Page 11 of A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace

By the time Mira wrapped up the assembly, Kat had almost started to believe she’d gotten away clean.

After the prince’s surprise arrival completely derailed her briefing, their centurion had righted the ship with staggering aplomb, delving into a rundown of the next week’s outlook as if a token-laden boulder hadn’t just rolled through her plans.

Even if the Demon Lord had been defeated, there was still laundry duty, armory duty, kitchen duty, and everyone’s favorite, the latrines.

Decades were given their assignments and report times, read out by Mira’s wisp of an aide, Mobbert—another Morgenstern, one who’d been placed under Mira’s protection in a role that many saw as some sort of punishment for an indiscretion that was the subject of constant speculation between Carrick and Sawyer.

It was so normal that when Mira hollered, “Dismissed,” Kat turned to Ziva and said, “Wonder what’s for dinner?”

Ziva looked her up and down. “You might wanna wash up before you worry about that.”

Kat frowned down at her arms. They were filthy. They were filthy because—

“Katrien, with me.”

She startled, lifting her gaze back to the platform, where Mira glared down at her like she was trying to cultivate a brand-new token that would let her shoot fire from her eyes. “Just me?” Kat blurted.

Emory ducked from under the arm Carrick had slung over his shoulders, moving in to square at her side. Kat wanted to hiss at him to run while he still could, but he stared resolutely up at their centurion with the air of a man who could only be budged by a direct command.

“Just you,” Mira said. “Emory, count yourself lucky I’ve got too much on my docket to deal with you at the moment. Get out of my sight.”

Order received, Emory made like a man of duty—but not before he’d leaned in close enough to knock his shoulder into Kat’s. “Save you a plate?” he muttered.

“I’ll be fine,” Kat told him and wished she meantit.

“Been nice knowing you!” Carrick called over his shoulder. Sawyer cuffed him, which Kat appreciated, then pantomimed wiping a tear away, which she didn’t.

Mira dropped off the edge of the platform, her Lightness of Angels token making her landing cat-soft. “The prince has asked to meet with you,” she said, and under the words Kat heard the obvious corollary: and until that happens, there’s nothing I can do to you.

Kat would take whatever escape she could get. “Can I clean—”

“No. Now.”

She tried to tell herself it wouldn’t have mattered much.

The prince had already seen what he’d seen, and she doubted he’d forget it.

Kat smoothed her battle braids as she followed Mira across the assembly field, fussing with the worn leather tie that gathered them.

At least she could tame some of the flyaways before they reached the prince’s doorstep.

Over the course of the briefing, an actual doorstep had materialized, a massive red tent looming over its fellows with a single gold pennant flying the Augustine crest—an angel skirted by a radiant crown—on the top.

Mira paused at the entrance, glaring sidelong up at Kat.

“No gawking. You don’t speak unless spoken to.

You address him as ‘Your Highness’ and answer anything he asks truthfully and to the best of your ability.

All his ideas are the best ideas you’ve ever heard. Got it?”

“Yes, centurion,” Kat replied, chasing it with a nervous gulp. She’d only ever seen Mira this tense when she had all ten of her tokens attuned ahead of a battle.

“One step behind me.”

“Yes, centurion.” Kat fell in at Mira’s heel as she pushed through the flap.

She immediately failed Mira’s first command.

Within the tent was a level of opulence that Kat had never seen before, a level that seemed nonsensical for the middle of a war camp.

The ground was hidden completely beneath a tapestry of intricate plush carpets that made Kat want to lift up onto her tiptoes just to avoid getting more of her hopelessly dusty boots on them.

Fabric panels strung from the tentpoles divided the enormous space, carving out a foyer in which two gold-trimmed couches were arranged as a sort of receiving area.

The rest was clearly still a work in progress, valets laden with trunks, coats, and casks rushing back and forth, but anchored calmly in the midst of the chaos were four young people sprawled across the seating—and of course Adrien Augustine, placed upon the pedestal of a large wingback chair at the foyer’s center.

“Welcome,” he said. “Pardon the mess.”

“Your Highness,” Mira replied, bowing at the waist with a hand pressed flat against her tokens. Kat mimicked her, feeling the shape of her own Aurean gold stamp lightly into the skin of her chest.

