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“We’re heading back to the barracks,” Kat said as she breezed past where Emory had propped himself against the courtyard wall.

He startled, then hesitated. “But the tea—”

“It’s a very common peppermint blend. You can get it almost anywhere in the continent. We could even grab some in the South Bank Market before we head back.”

A hand settled on her shoulder, and she glanced back to find Emory fixing her with his worst mother-hen look, the one she usually saw pointed at Giselle after she’d had one of those training days where no amount of spear drills could settle the seething rage she always kept just below her surface.

“What happened?” he asked, low and serious.

“Not here,” Kat replied, her throat tight.

He followed her gamely down to the river’s edge, past the docks where the trade boats offloaded goods shipped from up and down the river that shared Rusta’s name, to a quiet set of steps built into the riverbank where marketgoers gathered to pick through their spoils and locals brought their washing.

There, with the water to cover the sound of her confession to anyone but the closest ears, Kat did her best to explain what had gone so wrong.

“But you’ve cultivated your token now,” Emory said, when she finally took a moment to breathe. “You have all the opportunities he’d hoped you might. He should be thrilled.”

She hadn’t told him everything. The one opportunity that no one but a prince and two very troublesome comrades-in-arms knew about, the reason she couldn’t look her father in the eye and tell him she’d done everything she could to make the most of her time away at war.

How could she face Honnold, knowing everything he feared about himself and everything he dreamed for her, and tell him that she was considering throwing the opportunity of a lifetime away?

Moon-eyed, he’d called her. This thing she had with Emory may have started as an eager infatuation, unexpectedly spurred by a last chance hookup and the surprise end of the war, but its foundations were far more solid than anything that deserved the word moon-eyed.

Of course, if that was the case, she should have told him that a long time ago.

“There’s another opportunity, isn’t there?” Emory said when her silence stretched on long enough. “A transfer? Did one of the Aureans offer to pull you into a leadership position in another legion?”

She snorted, but she couldn’t tear her gaze from where the river lapped teasingly over the edge of the lowest stairstep.

“I figured it has to be something really big. Otherwise you would have told me already.”

“Or it’s something so small it’s not even worth considering.”

“If it was that, it wouldn’t have been enough to make you storm out on your dad.”

“I didn’t storm. I…lightly breezed.” She paused. “I should go back, shouldn’tI?”

Emory scooched closer to her, pulling her hand from her knee and threading his fingers through hers. “You should tell me,” he said firmly.

Kat huffed. She fought back the part of her that balked at the contact.

The Third Century was quartered in the innermost district’s barracks, a solid two-hour walk from where they sat.

If any of those hundred soldiers and the dozen other attachés who might have known them had followed the two of them all the way here, they were dealing with far worse problems. “You’re going to laugh at me,” she said, tightening her grip on him.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Kat knocked her shoulder into his. “I’m not even going to take it.

” The moment she said those words, she felt the truth of them.

The burden they lifted from her back. She had given Telrus three years of her life unwillingly.

She didn’t have to choose to give the kingdom the rest of her life, too, just because the opportunity had fallen at her feet.

“Then you should tell me,” Emory said, giving her hand a gentle squeeze.

She drew a deep, steadying breath, staring out over the water. “Adrien asked me to marry him.”

With her eyes on the ducks milling hopefully around the distant bridge, where children often threw their scraps in the water, she only had her periphery and the feeling of Emory’s hand in hers to go on. The initial hitch of his surprise, followed by a soft “Huh.”

“Like I said, I’m not…It wouldn’t be right for me.

He has this lunatic idea that he’s going to stick it to his parents by marrying the most qualified commoner he can find, so he can usher in an era of equality with a common queen by his side.

Something about how a commoner will govern from a place of understanding to cover the gaps in his fancy noble education.

I just happened to be the single-token Aurean he knows best.”

“So you’ve already turned him down?”

Kat grimaced. “Well, no. He told me he’d await my answer at the victory ball. I’ll do it then.”

Emory let out a long sigh of relief. Before Kat could let herself savor it alongside him, he squeezed her hand again and said, “Then it’s not too late to change your mind.”

Her ears rang.

He couldn’t have said—

He didn’t—

But one look at Emory and she knew he’d meant every word. It was his turn to stare off into the middle distance, not meeting her gaze so deliberately that she was tempted to do something drastic about it. “You want me to…”

“It’s not about what I want,” he said roughly. “What I want to say isn’t what I have to say.”

