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She’d give Mira one thing—the second the centurion spoke, every lustful thought in Kat’s head fled with its tail between its legs.

Which wasn’t to say that the fear that replaced them was all too different. If Kat was being honest with herself, there had been stretches of the campaign where she’d entertained a completely delusional crush or two aimed in her centurion’s direction for that very reason.

It wasn’t the thing to be thinking about with Mira wading into the river, naked but for the ten tokens arrayed over her chest, flinty-eyed, and heading straight for her.

Kat stiffened, feeling the eddies of Carrick, Sawyer, Ziva, and—reluctantly—Emory’s retreat swirling over her hips.

“Centurion,” she said weakly. “The prince gave me permission to—”

“I’ve spoken with the prince,” Mira said levelly.

Kat fought not to flinch. Adrien’s order superseded Mira’s—it was just a little difficult to remember that while standing bare before a woman she’d once seen punch clean through a demon underling’s spine.

“With me,” Mira said, striding past her and sinking into the river’s chill with barely a shiver.

In a few powerful strokes, she eased into the current, drifting away from where the rest of the soldiers were carrying on as if they weren’t trying to listen in on whatever their centurion was about to say.

Kat followed at a dignified paddle, glancing over to where Emory could do nothing but pass her an anxious nod.

They’d swum a hundred yards before Mira slowed, checking over her shoulder to gauge the distance they’d put between themselves and the rest of the infantry. “Centurion,” Kat hazarded. “Are you sure we need to talk about this now ?”

“Do you have somewhere else you need to be?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Me neither. Which is a fucking miracle with the way we’ve been scheduled recently, so believe me, if we’re going to talk about this, now is the time. Would you care to explain why, after I elevated you to represent the whole of your century, I find you cavorting with the infantry?”

Kat sputtered. “I’m not… cavorting. I wasn’t doing anything useful trailing Ad—His Highness around, and we both know it.”

“You weren’t doing anything useful for him, certainly, beyond providing peace of mind.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. You’ve served under my command for three years.

You’ve been a good, reliable soldier—but you could be a great one.

I promoted you. I put you squarely in the sights of the most talented Aureans this continent has ever seen.

And you went scuttling back to dig holes and play in the river at the first opportunity. ”

“If the time comes when we have to fight, I’ll do the prince no good living separate from the soldiers I’m meant to rally,” Kat countered, battling back the burn of shame that rose instinctively within her at the criticism.

“I felt it when the first Lesser Lord struck. You want me to lead, but if I can’t earn their trust, I can’t command them.

Separating myself, elevating myself above them—it doesn’t work if you’re not a highborn. ”

Mira righted herself, her chin dipping just below the water’s surface as she let her hands tread lazily back and forth. “Have I ever told you about the Battle of False Creek?”

“I know of it,” Kat replied. She’d been fourteen at the time, but news of the horrific routing had made it all the way to the skirts of Rusta just days after it had happened, and a pallor had dropped over the capital like few others Kat had seen over the course of the war.

Mira shook her head. “Everyone knows of it, but I’ve never told you of it.

It was my first battle. I’d just enlisted.

Because I was a Morgenstern and because I wore ten tokens around my neck, they’d placed me in command of a century I had no business leading.

I was eighteen. Had only ever seen battle in smoke on the horizon from my family’s keep.

But I thought I was ready. I thought my gold made me untouchable, and that would be enough. ”

Her eyes had gone as glassy as the river’s surface. With her loose hair sopping wet and not a scrap of clothing on her, she looked so vulnerable that Kat barely recognized her centurion. “And then?” she prompted when Mira’s silence stretched long.

“And then it was the Battle of False Creek. You’ve heard the stories.”

Kat had, and she thanked the hosts once again that in all her years on the campaign, she’d never been present for a defeat that bad.

There had been days where they’d been thrown back on their heels, days the battle discipline collapsed and it became a long, ugly grind back to safety, days she’d had to throw down her spear and run when the horns sounded a retreat, but they never compared to the stories she’d heard of False Creek.

