Page 25 of A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace

As the morning shift wore on, Kat began to understand what a grave mistake she’d made.

Though really, it was two mistakes compounding.

On the one hand, if she’d stuck to Adrien’s side, she could have spared herself from the long, exhausting slog that was digging a trench down to bedrock—or at least to the firmest ground they could find.

On the other, if she’d done this sooner, she could have built up the strength and calluses necessary to keep up with the rest of her decade.

She was getting left in the dust. But that wasn’t to say she wasn’t loving it. Even with the sun beating down hard on their backs, even with her palms going raw and red around her spade, she was so profoundly happy to be with her decade, waging a war not against evil but against dirt.

It would have been even better if they’d stopped making fun of her for it, but Kat knew she could only be so lucky. “Keep up, princess,” Carrick jeered as she paused to readjust the strips of cloth she’d wound around her hands to protect them.

“Takes one to know one,” she replied. It was a bottom of the barrel retort, but she was too tired to think of a real one, and it got a snort out of Sawyer anyway.

If she’d had any of their respect as their hinge spear on the front lines, it had vanished within the first hour of digging.

“It’s not my fault I was missing out on all the fun you guys were having rolling around in the dirt. ”

“Oodles of fun. Miles of fun,” Sawyer groaned, driving his next strike deep for emphasis.

“You’d better thank the hosts that you lost out on the first days two weeks back.

When we started working our way out of Kaston, the soil was so rocky we barely got ten yards per decade laid in a day.

I feel like a proper farmer. Never thought I’d appreciate loam this much. ”

Neither had Kat. She’d seen a large portion of the continent in the course of her three years campaigning, but she didn’t know how to grasp its beauty until peace fell upon it.

Almost instantly, the craggy hills turned from insurmountably difficult terrain to breathtaking vistas worthy of admiration.

Their path had wound south out of Kaston’s foothills where the Mouth had once made its home, into Bredol and its vast tracts of farmland that had been razed by demons and were only now starting to percolate with greenery again.

From their worksite, she could see clear down to the town of Palomar, nestled along the edge of a river where the skeletal outline of a bridge marked this stretch of the road’s end point.

She was incandescently glad that she didn’t have to sit through another meeting about that bridge and all the debates that went into its construction.

Instead, she could merely appreciate it as a bit of architecture that would soon make this countryside both picturesque and easily navigable.

“Ten yards is bad?” Kat asked as she heaved another shovelful of dirt over her shoulder.

“The prince expects each decade to get twenty a day,” Emory answered from across the trench. Though nothing seemed to demand it, the decade had sorted itself into the battle formation, shields on one side of the ditch and spears on the other, battle partners paired like always.

“How hard is that to hit?”

“Easier for the other centuries with… less in their rotations,” Ziva said from her left, shooting a wary look down the line to where the next decade’s work was staked out.

On one side, they were flanked by the Third Century’s own second decade, but on the other were unfamiliar soldiers who knew that the Third had been wrangled into additional work as the prince’s guards but had no inkling as to why.

With the prince’s camp now separated from the main body of the legion and the first attack successfully covered up, they had no reason to suspect anything as drastic as two Lesser Lords still at large.

And if the first decade didn’t want Mira sending them home in pieces, they’d better keep it that way.

“We’ll make it today for sure,” Emory said with a steadying grin. “Now that we’re back at full strength.”

“You know what would have us really at full strength?” Brandt called from the far end of the spear line.

Giselle let out an earth-shatteringly teenaged groan.

“I’m just saying what we’re all thinking. If the Aureans pulled their weight instead of letting us do all the digging, this would go a lot faster.”

“Hey, one Aurean’s pulling her weight,” Ziva countered, flicking a salute to Kat.

“Kat hardly counts,” Brandt scoffed.

Emory’s next shovelful of dirt sailed across the trench and landed at Brandt’s feet.

