing would hold our horses' weight."
"And Soissons itself. What is it, exactly. I confess I know the name and very little beyond it."
Paulinus considered the question for a moment, the way a man considers how much of something large to compress into something small. "What is left of Roman Gaul, held together by stubbornness more than by any army large enough to deserve the name. We keep the courts running. We keep the language. We keep the forms of law that everyone else in that part of the world has long since stopped pretending to honor." He glanced sideways. "It is smaller every year. I will not pretend otherwise to a Roman officer who would see through the pretending in any case."
Caelius nodded slowly, filing that away.
They passed through a market square where vendors spoke in lowered voices and a few black cloths still hung from doorways, remnants of the mourning that had settled over the city two days before. Paulinus noted it without commenting directly, though his eyes lingered on the half-lowered banners above a garrison wall they passed.
"May I ask you something that may be improper for a stranger to ask," Paulinus said after a moment.
"Ask. I will decide whether it is improper once I hear it."
"The stories that have traveled even as far as Soissons, garbled as they likely are by the time they reach us, say that your emperor killed Odoacer with his own hand. Not through a general. Not through an order given from a safe distance. His own hand, in the man's own tent." Paulinus glanced over. "Is there truth in that, or is it the kind of story that grows taller with every border it crosses?"
Caelius was quiet for a few strides of the horses before answering.
"It is true," he said. "I did not see it myself. I was a younger man stationed on the eastern wall that night, and from where I stood all I knew was chaos and then, somehow, silence. But I have spoken to men who were close enough to see him return. Sixteen years old. Carrying what he carried back through the dark. It is true, and I have served seven years in this garrison and I still find it difficult to fully believe, even though I know better than to doubt it."
"Sixteen," Paulinus repeated quietly.
"He is not sixteen now." Caelius's tone shifted again, something more careful entering it. "He is a different man than the boy in that story. You will see that for yourself soon enough."
"And the mourning. The banners. May I ask who the city has lost?"
"The Praefectus Praetorio. Spurius Maecenas." Caelius's jaw tightened slightly around the name, the way a man's jaw tightens around a fact he has not yet finished absorbing. "Killed on the road to Milan, along with most of a peace delegation sent to settle matters with the usurper Nepos before they became matters no longer settled by letters."
"A usurper," Paulinus said carefully, testing the word.
"That is what he is called here, and I will not pretend the matter is simple enough to summarize between a gate and a garrison. There is a schism behind it. A bishop in Milan who will not bend the knee to the one in Rome, and a man crowned twice over by two different claims to the same throne. It has been building since before I held this post, and after what happened on that road, I do not believe it will be settled with more letters."
Paulinus rode in silence a moment, turning that over, when Caelius spoke first, the question apparently having sat behind his own tongue since well before the gate.
"Milan is closer to where you crossed the mountains, is it not? A shorter road, by most maps I have seen." Caelius kept his eyes on the street ahead, the question asked plainly, without much weight behind it, the way a man asks something he is genuinely curious about rather than something he means to press. "Why bring Syagrius's word here, to Ravenna, instead of there?"
Paulinus was quiet for a moment before answering, and when he did, there was something almost apologetic in how he said it.
"Forgive me. That is a question I will answer, but not for you. The day someone with the standing to ask it properly puts it to me, they will have my full answer. Until then I would rather carry it a little further than set it down on a street corner."
Caelius gave a short nod, not offended, the look of a man who recognized the shape of the line being drawn and had no quarrel with where it had been set.
"Fair enough," he said. "I imagine you will not have to wait long."
The garrison headquarters stood in the eastern quarter of the city, a complex of stone buildings wrapped around a central courtyard wide enough for full formation drills. Caelius led them to a smaller side entrance and asked them to dismount in the entry yard.
"Wait here," he said, gesturing toward a stone-walled antechamber with two long benches and a narrow window looking onto the inner courtyard. "I will find my commander."
Paulinus and his three escorts went in and sat. After nearly a month of travel, the hard wooden bench felt like an unexpected luxury.
Outside, the courtyard carried its own steady noise, commands given in the same cadence Roman officers had used for five centuries, boots falling in a rhythm passed down through generations of men who had never met each other but who moved, somehow, the same way. Paulinus listened and felt something he could not entirely name, recognition perhaps, or the sense that twenty-two days of road had delivered him somewhere that mattered.
Caelius found Marcellinus on the upper floor of the main building, seated with three other officers around a table buried in reports carried back from Claterna, documents that needed sorting, recording, and filing before they could be properly archived.
For three days Marcellinus had thrown himself into this work with a thoroughness that went well past what the task required, the kind of focus a man builds for himself when he needs somewhere safe to put his attention.
He looked up when Caelius entered.
"Dominus," said Caelius. "There is someone you should meet."
"Meet?" Marcellinus set down his pen. "Who?"
"They say they have come from Soissons."
A brief silence fell over the table. One of the other officers, an older man named Benedictus who had served long enough to know names rarely spoken in daily business, looked up from his own stack of papers.
"Soissons, Dominus," Benedictus offered. "In northern Gaul. The seat of the isolated Roman general who has held that ground alone for, what, more than a decade now."
Marcellinus looked at him. "You mean Syagrius."
"The same."
Marcellinus sat without moving for a moment. Of everything that might have arrived at Ravenna's gates on the third day of mourning, in the middle of a week that already carried more weight than most years carried in full, this had not been among anything he expected.
He stood, rolling the unfinished report in front of him closed without bothering to mark his place.
"Where are they?" he asked.