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Kat had to remind herself to slow down. No one was going to pull her away from her plate.

There was no mess schedule to stick to, no orders breathing down her neck, just her and the most generous meal she’d had in ages.

The pork was so fatty she could barely get it to stay on her fork, so salty she could have spent the whole night suckling one slip of it on her tongue.

The roasted vegetables, too, were a revelation, the late summer harvest’s bounty seasoned to perfection.

On the campaign, meals needed to be efficient—not only in the time it took to hork them down, but in the value they provided.

They ate heavily, loading up on meats and grains, and though the occasional vegetable snuck its way into the preparation of the cooks’ stews and roasts, it was another thing to see them laid out as dishes in their own right.

It felt foolish to see a miracle and a promise in a squash dish, but it was a kind of foolish she was allowed to be, now that peace was upon them.

And it wasn’t as if her foolishness lacked company. The soldiers around her were on a heaven-sent mission to drink their way clean through Adrien’s anxious overbuying, and it seemed like every three bites another rowdy toast was being raised to something or another.

“To never marching again!” Carrick hollered, lunging across the table to clack his tankard against Sawyer’s.

At his side, Emory took a measured sip from his own drink, catching Kat’s eye warily.

Carrick and Sawyer were a foregone conclusion.

The two of them had declared their intention to walk from the moment Adrien made the announcement.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get your papers in hand?” Elise asked, her question lobbed over Emory’s head.

Carrick smirked. “Can’t say. But the second thing I’m going to do is buy a horse and make use of this lovely new road until the fork in Fallon. Then it’s another day’s ride south to Brista where my folks are. What about you?”

Elise’s troublesome smirk spread across her lips as she jerked her chin at Ziva. “Guess that depends on which one of us gets to that kitchen girl first.”

Ziva sucked her teeth. “It’s cute that you think you have a shot.”

“I don’t just have a shot—I have a contingency. I’ve got my exits marked and my route drawn.”

“Gonna make it more embarrassing for you when she shoots you down and lets you know she’s waiting on someone else.”

“Ladies, ladies,” Brandt said from Ziva’s other side, spreading his arms in a gesture he probably thought was helping. “Let’s keep tonight joyous.”

“I don’t think you fully understand that this is joyous for the two of them,” Javi countered from opposite his battle partner, looking up from the book he’d snuck under the table.

“Thrill of the chase,” Kat confirmed, nodding sagely at Brandt’s confused look. “Honestly not sure how the poor girl is going to live up to the sport you two have made of pursuing her.”

“I’m sure I can find some ways,” Elise replied with a cheery grin, and Ziva scowled into her next swig.

“Cover your ears,” Emory said, catching Giselle’s eye.

“I’m not five, ” Giselle huffed, prompting snorts from every corner of the table. “Hosts, I’ll be happy to take my release and leave you losers behind.”

Emory stiffened. “You’re taking your release?”

Giselle shrugged as if she hadn’t just completely upended his world.

“I mean, the world is saved, right? I keep thinking about the rest of my life. Like, I always imagined I’d meet a boy on the battlefield.

Him cowering pathetically under a demon, me charging in with my spear, him swooning over my perfected technique.

But it’s never going to happen that way now, so I might as well enjoy peacetime like the rest of you. ”

“You’re saying you’ve been making me train you for the entire course of this road campaign just to give up your position as soon as we reach the capital?”

Giselle straightened, sobering. “I…I wasn’t in the best place when I joined up.

I had a brother. Older. He went to war five years ago, and when…

The way my family talked about it…I felt like I was the only one seeing clearly.

Felt like I had to avenge him in some way, carry on what he was trying to do, so I marched myself right into the local garrison and demanded they put a spear in my hand. ”

Kat shot Emory a did you know? look. He shot her a not a clue one right back.

“And it’s not just that I never got a chance to live up to what he could have been and pay the demons back for taking him from me. I don’t think I ever could. I mean, look at us. Look at all of us—even Kat has a token, and she’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to the prince and his lot.”

