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“And the one in your hands,” Farr said.

“And the one in my hands.” Ava smiled.

“I don’t believe you. You haven’t had time.” Rangar gave her a little shake. “They’re difficult to transport.”

“Just imagine,” Ava said. “The Rising Wave heading for Fernwell with at least twenty seven flares, all courtesy of the Kassian military itself.”

She couldn’t see Rangar’s face, but the look on Farr’s told her he was thinking of the many ways he could be killed by his generals.

“No.” Rangar shook his head. “It took nearly fifty soldiers all day to get them into place. You couldn’t have taken them.”

She shrugged. Said nothing. She wished she could get her hand into her pocket. But she would surely get the chance soon.

“Head up that hill there. There should be three at the top.” Rangar pointed to the ninth cannon nest.

“If she’s right, then her friends might already be taking the two that are left, which would leave us with just one.” Farr waved a hand at the soldiers behind him and they slid off their horses and started up the slope.

“She wants your people to go up there, she’s manipulated you into doing it, so her fellow Rising Wave friends can kill them.”

“Five against three. I’m sure my unit will be fine.”

Ava saw the five soldiers disappear up the path. They wouldn’t be coming back down.

“You don’t think they will, do you?” Farr must have seen something on her face.

She shrugged. “Who can say?”

He was much closer to them now, and she felt Rangar’s tension in the way he held himself behind her. He didn’t want Farr to recognize her.

If he’d just come from the Jatan border, he might not have seen the drawing.

Rangar wanted her for himself. She was his ticket out of the disaster that had just hit him.

Not that she was planning to oblige.

She looked down at the flare canister in her hands.

She thought it would feel warm, but it was cool to the touch, and the contents were a pale, luminous blue.

If the general’s reaction to the news of it hadn’t been enough to warn her, though, Rangar’s palpable fear would have done it.

It was hard to work out what to do when she was holding so much potential for destruction in her hands.

And then, suddenly it wasn’t in her hands.

Farr had snatched it from her.

“I think she was telling the truth about the other flares, and I need as many of these as I can get if I’m to go back without losing my rank.” Farr slid the canister into a pocket in his saddle bag.

“You have no right.” Rangar lifted a knife to Ava’s throat. “That was mine.”

“It belongs to the Kassian army, and I have orders to bring it out to the plains.”

The knife pricked at Ava’s skin and now that she was no longer holding the flare, she moved her tied hands to her pocket.

“Don’t move.” The knife dug deeper, and she stopped.

Rangar sounded desperate enough to cut her. And it hurt. Her protection was definitely not what it had been.