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Caught hopelessly off guard, she couldn’t smother the instinct to laugh in time.

Kat clapped a hand over her mouth. It was a small mercy they were in a tent—that the fabric couldn’t throw the sound of her catastrophic mistake back at her, though she still swore she heard its echo ringing in her ears.

But Adrien Augustine took having a commoner laugh in his face in stride. “I understand. It’s a lot to process. Let me catch you up.”

Kat stifled another inadvisable outburst.

“You know, of course, what I’ve just told the troops.

That I was trained all my life for a singular purpose.

To free this land from the blight of the Demon Lord.

For this, I shouldered the weight of a hundred Aurean tokens—aided, of course, by an Aurean token that makes carrying all that weight a breeze.

Now, I’m sure you’re all very happy that the war is over, thanks to me, but…

that might not…exactly…be true,” he eked out from behind steepled fingers.

Kat blinked, icy dread threading through her veins. She’d seen the citadel fall and the Mouth collapse, seen waves of thralls slump into a merciful rest. “Then the Demon Lord—” she blurted.

“Oh, no, not him. There wasn’t much left of him, after, well…” The prince trailed off, looking pensive. “No, the problem is the generals. The Three Lesser Lords—you’ve heard of them? Or perhaps faced one in your time on the front?”

Dignity demanded that she speak without trembling, but animal instinct won out.

“The First Legion was part of the force that liberated Fallon,” Kat said.

“I was fortunate to never meet the general in the field. Other centuries were not as fortunate. But I saw it on the city walls once.” She cleared her throat, scooting back on the couch to stabilize herself.

“The Lesser Lords are still on this plane?”

“All three of them,” Adrien said with a nod.

“They fled the citadel’s collapse while most of their compatriots were attempting to outrace the Mouth’s closing.

They will be weakened without the Demon Lord himself or any thralls to support their efforts, but even in their weakened state, well—we have a very clear picture of the paths they took through the battlefield, between the casualties and the eyewitness reports.

Unfortunately, they’ve been quite thorough in covering their tracks since then.

When the only information we have to go on is the sudden, sporadic disappearance of scouting parties, it’s beginning to seem more prudent not to hunt for them. ”

Horror overtook any qualms Kat had about challenging the prince. “Then the strategy is to let the Lesser Lords run rampant through the countryside?”

The look Adrien fixed her with was so dangerously serious that it rewrote him into a different man entirely.

This Adrien Augustine must have been the last thing the Demon Lord saw before he was reduced to ashes.

“The strategy,” he said firmly, “is to draw them out. But to do that, we need to present them with an obvious target. Their purpose, now that they’ve been abandoned in this realm, is to avenge their foul master.

To do that, they’ll need to kill me. If I present myself as bait, we can lure each of the three out of the shadows and strike them down. ”

Kat kept perfectly still. She wasn’t about to risk offending the prince worse than she already had, even as every part of her screamed, If they’re coming after you, what are you doing sitting so close tome?

“You have questions,” Adrien said.

“Concerns,” she hazarded.

“Name them.”

Well, now that she’d been ordered—“Not to put any doubt upon your prowess as an Aurean, but I understand the mechanics of attunement, especially where multiple tokens are concerned.”

“Which is to say you understand my array is practically useless unless I’ve been locked in quiet contemplation for five hours, which all falls apart if I’m interrupted at any point before I’ve finished attuning every token in my array.

” The prince nodded. “That’s a good one.

And it’s precisely the reason our defense won’t rely upon Aurean strength. ”

Kat nearly asked what other kind of strength there was, but then the realization hit. “You can’t mean—”

“In fact, the generals likely wouldn’t strike at all if they knew I was ready to meet them with the same force I used against the Demon Lord, not without antigold. No, we need to present them with a target they think they can win against and beat them with strength they’ll never expect.”

Kat could feel herself going pallid. “You mean beat them with infantry.”

Adrien held up a single approving finger.