The prince flapped his hands. “That’s going to get very old very fast. Come, join us.

” He beckoned to the couches, which were thoroughly occupied by his companions in various states of repose.

None of the four looked particularly motivated to make room—in fact, they all seemed alarmed that two soldiers had intruded on their space.

Mira straightened, Kat half a beat behind. “Thank you, Your Highness, but it wouldn’t be proper.”

“Don’t the philosophers say all people are equal under the eyes of the hosts?” he mused.

“The philosophers may say that, but the nobility says otherwise,” Mira replied with a deferential nod to the prince’s entourage. “I’d do House Morgenstern a disservice not to comport myself accordingly.”

“And what about you?” he asked, his eyes settling on Kat. Once again, she felt the weight of it—the way her future was at the mercy of his whims. “Philosopher or nobility?”

Mira glanced back over her shoulder, and the weight doubled.

“Neither,” Kat blurted.

A muscle in Mira’s jaw tightened.

“That is to say, I’m definitely not a philosopher, and I have no claim to nobility either.”

“Oh? But I thought we were all Aureans here? Did I not spot a bit of shine beneath that armor?”

Kat pulled the token out of her collar, letting it catch the candles that lit the space with a warm, low glow. “It’s a pauper’s token, Your Highness. I have no high name.”

Adrien Augustine leaned forward intently, and Kat resisted the instinct to tuck her token back in its safe resting spot.

When she’d first been drafted, she’d considered leaving it at home.

She’d heard the stories of single-token Aureans robbed for the power they couldn’t cultivate enough to defend.

Many would argue that a piece like hers, one with very little in the way of combat applications, would do more good in someone else’s array, where it could attune with the rest of their gold to enhance their other host-granted skills, and Kat had taken great pains to keep her token hidden for her first two years on the front.

Except from Emory. Emory, she’d told barely three months into their assignment—not because she trusted him, but because it was the only way she could think of to get him to take her seriously.

Theirs had not been a happy pairing at first. Emory had been on the front lines for two years, having enlisted the day he turned sixteen, and he had a deep-set resentment for anyone who had to be forced into soldiering by a random lottery pull.

He was fresh off the loss of his first battle partner and in no way ready to accept his replacement, but the war wouldn’t wait for that, and of all the people he could have been assigned, fate had given him Kat.

And Kat at eighteen had been, well, different.

Brighter, always quick with a smile, and so full of hope that it was practically intolerable to someone who’d been grinding through thralls and ground down in turn.

Even if physically they were well-matched, her height and bulk the perfect complement to his defensive power, he’d politely closed himself off from any of her attempts to be friendly.

She’d taken it personally. Taken it as a challenge. She’d break down those walls if it was the last thing she did. All it would take was persistence and kindness—with enough of that, her mother had always said, any garden could bloom.

What had happened instead was the same thing war did to everyone.

The Telrusian machine marched forward, and Kat discovered that the only way to survive it was to accept your place as a cog.

She learned, as every soldier did, that you had to put your head down, had to tune out the screams of the forsaken on the end of your spear, had to pray to the hosts that some combination of your century’s discipline and your centurion’s gold could keep you alive when the demons came to call.

She’d stopped crying for them. Stopped crying at all.

It hadn’t taken long. Three months in, and she understood why Emory had been cold to her.

But after those three months, she decided she couldn’t be both miserable and misunderstood. And so one quiet day on the training grounds, when it was just the two of them, she pulled her token out from under her shirt.

“A pauper’s token,” the prince repeated now. “Fascinating. I’ve never seen one in the wild before.”

If the way he described his upbringing was anything to go by, this young man had known nothing but multitoken Aureans his entire life. If there was anyone in his sphere who carried only a single piece, they probably kept it to themselves.

The Augustine heir’s eyes were locked onto her shine now, and Kat felt the prickling needle of Mira’s reminders at her jugular.

If he wanted it for himself, there was no way for her to refuse him.

Especially not in front of his four companions.

Now that she’d had a moment to adjust to the prince’s weighty glow, Kat could see they were each sporting gold of their own, arranged in gleaming decade ranks that ached just as much to look at.

Any one of them could claim her token—and would probably smite her where she stood if she resisted.

“Your name?” the prince asked.