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“Well then, it can’t be helped. I had the misfortune to be born hopelessly royal—I suppose I must bear it.

” He sighed, slumping back in his chair.

“Anyway, on the subject of my first royal decree—the plan is to repurpose our now grossly overstaffed military into the labor force we need to build this magnificent road. We have far too many soldiers contracted for peacetime, eating significantly into my treasury at a time when those funds will be critical to the reconstruction effort, and my advisers warn that Vaya and our other neighbors may find our militarism concerning now that it’s less justified by a demonic invasion.

So you and your comrades will dig and pave your way to Rusta, where, as I mentioned before, you’ll be offered a full release from service in exchange for your labor. What are your thoughts?”

Kat sputtered. “ My thoughts?”

“Will you take the release?”

“It’s…I just found out about it. Your Highness. It’s a very generous offer. I’m thankful for the opportunity.”

“You’re making a simple answer quite complicated, Katrien.”

“Are you ordering me to answer?” she shot back. Her hands were clasped in her lap, holding on to each other like something was about to be torn from her grasp.

“Come now, you must have had a gut instinct when I announced it. Hand to the hosts, tell me what it was.” He paused. “Tell me or I’ll tell your centurion you defied a direct—”

“I’ll take it!” Kat blurted. “I’ll…I don’t know how much you already know about me.”

“Next to nothing,” Adrien replied, waving a flippant hand.

“I was drafted,” she said. “Called up in the census the year I turned eighteen. Before that, I worked my father’s forge.

He’d been a blacksmith, but as the war escalated, our purpose bent to armory.

Everyone was doing their part, but a number pull decided I had to put my body on the line too.

It wasn’t ever something I would have chosen for myself. ”

She risked a glance prince-ward and found Adrien Augustine staring at his own hands contemplatively.

“I don’t think I can look at the draft with objectivity,” he mused.

“I was born into this fight quite literally—one year after the Mouth broke through. I never got a choice either. In one sense, that’s just the way it’s always been for me.

Now that we’re faced with an overabundance of soldiers, the practice seems barbaric, but I recognize that when my parents put the policy in place, we were losing.

Badly. Against an enemy who could compel the dead to fight for him. ”

“You don’t need to justify the draft to me,” Kat said. It was nauseating listening to him try. “I’ve made my peace with it, and it’s certainly easier to stomach on the other side of the Battle of the Mouth.”

“But,” Adrien Augustine interjected cannily.

Kat took a deep breath, rebalancing her focus from the mire of the past to the uncertain footing of the future.

“It’s just, I don’t know what my life is supposed to look like now that I get to live it.

All this time I dreamed of going back to my father’s forge, being able to make things again, but never this soon.

It’s a lot to take in all at once, and I thought I’d have more time with the people I marched beside for these three years.

More time with…” She stopped herself from saying Emory, but it was a near thing.

“So it’s a yes. I want the release, I’m eternally grateful, Your Highness, but—”

“You’re welcome,” the prince said, and the interruption was halfway to a kindness.

“If it’s any consolation, I too find the future very sudden and strange at the moment.

I was born for something. Two days ago, I accomplished that purpose.

Now I must make something of the rest of my life.

A road seems like a good enough place to start. ”

Kat glanced at him sidelong, gathering her courage like she was at the fore of the century. One moment to steady, to root herself, and then she was ready to ask him plainly—“Why are you telling me all this?”

Adrien grinned. “Wanna know my favorite token in my array?” He tapped it twice with a fingertip, sending it jangling against its fellows.

In the low light of the tent, it was difficult to make out the glyph.

“This one is lucky. I don’t mean that in a superstitious sense—I can feel it pulling me toward the easiest solution to my objectives.

Its guidance got me to the Demon Lord’s doorstep at the moment he tipped the crucible, the moment he was about to alchemize antigold. ”

Adrien had used that phrasing before in his speech to the century.

Kat thought he must have misspoken, but perhaps the prince just didn’t know what he was looking at in the moment and decided it sounded impressive.

After all, if the Demon Lord had been tipping the crucible, that implied he’d already smelted the antigold within it and was instead in the process of casting it into a mold before it stabilized.