“The thing was, I was as untouchable as I thought I’d be. Morgensterns start training their gold at the age of ten, and by eighteen I was lethal with it. But just because I was untouchable didn’t mean I knew the first thing about protecting my ranks.”

Another blessing she was never grateful enough for—Kat had never had the misfortune of serving under an incompetent centurion.

She’d arrived at the front after her basic training and immediately been assigned to the First Legion’s Third Century under a Mira Morgenstern who’d been at war for four years.

She found it difficult to imagine any other version of her commanding officer.

To Kat, Mira must have sprung from the womb barking orders and waving that glorious sword.

But she’d heard the stories from soldiers who weren’t so lucky.

Soldiers whose commanders cared more about driving their line forward than making sure everyone came home.

Commanders whose orders fell apart the second pressure hit them on the field.

Some of these centurions had no qualifications beyond the gold they carried and the recommendation of a powerful ally.

It was too close to the path she was being shuttled down now, rushed along by Mira’s pressure and Adrien’s senseless enthusiasm.

“That’s how I felt when the general struck,” Kat said.

“Well, not untouchable—not at all. But like I couldn’t keep everyone safe.

Or like I could if they would listen to me, and I didn’t know how to get them to hear my command. ”

Mira scoffed. “That’s not what the reports told me.

Unless every one of those soldiers—and you yourself—lied, you marshaled them into formation within moments of the situation turning hot.

And not only that, you figured out exactly how to draw the Lesser Lord out of the shadows and focus its attention solely on yourself. ”

“I was just trying to do what you would have done.”

“Do you want to know what I did at False Creek?” Mira asked, glancing sidelong at her.

“I tired my lines. I was holding back, trying to draw out the changeovers, because I could feel things going to shit around me and the only way I thought I could fix it was giving the rear more time to recover. And then the turning point hit, and suddenly my soldiers were dropping left and right, so instead I tried to frontline myself. I’d never stayed in attunement for that long before.

I burned hot and hard, too much, too quick, because I had no sense of how to pace myself when it mattered. ”

She broke off, swallowing thickly.

“I lost fifty people that day, and I had to be carried in the retreat.”

Kat shivered. Every soldier had a worst day burned into their memory.

For Kat, it was Murdo’s Gulch—a brutal slog of a battle that had been fought in rain so heavy it was difficult to tell thrall from comrade in all that mud.

Only battle discipline held them together, and in the end, the Third Century lost ten.

Fifty was unthinkable to her. Half a century gone, with the blame falling directly on Mira’s shoulders. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, not with a full legion working in tandem, not unless the Demon Lord’s foul magic was involved.

There was a part of her that flared righteously angry at the thought—not on behalf of Mira, but on behalf of the infantry who’d been saddled with a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old giving them orders.

It shouldn’t be possible for an officer that unqualified to take the field, but Telrus’s hierarchy was tailored to create these situations.

When the prerequisite to become a centurion wasn’t length of service but a piece of angelic gold hanging around your neck, there were bound to be some people who got in over their heads—and others who died because of their incompetence.

Mira fixed Kat with a miserable look, one that said she knew exactly what path her soldier’s mind had wandered down. “It’s fucked. If the hosts refuse me when it’s my time to shake their hands, I’ll know why.”

Kat understood abruptly, in a way she never could have prior, why Mira was so exacting when it came to battle discipline.

Kat had always thought she was just a hard-ass—a typical highborn, raised in a military family, with no empathy for common soldiers who hadn’t been drilling since the day they lost their first milk tooth. “I’m sor—” she started.

“I’m not telling you this to get your sympathy,” Mira interrupted, shaking her head. “I’m telling you this so you appreciate that your first experience of command was after three years of campaigning. You didn’t lose a single soldier.”

“One man died in the initial—”

“A man died at his guard post before you had given a single order, yes,” Mira said sharply.

“If you choose to carry that, I can’t stop you.

But I need you to understand that what you achieved that night was not a failure in any sense.

If anything, it was an illustration of what a folly it’s been to allow some of our centuries to be commanded by inexperienced Aureans when we’ve got experienced ones at hand. ”

“But it felt like—”