“Thanks, kid,” Kat muttered under her breath, but she wasn’t about to stop Giselle from calling it like it was.

“I just…I wonder how my family made peace with it. I think I should go back and talk to them—see if there’s any peace for me there too.”

A weighty silence swept over their table, made all the more potent by the background noise the rest of the century provided. After a second, Kat lifted her tankard and caught Giselle’s eye. “What was your brother’s name?”

Giselle never had much tolerance for prying questions. She always deflected anything of the sort with her ceaseless commitment to honing herself as a spearbearer. So it was new for all of them, the softness that came over her eternally pinched expression as she said, “Henry.”

Kat lifted her tankard. “To Henry. May his bravery not be forgotten and his legacy stay lit in you.”

“To Henry,” the rest of the decade echoed. Giselle’s lip wobbled as she met their hoisted tankards, then ducked behind the shelter of her drink.

When she resurfaced, she’d schooled herself back into her usual neutrality, though her gaze darted suspiciously around at the rest of the decade.

“Don’t look at me like that. There’re far too many other dead people for you to pity me and me alone.

Let’s toast to them, yeah?” She twitched her mug at Emory, as if desperate for a lifeline.

Though he still looked somewhat shaken, he sat forward gamely and raised his mug.

“Some of you remember my first battle partner, Nolan,” he said, nodding to Carrick and Sawyer.

“Before I was your hinge, I was a fresh recruit about to shit my pants on the verge of my first battle, and he was the one who showed me how to bind my shield on right. That little kindness has probably kept me alive to this day. But Nolan wasn’t so lucky.

He fell to thralls at the Battle of Belin, and he left a hole in our ranks that I’ve been trying to fill ever since.

I wish he could be here tonight, sharing in this bounty he helped create. ”

Kat exchanged a glance with Carrick across the table.

Three years at Emory’s side, and this was the first time she’d heard him say more than five words about the man whose place she’d taken.

It had gone from an unspoken resentment that hovered between them to an unspoken ache she’d learned to let lie every time they lost another member of their decade on the front lines. At last, the dam had broken.

“To Nolan,” Kat said, pushing forward across the table to knock her mug into his.

“To Nolan,” the decade rumbled.

They continued on like that for some time, each of them taking a turn to memorialize one of the fallen soldiers whose memories they carried.

Though the thought of how many they’d lost was sobering, by the end of it all of them were grinning, swapping every story they could recall of the people who had once made up their unit.

It seemed a peculiar arrangement of fate that this was their final configuration—so arbitrary, that the war’s end had happened to fall on this group of ten.

And with the capital looming, with the threat of a third Lesser Lord still on the prowl, all Kat could think as she got deeper and deeper into her cups with every fallen soldier’s name, was that she desperately hoped—hoped beyond hope —that all ten of them were done with war and free to choose whatever future best suited them.

The decade had moved past both the sobering business of honoring the dead and sobriety itself as a whole for some time when Emory lurched up from his seat. “Back in a moment,” he slurred, then strode unsteadily across the clearing where the banquet had been set and into the cover of the woods.

“He knows the latrines are dug back that way, right?” Ziva asked, hitching a thumb over her shoulder.

“Man that drunk can piss where he pleases,” Sawyer replied with a shrug.

Between them, Kat sat in crisis. A tension had been building in Emory as the night went on, but she wasn’t sure what to make of it—whether it was just a natural by-product of so much melancholy or something more. She didn’t want to add to his woes by calling attention to it, but at the same time—

“I’m going to make sure he doesn’t get lost,” Kat declared, plunking her tankard down a bit too loudly and shoving herself up.

Across from her, Carrick’s lips pursed toward a salacious whistle, but a distinct thud underneath the table had him wincing instead.

Kat patted Sawyer’s shoulder gratefully, then shunted her chair back and made off in Emory’s wake.