It wasn’t worth interrupting to press the issue.

The Demon Lord was defeated, the Mouth of Hell had crumbled, and the prince was on a tear.

“Now I find myself in need of someone who can defend me when I can’t defend myself,” he continued, “and lo and behold, it guided me to you precisely at the moment you put a man of that size on his back like you were playing with him. It’s fate. ”

Kat had never been one to doubt the will of the hosts, but this was the will of the hosts as interpreted by a prince who’d popped up out of nowhere. And, in point of fact, she had been playing with Emory. “An exhibition duel’s not necessarily an indicator of combat prowess.”

“Oh believe me, if exhibition duels were accurate descriptions of combat, it would be Bodhi Ranjan’s praises you soldiers would be singing, not mine.

The point remains. The angels’ guiding hand brought me to you.

” The prince looked her up and down with an appraising eye.

“I wonder what lessons they have to impart.”

Kat was hardly a vessel for angelic power —it seemed bordering on madness to expect her to be a vessel for angelic wisdom on top of that. “Surely…” she said, floundering, “surely there are people more blessed by the angels than me. Your friends, for instance.”

“Oh no, not them. Anyone but them.” Adrien’s smile had disappeared.

“Why not?”

“Because all of them want to marry me.”

Kat snorted, which only worsened the dangerously distressed look that strained Adrien’s face. “Why…What…” Kat couldn’t quite find the words to express the absurdity of it. “Wouldn’t that mean they want to protect you?”

Adrien shook his head. “You’ve met me. Like, really met me.

You saw me make a fool of myself in front of the troops out there.

I’m barely worthy of the crown on my head, and the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life is behind me now.

I am not what you would call a hot prospect—beyond, of course, the fact that my bloodline has held the throne of Telrus for centuries.

So anyone who’s expressed intentions to marry”—he gestured up and down—“ this is only in it for the power. And if they’d marry me for power, they might kill me for it too.

So again, none of them can be trusted. Not them, and not any of their centurion friends—any of whom could be vassal families to theirs. ”

The bitterness startled her. He was mercurial, certainly, but her first impression of the prince hadn’t allowed for this kind of sharp edge. “So your solution is to trust someone you just met instead?” Kat asked.

“Well, my lucky token hasn’t warned me away from it yet. So. What do you say?”

“That it’s absurd,” Kat blurted. So much for Mira’s all his ideas are the best ideas you’ve ever heard, but she couldn’t stand it any longer.

“I’m just one person, and infantry isn’t built for taking on a Lesser Lord.

On the battlefield, even with a hundred of us, we still rely on our centurion to frontline when the demons strike. ”

“Which is why it will work!” Adrien exclaimed. “Like I said, they won’t strike in the first place if they think they’ll be going up against an Aurean.”

Kat shook her head. “For non-Aurean troops to face one unassisted, it’d take a whole decade. A whole century. ”

Adrien nodded, his expression switching over to a thoughtfulness she didn’t like.

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. This is why the token brought me to you.

One second.” He stuck his fingers in his mouth and blew a short, sharp whistle that brought a valet bursting through one of the tent’s back flaps.

“There’s a centurion outside,” he told the man. “Bring her in.”

One flurry of activity and another interminably longwinded, self-aggrandizing explanation later, Mira sat across from Kat, glaring daggers through her soldier as Kat did her damnedest not to meet that razor-edged stare.

She’d misspoke. Or hadn’t realized what she was implying. She’d fucked up—and now not only would she pay the cost, but her entire century would pay it alongside her.

“So you see, Lady Morgenstern,” Adrien concluded at last. “I’ll need you at the fore of the formation as we lead this project.

Your unit will do their part in the road construction, of course—Iwouldn’t want to deprive you of that honor—but you’ll have the additional honor of ensuring that I make it safely to the capital in time for my victory ball as we root out the Demon Lord’s last remnants in this plane. Any questions?”

Doubtless Mira had several. Kat could almost hear the fluttering of the deck as her centurion shuffled through it, weighing which card to play. But in the end, her commanding officer was a professional—and more than that, Adrien was the heir to the kingdom. There was only one answer he’d hear.

“When do we start?” Mira asked through clenched teeth.