Page 50 of A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace

“So I don’t have a ring—”

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” Kat muttered through her teeth, ducking down to join Adrien in a crouch on the forest floor.

Her gaze darted back to the light of the pyre flickering in the distance.

No salacious jeers had risen from the celebrations, but that didn’t mean no one had spotted them.

“I’m doing the right thing for Telrus,” he said as if it was obvious, taking in her panic with an infuriatingly bemused smile.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past months, it’s that the realm is better off with your input.

You’ve proven you can tackle weighty problems—like the problem of my marriage, in fact—and come up with innovative, concrete solutions that put the people first. So if I elevate you to the role of princess—”

“Do you hear yourself?” Kat interrupted. She hadn’t taken a single blow in the fight against the final general, but she felt like she’d just been hit over the head. “I’m common. There’s elevating and then there’s dressing a…a horse up as royalty.”

“You’re not a horse, Kat.”

“I’m infantry. I don’t even have a high name. It’s basically the same thing.”

“First of all, you’re an Aurean. That token you wear around your neck and the way you’ve trained yourself to wield it make you far more potent of a warrior than you give yourself credit for, and the Telrusian high court runs on gold.

They’ve turned it into this elaborate game, played out over generations, all with the end goal of amassing as much angelic gold as possible in a single lineage.

” He gestured to their obvious success, splayed over his chest. “Which is why it would be perfect to throw all of that back in their faces by marrying a single-token Aurean—one who took down two of the Demon Lord’s fiercest generals. ”

“ Took down is generous,” Kat said weakly.

“Every soldier here would vouch that this is your victory. Don’t pretend otherwise. Even Mira Morgenstern would swear it.”

Kat grabbed desperately at the line he’d strung past her. “If it’s just a low-tokened Aurean you need, Mira’s right there. She’s quite literally ten times the warrior I am.”

“And saddle myself with the Morgenstern family and all their ambitions in the process? No thank you. They’d probably want heirs, ” he added with a shudder.

“You don’t want heirs?”

“I’d have shockingly little say in the matter if I were to marry anyone but a single-token commoner. Another point in your favor,” he said, as if it was supposed to be anything other than horrifying. “Look, I know this is a lot to take in, and I want you to know I hear your concerns.”

She barked a laugh.

“However, for the good of Telrus, I’d like you to at least consider it. Sleep on it. My victory ball is in ten days. Just let me know before then if I should ask again—this time in front of a proper audience.”

“By a proper audience, you mean your parents. The king and queen of the realm. Who drafted me,” she added, in case it wasn’t clear how she felt.

“I would really love to see the look on their faces.” The prince seemed nothing but gleeful at the prospect of placing Kat’s thorny political opinions squarely in front of their source.

“Just think about what Telrus has become in these months with you by my side. Imagine what it could be with a woman like you shaping policy as a queen. It’s a realm I’d be proud to rule. ”

And before Kat could put together an answer to that, Adrien Augustine launched from his crouch and shot into the night sky, disappearing past the darkened canopy overhead.

Kat shoved to her feet, feeling feebler and more plainly human than ever before.

How else was she meant to respond to a hapless princeling overladen with divine power asking for her hand in marriage ?

She’d been sent away to war with instructions to make the best of it, to find some bright side, something that would improve her prospects instead of stalling her future in its tracks.

A marriage proposal from the heir to the realm certainly qualified.

And a pragmatic voice in the back of her head warned her that the real mistake was considering anything but taking the hand that had been offered to her.

She’d watched Adrien’s companions spend the past months falling over themselves trying to court the opportunity that had spontaneously landed in her lap.

Short of breaking the Seal of Heaven herself, Kat would be hard-pressed to find a better improvement of her circumstances.

Worse, Adrien was correct about what she might be capable of.

A commoner rising to the rank of queen was something out of a hopeful folktale, not something that happened in real life, precisely because of how much it could shake the foundations of the world.

In her mother’s fanciful shadow plays, these commoner queens never did much beyond enjoying their sudden change in social status, but Kat would never be one of those queens—especially not when Adrien had made it clear that he would gleefully support the consequences of giving someone who’d worked and marched and fought for a living that much power over the realm’s fate.

She could block senseless policy decisions. She could reverse them. She could go straight to the high command and demand that they tear down the requirement that all officers in the Telrusian military must carry a minimum of one Aurean token.

That policy being the first place her mind went shook her fully awake.

The first thing she’d thought about was Emory’s future.

Emory, who’d just confessed to her that he felt as if the life he’d built was slipping through his fingers with every new member of the decade who announced their intention to take their release.

Emory, who was losing everything he held dear.

Emory, whose fate she could change, whose future she could guarantee—if only she took the prince’s outstretched hand.

“So, are you gonna do it?”

Kat nearly screamed, whipping around to find Carrick and Sawyer leaning over a toppled tree like it was a bartop, chins in their hands. “You—how long—” she choked out.

