Page 16

“Well, no, that’s what those magnificent muscles are for,” he replied, rapping his knuckles against her bicep.

They did this all the time. Casual touches. Teasing compliments. Hosts above, she’d had him on his back in front of the whole century just a few hours prior, so why was it that this—just a brief touch and a kind word—had her feeling like she’d toppled over the edge of a cliff?

The fraught talk of the future wasn’t helping.

Kat had dreamed of returning to the forge with something to show for her time away—to walk back into her father’s arms and prove to him that these stolen years hadn’t been for nothing.

But she wouldn’t be coming back an officer or even a proper Aurean.

All the prince had done was move the timetable up on the moment she’d have to leave Emory behind.

There was no question of what he’d do next.

Emory had enlisted the day he’d turned sixteen, practically the second he was legally able to take up arms in service of Telrus, and signed on for twenty years of service.

He’d grown out of the teenaged snobbery that had Giselle in its grip, but he remained a loyal soldier through and through.

There was no other life he’d ever choose for himself.

And maybe that made it selfish of her to dream that anything could happen between them in the time they had left. They’d had one glorious night. She could— should —let that be the ending of something wonderful, not the beginning of something that could ruin them both.

Or at least, that was Kat’s line of thinking before Emory reached down to the bag she hadn’t noticed on the ground next to him. “Dinner was wet and sloppy, so I couldn’t sneak a plate out of the mess for you, but I think I found the next best thing,” he said.

The object he pulled from the bag was so impossible that for a moment, Kat couldn’t quite see it.

The pieces she put together—aspiky tail of stiff, waxy leaves, a spiny, almost reptilian skin, a shade of yellow molting into green—didn’t add up, even when she finally understood what she was looking at.

They were hundreds of miles from the southern coasts.

And yet Emory was holding a pineapple.

“Wh… How? ” Kat demanded, reaching out to prod one of its spines. The confirmation that it was tangible didn’t do anything to correct the feeling that she was dreaming.

“The prince brought his own supplies when he rolled into camp, and the kitchens haven’t figured out where to put them yet,” he said with a shrug. “Before I was a soldier, I was a food-snatching thorn in Miss Ophelia’s side. The cooks in this camp have nothing on her. Go on.”

Kat gingerly lifted the fruit from his hands, turning it over to inspect its scaly surface.

She’d never seen one up close like this.

It had always been a dream of hers to eat one, but she figured she’d either need to voyage south or somehow get herself invited to a fancy dinner party to make it a reality.

But here she was in a war camp, where they’d all been going for months on strict rations, holding a genuine treasure.

“You remembered,” she said wonderingly.

“It was the first thing you ever told me you wanted to eat when this was all over.”

“Because it was such a long shot, I figured I had to dream big.” Kat laughed, pinching one of the rigid leaves between her fingers.

That day was crystal clear in her memory.

It had been horrible—not in the bloody sense, but in the tedious one.

Their gains were minuscule, every ten feet earned over several rotations through the lines, and it was the first time Kat had ever felt just how dangerous fatigue couldbe.

In previous engagements, she could always trust that the next rank would be ready to take over and that she’d get the time she needed to recover her breath and rally for her next turn at the front.

But on this day, the rest wasn’t enough.

She’d gotten sloppy, taken a hard knock on the head from the butt of her own spear, and she saw the panic it put in Emory’s eyes.

Their fates were tied. They both needed to focus.

She’d been disoriented, but she knew on a bone-deep level that they weren’t going to make it out of this if she couldn’t get him to cover for her, and that meant wrenching him out of the spiral his thoughts had locked him into.

So in the press of the midcentury, with the chaos of battle clamoring ahead, she had yoked one arm over the back of his neck and said, “Pineapple.”

“Pineapple?” he’d repeated.

“I’ve never had a pineapple. So we’re going to get through this, and then I’m going to go on a nice trip to some southern beach and I’m going to find a pineapple and eat it.”

“What, just lying around?”

“Don’t they grow on trees down there?”

“I don’t…I have no idea…”

For a moment, she’d feared she’d only made his distraction worse. “That’s my thing,” Kat said hastily. “Now you go. Something to look forward to when all this is over.”

She had felt the moment the focus took him, his posture steadying under her arm. “Remember when we passed through Valon? The officers wouldn’t shut up about that tavern they stopped in that had a strawberry mead.”

“Perfect. We’re going to get through this, and I’m going to have my pineapple, and you’re going to have your strawberry mead.”

It had become their ritual. Something to keep them going when the churn got hard.

As the campaign wore on, the list got absurdly long and occasionally fanciful beyond reason.

They dreamed of shaved ice from the far northern reaches, of spun sugar street food Emory had once heard about from a Vayan comrade, of dining at the king’s own table, which Kat promised to tolerate long enough to see what kind of wonderful dishes it must entail.

It would take a lifetime to check off every promised reward.

