Page 3 of A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace

It was for that reason Telrus had mustered seven legions and battled to his doorstep.

The mire of this fight was the end result of decades spent pushing back against the invasion and six months pressing this ruthless offensive, but from where Kat sat, the distance between here and the citadel might as well have spanned to the moon overhead.

There’d been a tacit understanding when the high command had distributed their marching orders.

Today, there would be no retreat. Their job was to gain that ground, no matter the cost, until they couldn’t anymore.

To do everything in their power to beat back Hell itself—and when they had nothing left to give, to die.

Whistle. Another rank fell back, and the decade shuffled dutifully forward.

With their breath recovered, their awareness could finally expand to include the rest of their rank—and as the hinge of the decade, it was up to Kat and Emory to make sure everyone was ready for their next turn at the fore.

Already, Emory had his head bent close to Carrick’s, the two shieldbearers shouting into each other’s ears over the clash ahead.

Kat took stock of her panting spear line, catching Sawyer’s eye at her right. “Problem?” she asked, eying his battle partner.

“Took a bad hit, and his shoulder’s acting up again,” Sawyer replied.

Kat hissed through her teeth. Carrick’s old injury predated her time with the century, but at least that meant she knew how to handle it. “I’ll back you up next turn. Let’s try to keep them off his shield as much as possible.”

“Giselle too?” Sawyer asked, glancing to his right, where the youngest and newest member of their decade was glaring at the fore of the lines with her whole body wound tight and her spear white-knuckled in her grip.

“What’s your count, Giselle?” Kat hollered.

“Eighteen,” Giselle replied, unblinking.

As usual, battle had transformed her into a flighty ball of teenaged rage.

They all suspected she was a runaway of some sort, a wisp of a blonde who’d thrown herself into the war on a mission of revenge she’d never deigned to fill the rest of them in on.

As with all fresh recruits, she wasn’t particularly good at it— eighteen, only eighteen?

—but she more than made up for it with sheer tenacity that Kat, as a draftee, scarcely understood.

Emory’s attention wrenched away from Carrick. “Remember what I told you. Stick them once, well.”

Giselle gave him a coltish huff, but Kat wagered she’d be picking up the pace on their next rotation.

Emory had taken the kid under his wing the second she’d been assigned to their decade, and she’d gone from barely knowing which end of the spear was which to working in functional tandem with Gage, her big lug of a shieldbearer.

Emory had kept her alive—even if today it’d all prove to be for naught.

“Let’s let Giselle focus on getting that number up,” Kat told Sawyer with a firm hand on his shoulder. “You and I are more than enough to get Carrick some space.”

Whistle. Kat stepped back from Sawyer to let the next set of battle partners pass through the ranks. The motion rocked her into Emory’s side, and he steadied her with a gentle hand at her hip. “Easy,” he murmured, close enough to send a thrill skittering over her skin.

Here in the tight press of the midcentury, there was no choice but to cozy up with your battle partner.

Here was where they leaned on each other, heads bent close to counter the relentless noise.

It was a place for prayers to the angelic hosts, for little luck rituals, for anything you could grasp that would carry you through your next turn at the fore.

“Strawberry rhubarb pie,” Emory muttered in her ear.

Kat grinned. “High season, start of summer, when the berries roll right off in your hands?”

“There was a patch down the road from the orphanage. They always thought it was the raccoons sneaking in there at dusk to lighten their harvest,” he replied, boyish mischief sparkling in his eyes.

“But I couldn’t take too many, because Miss Ophelia said they’d raise the prices too high for her if their yield started to dip, and if I wanted that pie, I couldn’t exactly slip the berries for it into her stores one by one. ”

Kat could picture it with painful clarity, the wide-eyed, round-faced boy peering hopefully into the kitchen as the orphanage matron pushed her latest masterpiece into the oven. “Has to be Miss Ophelia’s?”

Emory shrugged. “Haven’t had a better one since, but on a day like today, I’m not picky. I’d kill for a slice from the baker in the next town on the road out of Hell, even if they can’t make a crust worth a damn.”

Kat leaned into him. “The point of the exercise is to dream big.”

He chuckled. “Fine. Miss Ophelia’s strawberry rhubarb pie. Though I’m gonna have to troop to the far end of the continent to get it. Your turn.”

