Page 9

Three short blasts on Mira’s whistle had never been such a mercy.

The century scrambled to assemble, and in the thick of the commotion, Kat heaved herself up to her feet as Emory rolled out from underneath her.

She tried not to feel any sort of way about it, even as the realization escaped, like a knife slid from her gut, that her embarrassment wasn’t enough to overpower her reluctance to let him go.

There was a fumbling attempt to beat some of the dirt off, but it was beyond hopeless, and their weapons had disappeared somewhere beneath the crowd.

They shouldered through the soldiers who weren’t a part of their century fleeing the scene now that the entertainment was over—Kat fielding more than a few nods, grins, and knuckles knocked against her training armor—and slotted into their place alongside the rest of their decade.

Some days, being in the first decade was a point of pride. The ten of them were at the fore of the fighting formation, leading off every battle looking the Demon Lord’s forces square in the eye, setting the tone for the rest of the engagement with their valor.

Today was not one of those days. As Kat fell in with her fellow soldiers, she registered that their position put her squarely in Mira’s sights.

She was taller than every shieldbearer who stood in a line before her, and without the length of their spears to even things out, she stuck out between Sawyer and Ziva too.

Ziva leaned in close. “Dirt on your cheek. Actually both cheeks,” she corrected when Kat took a swipe. “Actually—”

Kat ducked her head down into the collar of her tunic, scrubbing. It wasn’t doing anything to help the furious redness. Hosts, Ziva had been right to warn her not to get too carried away. Now the whole legion would be talking about how out of hand that got.

“It’s been nice knowing you,” she told Ziva from the safety of her collar.

She considered going full turtle and staying in her shirt for the rest of the briefing, but the sweat she’d worked up in the fight had a point to argue against it.

Kat was forced to retreat, popping her head back up just in time to catch the moment the newcomer—the prince —floated up to join Mira on the platform in a display of Aurean power so casual it was difficult to believe it was a Flight of Angels token doing it and not the angels themselves.

In all her years on the campaign, Kat had never seen royalty in the flesh.

They’d remained comfortably abstract—an amorphous force she could resent for signing the orders that pulled her name in the draft and forfeited the next five years of her life, provided she survived them.

Judging by the age of this young man, he’d had very little say in the matter, but the sight of the crown on his head stuck like a thorn in her side, and she had the feeling she wasn’t alone in this crowd.

Mira snapped into a salute, still looking like someone had kicked her in the head, and Kat was briefly, incandescently thankful that this stranger had shown up and absorbed the entirety of the century’s attention all at once.

He looked… confused more than anything, then startled suddenly and made a flapping gesture that Mira seemed hesitant to take as a genuine dismissal.

After another floundering moment where neither of them made another move, the prince raised an open palm as if to say, After you.

Mira turned out to her soldiers. “Third Century,” she called.

The assembled thumped their chests as one.

The sight of it locked their centurion’s balance back in.

“I’ve called this briefing to address the circumstances surrounding the ending of the war and give an overview of what the next few days will look like.

That being said…” She glanced sidelong at her strange new guest. “I’m sorry, would you like to say something first? ”

The prince’s face lit up, like it never would have occurred to him to address the troops. Kat suppressed the urge to snort, succeeding where several of her compatriots failed. “I’D LOVE NOTHING MORE,” he replied—and the entirety of the assembled century ducked for cover.

Hosts, Kat had never heard a Voice of Angels token quite that cultivated before.

Her ears rang, and she shook her head like a horse, blinking first at Sawyer and then at Ziva to confirm they’d nearly been deafened just the same.

A confused murmur rose from the crowd as a hundred soldiers tested their ears against their voices, punctuated by the sounds of snapping fingers and no shortage of vehement swears.

“Sorry,” the prince whispered, slightly less overwhelming this time.

“So sorry. That token doesn’t get a lot of play compared to the rest of my array, and I’m not used to attuning one at a time.

Still fine-tuning the particulars. Is this okay?

” He turned to Mira, who gave him a vexed, bug-eyed look, followed by a shrug as if to say, It’s really your call.

