Page 15

“I think the hosts are trying to tell me something,” Mira groaned the moment they strode out of the prince’s tent and into the startling discovery that night had fallen over the course of their visit.

Kat didn’t know how not to provoke her, so she kept her silence and thought forlornly of the hot meal she’d missed at the mess tent. Mira held the kind of sway that could get her fed after-hours, but Kat genuinely feared what her centurion might do if she asked for help making up her lost dinner.

“I made it out alive yesterday. This must be them rebalancing the scales,” Mira said, staring pensively into the middle distance.

Kat decided to roll the bones. “So, can I go, or…”

And truly, strange things were afoot in the war camp, because Mira flapped a hand and muttered, “Best not to risk it. Get out of here before I change my mind.”

Kat bolted. First to the mess tent, where the dishwashers confirmed her worst fears had come true.

She trudged back through the camp, finding a rock to kick every time her stomach growled.

If she couldn’t have her dinner, she might as well have the next thing she craved—and so she made her way to the training field on the far outskirts.

Emory leaned against one of the posts of the makeshift fence that walled off the training ground from the rest of the camp, and even from behind, Kat could tell his usual after-meal drowsiness was hitting him.

She softened her footsteps, sidled up to him, and nudged his hip with her own.

“Someone should tell her we won,” she said, nodding out to the field beyond.

Giselle stood in the middle of the training ground, her pale hair luminous in the torchlight, jabbing her way through spear drills as if the legions of Hell were upon her and it was her personal responsibility to skewer as many of them as possible.

“Tried that,” Emory said once he’d recovered his footing and choked down his startled yelp. “Got some line about how we all have to be prepared and evil never sleeps.”

“Pretty sure I heard that one a time or two when I was first assigned to this century.”

“I was not this bad,” Emory scoffed, gesturing to where Giselle had just executed a truly unnecessary spin of her spear around her neck. “Look at her. She’s ready for the Mouth to burp the demons right back out.”

“Teenagers,” Kat lamented as if she hadn’t been one herself barely two years back. “So, here’s the interesting thing: She might be a little bit right.”

Emory’s eyes went wider and wider as she muddled through a disjointed explanation of everything that had transpired in the prince’s tent. “So now we’re supposed to fend off the Lesser Lords themselves because the prince is making himself deliberately vulnerable?”

“Seems that way, yeah. Wanna run a few drills now?”

“No, I want to save my strength for all this road construction,” Emory deadpanned. “Say what you will about the man, but he certainly knows how to get the infantry on his side.”

“Hey, I’ll take digging a road over a day on the lines any time,” Kat countered. “Provided, of course, my battle partner doesn’t go and do something stupid like break rank while a shock knight’s bearing down on us.”

“Are you trying to get me to regret saving your life?”

“Oh, was it saving my life? Because I seem to recall both of us being seconds away from shaking hands with the hosts before the prince swooped in.”

“You are trying to get me to regret saving your life.”

“I’m trying to—” Kat broke off, scrubbing her hands over her face. She was still hopelessly dirty from their wrestling match, though maybe it worked out in her favor, covering up the furious red. “Thank you for saving my life. I’m sorry Mira tried to make you pay for it.”

“If she really wanted to punish me, she couldn’t have chosen a worse way to go about it,” he said, glancing at her sidelong with a knowing smirk that nearly swept her legs out from under her.

“Are you even paying attention?” Giselle hollered from across the training field with impeccable timing.

“No,” Emory hollered back. “Run it from the top again, and I’ll watch this time.”

Giselle let out a long-suffering ugh that Kat felt on a personal level for several reasons and trooped back over to the fence. “I feel like I’m not getting the form right.”

“Maybe you need a spearbearer’s eye?” Emory offered, nudging Kat.

“Have you tried growing a foot or two?” Kat asked. “I find that really worked out for me.”

“As did resting properly,” Emory added before Giselle could bite her head off. “I know you’ve got this whole raging mission of revenge thing going on, but training late into the night is only going to make recovering your strength harder.”

“What else should I be doing with my time?” Giselle asked with a haughty sniff. “Normal teenage girl things? Swooning over pathetic young men?”

