Page 57

Von sobered. “Well, there’s the draft and there’s the draft. I chose soldiering for steady coin. Made it work for me for many a year, and at least before we were called up to the fronts, I was happy to do it. I imagine it’s the same for a lot of you,” he said to the rest of the decade.

“Taking mine,” Sawyer confirmed, and Carrick echoed with a nod that reverberated through the rest of them. Emory’s eyes skimmed uncertainly from face to face. On the battlefield, he was steady, even when outnumbered. Here was another thing entirely.

“Well, I’m staying signed on,” Brandt announced. “Good coin, and I don’t have to contend with any more demons on this side of the plane.”

“It’s going to be a bit different when it’s living people on the other end of your spear,” Javi muttered.

Von nodded sagely. “That it is. I’ve still got five years left on my contract, and I’d rather get that time back than a pension, a pat on the head, and the potential to get caught up in a future campaign.

Plus, I’ve got dreams that go beyond marching.

In fact, there’s a baker based out in Sprill I met toward the end of the campaign who told me they’d been looking for a deliveryman who could spend his downtime tending the ovens.

I figure it’s as good a foot in the door as any, so that’s where I’m headed once the ice firms up for the season. ”

“ Baking ’s your calling?” Emory said, incredulous.

“Baking’s what I’d love to be doing right now. Need to give it a try before we can say anything about a calling, but the odds are looking good. Doesn’t hurt that the baker’s cute. But really, I owe it to myself, same as any of you, to make something of the fact I made it back.”

“Cheers to that,” Ziva said, raising her glass, and the rest of the decade followed her in the toast. Kat, having only just gotten there, was stuck lifting her knuckles and trying not to overanalyzethe dazed expression written across Emory’s face.

It didn’t have to mean anything. That the man who had been the foundation of his drive to be a soldier was himself leaving soldiering.

That the end of the war was a promise of a new beginning for practically all of them, and Emory was exempting himself from what looked increasingly like an inability to imagine a future outside of the path he’d already been walking.

But Kat swore, as she cast her gaze about desperately, looking for a servant with one of those trays laden with tempting drinks, that she could hear the squeaky waterwheel of Emory’s thoughts suddenly kick into motion.

Maybe there was a passion out there for him. Something he felt called to do instead of obligated. Some mark he could make upon the world. Something that wouldn’t break his heart—or would break it in all the wonderful ways a heart could be broken. Maybe he could find it, given time and freedom.

Kat’s own broken heart could only mourn that she’d slipped from his grasp before she could be a part ofit.

It was at that precise moment a squadron of trumpeters blasted an exuberant fanfare from the hall’s entrance.

Every head wrenched from its business to find the royal procession, headed by Adrien Augustine, striding forward into the hall.

Cheers and applause crowded out the horns as the prince grinned and waved to all his guests.

Behind him, the king and queen walked arm in arm, swathed in golden robes held together by ribbons of bright Telrusian red.

To Kat, the crown had always been an abstract concept, a force beyond her reckoning that dictated the shape of her life without any consideration for how she might feel about it.

By contrast, even with all the trimmings they’d been wrapped in, these two people were almost painfully human.

There was a bit of Adrien in both their faces—the king’s nose, the queen’s brow.

Both wore arrays of Aurean tokens, but she doubted either of them put much practice into the gold.

High houses distributed angelic gold from their vaults to their scions, who wore it in rotations to ensure the work that had gone into cultivating their power for generations would not erode.

In the back of her mind, a thought snagged—that if she accepted Adrien’s hand, one of those tokens could very well pass to her.

Her focus slipped to her would-be fiancé, who wasn’t putting nearly the same effort into appearing stately and dignified.

After months on the road with his legions, he’d developed a natural ease with the people underneath him, hard-won after the years of his life spent isolated in monastic training.

He smiled at his courtiers. He shook hands as he passed people and shot salutes to those he sighted in the back of the crowd.

Kat braced herself to receive his attention as the procession drew near.

She never did. Adrien walked right past their decade with nothing but a glance and a nod, his eyes skipping clean over her as he moved on to the next group of people clustered along the walkway, a knot of youthful nobility who waved eagerly and were eagerly waved at in turn.

It took Kat an extra second to register what had just happened, and a second more to understandit.

Part of it was Adrien’s showmanship, no doubt. A good magician would never draw your eye to a rabbit before he pulled it from its hiding place, and that didn’t even account for the possibility that Kat turned him down before he had a chance to introduce her as his future queen.

They’d discussed it the night prior. She’d told him to ask again.

But the part that stuck in her craw as she watched him chum it up with another patch of token-wearing nobles, none of them dressed in soldiers’ uniforms, was that it wasn’t just Kat Adrien had skipped over.

The first decade had marched side by side with him since they departed the Mouth of Hell.

Had fought off Lesser Lords bent on rending the prince limb from limb.

Had built his stupid, clever road, and done it well.

And Adrien Augustine had nothing but a nod for the lot of them.

Was it all for show? This integrating himself with the legion, this commitment to the common people?

Maybe a grand celebration like this wasn’t the right occasion for waging his little war—but if he really meant all the things he’d said when he asked her to marry him the first time, then this was the occasion.

Instead, Adrien Augustine was playing to the gold in the crowd, the dark wool of the legion’s dress uniforms a handy guide to every face he could filter out.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered. The king had issued an order that had forced her, by random chance, to put her body on the line for the world’s sake.

Many of the soldiers in this room had done the same, and even the ones who hadn’t been forced had, by choice, marched on the Mouth of Hell.

