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“Sounds like a hell of a guy.” A looming question tugged at her, and it took Kat a long moment to muster the courage to voice it. “What happened to him?”

Emory shook his head. “No idea. Egren was a safer duchy, relative to the Mouth, but as the war escalated, they called up every trained soldier in Telrus. I looked into the rolls after I enlisted, but with no high name to track him by, I couldn’t find where he’d been posted after his garrison was absorbed into the legions. ”

“He could be marching with us.”

Emory offered her a weak smile. “Suppose so. It’s certainly what I’m hoping for.” He took a long, considered look at his cup. “He would have loved this. Any sweetness with his drink, he couldn’t resist.”

Kat offered hers. “To tracking him down and letting him know what you chose in the end.”

“To getting to thank him, the way I never could have when I was a stupid little kid,” Emory replied, clinking the rim of his cup with hers.

They both drank, Kat taking a far deeper pull than any of the ones that had preceded it.

She’d hoped talking to Emory would give her clarity, but she found herself more conflicted than ever.

He made his path sound inevitable, a perfect summation of all the things that had created him, but when she tried to follow the same throughline in her own history, she hit a wall—the one that had dropped into her life three years ago when her name got pulled in the draft.

She could barely imagine the person she’d be if that moment had never happened.

It had rewritten her story down to its very bones.

Kat was no longer the forge girl, working diligently at her father’s side, untouched by the war but shaped by it all the same with every new sword that passed beneath her hammer.

She was a spear—a hinge spear at that, holding her line together as she pushed them through horde after horde of thralls.

But the real guilt wasn’t in coming back different.

It was in coming back not different enough to make up for the three years she’d left her father alone.

If she accepted Mira’s training, she could forge yet another new version of herself out of the twist of fate she’d never wanted.

But she needed to be able to see the shape of that future—the person she could be at the end of the road.

Emory had Von. A man who’d shown him the kind of life he could make for himself, shown him what a man could be, and gave him hope for the kind of man he could become.

Kat thought of who that person was for her, and only one face came to mind.

It had been eight years since her mother’s passing, but the version of her mother that Kat had done her best to enshrine was one from years before that—before she got sick, before that sickness began to chip away at her no matter what they tried.

Bronwyn had been full-cheeked and bright-eyed, and the combined force of the two made every smile a knockout.

She’d whistled off-key as she swept the forge, and Kat had always thought it flustered her father because, well, that was his wife—he was supposed to go crimson at the tips of his ears when she was charming.

It wasn’t until Kat was much older that she realized every song she’d only ever heard in haphazard notes had lyrics that would make even a Silk Row worker blush.

Nowadays, Kat could only mouth the words every time one of them started up in a rowdy bonfire circle and never explained to anyone why her eyes were leaking at the corners.

Her mother had taught herself to use the token, the family heirloom passed down from a grandfather Kat had never met without a single drop of cultivated power in it.

She’d taken hold of its angelic magic and made it useful in little ways—reading to Kat by its light, giving herself a safe pool of brilliance anytime a delivery had her walking the roads at night—and the assumption had always been that one day, when Kat was old enough and Bronwyn had no more use for the gold, she’d hand it down to her daughter with that power enshrined.

But instead, she’d gotten sick. And the sicker she became, the further the notion of preserving the token’s power got from their minds.

The token was a thing to pray over—to ask the hosts to infuse it with magic it didn’t hold—but asking Bronwyn to pass it on was as good as accepting that she wouldn’t get better, and none of them wanted that.

It had happened anyway.

Kat knew—and had been trying to deny for a long time now—that her mother probably would have wanted her to start over with the token.

Probably would have laughed and swept her into a hug and told her it was fine, it was honoring her memory, not tarnishing it, to do what she hadn’t been able to.

To forge a power worth handing down to the next generation, instead of leaving the hosts’ gift squandered.

Her mother would have been so excited to see what Kat could do withit.

And for years, the idea that she never would had put the taste of bile on Kat’s tongue anytime she tried to call upon her token’s power.

