Page 19

“How’s it feel so far?”

Kat scoffed through a weary grin. “Feels like a lot of people are upset with me all the time and there’s no way to please all of them. Which, I imagine, is probably how Mira feels every day.”

“So you’re saying it’s good training. But how do you feel about it?” he asked.

The sudden intensity of the question made Kat thankful the night had rendered her just as impossible to read.

“I feel like it’s wasted on me if I’m just going to take my release at the end of this.

But when I was first drafted, my father told me I should try to turn it into an opportunity.

If I was going to lose this time anyway, I might as well wring what I can from it.

Now I’m starting to wonder if…Maybe if this works out… ”

Emory’s breath caught.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not such a certain thing after all. Maybe you’re right, and Mira’s right, and there’s more I can make of myself here.”

“I wasn’t kidding,” he said. “I know I joke about a lot of things, but never that. You’d be an incredible officer.

And if this is what you want, consider me your aide.

” There was a pinch on the edge of his words, and for a moment Kat felt profoundly callous.

Here she was, hemming about a golden opportunity that had fallen into her lap to a man who’d never had a scrap of gold in his entire life.

“It should be you,” she blurted.

“Kat—”

“You were the one who marshaled the rest of the decade to get the century off my back tonight. And you were the one who was supposed to be getting disciplined anyway. The only reason anyone’s paying any attention to me at all is this.

” She clasped her token through her shirt, pulling the fabric taut.

But before she could get another word in, Emory’s hand was covering hers. “Kat,” he said, a sudden, unbearable rasp in his voice. “I can’t be jealous over gifts I was never born with or doors that will never open to a man like me. I’m just happy someone as incredible as you gets a chance to shine.”

In the dark, he was barely more than a shadow, his features indistinct but his gaze unmistakably locked on her.

It was impossible to look his generosity in the eye and feel worthy of it.

“Y-You…” she stammered, reaching up with her other hand.

Her fingertips grazed hesitantly along the scruff at his jawline—as if she didn’t already know the shape of it, hadn’t already felt it against more than just her hands.

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “You can’t just say things like that. ”

There was a tension in Emory, the same tension she saw break beside the bonfire on the night that started this. He was holding himself back, even as his grip on her hand tightened. “Kat, I…I don’t know if we should…” he breathed in the narrow space between them.

Her heart sank. This was never supposed to happen.

They weren’t supposed to survive the Battle of the Mouth.

Everything they’d done together the night before it had hinged upon that fact.

And yet, a sudden spark of anger lit inside her.

“What was the point of living through that hell if we don’t get to go after the things we want?

” she whispered, letting her hand fall deliberately on his stubbled cheek.

“This is what you want?” Emory asked.

Kat fought the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “Am I not making it clear enough?”

Emory’s gaze fell to where their hands were entwined, his shielding hers. “I don’t want to be a burden to your ambitions. It was different when we had nothing to lose.”

“Is this…what you want?” Kat hazarded, stilling.

“Of course,” he blurted, and she swore she felt his cheek heat beneath her hand. “But…”

“You can’t risk your reputation,” Kat said, so he wouldn’t haveto.

“I think we’ve proven that I can, ” he replied, and Kat counted herself lucky she couldn’t quite make out the insufferable sly look that had no doubt come over him. “ Should is harder to say. And I wouldn’t be risking as much as you. You think I’m worth ruining your future over?”

“Hosts, you might be the most dramatic man I’ve ever met—and we share a tent with Brandt.

We didn’t have a future until two days ago.

And I’m not sure about a lot of things, but this…

” She slid her hand carefully into a firmer hold on his jaw, pulling his eyes back up to meet hers.

“The future’s not promised, and we might not be able to get away with this tomorrow, but we can try, can’t we? ”

Emory’s pulse jumped beneath her grip. On the battlefield, she’d always felt her own fear in step with his, and she understood all at once that this was not the case now.