Kat tapped her chin. “Bread, fresh from the oven.”

“Just bread ?”

“There’s no such thing as just bread. Especially not when it’s so fresh it steams when you tear it in half.”

“You can’t tell me to dream big and then pick bread, Kat. Not today.”

“Fresh from the oven, though—”

“Bread.”

Emory was doing that thing that drove her absolutely out of her skull, the thing where he tried like hell to maintain a serious, stoic face when she could see the laughter he’d bottled steaming out of his ears.

The press of the ranks, the clatter of gear, the stench of death—all of it came second to the way he looked at her with that suppressed humor sparkling in his eyes.

She tugged his chinstrap, dropping his helm forward.

Focus. They needed to focus. They needed to make it one more turn if Emory was going to eat his matron’s strawberry rhubarb pie again, if Kat was going to have another chance to savor the simple pleasure of fresh bread.

The mere thought of those delights was one of the easiest ways to convince yourself the fore was worth surviving—and through the long years at the front, the two of them had never drawn a blank when dreaming of the food they’d have on the other side of this war.

Whistle. A nervous silence fell over their decade as they stepped up, now separated from the fore by only one line of battle pairs. Their breathing was starting to accelerate as one. Emory moved back into position ahead of her, his shield loose at his side until the moment he needed to heftit.

“This morning,” Kat whispered, and Emory tensed. “I thought we agreed that I’d take the south path out of the officer section, you’d take the north.”

This wasn’t the time. She could get this answer later. But with every turn at the fore, later was getting more and more impossible. Fatigue was setting in. And Kat couldn’t take not knowing.

“You went to the chapel instead,” she said, bending close enough that she could feel the heat off his neck. “How come?”

Emory turned back just enough that she could see the edge of his smile. “Had to put a word in with the hosts. Needed to say thank you.”

And before Kat could spin him around and demand to know what that meant, the whistle blew once more. The rank ahead broke back, Emory took a steady step forward, and Kat moved in tandem, her spear coming up to maintain the distance he needed to lock his shield into the decade’s line.

The ugly monotony of battle took over, but between the thralls in her own way and the extra help she was lending to Sawyer, Kat’s focus was hopelessly scattered.

She needed something better than fresh bread, something to fix her mind on that would keep her hungry for a future that was looking bleaker by the minute.

But every time she asked herself what she craved, she couldn’t help circling back to that morning.

To the feeling of Emory beneath her. To the way he’d laughed when he didn’t have to put on a show as the hinge shield and the way she’d wished she could hear him laugh like that— make him laugh like that—at least once more before the end.

Yearning wasn’t doing her attention any favors. Kat barely registered the change in the wind. The brimstone scent that crept stronger and stronger into the dust they kicked up. The shadow that loomed from beyond the choke of the thralls.

“ Shock knight! ” a voice howled over the fray.

The icy fear that gripped her had little equal on the battlefield.

Across the line, spearbearers dropped to one knee behind their shieldbearers as the second-rank shields lunged forward to lock in place above them.

Kat ducked low, keeping her spear braced as she angled it through the gap next to Emory’s head.

When the demon hit the line, it felt like the world had ended.

The force of it rattled through the entire decade at once—shattering, thundering, grinding them into the dirt.

Kat dug her weight into Emory’s back, doing her best to keep him upright against the towering lieutenant of Hell’s ghastly strength.

Through the gap in the shields, she could only make out pale, leathery skin, swelling muscle, and the flash of iron-tipped horns.

“Push, my count! One, two, three—” Emory’s shout vibrated through her, every shieldbearer in the fore joining in a wordless chorus as they shoved in unison and threw the demon on its heels.

From the heart of the century, the whistle shrieked—not the sharp blast of a rank changeover, but a long scream that could only mean one thing.

In the desperate seconds before the shock knight recovered its footing, the ranks parted clean down their middle.

And from their heart, Mira charged.

The centurion hit the demon like a ballista bolt, knocking all nine feet of it back on its thrashing tail as it howled in outrage and swiped at her with a claw-tipped hand.

Mira caught the hit with a crack across the buckler strapped to her left arm, and before it could swing again, she leaped into the sky—five yards, easily—and held her sword aloft.