“Pathetic’s what does it for you, huh?” Kat replied, grinning.

Giselle fixed her with a look so withering she could have only learned it from Mira.

Unlike Emory, Giselle hadn’t been in the ranks long enough to grow out of her disdain for the draftees, and Kat had turned making it worse into a hobby.

She didn’t have Emory’s patience when it came to helping the youngest member of the decade in her quest to out-drill all of them, but she admired it because she knew where it came from.

Over the course of her three years, Kat had seen fifteen members of their decade killed in action, and none of them took it harder than Emory.

She suspected that she’d missed out on the worst death he’d seen, the one that made every subsequent loss knock him off his axis—that of his first battle partner, Nolan, whom she’d never heard him say more than five words about.

Every death rattled Emory so badly that Kat had to fight twice as hard to keep the thralls off him, and it was never worse than when it was a young soldier—many of them enlisted, many of them bright-eyed with the notion that they’d be part of the forces that saved the world.

And then came Giselle—small, nearly no muscle to speak of, soft-handed, but with a vicious spark that Emory saw right from the get-go was going to get her killed if he didn’t do something about it.

He’d decided, practically from the moment she’d been assigned to their unit, that he wasn’t going to let her feral teen rage be the death of her.

Miracles on miracles, he hadn’t. Here they all were, on the other side of battle—if only for a moment. In battle, Kat knew exactly what to do with a break in the onslaught. How to rock back, regroup, release what tension she could.

If she didn’t think too hard about it, this could be the same thing.

“I feel like we should talk,” Kat muttered as Giselle started from the top of the drill set, each thrust of her spear punctuated by a grunt. “ Higher, kid,” she added. “Hitting them in the gut is only going to slow them down.”

Giselle let out a snarl but took the note.

“I agree,” Emory said, once his protégée had slipped back into her flow.

“It seems we’ll be fighting one last campaign,” Kat said. “And then…”

“And then you’ll take your release,” Emory finished, so matter-of-factly that it hit her like a kick in the chest.

“I should, shouldn’t I?” she replied, and immediately hated herself—both for how easily she’d told the prince that she would earlier and how much the hesitation in her voice now made Emory’s face light up.

“Soldiering was never supposed to be my future, but there’s an opportunity in it that I never seized. ”

“Oh?” Emory asked. She knew she wasn’t imagining the hopeful lilt ofit.

Kat’s hand crept up to where she’d tucked her token beneath her armor’s protection.

Emory’s brow wrinkled. “But you always said—”

“There was never time. It’s a Light of Angels—the most it could do on the battlefield was aggravate a demon and blind the rest of the century in the process.

The other Aureans in the ranks were too focused on their own cultivation anyway.

It wouldn’t have made sense, tactically, to demand their time.

And once we hit Fallon…” She trailed off, knowing Emory would understand.

Past a certain point in the campaign, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d had a willing tutor. The days collapsed into an interminable grind, and Kat barely had the energy to kick her boots off each night. The idea of mustering the willpower to train her token on top of that was outright laughable.

She’d hoped, once, to walk back through her father’s forge door at the end of her contract not just safe and intact but fully in command of her mother’s token. By the Battle of the Mouth, she’d have been happy just to walk through it at all.

“Now there’s time,” she continued. “However long it takes to build the prince’s road. But there’s not much to be gained from whatever skill I can muster if I’m not going to stay signed on.”

Emory nodded. “But if you were to stay signed on, one cultivated token alone would be enough to qualify you for centurion.”

Of course it was the first place his mind went.

So few of the people commanding them had come up through the infantry.

Most Aureans entered the ranks as centurions—though not without reason.

“I’d get my century killed if it fell to me to defend them from a demon trooper with nothing but a Light of Angels,” she reminded him.

“Who’d serve under an officer like that? ”

“I would,” he replied without hesitation.

Kat blinked. “You’re just saying that because I put you on your back today.”

“I’m just saying that because I’ve seen what happens when you rally the line. Even this morning in the med tent, you brought the whole decade into focus. You think a light’s not much, but sometimes all people need is a reminder that the hosts are on our side.”

“And what about the demons strong enough to cut a soldier clean in half? Think the reminder’s going to do them much good?”