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The list was not long, and Kat hated all of them.

She knew part of it could be solved with tailoring that would take in what little needed to be taken in and let out almost everything else, but there was something more to it that rankled at her.

It wasn’t the skirts, she was fairly certain.

Before she’d been a soldier, she’d loved a good skirt.

She’d worked in one many a day in her father’s shadow and had never found them uncomfortable.

Going back to skirts after three years in the stiff tunics and pants that all soldiers wore would be one of the highlights of handing in her papers.

No, it all came back to the cuts. The intention she could sense behind each and every garment, none of it quite aligning with the parts of her body she wanted to show off.

She knew, objectively, that she had a wonderful body.

It had served her well and carried her through the war.

But none of these dresses seemed to care that she had broad, muscled shoulders, lats that thickened her torso significantly, and legs that made Emory go starry-eyed every time he’d been between them.

The only point they could seem to agree on was showing off her generous bodice, but even there she had a disagreement about the priority it seemed to take.

“But you’d look incredible in that one,” Daya whined as Kat turned her nose up at yet another dress.

The highborns all seemed far more invested in this than she was.

Most likely it was the novelty. For them, fashion had never been so much of a challenge, and all four of them were practically bred to compete.

She was already seeing it manifest—the way Bodhi’s usual smile had dropped to a canny, thoughtful look as he hunted through rack after rack that was presented to them, the way Celia and Daya got into increasingly specific snits over the smallest of details, and of course the way Faye kept trying to rein them all in like an anxious sheepdog.

A desperate glance at the bench against the wall found Mira slumped in obvious boredom, her legs spread wide and one hand pressed gingerly against her ribs where the healers had elected to let her bones mend naturally rather than force the issue.

The centurion caught Kat’s eye and gave her a grin she’d know anywhere—one that said, You just let me know when you want to tap out.

Ordinarily, the goad would work in the other direction. Kat would pull herself together, dig for some inner strength she didn’t know she had, and finish the fight. But that was a wartime necessity. One where they’d all had to band together and do the best they could with the worst options.

Now they could band together in other ways. “What do you think, centurion?” Kat asked, quieting the latest round of bickering between Celia and Daya and snapping Bodhi from the calculating trance he’d sunken into.

“The blue one,” Mira said. “You can make that work, can’t you?”

It was exactly the spur she needed. There was only one thing left that could make it perfect. “I suppose,” Kat said, drawing out the last syllable in obvious challenge.

“The blue one,” Mira repeated. “That’s an order.”

It was the best and worst thing about serving under Mira Morgenstern.

The thing that had carried them all through countless battles, that the decade constantly joked about in a morbid sort of way.

The easiest way to make anything possible was to have Mira command you to do it, because Mira didn’t care about your feelings.

“The blue one, then,” Kat said. It had a structured bodice that, with enough spacers in the lacings, would accommodate her torso and emphasize the strength of her chest and shoulders, covered only by a gauzy layer of tulle.

Her lone token could almost pass for simple jewelry with the way it dropped between her breasts.

The dress’s skirt was layered in a flattering swell that, by some miracle, reached the floor without tailoring.

It was functional. It would carry her through the night.

“Oh, someone’s going to be very pleased,” Faye said with a wink that had Kat checking nervously back over her shoulder to confirm Mira was sufficiently distracted by her own browse through the racks.

Guilt racked her, but she couldn’t set the record straight with the room’s current population listeningin.

If Faye noticed the sudden tension that came over Kat, she’d probably blamed it on the discomfort of the dress and moved right along. As the Aurean noblewoman fell easily into a conversation with Bodhi about fabric trends, Kat let out a long, slow breath, smoothing her hands over her skirts.

Mira’s order made it starkly clear. Kat didn’t belong in this world.

She was a soldier, through and through, no matter how they trussed her up.

She was built to march, to die, to do as told, and the luck that had brought her here wasn’t even her own.

Why did it have to be her burden, to cross the gap from where she’d started into this strange, opulent world?

For the good of the people, she reminded herself.

For that little girl’s smile when she saw that magic was something she, too, could hold in her hands.