“Essentially the whole time,” Carrick said cheerfully, even though it caught him an elbow from Sawyer. “It’s shockingly easy to sneak around a prince locked in a soliloquy.”

“You let him go on for a while,” Sawyer added.

“He tends to do that,” Kat muttered sourly. The hosts’ mercy wasn’t going to be enough to save her from this one. “I don’t suppose it’d be too much to ask you two to keep this between us?”

Carrick and Sawyer exchanged a glance.

“As comrades,” Kat added. Three years of serving side by side had to count for something.

“As comrades,” Sawyer repeated slowly. “I suppose we could. But Kat…”

“Don’t look at me like that,” she seethed. “He sprang it on me. How was I supposed to know he’d think something as senseless as marrying me is the answer to all his problems?”

“Kat—” Carrick tried to interrupt.

“It’s so ridiculous. So transactional —they’re all so transactional, these highborns.

They think everything can be bought, whether with favors or with the weight of these stupid little gold tokens.

” She pulled despondently on hers, tamping down the urge to tear it off and pitch it into the woods.

“And maybe it’s a good trade. That’s the worst part.

I’d get a say in the shape of the kingdom.

I’d get to advocate for all the soldiers this realm is determined to forget in favor of their glorious Aurean saviors.

I could do so much. I could be so much. And all I’d have to give up is… ”

“Emory,” the two of them breathed.

She grimaced. Of course he’d told them by now.

They were his closest friends—the ones who’d looked out for him when he first joined the ranks, who’d survived battle after battle locked side by side with him.

It was dangerous to give intel on his indiscretions to these two clowns, but maybe it was more dangerous to let them sniff out the secret themselves.

“Look, Kat,” Sawyer started, rounding behind the log and approaching her with the caution of a hunter moving in on a wounded animal.

“We didn’t dream of being soldiers either.

The only good thing it ever did for me was introduce me to this knucklehead over here.

I certainly wouldn’t have made it to this day if I hadn’t met him.

So I think I understand a bit of what you feel.

The bit that’s not a prince asking you to marry him,” he added after a beat.

Kat blinked. It seemed she’d failed somewhat spectacularly in her duties as a decade’s hinge. She was supposed to know the soldiers in her line well enough not to miss something like this. “The two of you…” she hazarded.

“—were on our way to see what kind of delightful dark corners these woods offer,” Carrick finished.

Sawyer threw his battle partner a long-suffering look but didn’t dispute it. “And I suppose we neglected to mention back at the banquet table that when we have our releases in hand, we’ll be going to Brista together,” he added.

Kat bit down on the urge to point out that this, too, was transactional. They didn’t need to offer up their own intimate details to convince her they’d keep her secrets. “That’s wonderful,” she said instead. “I wish I could say I had half as much of a plan for what the future holds.”

“Care for a suggestion?” Carrick asked, sidling up to his battle partner and propping his elbow on Sawyer’s shoulder. “We didn’t just wake up one day, face-to-face in that tiny decade tent, and announce with perfect synchronicity, ‘Ah, of course. We agree.’?”

“What my esteemed battle partner is trying to say is that you need to talk to Emory,” Sawyer interjected. “And maybe tell him a thing or two before it’s too late.”

“And by ‘too late,’ we mean if you don’t tell him about this whole prince proposition thing straightaway, we will,” Carrick added with a wolfish smile.

“Your shieldbearer is a menace,” Kat muttered to Sawyer.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” he replied, but the levity slipped from his expression and he laid a sturdy hand on her shoulder.

“It…wasn’t hard to guess where his head went back at the feast. Giselle’s little announcement was a surprise to all of us.

If you’re going to let him down, maybe it’s better to wait. ”

“ No, ” Carrick said vehemently. “This has gone on long enough.”

Kat shook her head, biting back a smile.

“I think you’re right. I’ll talk to him, I promise.

Not right now,” she added as she saw Sawyer about to open his mouth again.

“Tonight is for revelry. Tomorrow is going to be a march. But if I haven’t started the conversation before sunset two days from now, after we’ve arrived in Rusta proper, you two have permission to ruin my life exactly as much as I deserve. ”

Carrick and Sawyer exchanged the kind of glance only battle partners could share—a look that was a conversation and a decision in the span of a second. Both of them nodded.

Kat let out a long, relieved sigh. “How long have you two known, anyway?”

“Years,” Carrick blurted, just as Sawyer said, “Known?”

“That we hooked up— years ?”

“ Hooked up? ” Carrick sputtered. “When?”

“Before the Battle of the Mouth. And again—No, hang on, what did you think I meant?”

“We didn’t—” Sawyer tried to interrupt, just as Carrick replied, “Well, Emory has been in lo—”

Whatever words he might have said next were smothered by his battle partner’s palm.

“ That, ” Sawyer said over Carrick’s muffled protests, “is something Kat should hear from her battle partner first. Speaking from experience,” he added with a wink that only drew an even more irascible flurry of wrestling attempts to get free.

“Hosts help me,” Kat muttered, but a part of her felt as if she’d just taken flight in Adrien’s wake.