But now Kat found herself faced with an unexpected lifetime of potential ahead—and, as promised, a pineapple.

“How do you even eat this?” she asked with an incredulous laugh.

“May I?” Emory held out a hand, and she hefted the pineapple into it. “I asked around, and one of the guys in the Fourth Century knew the trick to this.” He palmed it around until it was, at least to her mind, upside down, and jammed his thumb against the base.

“You asked around…just now?”

Emory grunted. “Course not—I just stole this from a prince. It was years back.”

“Years back as in right after I said I wanted to eat a pineapple?”

“Had to be sure we’d be ready when the moment came.

” He wedged his thumb into a seam in the fruit and began working it around the hardened circle that she assumed had once been a stem.

Heat rose in her cheeks, and she wasn’t sure whether to blame it on the fact that he’d been preparing for this moment for years or the fact that the…

thumbing looked vaguely suggestive. “Hah,” he rasped unfairly, jammed the rest of his hand into the base, and tugged, pulling out a juicy, conical plug.

“Guy in the Fourth taught you how to do that, huh?” Kat said with a waggle of her eyebrows.

“Do you want the fruit or not?” he replied, cradling his bounty closer to his chest.

She laughed, holding out a hand. But instead of handing the pineapple back over to her, Emory dropped the plug and dug back into the hole he’d made, levering his thumb against the spiny rind to split off a chunk of gleaming yellow flesh.

He handed her the bite, and she took it with the same reverence she might have granted an Aurean token.

“You too,” Kat said, hefting her chunk like she was waiting for a toast. “At the same time.”

“I don’t want to step on your moment.”

“I want you in my moment.”

The words had rushed out before Kat could think about what she was saying, but before she could teeter into an excuse, Emory blinked, nodded, and dug his thumb back into the pineapple’s flesh, splitting off his own chunk. “Together, then?”

Kat brought the pineapple to the cusp of her lips. The sweet smell was overwhelming, bright and fresh like nothing she’d tasted in ages, and her mouth immediately began to water. But she waited until Emory had done the same before slipping it into her teeth and biting down.

She hadn’t expected it to be so fibrous, but the shock of the texture was immediately washed away by the flavor—sugary, to be sure, but with an acid tartness that offset it, sending a tingling sensation buzzing through her mouth.

Her eyes watered. For the longest time, food had been nothing but fuel to her.

The only job the cooks took seriously was doling out large enough portions to keep the legions going, and taste was an afterthought—nice to have, but never essential.

“You okay there?” Emory hazarded, and Kat nudged away a tear with the back of her hand.

“I’ve got to get you back for this,” she said, sniffling, then took another nibble from the remaining pulp on the rind.

Wordlessly, Emory handed her another piece.

“Strawberry mead?” she asked once she’d finished chewingit.

“Whatever we find next. As much of it as we can manage before the prince’s road is finished.”

“We should have been writing them down,” Kat lamented.

“Well, that’s the other thing,” Emory said. “I may have traded a favor with Javi for pen and paper. Might have a list in my pocket.”

Kat’s eyes widened. “Show me.”

He raised his juice-smothered hands helplessly.

For a brief, less-than-rational moment, Kat considered pawing for it herself. “Well, if it’s been canonized in writing, we have to do it. No backing out now.” She held out her own juice-stained hand to shake.

Emory took it with just a shade too much tenderness, his grasp firm and sticky. “Till the end of the road,” he said, and Kat knew she wasn’t imagining the hint of sadness in those words.

It was at that precise moment Giselle realized that neither of them was paying attention to her. “ Hey, ” she shouted, and the two of them lurched apart. “You didn’t see anything I just did, did you?”

Kat, who was slightly more concerned with what she’d seen, sputtered. Emory stowed the pineapple behind his back a hair too slowly.

“What is that?” Giselle demanded.

“Nothing,” Emory said, half an octave higher than his usual timbre.

“I saw it. How the hell did you get a pineapple ?”

He shrugged. “Found it lying around.”

Giselle stomped back across the training field, and Kat lurched in front of Emory like she was the shieldbearer and not the other way around. Giselle’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You guys are acting weird.”

“No, we’re not,” the two of them replied in unison.

“Sure.” A canny look came over her features. “So you wouldn’t mind if I mentioned this to Mira?”

“First of all, I’m very disappointed in you,” Emory said, leaning out from behind Kat’s shoulder. “All these lessons mean nothing if there’s no loyalty in the decade. Second, loyalty can be bought.” He proffered the pineapple. Giselle reached for it, and he tugged it back. “Uh-uh. Let’s hear it.”

“I will not mention this to Mira,” Giselle recited in a monotone.

“Good kid.” He snapped off a large chunk and held it out to her, and Giselle snatched it from his grasp.

She bit into it, glancing warily between the two of them, and Kat knew that though her silence had been purchased for the moment, there was no walking back the suspicion that lit Giselle’s eyes.