Page 8

She caught Emory’s eye, planted the heel of her spear, and flexed her grip. He grinned, tilting his sword outward as if inviting her in, and she knew he’d read her as easily as he did in the thick of battle.

Mira wanted a spectacle. They’d give her one.

At the sound of the whistle, Kat let go.

Her spear toppled out of her grasp as she charged forward, and Emory threw down his sword, lunging to meet her.

They collided, padded armor barely stopping them from knocking the wind out of each other.

Kat grappled at him, fists latching in whatever cloth or skin she could find, desperately, desperately trying to ignore the memories conjured at the feeling of his body under her hands.

It was crude, undignified, hardly befitting of a proud Telrusian soldier.

And the proud Telrusian soldiers watching them fucking loved it.

The noise tripled in volume, and with no weapons to duck, they surged to the edges of the circle, hooting and hollering, yelling taunts, kicking dirt, joyous and completely ungovernable.

If Mira had any objections—and surely she had several—she’d have to get them heard over two hundred rowdy voices.

Kat and Emory swayed, stumbled, and toppled over as one, hitting the dirt hard enough that they took a mutual pause just to recover the breath it punched out of them.

Emory tried to snake an arm around her torso and get her into a submission hold, but Kat wrenched it back, turning in his grip so she could sling one leg over his hips and lock him in place.

He had the audacity to laugh at the attempt, and she couldn’t help mirroring it.

They’d gone from soldiers squaring off with honor to kids scrapping in the dirt, and in the moment, Kat was so blisteringly happy that she barely cared.

She couldn’t win Emory his dignity, but she could lose hers alongside him.

They’d become a single panting, heaving creature, entangled by strength so evenly matched it would take the rest of their decade to pry them apart.

But Kat had learned a trick or two in the wreckage of Mira’s cot two nights prior, and she deployed them without mercy, landing a downright dirty pinch that elicited a noise they were lucky only she was close enough to hear.

In the space it created, she made her move, wrenching Emory’s arms up over his head as she spun him onto his back and slammed her full weight down on his stomach.

For a frozen, delirious moment, there was no difference—they might as well have been back in that tent, doing everything they could to put thoughts of death at bay, nothing between them but heavy breathing, heat, and the feeling that they probably shouldn’t be grinning this much.

But the noise had fallen away, strangely.

The shouts and heckling that crested when Kat pinned Emory had trickled off into a confused wave of mumbling, and the whistle—which surely should have cut through even the peak of the noise—hadn’t been blown.

Kat tore her gaze away from Emory’s flushed face, turning her head to sight Mira on the platform.

“On his back, right?” she called.

But Mira wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were pinned somewhere above Kat. In all their years on the campaign, no matter how daunting the demons she squared off against were, Kat had never seen her centurion look so rattled.

Kat turned.

There was a hole where a pack of rowdy soldiers should be, as if the ranks had melted back from the edge of the circle, and in the center of it stood a lone figure, backlit by the late-afternoon sun and nigh indistinguishable from it.

He hurt to look at, as if the light bled right through him, and it took a few seconds of squinting to see past the brilliance.

Beneath it was a young man— young, truly, with the same gangly coltishness Kat was used to seeing on the teenage draftees—floppy-haired, pale-skinned, and sharp-featured, his eyes wide as he stared right back at her.

He was kitted in ceremonial armor that put all Mira’s shine to shame, though it looked slightly ridiculous against his less-than-bulky physique. And around his neck—

There were a few notorious centurions scattered throughout the legions.

Every officer had at least one Aurean token to their name, one piece of gold that would help them frontline against the worst demons that tried to hit the troops under their protection, but some, through the blessings of their lineage and the devoted cultivation that had honed their gifts to a peak, carried dozens.

When unleashed, they could churn through a battlefield like a rolling boulder, decimating everything in their path, turning tides as if through their power alone, they could reshape the world.

Compared to them, this man blazed like a young star. The tokens layered over his ostentatious chestplate were set in ranks, and though Kat had never been quick at addition, three years of marching in a century had locked in the ability to recognize when something numbered ten across and ten down.

A hundred-token Aurean in the flesh. No wonder he hurt to lookat.

But there was one more bit of shine that caught Kat’s eye—not on his chest, but on his head, and just as golden. A circlet that could only mean one thing.

This youth staring down at the two of them—at Emory, pinned in the dirt with his hands over his head and looking far too pleased with himself, at Kat straddling him, her hair askew and her token spilling out over her armor—was royalty.