Page 28

“It’s always going to feel like that. The important thing is that you didn’t let your panic stop you from acting.”

But I don’t want to feel like that, Kat didn’t dare blurt.

When she signed her contract of service, she’d understood the implication that for the next five years, her feelings were irrelevant.

Failure to follow orders was a failure of discipline, and a failure of discipline was dangerous.

“I think,” she said instead, after a reeling pause, “that I can be better.”

“Obviously,” Mira replied so offhandedly that were it not a punishable offense, Kat would have splashed her.

“Which is part of the conversation I had with His Highness this morning. He accepted the premise you presented to him yesterday, that there are better ways that you could be using your time, and I’ve also managed to convince him that I know exactly how to instill in you the discipline necessary to lead.

If you truly want to feel more in control, there’s one thing you need to do. ”

“Lead drills with the rest of the century?”

“Cultivate your fucking token.”

Kat’s hand went to it on instinct, closing around the gold to press the familiar sun sigil into her palm. Easy for you to say, she wanted to hiss, but she knew how that would go over with her centurion. “I’m not sure that has anything to do with it,” she demurred.

Mira fixed her with a level look. “Why haven’t you cultivated it?”

“My mother never—”

“I don’t want to hear about your mother. I want to hear about you, Katrien.”

Fury smoldered in Kat, barely cooled by the river’s chill. “I suppose it’s different for highborn families,” she said, fighting the urge to spit the words from between gritted teeth. “You’ve never started a token from scratch, have you?”

Fortunately for Kat’s anger, Mira looked appropriately cowed. “It’s true, I inherited all my gold with at least some power in it.”

“And when you took up your first token, there was someone to tell you what to do with it, right? You weren’t trying to figure it all out on your own as a ten-year-old. You had your parents. Your family.”

“Tutors, too,” Mira said with a flippancy that made Kat want to kick something.

“I had my mother’s memory and…fairy tales.

All those old stories of folk heroes who had a dying stranger press a token into their hands and worked out on their own what it meant to channel angelic power from the other side of the Seal.

And it turns out that channeling is a lot easier when it’s not something you associate with your dead mom. ”

A brutal, necessary silence stretched long between them, filled with nothing but the lap of the river against its banks and the distant shouts of frolicking soldiers.

Kat found that she was breathing quickly, tensed like she was braced for a blow, and she couldn’t bring herself to meet Mira’s eyes without her own burning.

Her entire career depended on the next words out of Mira’s mouth and whether Kat could abide them.

“I don’t think I fully appreciated your circumstances,” Mira said at last, and though the statement had more syllables than Kat would have liked, it passed muster. “I’m sorry about your mother. How old were you?”

“Thirteen,” Kat said hoarsely.

Mira sat with that for another long moment, Kat feeling like a raw nerve all the while.

Centurions weren’t supposed to have this much personal leverage over their subordinates.

It was part of why they slept separate from their ranks, and though it resulted in a lot of circumstances going unappreciated, Kat found that she agreed with the layout.

It was the natural order of things, wasn’t it?

She hated the feeling of a highborn sifting through her life, trying to twist her worst moments into the words that would convince Kat to do exactly what she wanted.

It pushed her toward caving just to spare Mira the trouble.

“It’s not fair that you never had a chance to pursue your own potential,” Mira said at last. “But I don’t think you do anyone any favors—least of all yourself—by leaning into that unfairness when you have the opportunity to correct it.”

“Fuck you,” Kat snapped.

Mira nodded. Her lips had thinned to a disappointed line, and Kat braced for the inevitable.

Laps. Latrines. Or maybe they’d skip straight ahead to execution—all for the crime of not daring to want for herself what her centurion had been handed at birth.

Kat felt incomprehensible, like her own desires were something that needed to be picked apart, parsed, translated—like a creature that had broken through not from the hellish plane or the heavenly one, but another place entirely.

There was nothing to be corrected here, but maybe there was something to be forged. Something she could make of herself—if only she could admit that the woman sitting next to her was right.

“It’s up to you,” Mira said at long last. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll be waiting on the field’s edge when the dawn horns sound.

Think about it. And one more thing.” She fixed Kat with a dangerous look.

“Bodhi Ranjan has ninety-nine tokens. One shy of a nice, even one hundred, and I’m sure the Vayans would love to see him in equal standing with Telrus’s heroic prince.

It would benefit you immensely, I think, to have a good counter to the argument that your token would be better off with Ranjan—or any of the prince’s companions.

The longer you spend time around them, the more likely it is that one of them is going to get ideas.

Something to consider when you decide whether to train with me or not.

” Mira gave a sharp jerk of her chin. “Dismissed.”