But if she thought about it from a different angle—from Emory’s angle—she could see a way forward.

The world had been robbed of Bronwyn too soon, but not so soon that she hadn’t enshrined herself in Kat’s memory as the sum total of everything her daughter wanted to be.

A brightness in people’s lives. A barroom song so bawdy it left the whole room flustered. A light to those who neededit.

It had taken only a few months on the front for Kat to believe that dream was dead. War had ground her down with its horror and its monotony equally. But in the new world, she could take up her hammer and tongs once more.

She could forge herself into everything that had been taken from her.

“It’s good, but it’s not worth crying over,” Emory said softly, and Kat jolted back to the crowded room and the cup starting to tremble in her hand.

She dabbed at the corners of her eyes, shaking her head. “Sorry, it’s just…I realized I’ve got an early start tomorrow.”

His brow wrinkled, then smoothed in sudden understanding. “Well then. Guess we’ve got to make the most of tonight.”

She glanced at him sidelong, a familiar, dangerous heat building in her.

They were in plain sight, but there was a kind of anonymity in crowds like this, details swallowed by the torrent of face after face after face, body after body after body.

It almost made her believe they could get away with something, could fulfill the unspoken promises they seemed to be accumulating.

“Make the most of it, huh?” she muttered, and this time she let her shoulder fully settle against his, even though nothing was pushing her from behind.

Emory leaned in closer, close enough that she could smell the river in his hair, close enough that she couldn’t tell whether the hint of strawberry sweetness was coming from her lips or his.

“As much as I enjoy what is clearly the premier establishment for infantry making bad decisions, I can’t help but wonder if this town has more to offer. ”

“I dunno if we can beat this mead.”

His eyes dropped unambiguously to her lips. “I can think of a few things that might.”

She reached for him, letting his bulk shield the hand she slid around his waist. She’d fought tooth and nail to gain this ground, and there was no retreat now.

For weeks she’d been starved for this—for how easy it was to touch him, how natural it felt to let him steady her or let herself be steadied.

This wasn’t a steadying touch. It was a push at the top of a precipice. A promise of a fall.

“Gimme a second,” Emory breathed, then lifted his cup to his lips. She snickered into his shoulder as he gulped down the rest of his drink, watching his throat work with an idle fascination. “Sorry,” he gasped between swallows, “it’s just really good.”

“Don’t choke,” Kat warned, though the hand she had on him was wandering in a way that made it a difficult command to follow.

Her head was going a bit fuzzy, and she could feel her decision-making starting to slip.

The sweetness of the drink had masked a dangerous factor now coming into play.

That mead was strong, and it made her bold.

“Knew we’d find you here,” a voice called, and any notions of boldness evaporated in an instant.

Kat jolted away from Emory, her hand clipping the wall as it beat a hasty retreat behind her own back.

Before she could fully disentangle herself, Emory was shoved forward, forcing her to catch him again as her own drink sloshed precariously.

Carrick had draped himself over Emory’s back, his head nestled on top of her battle partner’s shoulder, and before Kat had time to scope out her surroundings, Sawyer had jammed himself in at her side, one arm slung comfortably around her.

“The hell are you drinking?” Sawyer asked, his nose already halfway buried in her cup. “The prince put you on to the fancy stuff? Too good to drink swill with the rest of us?”

“Hosts forbid we try to expand our horizons a little,” Kat replied, jostling him in the hopes he wouldn’t notice the terrified kick his appearance had put in her pulse.

“You’re back with the infantry now, Kat,” Carrick said, reaching over Emory’s shoulder to muss her hair. “You wanted to be one of us, you prove it.”

Kat caught Emory’s eye, and he gave her a rueful shake of his head. “Fine then. One round of swill, on me, coming right up.”

Carrick cheered, Sawyer clapped her on the back, and Kat knew with bone-deep certainty that any notions of getting back to camp at a decent hour had just been thoroughly quashed.