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“Oh, it’s ridiculous that he wouldn’t want to—well, you know?”

“ Yes, ” Emory blurted. That furrow between his brows was back with a vengeance.

Kat resisted the urge to put her thumb in it. “Are you mad that he’s not going to?”

“Maybe?”

“Why would you be mad?”

She wouldn’t have been surprised if steam started leaking from his ears. “It’s…it’s… wasteful, ” he concluded. “Extremely wasteful. Like throwing out a whole roast when it’s fresh from the oven.”

“Oh, I’m the roast in this metaphor?”

“Forget the metaphor. To ask a woman like you to marry him, then not follow through? I worry for the future of his rule if these are his choices.” He paused, tamping down a hiccupping, almost hysterical laugh. “Anyway, back to the part where his life was on the line and you covered me. ”

“What’s that all about, huh?” Kat replied, propping herself up on her elbows and hiding her smile behind the knuckles of one hand. “I mean we already knew that I’m prone to bad choices. But fortunately, as is the wont of royalty, the prince has done us the favor of making it not a choice at all.”

“Kat,” he warned.

“You’ve been upgraded from worst option to last,” Kat said, nudging him with her shoulder.

“Kat, there’s no world in which you have no other options. Hosts, look at you. You’re dressed in a ballgown, and you took on a demon. Half this party would take your hand in marriage the second you asked.”

“Oh, so you want me to be sincere about it?” She leaned closer.

It was difficult to tell in the dark, but she swore the tips of his ears had gone even redder.

“I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you. I wouldn’t have made it through the war if you hadn’t had my back at every turn, on every battlefield, even when we were young and stupid and you didn’t like me for some reason.”

“I did,” he muttered quietly.

“What’s that?”

“I did like you. I was just terrible at showing it. You confounded me.”

“Oh, every young woman aspires to be confounding.”

Emory ducked his head, his shoulders coming up as if trying to shield his blazing ears. “Can we go back to the thing you were just saying?”

She could have happily teased him for another round or two, but it would have amounted to psychological torture.

“The thing where I wouldn’t have been able to picture a future for myself outside of all that blood and death if you hadn’t lifted my head from it?

The thing where I couldn’t have made it to that future if you hadn’t kept me going?

The thing where you still want to argue that there could be someone better for me out there than the man I’m looking at right now? ”

He opened his mouth, then wisely closedit.

“There’s no ranking. There’s no contest. The Aureans want it to be—to them it’s a calculation, adding up all their gold pieces and seeing how high they can get that number.

I don’t want to play by their rules anymore.

All that’ll ever get me is cast aside when the math calls for it.

I knew it was bullshit from the moment that math told me I was better off without you. ”

Emory tipped his head back and let out a long breath. When he lowered his gaze back to hers, there was a faint glimmer in the corners of his eyes. “Can I say something?” he asked, the words half caught in his throat.

“I need a moment to breathe,” she said, waving him on with a frighteningly Adrien-esque gesture.

“I’m sorry,” Emory murmured. “I’ve gotten so used to following orders, to accepting orders that I think sometimes I see commands where nothing is written.

I thought you could change the world within the confines of the cage I built for myself, and all you wanted to do was pull me out of it.

The last thing I wanted was for you to live in that cage with me—but you’ve never seen a cage at all. ”

“Might have been because I’m not bright enough to recognize it.”

“Katrien, you have no idea how bright you are. The angels knew exactly what they were doing when they fated that token into your lineage. There were days on the campaign where I might have faltered, might have let the line break if I hadn’t known that when the whistle next blew, I’d get to turn and see you.

I thought it was enough just to be near you, to let you keep giving me all these little things to look forward to.

You wouldn’t believe the number of nights I spent staring at the canopy of the decade tent, trying to come up with the next dish I could tempt you with when the going got tough.

I was so afraid of forgetting them, I had to start writing them down. ”

“You still haven’t shown me the actual list.”

“I have it here,” he said, fumbling into the pocket of his dress uniform until he drew out a battered piece of paper folded several times over on itself.

His large hands unfolded it so delicately that it might as well have been a book of prayer from the Age of Hosts.

Kat called up a light as he laid it flat on the battlements, leaning in close to peer atit.

It didn’t do her much good. “You can read this?”

“You can’t?”

“Does that say ‘milk steak?’?”

“No, that’s—” Emory broke off, frowning. “I’m not actually sure what that says. But the line above it is the hand pies. See the check? So it must have been something I was thinking about in Fallon.”

Kat leaned closer as if that would magically rearrange Emory’s handwriting into something legible.

“Stop laughing.”

“I’m not laughing,” she protested, but it came out garbled and even worse of a lie. “I’m…so ridiculously happy that you wrote this down. I never would have been able to remember all of them myself. I’m not sure this does us much good, but—”

“Oh hush.”

“ My point, ” she continued over his scolding, “is that there’s barely anything checked off here. We had months on the road and very little to show for it. I think we need to get serious.”

“Serious as in…”

“As in forget that deadline we gave ourselves. Forget only seeing how much we could get away with between the Mouth and here. You and I are going to check off every single item on this list. As long as we can decode them all,” she added, just so that he’d knock his shoulder playfully into hers.

“That’s going to be a tall order,” Emory said, tapping another piece of illegible scrawl. “This is a teahouse I heard an officer talk about once. Said it took a month of their wages just to get a seat. And this one’s all the way in Sprill.”

“So we’ll save our money. We’ll make a trip to Sprill—we can visit Von and his baker.”

“It’ll take a lifetime.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

He turned to face her fully, his mouth slightly agape.

Kat felt it—that same opening she sometimes saw in battle, where she knew the moment had come to drive her spear home. Here in the half-dark of the balcony, surrounded by the nervous chatter of the other partygoers, they could easily be taken for a noble heiress and a brave soldier.

And even if they weren’t, even if Mira spotted them and finally realized why she’d needed to requisition a new cot all those months ago, they’d both be taking their release tomorrow.

So she moved, her lips coming home to his as she curled one arm around his neck and used her other hand to tilt his jaw up. He opened for her eagerly, letting out the softest of groans as he threaded his arm tight around her waist in kind.

When she pulled back, she saw that his other had stayed on the battlements, white-knuckled as he kept their list pinned to the stone. She grinned, and grinned worse when he mirroredit.

“You know,” Kat said. “I think I have an addition. But I don’t know what to write for it—I haven’t eaten all night and I saw platters of something that smelled heavenly going around before all the screaming started. Want to hunt them down?”

Emory was already tucking the folded paper safely back in his pocket.