Page 51

In battle, it was Emory’s job to push forward into the thick of the fighting and Kat’s to follow him like she was glued to his back, matching him step for step.

This afternoon saw them starkly unprepared for the reversal.

Kat charged on a bullheaded path through the market day crowd, and Emory fought to keep up in her wake, dodging pedestrians and calling apologies over his shoulder to the elderly women with wicker baskets of laundry twice their size strapped to their back whose path Kat had unintentionally plowed through.

She couldn’t help herself. Not when the day she’d been waiting on for months was finally here. And not when Carrick and Sawyer had permission to ruin her life the moment the sun set tonight—if she didn’t have a very important conversation with Emory first. Kat was already starting to sweat.

Though part of that wasn’t her fault. It was uncommonly warm for the onset of autumn, and the pleasant weather had drawn a larger than usual crowd to the South Bank Market, the weekly assembly where tradespeople hawked their crafts on the edge of the river that defined the outer limits of Rusta proper.

Under the auspices of the bright sun overhead, the cobblestones baked and the throngs of people trapped the heat.

Kat used to spend all week looking forward to market day.

When she’d left home, she hadn’t been any smaller, but after seeing so much of the world, after marching to the Mouth of Hell itself and back, she felt twice as strange as she once had towering over these crowds.

She found herself scanning the faces she passed for childhood friends, chastising herself when she turned up nothing.

All she recognized was older neighbors. People whose numbers hadn’t been pulled when the draft hit their assembly house.

The young had been scattered, and the old stayed planted.

She’d done her best to cultivate a healthy mindset, but it was so hard to hold on to here in the capital’s outskirts.

The war had barely touched these people, even when the Demon Lord’s armies pressed close to Rusta.

And if Kat had her way, she would have been one of them—would have spent the last three years holed up behind the city’s outer wall, grateful for the hard work of people like Emory who’d stepped up without being pressed into service.

Now she strode into the market square wondering if she was just as unrecognizable as the place that raised her had become.

There weren’t a lot of towering platinum-blond women passing through every day, and though her training as a soldier had packed more muscle onto her frame, she hadn’t started from zero as a forge girl.

But she noticed as she moved through the crowd that one inescapable thing had changed.

She wore her Aurean token outside her tunic, and every eye that might have otherwise recognized her lodged on it and stuck.

Until she arrived at one stall in particular, a stall with a spectacular array of expertly crafted knives laid end to end and a banner hung over it that read, in the same inelegant red scrawl she remembered, “Honnold’s Honed Edges.

” The man sitting behind it, sheltering from the sun under both a parasol and a floppy straw hat, took one look at her and lunged clean through his displays, sending the gorgeous knives scattering in utter disarray as Honnold himself nearly tripped over his sandals to wrap his only child in a bear hug.

“Dad,” she gasped into his shoulder. This, too, was different.

Last time she’d hugged him, he’d felt solid all the way through, but three years had seen a sudden reversal in both of their compositions.

She put it to the test, grappling him hard and swinging him up off his feet in a haphazard circle before setting him carefully down on a patch of knife-free dirt.

“Bean,” her father sobbed, pulling her back by the shoulders so he could get a good look at her.

“ Bean, ” she heard snorted somewhere near her boots, where Emory was already in the process of helping pick up the scattered cutlery.

Kat let her father drink in the sight of his kid, intact and back from the front lines.

His eyes roved up and down as if to verify she still had all her limbs, lingering here and there.

First on the scar on her forearm from a demon underling at the Battle of Bolsun, one of the few places she’d been wounded enough that not even Aurean magic could wipe away the mark.

Then on her eyes, for a minute that felt both interminable and far too brief for him to possibly understand the weight they now carried.

Finally, they dropped to her token. “Well, that’s new,” he said, pinching the chain where it sat on her neck and tugging it gently.

Kat grinned, slipped into alignment, and watched the light she summoned reflect in her father’s wondering eyes, brightening the sudden tears that welled there.