She knew she’d been drinking heavily, but it was another thing to feel the alcohol hit her all at once as she struggled to keep her feet on a straight path.

That task became even more difficult the second she hit the brush at the edge of the clearing, and she found herself bracing trunk by trunk for balance as she moved through the trees.

She didn’t have to go far. With her utter lack of elegance, it was no secret she was following him, and Emory had paused to give her a chance to catch up. “Kat,” he warned, his voice lowered and his eyes fixed somewhere off in the dark.

“Emory,” she replied evenly. “What’s going on?”

“I’m fine,” he said in the strained tones of a man who was plainly not.

Behind them, the raucous noise of the party carried on.

They hadn’t gone too far into the trees, and the spill of the torches that surrounded the festivities cut deep enough into the woods that she knew the two of them were still visible to most of the revelers.

Even so, she reached out, laying a less-than-steady hand on his shoulder as she pulled him around to face her.

“Don’t,” he said gently. “I just needed a moment to breathe.”

“It got heavy back there,” she offered. “All those losses, all together. Tonight’s supposed to be joyful.”

Emory grimaced. “That’s…not quite it.”

“Whatever it is, I have your back. You know that.”

“I do,” he said, his eyes meeting hers at last. “But I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what the end of the road means.

For you—for a lot of you—it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

Most of the people who march with us did so because they had to.

Whether by draft or by calling, we needed to defend Telrus from the grasp of evil.

So you played your part, but you dreamed of a world where you wouldn’t need to.

You dreamed about the shape of your life without a weapon in your hand. The forge, right?”

He let out a long, bracing breath, and Kat tightened her grip on his shoulder.

“It’s a bit fucked-up that a soldier is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be.

That even when we were neck deep in blood and mud, I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else.

I know we tried. I know we said all these amazing things we’d eat when the war was over, and I could at least imagine that bit and get through the day.

But I think a part of me always knew I was right where I wanted to be.

And it wasn’t until these past two months that I figured out why that was. ”

Her throat had gone dry, the remnants of the feast ashen on her tongue. “Why was it?”

The look he gave her was quietly devastating, the sorrow and care that welled in his warm brown eyes. “This is my whole life. These people, this army, this mission. And it’s ending.”

Kat blinked. “Because I’m—”

Emory shook his head vehemently. “No, not because of you. Hosts, I couldn’t live with myself if you did anything but go after everything your heart desires. But you heard the rest of them. Carrick and Sawyer have a plan. Ziva and Elise have their kitchen girl. Even Giselle…”

Kat laid a hand on his shoulder. “You trained her so well. You thought she was sticking with it because she was going to stay signed on past the end of the road.”

“She’s free to make her own choices, that’s the thing,” he said, pinching his brow. “It’s not that I resent the time I spent, I just thought…I’d have someone —”

Kat was past caring about the potential onlookers.

She stepped in close and snaked her arms around Emory’s shoulders, pulling him tight into her chest. He caught her around the waist immediately, returning the hug with so much fierceness they might as well be wrestling.

In it, she felt every drop of what he’d just confessed, what she’d failed to notice all this time.

How badly he didn’t want to let go of the wonderful thing he’d built for himself in the hell of the war.

He was an orphan who’d chased the shadow of a kindly man, wrapped himself in the armor of a soldier, and found a family to fight by his side.

They’d never known a world without the war, but now that it had arrived, the life he’d built for himself was on the verge of crumbling around him.

He was helpless to it. Probably thought himself selfish for wanting things to stay the same.

In this moment, all Kat wanted was to be the one thing that could never slip through his grasp.

But just as that thought settled, a shrill whistle blasted from the clearing.

It took a moment for her thoughts to arrange around it—to soothe the initial jolt that came from expecting Carrick’s heckling, register that this was blown on metal, not fingers, then process the confusion of the automatic response that had her snapping rigid and stepping back from Emory anyway.

They hadn’t heard this whistle in months, but its meaning had been drilled into them for years.

It was Mira’s. It was an order. It was a call to arms.