“She doesn’t!” Brandt protested, which only earned him another load from Ziva. “That token’s not gonna—”

Carrick plucked a thick clod from the dirt and hurled it at him, striking him squarely in the forehead. Brandt seethed in outrage, but before he could put his fury to words, another clod exploded on Carrick’s sweat-soaked shoulder.

Carrick blinked—not at Brandt, who’d been shocked into silence, but at Javi, who’d already bent to pick up his next weapon.

Sawyer threw down his shovel and rolled up his sleeves.

It was senseless. It was irresponsible. It was senseless and irresponsible in a way they hadn’t been allowed in years, in a way war had completely robbed them of, and even though Giselle fumed and stamped her foot, even though Emory flashed Kat a helpless smile from the middle of the cross fire that she couldn’t help but mirror, even though as hinges it was probably their job to put an end to this, nothing could stop any of them from giving in toit.

What was more important, after all? No one would die if they didn’t get their twenty yards in.

Well, maybe some of them might, after Mira was through with them, and it was only that thought that did the work of sobering them up enough that they went back to their shovels, dirt-spattered, grimy, and fighting smiles—even Brandt.

By the end of the afternoon, their scuffle felt like a distant memory—made more so by the fact that over the course of a full day of digging, the soil they’d thrown at one another had easily been eclipsed by the amount of filth they’d accumulated just by doing their work.

Kat was no stranger to getting this dirty, and she counted it as a rare mercy that dirt was the only thing coating her—not blood, not guts, not bile.

And another bright spot to savor: At the end of a long day on the battle lines, there was rarely a river so closeby.

The exhaustion that had set in as the day wore long faded the moment her shovel left her aching hands.

Carrick and Sawyer led the charge away from the equipment tent, and Kat broke into a run to catch up, the rest of the decade hot on her heels.

They raced down a path that had become well-worn in the scant few days the camp had been pitched and spilled onto the sandy riverbank.

Half of them had their shirts over their heads, the other half prioritizing kicking out of their boots, and Carrick and Sawyer were already stripped naked and howling as they plunged into the water.

Kat’s hands hesitated on her hem.

It was one of the first things she’d had to get used to as a soldier—the way living on top of one another eradicated any shred of privacy she’d once valued.

The decade slept ten to a tent and bathed side by side when the rare occasion arose where they had the opportunity to get clean.

She’d seen every inch of most of them and had learned to think nothing ofit.

But now she was thinking. She was thinking very intensely about how her eyes had been skating off Emory for weeks, about how easy it had been to hide that fact in the dark of the decade tent or the focused mission that every chance to bathe became.

About how she’d caught him doing the same once or twice and had only wished she could make his blush even worse.

About the way the sight of just the slope of his back in the half-light put a dryness in her mouth worse than any thirst she’d ever known.

Ziva saved her, jabbing an elbow into her side before her pause could get any more obvious. “Down, girl,” she whispered theatrically, tugging her own sweat-stained shirt over her head. “Though honestly we’re all so mudded up I don’t know what you would —”

She cut off on a squeal as Kat hip-checked her toward the water, then stripped off her shirt, followed quickly by her bandeau.

She shimmied out of her pants and underthings— not thinking, not thinking —and scuttled over the pebble-studded bank as fast as her bare feet would take her, trying to play it like she was looking only at her feet for reasons that didn’t go beyond sure footing.

The shock of the water’s chill was enough to put most of her untoward thoughts away. On the surface, it was sun-warmed, but the deeper she waded, the more the cold sank in. Any other day, she would have taken her sweet time easing into it until at last she let herself sink fully into its embrace.

Instead, Kat flopped face-first.

She resurfaced to cheers from the rest of the decade and glanced back at the shoreline to find Ziva plunging after her, two fists held triumphantly over her head.

And behind her, standing on the riverbank, looking less like a seasoned soldier and more like a village girl tucked shyly at the edge of some spring festival, waiting to be asked for a dance, was Emory.

Fully clothed.

So he was going to blow this for both of them—that’s how it was? Over her shoulder came a bewildered shout as Carrick set his sights on his comrade and nudged his battle partner. “Fuck are you standing around for?” Sawyer hollered.