Kat’s vision of an uncertain future was a hopeful one, and Emory couldn’t match it.

He’d only been able to act when there was nothing but death ahead of them.

And she couldn’t force him.

Kat let her palm slip down his cheek. She knew the retreat had been called. They weren’t far from the scribes’ encampment now, and maybe it was better to focus on the future that had dragged her unwillingly forward, not the one that stalled in its tracks.

But as she leaned back, a hand at her waist stopped her.

Her sharp breath in was twinned as Emory seemed to steel himself.

She could barely see him, but two trembling points of contact were all she needed to understand.

Her eyes dropped hungrily to where his lips must be. Dropped shut as he leaned in carefully.

Then snapped open as somewhere out in the brush, a twig cracked.

In a heartbeat, he’d spun to shield her as Kat’s fists closed around empty air, longing for her spear. Something was moving out there and getting closer. Something that sounded big —too big to be another pair of soldiers stumbling out of the camp trail for an illicit rendezvous.

“You don’t think…” Emory breathed.

Kat did. She’d been thinking, ever since Adrien told her about the Lesser Lords. Wondering when the first strike would come and how unprepared the Third Century would be. It had left her primed to jump at shadows, and for a moment she was ready to dismiss her paranoia as exactly that.

Then she saw movement.

It was enormous—far bigger than the last shock knight that had rattled their line, bigger than any demon she’d faced on the battlefield before—which made its quiet creep all the more eerie.

It moved through the woods like liquid shadow, indistinct through the dark columns of the tree trunks, and for a moment Kat was so fixated on trying to track it that she failed to notice it had company.

Not thralls—they would have heard thralls coming, for one thing, and only the Demon Lord’s magic could raise them—but no fewer than five underlings skirting its wake.

Kat nudged Emory’s shoulder, and together the two of them crept for the nearest tree trunk, pressing themselves into the cool, damp wood of the old growth.

Her breath came in shuddering fits as she struggled to keep it quiet, and she held her arms slightly away from her body, terrified that any brush of cloth on cloth might give away their location.

The demon paused, its lungs working like a great pair of bellows as it scented the air, and Kat ducked lower to the ground, pulling Emory with her. She’d never had to worry about a demon being able to smell her—had never thought to wonder if their senses were sharp.

A hand at her chest startled her so badly that she nearly yelped, slipping her palm over her mouth to catch the noise before it could escape her.

Emory pressed insistently on her token, and Kat understood.

If they were caught, they didn’t have a chance—but they could give one to everyone else.

If she could call on her token. If she could flood the woods with angelic light.

It was Kat’s turn to cover his hand with hers.

She thought of her mother, of every night her token had made itself a beacon, of how she’d never had to fear the dark as long as her mom was at her side.

She’d never been able to match that light in her own feeble attempts to cultivate her Aurean power, but maybe now was the moment—now, when it mattered more than anything else.

Kat called to the hosts, imagined her voice reaching past the Seal of Heaven, fought back the bile flooding her tongue. Help me. Let me bring your light forth.

Nothing answered. She was hollow with fear, inadequate as a vessel for anything else, and the metal beneath her palm was nothing she could shape into a tool. She was on her back beneath the shock knight again, infantry meat in the mortar, waiting for the pestle to drop.

Another crack. This time, the noise was farther away. The demon and its underlings were moving again, continuing along the forest path. Maybe the hosts were on her side after all.

“They’re after the prince, right?” Emory breathed close to her ear.

Kat nodded—she wouldn’t risk more.

“Then why are they headed toward the scribes?”

Dread flooded her the moment she landed on the answer.

The scribes’ encampment rested on the outside edge of the legions’, positioned for efficiency when it came to sending and receiving couriers.

It was the beating heart of the army’s logistics, managing the supplies necessary to keep the legions fed and equipped.

With their sudden pivot to infrastructure, it had become the central hub of the road project. Which meant—

Kat stiffened. “Because they’re after the prince.”