Page 29

There was no question how Kat would spend her first night of freedom.

For as long as they’d been approaching Palomar, the Third Century had been talking her ear off about securing permission to spend their leave in town.

They were close to a hub of a legion, whose bursar tent was swarmed nonstop with joyous infantry withdrawing their wages to spend on the local wares.

Roughly half the complaints levied at Kat over the past week had concerned who was able to live the fantasy of an evening off and when.

What she’d failed to anticipate was just how many of them were living that fantasy simultaneously.

Kat had thought she’d get to the tavern early, beating the rush, and had thought completely wrong.

The dimly lit barroom was packed to bursting, and there was no camaraderie to be found in these ranks.

Every soldier was out for themselves, battling through the lines to the bar, where a harried man and his three gorgeous daughters were running their own operation with military efficiency to rival the troops.

It had taken all her charm for Kat to convince them to give her two pours at once and all her training to keep both of them from spilling as she wedged her way back to a chance for some breathing room.

Seating was even more of a fantasy, and she had to content herself with a position on the back wall that gave her ample view of the throng and a clear line of sight to the door.

So she didn’t miss the moment Emory slipped through it, his eyes going wide at the crowd, then soft as he picked her out among them.

Part of Kat had been convinced he wouldn’t come.

After all, hauling him into the river might have made him rethink a few things.

She’d invited him as they trod back up the path from the water’s edge, trying her damnedest to make it sound casual because there was no telling how far Carrick’s hearing extended and Giselle had been giving her suspicious looks ever since she came back from her chat with Mira.

This was just two friends spending time together, a decade’s hinge pair strategizing, nothing untoward.

And at the moment, with half the legion packed into this tavern, she didn’t dare make it anything else.

It took Emory a few minutes to battle his way over to her side, clapping shoulders as he passed and nodding greetings to the comrades he recognized. “Cute place,” he said as he wedged himself in next to her, drawing a disgruntled look from the woman behind him.

“Cozy, right?” Kat replied, shifting so he couldn’t see the cups she’d tucked behind her back.

“You sure you want to spend your evening here?” he asked with a nervous glance over his shoulder. “This is tighter than the midcentury on a bad day.”

“But the midcentury on a bad day doesn’t have this, ” Kat said, drawing the cups out with a flourish that only cost her a couple drops.

Most people, when confronted with a cup of unknown liquid in a dubious, packed establishment, would react less with curiosity, more with an appropriate sense of caution, but Emory was not most people.

His eyes immediately lit as he took the cup she offered, and she commended herself for barely reacting when his fingertips brushed hers.

“And what is this?” he asked, lifting it to his nose.

Kat took a whiff of the bouquet herself, her mouth watering at the lightest touch of sweetness woven through the scent. “A step above what most of these louts have in their tankards, I’ll say that much. Go on, try it.”

With the pineapple, Emory had insisted they go together, but Kat couldn’t resist letting her cup pause on the cusp of her lips so she could fully appreciate the sight of Emory’s first sip.

His brows shot up, and a dribble of red-tinted liquid escaped the corner of his mouth as it twisted into an irrepressible smile. “That’s—”

“Not exclusive to Valon, turns out,” Kat said, then tipped her cup back to let it wash over her tongue.

The drink was bright, honey-sweet, and flavored with a delicate hint of strawberry that gave it a subtle floral tartness.

On any other day, she would have been content to drink the most bottom of the barrel beer her wages could buy, but earlier this week, she’d overheard the high command—possibly the same officers who’d inspired Emory’s first battlefield wish—talking about this particular tavern and how it carried a delectable strawberry mead.

One sip and she understood why they couldn’t stop talking about it. It had been worth the dent it put in her coin purse. If she came from a family with a vault full of Aurean tokens, she’d drink it every night.

Emory, too, seemed to be having a lightly religious experience about it. He could barely stop smiling enough to get another sip down, then another, then pulled the cup down and held up his other hand as if he had to physically force it away from his lips.

“Worth the fuss?” Kat asked wryly.