“I want to hear what you want to say.”

“Kat,” he warned.

“How much longer are we going to dance around this? After the victory ball, we’ll be out of excuses, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get our stories straight before then.

Like Carrick and Sawyer—yes, they told me,” she said as Emory opened his mouth to interject.

“We can have everything we want if we just say it. ”

“It’s different for them,” Emory said. “They’re each other’s best option. The best possible future either of them can have is the one where they’re together.”

She tightened her grip on his hand. “Don’t you dare say what you’re about to say.”

“Kat—”

“I just got done having this conversation with my dad. I walked out on him after years apart because—”

“Kat, do you think I could live with myself, knowing I held you back from this kind of greatness?” He still wasn’t looking at her.

“What greatness ?” she sputtered. “The thrilling opportunity to be trotted out like a prizewinning horse every time the crown needs to prove it’s invested in the common people?

The chance to spend the rest of my life shackled to Adrien Augustine, as if the past few months haven’t been bad enough?

He’s insufferable. I don’t want to suffer him any more than I already have. ”

Emory’s brow furrowed. She gave him time to gather his thoughts, time which she also desperately needed to quiet the thundering of her fearful heart. “Do you remember how it felt after we found out about Adrien and his companions?” he asked at last.

“Exhausting,” she replied immediately.

That got a slight twitch at the corners of his lips, which she’d take as a victory under these conditions.

“That too. But I was more thinking about the helplessness. We’d been through so many fronts.

So much mud and gore and days we didn’t think we’d make it back.

And for what? For these people to come out of nowhere and end the war in one blow? ”

“That blow wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t liberated Fallon and pushed to the Mouth,” Kat countered.

Part of her cringed away from repeating command’s constant refrain to them on the long march west, as more and more soldiers questioned why Telrus was throwing all its resources at a campaign against the heart of the Demon Lord’s foothold on this plane.

From a legionnaire’s perspective, it made no sense.

It had felt like they were nothing but meat stuck in a mortar, waiting for the inevitable grind of the pestle.

Emory’s eyes finally found hers. He looked like he was back in those exhausting weeks before the Battle of the Mouth, where they were marching toward a single, awful ending.

“We made a difference. I won’t deny that.

But Adrien made a difference for the whole of Telrus.

And that’s the kind of difference you could make as queen of this kingdom. ”

“And when do I get a say in what kind of greatness I get to share with the world?” Kat countered.

Furious tears were finally starting to burn behind her eyes, and she folded her free hand over her face, trying to press them down.

“I went to war out of obligation. I spent the last two months thinking I would be free from it at the end of the road. Free to make my own choices, free to decide the shape of my life, free to give my heart to the man who’s made these past three years worthwhile. ”

Emory’s breath caught.

“And right when I thought I’d finally earned the right to lay down my spear, instead I’m called on to…what, to be the people’s champion? And if I refuse, I’ve let down every person I’ve spent the last three years fighting for, so I’m not allowed to choose anything. It’s just another fucking draft.”

They sat in a lingering silence as the world moved around them.

The washers wrung out their work and loaded it up into their baskets.

The ducks fussed and squabbled over every scrap flung their way.

Farther in the distance, the market’s constant rumble set a comforting, familiar blanket over all of it—a quiet promise that life wenton.

“If I loved you any less,” Emory started, then broke off, squeezing her hand again.

“Don’t,” she whispered, but for once, her order didn’t take.

“If I loved you any less, I could be selfish. I could put myself above you. Beg you to stay by my side—to not go so high above me that I couldn’t possibly follow.

But, Kat, I love you.” He reached over with his free hand, cradling her jaw and drawing her in to press their foreheads together.

“Too much to let myself be your worst option.”

He leaned back slightly—just enough to pull her head down and press his lips to her forehead. “I love you too,” Kat warbled. It was the only true thing she knew how to say.

One last squeeze of the hand. One last press of his shoulder into hers. And then Emory stood, turned away with a hitching breath she wished she didn’t hear, and made his way back up the steps to the heart of South Bank.

There on the river’s edge, beneath the ducks and the washers and the market’s comforting hum, Kat let herself cry, at last, for every future that had been stolen from her.