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Three years at war had trained Kat well in the art of campaigning.

She’d learned to welcome the kind of days where nothing was expected of her beyond taking her turn leading the decade’s pack mule in the winding snake of the First Legion’s progress through the landscape and arriving on her feet at the camp the scouts had chosen.

With a walking song bouncing between the soldiers to buoy their spirits, she could make the miles disappear easily, even if she could never quite bring herself to join in the singing.

Two weeks in, it was becoming clear that the road project was a different kind of campaign.

The legions’ organization had dissolved under Adrien Augustine’s management as centuries were broken out into working units and spread over miles of countryside at a time.

Gone were the massive war camps with nightly fortifications dug in around a single legion and all its centuries.

The Third Century had been absorbed into the slow, strange parade Adrien was making along the road as it chewed its way down through the highlands of Kaston and out into the plains of the continent’s heart.

After years of slogging west, fighting and clawing for every scrap of ground gained, it was a relief to walk east unhindered.

Or at least less hindered.

Kat’s life had been thrown into utter chaos thanks to Mira’s so-called promotion.

She could no longer afford to sleep until the wake-up call, as she’d learned on day two, when a disgruntled shieldbearer from the fifth decade latched onto her the second she rolled out of the decade tent.

Sleeping in with the rest of her rank meant they knew exactly where to find her and could make sure their particular gripe was at the top of her list for the day.

Instead, she’d begun forcing herself to get up as soon as dawn began to pearl the sky, stepping over the lumps of her comrades in their bedrolls, then stealing past the rows of the century’s tents and into the relative safety of the camp’s administrative heart that they flanked.

Here lay the intricacies and essentials of the prince’s entourage, from the command tents in which the legions’ leadership plotted the Augustine Road’s grand advance to the tents that quartered the second army—the hundreds of workers who kept the whole operation fed and broke the camp down each day for the next fifteen-mile march they’d progress along the road’s construction.

Here also lay the most important tent in the whole operation—the one in which breakfast was served.

Being Adrien’s purported good luck charm was more of a curse than a blessing, but it did entitle Kat to eat with him and the rest of his companions, and her forced early start meant she had plenty of time to savor the decadence of it.

Every morning there was sizzling bacon fresh off the griddle and pancakes with crisp edges neatly fried in the leftover fat.

Today, they’d pitched camp close to Palomar, a riverside town nestled in the foothills that drew the edge of Kaston’s border with its neighboring duchy, Bredol, and that meant that a runner would be arriving soon with the finest selections the local patisserie could provide.

As usual, Bodhi Ranjan was the first to join Kat.

He rose and fell with the sun itself, and though he never seemed to need it, his appearance was always accompanied by a steaming mug of milky black tea that she suspected he brewed in the privacy of his accommodations.

“Morning, Katrien,” Bodhi said as he slotted in at her side on the long bench laid against the dining table. “Hope it wasn’t too late of a night?”

“No more than usual,” Kat replied, which was a roundabout way of saying it had been.

After the first Lesser Lord’s attack, Adrien had declared it in everyone’s best interests that his lucky charm accompany him through his late-night work.

Kat had made the mistake of going along with the order before she’d become acquainted with the prince’s horrendous sleep schedule.

One of the tokens in his array must have given him a boundless wakefulness—that, or the drastic amount of horrible black coffee he’d started drinking after picking up the habit from the officers in the command tent.

It left her staggering back to the decade tent long after everyone else had bedded down for the night, feeling less like a soldier and more like a security blanket that had been dragged through the dirt after a clingy child.

Bodhi let out a sympathetic hum. She used to think he asked this kind of question out of concern for her, but then she’d started to notice the undercurrents of the curiosity he directed her way.

It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Kat’s well-being—he just also had a keen interest in whatever it was that kept the prince up so late at night.

The answer wasn’t all that interesting. Usually, the prince was sorting through his correspondence and muttering over the logistics of the absurd project he’d spearheaded.

She hadn’t once caught him at anything even mildly salacious, nor anything that might threaten Bodhi’s chances of coming out on top in the scramble to secure Adrien’s hand.