Before she could apologize, he was pulling her back in for another hug, and this time she let him give grappling the life out of her his best shot.

By the time her shoulder was thoroughly soaked and they both had reached a mutual agreement to let each other go, Emory had all the knives collected and was carefully laying them back on the booth’s resettled tabletop.

“Sorry,” he called back over his shoulder.

“Didn’t want to interrupt, but I’m not certain where each one goes, and I’m sure you have a system—”

“Dad, this is Emory,” Kat said, biting back a grin. “My shieldbearer and battle partner. Wouldn’t be alive today without him.”

“It’s very nice to meet you, sir—” Emory started, but didn’t get a chance to finish as Honnold sideswiped the hand he offered and pulled Emory hard into his chest.

“Nice to meet you, too, Emory,” her dad replied, sounding vaguely snotty from where he’d tucked his head over her battle partner’s shoulder.

Emory had frozen up like a dog that hadn’t been petted in an age, and it was only after an encouraging nod from Kat that he wrapped his arms around Honnold’s barrel of a torso.

Kat felt something inside her settle at the sight.

She hadn’t been sure about bringing Emory along today, given what she was obligated to tell him by the end of it.

But she’d feared she wouldn’t find her father at his usual market stall—that somehow in the three years she’d been away, something might have happened to him—and if the worst came to pass, she knew she couldn’t confront it alone.

Instead, she was treated to the sight of the two most important men in her life meeting for the first time.

Her dad looked ridiculous in his market getup, between the patchy hat he’d never let go of and the sandals she’d fretted over time and time again.

The man worked with knives, hot metal, and yet he never seemed to be able to tolerate a close-toed shoe for long.

Emory, too, looked out of his depth, if his panicked glance, once it became clear Honnold wasn’t letting go any time soon, was anything to goby.

Sorry, she mouthed before hiding a smile behind her knuckles.

’s fine, he mouthed back, though he was plainly being crushed.

“Dad, okay, that’s enough,” Kat said, stepping in and laying a hand on her father’s shoulder.

He released only a single arm, and Kat huffed as she was drawn back into his embrace, shunted awkwardly against Emory’s shoulder as her father held them tight.

“We’re making a scene,” she hissed, passing a strained smile to some of the bystanders.

“You think my daughter gets to march back home a victor after three years on the battlefield and I’m not going to make a scene about it?” Honnold said, clapping her on the back. “You hear that?” he called out to the rest of the market. “My kid’s back!”

His words were met with a few scattered cheers and claps, though from the way his face lit up one might think the whole crowd had burst into applause.

“Hosts, I can’t take you anywhere,” Kat grumbled.

Across from her, Emory was looking dazed.

Throwing the full force of her father’s affection at a man who’d had very little in the way of fatherly affection in his life might have been a lot to handle all at once.

“We’re quartered in the city proper ahead of the prince’s ball, but I have a free day to visit,” she said.

“Well, then, c’mon, you two,” Honnold replied, tugging on their shoulders. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”

“Dad, the booth.”

“Lance can watch the booth. Can’t you, Lance?

” he hollered, and the basketweaver at the adjacent stall flashed him a thumbs-up without lifting his eyes from his craft.

Kat had her doubts about Lance’s attention, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from following the gentle squeeze of her father’s arm finally, finally around her as he guided them onto the familiar path home.

The forge was just as she remembered, the smoky fug of it welcoming her in the courtyard.

Kat knew she shouldn’t linger—the sun was starting to dip from its zenith already, and she didn’t want to waste a single second with her father—but she couldn’t help taking a moment to breathe it in deep.

Her feet had stalled at precisely the spot where she’d read the conscription notice, and it felt as if the next step she took was the first step of a brand-new life.

“Might have tidied the place up a bit if I knew I’d be having such esteemed guests,” Honnold joked as he waved the two of them into the cramped little kitchen on the first floor of the home.