“Worth surviving Hell, that’s for sure,” Emory replied, meeting her eyes with a boyish grin.

The droplet of mead that had escaped nestled into the scruff on his jawline, and Kat felt briefly insane with the urge to put her lips to it.

They were far too close together for those kinds of thoughts, and her attention must have been transparent, because he ran the back of his wrist sheepishly over his chin, which at least saved her from the temptation.

Some of the temptation. She’d cooled off since the river incident.

The sight of Emory shuffling around in his soaked-through clothes had gone from enticing to a little pathetic past a certain point, which helped.

But they were still packed in tight by the crowd, his shoulder joined with hers in the gap they’d managed to create for themselves along the wall.

It felt obvious—a dare to the world for someone to catch them, someone to yell that this wasn’t allowed.

Kat took another hurried sip of her drink, then blurted, “So Mira wants to train me.”

Their centurion’s name was a shield thrown up desperately between them, putting a furrow in Emory’s brow.

Kat launched into a summary of her conversation with Mira, lightly tongue-tied by her own flusteredness and hampered by the fact that by the end of her explanation, the barroom had gotten so loud that she was on the edge of shouting to be heard.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“Hosts if I know,” Kat huffed. “I…I understand every point that she’s making, but I can’t…

I feel like…” She took another pull from her cup as if that was going to be the thing to clear her head.

“I have to. I know I have to. Even if it’s only for the summer, even if my token’s never going to be properly useful, I’ll never have access to Aureans of this caliber again.

I can’t go back to the forge without something to show for the last three years.

But I don’t feel called to it—not the way I should be if I really mean to take up my mother’s legacy.

It should feel like the hosts are reaching out, asking me to channel their power. So why am I not feeling called?”

“You know I can’t answer that for you,” Emory said gently.

“I know, but you’re called to soldiering, right? You’ve known what you wanted to do with your life since you were sixteen.”

“Earlier, actually,” he said, then shrugged when he caught her puzzled look. “Sixteen’s just when they were legally allowed to take me on.”

“How’d you get it figured out so early?” she groaned.

It was difficult to tell in the low light, but she swore his expression had just gone wistful. “Guess I’ve never told you about Von, haveI?”

“Someone I need to be worried about?” Kat asked with a daring, flirtatious smirk.

“Hah. Well.” Emory blinked. “Hosts, that might have been part of it, now that I think about it. But no—first of all, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said with a nudge that made her stomach swoop, “and second of all, I was a kid and he was a grown man. When I was growing up in the orphanage, I used to skip lessons and go watch the garrison practice. Most of the soldiers would chase me off if they caught me at it, which was probably the right thing to do, but then there was Von.”

“A bad influence?”

“From a certain point of view. But I think he knew what I was after, and he didn’t see the harm in giving it to me. He called me little brother. Or Scraps, if he wanted to knock me down a peg. Told me I could stick around and watch the drills if I hauled equipment for him.”

Kat snorted. “Guessing you didn’t see that as a raw deal?”

“Wasn’t smart enough,” Emory said. “Probably should have stuck around for those lessons, huh?”

“What was it about the garrison that caught your eye?”

“Apart from all the handsome soldiers?” He stared out at the barroom, the seething mass of joyous people celebrating the end of yet another long day where their only weapons were spades and their only enemy was the soil.

“I was too young to remember my parents when I lost them. Too young to ever feel like I was part of a family—of anything, really. There were plenty of us in that orphanage, more and more every year as the Demon Lord’s raiders began to push into Egren.

But it felt like we were bonded because of what we survived, not what we’d chosen to do about it.

The garrison was full of people who chose to stand together against the hold evil was trying to take on our lands. ”

“You wanted to choose,” Kat said, and he nodded.

“The way I saw it, I had a chance to choose—what mattered to me, who mattered to me, who I wanted to protect. I had to find something worth choosing. And Von showed me how to make that choice because he chose me. He saw that I was lonely and searching, and he invited me in. Made a home for me. Showed me my home could be here in the ranks.”