“I have a few more concerns,” Kat said weakly. “Why not use the strength of lesser Aureans? Mira only takes half an hour to attune completely. You could build a guard of centurions and a rotation of attunement.”

Adrien’s eager smile went strained. “Well, first of all, there are some political considerations to take into account. I rely upon the faith of House Morgenstern, and it wouldn’t do for me to put one of their most capable daughters in the path of a Lesser Lord.”

Kat nearly bit through her tongue. So you’ll protect the Aureans in your forces and risk hundreds of foot soldiers instead?

“The other consideration is one of optics. There’s a narrative we need to establish that gets more difficult when a blazing star of an Aurean is seen grappling with a demon and word begins to spread that evil is not quite as defeated as previously thought.”

“Optics,” Kat breathed.

“Public opinion,” Adrien added, and it took her a moment to understand that he thought he was clarifying the term for her.

“While I’m sure you must have been very impressed by my defeat of the Demon Lord, I’ve got a lot more to live up to as the Augustine heir.

Mine must be an era of decisive peace, and the campaign we wage across this kingdom must be one that spreads the good news, not one that’s dogged by rumors of demon attacks.

Battling with infantry will be much less noticeable, which serves our mission well. ”

“Our mission,” Kat replied, and this time she was asking for clarification.

“You and your century are the first of many to hear the good news—that news being that House Augustine has an heir who will take up his father’s crown and steward this glorious country into prosperity.

Bit of a mouthful, but we’ll figure out the short and sweet way to get the message across.

I don’t want to be one of those useless royals who sits around and does nothing but accumulate bad reputation after bad reputation. I want to use my power for good!”

Kat genuinely could not tell if this young man was self-aware or not.

“The people need to know me. They need to see what kind of a leader I’ll be. And I know the perfect gift to give to them—apart from my divine presence, of course.”

“Of course,” Kat repeated.

The prince’s eyes lit up so brightly she swore he was using a token for effect. “Public infrastructure,” he exclaimed, clapping his hands.

“You mean—”

“A road. ” He said it with the reverence Kat had come to expect from priests speaking of the afterlife that awaited beyond the Seal of Heaven.

“Think about it. Our countryside has been ravaged for the past twenty years, turned into salted battlefield after salted battlefield. You’ve marched through your fair share of them—you’ve seen it firsthand.

If my rule is to be prosperous, it must start with a solid foundation.

And what foundation is more solid than a road that connects our countryside from here in Kaston clear to the capital? ”

It hadn’t been high on Kat’s list of guesses for what the prince’s so-called next stage would be—namely, because she hadn’t thought to guess anything that was genuinely useful.

The prince had been locked away training relentlessly to punch clean through the Demon Lord for most of his life.

Who would expect him to know the first thing about the essentials of good governance?

And he was right about the road thing. Kat had trooped all over this country, sometimes doing more sliding in the mud than forward motion, and over the course of her service, she’d gained an appreciation for the rare moments when there was solid, hard-packed road beneath her boots.

She’d shoved enough equipment carts over uneven terrain to last her a lifetime, and there had been a few tight moments on the campaign where they’d stretched their rations to the breaking point waiting for a supply line that had been promised.

A road was food and stability and safety. It was exactly what the people needed.

It was, to put it frankly, suspicious that this newly minted royal had landed on the right answer. “That’s…generous of you,” Kat hedged.

“Isn’t it? I hope everyone agrees.” His grin suddenly dropped. “Seriously. You think it’s a good idea, right?”

“Brilliant, Your Highness,” Kat replied, maybe a shade too fast.

He pursed his lips. “I think I want you to stop doing that. The title thing—it’s so clunky.”

“Respectfully, Highness, I’m not looking forward to what my centurion might do to me if I drop it.”

“I can tell her you’re under my protection.”

“I can promise you that’ll only make it worse,” Kat muttered. “Your Highness,” she added after a beat long enough to bring Adrien Augustine’s smile back.