Kat was starting to worry the concussion was setting in, because now that she thought about it, this wasn’t the first time they’d been blasted with his overly amplified voice.

This, then, was the shooting star who’d shouted “You’re welcome!” over the battlefield yesterday.

Which meant that this was the man who’d felled the Demon Lord.

“Okay, great. Hi. Hello. Uh, greetings.” The prince straightened, folding his arms behind his back and lifting his chin high.

The effect was somewhat lost in the way it jutted out the collar of his ostentatious breastplate, nearly swallowing the bottom half of his face.

“My name is Adrien Augustine.” He flinched as the metal of his armor threw his too-loud words right back at him, and he immediately abandoned his attempt at posturing.

Ziva leaned in close to Kat. “Is it treason if I say I can’t watch this?” she deadpanned.

“I think it’s only treason if you laugh,” Kat hissed back. It was going to be a battle. In front of her, Emory’s shoulders were beginning to tremble.

“Now I know what you’re thinking,” the prince said, his arms now rigid at his sides. “ I thought the Augustine line had no heirs! Well, you thought that for a very good reason.”

He glanced around as if he genuinely expected someone to ask, What reason?

“And the reason w-was…” he stammered after another agonizing beat of silence. “…that it was a secret!”

At Kat’s side, Sawyer feigned smothering a cough. Tears glinted in the corner of his eye.

“Yes,” the prince blundered onward, clenching a fist in front of him.

“To defeat the Demon Lord, sacrifices had to be made—for only an heir of the Augustine line could successfully unite enough angelic power to smite the High King of Hell. I was born in seclusion and secreted out of the capital to be raised by the finest Aurean tutors the front lines could spare.”

Kat could feel the crowd’s pivot, the suppressed laughter suddenly throttled by the implication of the prince’s words.

They needed every Aurean they could get on the lines.

Every century fought like hell to protect their centurion, and every officer bore the tremendous weight of the responsibility for their soldiers’ safety in turn.

None of them—and especially none of the draftees—had thought that any Aureans could be spared.

The prince didn’t seem to register the crowd’s suspicion at all.

“Under their guidance, I took up my first token at the age of five. By the age of ten, I had twenty under my command. There was a bit of a hiccup in my development, and I stalled out at thirty for a few years, but finally, at nineteen, I stand before you with a hundred fully cultivated tokens.”

Again, he paused, looking expectant.

“You can clap—don’t be shy.”

A smattering of applause rose from the ranks, strengthening once enough people had decided it might be a direct order they were disobeying.

Kat gave him three generously spaced claps.

Sure, this surprise royal had temporarily saved her ass from what would likely be the mother of all dressing-downs from Mira, but his clueless yammering seemed like a portent of far worse problems.

“So what, he’s raised from birth, plied with every token he could carry from the royal arsenal, and turned loose once he’d cultivated them all?” Ziva asked under her breath. “And it couldn’t have come any sooner?”

“Least it worked,” Elise threw back over her shoulder, drawing a scowl from her battle partner. “Least we get to finish our contracts in peacetime.”

“That’s an awfully large parade for peacetime,” Sawyer said, glancing sidelong at the edge of the ranks.

The prince had arrived with an army of his own.

While the century had been distracted by Kat and Emory’s scrap, an entire royal entourage had crept up on the camp.

Only a fraction of it was visible from the assembly field—carriages on carriages on carriages, some of them already broken open to unleash their cargo.

Footmen scurried back and forth, clearing space where the stakes of a tent to rival the scale of the legion’s command headquarters were sketched out.

The prince hadn’t just stopped by to introduce himself. He was putting down roots.

“Thank you, thank you,” the invasive species demurred, waving his hands in mock flattery.

“Yes, it’s true—I united a historic degree of Aurean power, all in the name of ending this war.

As you all must have seen yesterday, it worked.

The Demon Lord is no more. I stopped his hand as he tipped the crucible, and so the threat of antigold has been wiped from existence.

The Mouth of Hell is sealed. Telrus is free to thrive and prosper for the first time in twenty years. ”

He paused as if fishing for more applause, but all their years at war had made the ranks canny. They knew when an ask was coming.