But though the prince hadn’t earned her loyalty in the slightest, he did have her pity, and for that reason, Kat protected his privacy to the best of her ability.

Another benefit of Bodhi’s disposition was that he was far too nice to ever call her out onit.

Next came Faye, rushing into the tent with a stack of papers clutched tight to her chest. She let them splay over the breakfast table, then pinned them with her plate.

Bodhi craned forward, squinting. “Still running the numbers with the quarries, huh? You know, the scribes could probably handle—”

“Yes, they could, ” Faye interrupted, “but then I wouldn’t understand it at all. Aren’t you curious where the stone for this road comes from?”

Bodhi and Kat exchanged a dubious glance.

He’d chosen good looks and charm. Faye, on the other hand, had decided the way to Adrien’s confidence was to make herself as useful as possible or die trying.

More than once, Kat had borne witness to an absolute firecracker of a conversation where Faye had tried to engage the prince in a spirited discussion of his logistics and Adrien had nodded along, muttered the occasional word, and glanced about desperately for some excuse to bolt.

Given Adrien’s penchant for late nights in the scribes’ tent, if anything should have captured his attention, it would be the logistics of his road project. Faye was right to try it as an opening and right to be driven slightly mad by the fact it wasn’t working.

Kat was beginning to find the prince’s companions as tedious as he did—and that was before Celia Vai and Daya Imonde swept into the tent, arguing viciously about couriers.

Though all four of the companions insisted on traveling with Adrien at the fore of the road project, he’d tried to keep them occupied by giving them a legion apiece to “manage,” a task some took to with more aplomb than others.

Faye was studious and curious, Celia forceful, Daya frivolous, and Bodhi, Kat thought privately, was the best of all of them because he ignored the assignment and left the management of the Fifth to the commanders who’d been properly trained forit.

“This is the second time you’ve stolen a rider out from under me this week,” Celia seethed as she flung her plate down on the table. Faye shielded her papers without looking up, while Bodhi sat back with his usual spectator’s grinon.

“It was very important,” Daya replied, all the while wearing the kind of smirk that made it clear it wasn’t important at all.

“You’re free to mismanage your own resources, but leave mine out of it,” Celia groused. “Back me up, Faye—isn’t that what you’re studying?”

Faye’s gaze snapped up with the air of a prey animal who’d just caught sight of a hawk circling overhead. Before she could get a word of defense out, the tent flaps flung outward and Adrien strode in, carrying a teetering plate loaded with a truly inadvisable amount of bacon.

If it weren’t for the circlet on his head or the array of tokens rattling around his neck as he plunked himself down at the breakfast table, Kat never would have taken him for the prince of the realm.

Maybe an overworked scribe or some lesser cousin like Mobbert, thrown into administrative work mainly to get the youth out of the house.

The impression wasn’t helped by the way he immediately began inhaling the bacon, a spectacle mercifully smothered by Celia and Daya’s arguing, though it didn’t stop Faye from staring at him like she was watching her beloved childhood home burn down.

Once the last piece of gristle had disappeared, Adrien laid both hands firmly on the table and shoved to his feet.

“ You, ” he said, pointing at Daya, “can’t possibly have that much to relay to your legion.

If there’s only one rider available, I want you to think long and hard about whether you really need to send that message.

And you, ” he continued, fixing his sights on Celia.

“If you have so much of dire import to communicate to your forces, have you considered joining them in the column? Just a thought.”

“But then I’d miss all this excitement at the fore,” Celia replied flatly.

“Keep that in mind when the next Lesser Lord comes to call,” Adrien shot back, and a sudden stillness fell over the table.

“Has there been an update from the scouts?” Kat dared to ask when the silence stretched long.

“Nope,” the prince replied with a grating false cheeriness. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

Kat narrowed her eyes. “So there has been an update from the scouts.”

“There’s been an update—the update being that they haven’t caught on to the trails of the two remaining generals yet.”

“Seems suspect,” Daya interjected. “They’re huge, aren’t they?”