They were there as set dressing, nothing more.

Charity, by which the nobles could reassure themselves that they’d done their due diligence in showing some measure of gratitude to the people who had wrought their victory.

A vicious, bilious anger rose in Kat, fury that it had taken her this long to notice that Adrien Augustine only ever noticed her.

She tracked him across the ballroom, a process made staggeringly easy by the fact that she was a head taller than many of the people in the crowd and easier still when he mounted the dais in the center of the room to another swell of thunderous applause.

“My friends,” he said, his Voice of Angels token projecting him so clearly that an echo rang from the glass ceiling high above. “We assemble tonight to celebrate my victory over the Demon Lord, but I look out at this room, and I see the faces who made that victory possible.”

A passable start. He’d clearly learned to lead with humility.

“I see Bodhi Ranjan, scion of the Southern Reach, who I know is hoping I rush this speech so he can get to the dance floor quicker. Young nobility of quality, I advise you to stake your claim on him early, as I expect he’ll need to be wheeled out of the ballroom in a hand cart by the end of the evening. ”

The crowd laughed amicably, and she saw Bodhi wave to a smattering of applause from his position at the foot of the dais.

“I see Faye Laurent, Duchess of Halston. Never was there a more polite Aurean warrior capable of freezing a horde of demons in their tracks from a hundred paces. If I use the incorrect address for anyone over the course of the evening, just log it with her and she’ll take it out of my hide later.”

Faye, too, waved to the crowd, looking decidedly distressed at the implication that she’d ever lay hands on the prince.

“I see Daya Imonde, Duchess of Egren, whom I almost didn’t recognize in the finery she’s decked out in tonight.”

Kat couldn’t find Daya from where she was standing, but from the swell of titters and the way Faye looked liable to vomit, she could assume the duchess had just flashed Adrien an uncouth gesture.

“And of course I see Celia Vai, Countess of Sprill, who looks positively thrilled to be here,” Adrien concluded, earning him an eye roll visible from clean across the ballroom.

“My companions, who were at my side every step of the way. We trained together. Made each other sharper. Made each other strong enough to accomplish what no other Aurean could in the twenty years since the Mouth first opened. Were it not for their might, I wouldn’t be standing before you today. ”

Another vigorous round of applause rolled over the crowd.

Say something about the soldiers, Kat urged him silently. About how it was their might that got you safely to the capital.

“However, before the dancing starts in earnest, we have an important bit of business to attend to,” Adrien said, and only then did his gaze slip up from the nobles crowded in his immediate vicinity.

Only then did he search the crowd of soldiers he’d invited until his eyes landed squarely on Kat’s unmissable height.

The prince smiled.

“The fact of the matter is, there were significant obstacles along the long march home—obstacles that went far beyond the Augustine Road’s construction.

Three of the Demon Lord’s generals remained in this plane.

These Lesser Lords hunted us on our journey across the continent, and though they were defeated”—through her confusion Kat had just enough presence of mind to note he’d left off the agent of the Lords’ defeat—“they had help along the way. Help from one of my four closest companions.”

The ballroom’s noise shifted abruptly to a miasma of confused muttering that Kat wholeheartedly seconded.

Had Adrien uncovered some evidence in the final days of the campaign?

Something he hadn’t told Kat? Of course the prince had reserved the accusation until the moment he could make theater out ofit.

“Guards, if you would, please escort Lady Daya Imonde from these chambers.”

“Sorry, what ?” Daya shouted over the crowd’s clamor.

Kat finally got eyes on her as the people in her vicinity surged away from the accused young duchess, whose ninety-five tokens suddenly seemed less a display of wealth and status, more an immediate threat.

“I’m loyal to Telrus. I flew into battle side by side with you! ”

As the guards closed in, their polearms lowered as if confronting an escaped zoo animal, Celia Vai shot from the crowd, skidding between Daya and the royal dais. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the countess called, a rare urgency blazing in her eyes.

Adrien looked thrown, but only momentarily. “Remove them both,” he said, his Voice of Angels easily overpowering the young nobles’ protests and the crowd’s shocked murmurs.

Everything was happening too fast for Kat to process.

She’d expected a proposal and instead gotten an abrupt, confusing end to the mystery that had been plaguing her for weeks.

But none of it felt right. She’d suspected Celia and Daya, but neither of them was behaving like an enemy of the crown.

Both followed the royal guards’ directives, lifting their token arrays from their necks and holding them out to prove themselves disarmed.

Both complied when guided out the ballroom’s massive doors, Daya still seething and Celia holding her arm to steady her.

Kat wanted to pull Adrien aside and ask him how he’d been sure, but the prince was still up on the dais, grinning uneasily out at the crowd.

“I hate to darken such a joyful occasion with such unfortunate business, but now we’re free to celebrate without the specter of the lady’s sedition hanging over us.

And we have much to celebrate. The Augustine Road is my first gift to the people of Telrus, but it will not be my last. As your prince, as your future king, it is my duty to rebuild this kingdom.

To peel back the Demon Lord’s scars and heal from the evil that has been wrought upon us. And to that order—”

Before Adrien could get another word out, a shadow flickered overhead, followed by an almighty crash.

The height of the ceiling gave the ballroom’s denizens just enough time to look up and register the shattered glass fragments plummeting toward them, and not much time more to duck, cover their heads, and lunge for whatever shelter they could find.

A single, soul-shattering roar smothered the screams and confusion as an enormous demon—a fourth Lesser Lord—tore through the gorgeous iron struts and plunged into the heart of the ballroom.