Chapter 73 - 72

Chapter 73: Chapter 72

Master Bram had four iron kettles of pine-tar pitch boiling on the coal brazier at the back of the staging tunnel, and the smoke made everybody’s eyes water before we even got our vests strapped on.

"Hold your shield arm up," Bram told Nia, slapping a thick leather pad soaked in warm tallow over her left shoulder and pulling the buckle tight with a pair of iron pliers until the leather creaked. "If you drop your elbow against Falk’s heavy man, he’ll put your collarbone through your lung, blunt steel or not. Keep the buckler six inches off your chest so your wrist has room to bend."

"If you pull that strap any tighter, Master Bram, I won’t need lungs," Nia wheezed, trying to roll her left shoulder inside the stiff boiled hide.

It was eight o’clock on Thursday morning, and the stone seats of Pit One outside the tunnel grate were packed all the way to the top rim. Unlike the monthly purge bouts, where half the school only showed up to watch the live-steel challenges, the Winter Trials quarterfinals drew everybody—including forty wagons’ worth of town merchants and minor lords who had bought gallery passes from the bursar’s office to see which squads would make the Sospurro roster.

Down at the end of our bench, Kaelen was wrapping a strip of dry linen tape around the handle of a blunted steel shortsword. Because Pit One was sixty feet of bare yellow clay with zero cover, throwing weights weren’t going to do him much good once the front lines locked together.

Luckas stood by the tunnel grate, peering out across the sand toward the eastern arch where our opponents were warming up.

"Falk took his sling off," Luckas noted, turning back to us and tapping his own left shoulder. "He’s swinging a broadsword with his right hand and carrying three iron-shod ash stakes in his belt frogs."

"Warding pins," I said, sitting on an upturned ammunition crate while I laced my tall calfskin boots up to the knee. "When I went up to the Apex Hall last month, he was copying geometric field arrays out of the fourth-year engineering folios. If he drives three brass-inlaid stakes into the clay and links them with his Ember, anyone standing inside the triangle moves like they’re wading through waist-deep tar."

"Can you cut the stakes?" Nia asked, flexing her fingers inside her padded mittens.

"Not if they’re banded with cold iron," Luckas answered for me. "You try chopping an iron-banded stake with a rebated tournament blade, you just numb your own hands and leave your ribs open. You have to kick them out of the dirt or knock down the guy feeding heat into the array."

"Who has he got with him?" I asked, standing up and stamping my heels twice on the flagstones to settle my feet.

"Toma on the heavy shield—Rank Twenty-Nine," Kaelen said without looking up from his sword grip. "Brenn on the long billhook, Rank Thirty-One. And Sylvia Vane-Croft on the short spear, Rank Thirty-Eight. No archers, no scouts. Four fourth-years who weigh seven hundred pounds between them."

I picked up my tournament bastard sword from the rack. It wasn’t my runic blade—live steel wasn’t allowed in four-on-four brackets until the final match on Saturday, because eight people swinging sharp edges in a crowd usually ended with somebody losing a foot before the wardens could blow the whistle. This one was four pounds of unsharpened grey spring-steel with a rounded tip as thick as my thumb and a smear of bright red grease-chalk down both edges. Without the sky-runes carved into the fuller, it felt dead and clumsy in my hands, like swinging an iron crowbar.

"Listen up," I said, gathering the three of them by the nail keg before the horn blew. "Falk knows how we beat Oakes and Redgrave. He knows Kaelen likes to hit the back corner, and he knows Luckas and I carry the heavy weight. On flat sand, he isn’t going to split his people up. Toma and Brenn will lock the middle while Falk uses those warding stakes to cut the ring in half."

"If he cuts the ring in half, he’s going to box you out first, Elvit," Luckas said quietly. "You’re Rank Three. Even without your sharp sword, he won’t let you near his flank."

"I know," I said. "Which means the second I step forward, Falk is going to drop that tar-ward right on my boots to hold me in place while Toma and Brenn try to run over Nia and you in thirty seconds."

Nia swallowed once, adjusting the grip on her five-foot boar-spear. "So don’t step forward."

"If I hang back at the gate, they just march across the circle behind Toma’s big shield and pin all four of us against the wall where we have no room to pivot," I said. "I have to make him spend his stakes early, out in the middle of the sand. When the flag drops, I’m going straight at Falk’s chest. Let him box me. Once his three stakes are in the dirt, he has to keep his left hand open to feed the line, which means he can’t move more than ten feet from the triangle. That turns their four-on-four into a three-on-three for sixty seconds."

Luckas looked at Kaelen and Nia, then back at me. "Sixty seconds for the three of us to break a fourth-year shield wall."

"You only have to pull one of his stakes out of the clay," I said. "Pull one stake, the triangle breaks, and I’m right behind Toma’s back. Can you get to the rear pin in a minute?"

"Forty seconds," Kaelen said, sliding his blunt shortsword into his belt scabbard and picking up a second one in his left hand. "Just don’t get three red stripes across your chest while you’re standing in the mud."

Outside, the arena warden’s bronze gong rang out across the frost-bit morning air.

"Quarterfinal Bout Two!" the warden’s voice boomed through the brass horn. "Fourth-Year Squad Four—Falk, Toma, Brenn, and Vane-Croft! Versus First-Year Squad Seven—Elvit, Vance, Kaelen, and Valerius! Rebated steel! Three torso marks or a four-point pin eliminates a cadet! First squad to lose two members forfeits the field! Enter the sand!"

We walked out of the western tunnel side by side into the bright, cold glare of the December sun.

Up in the stone tiers, the noise was loud enough to feel in my teeth. The first-year sections along the south wall were banging their boot heels rhythmically against the wooden floorboards and waving grey scarves—not because they all loved us, though after we dumped Redgrave in the quarry ditch last night, even the merchant kids who used to cross the street to avoid me had put copper marks into the dormitory betting pools on our squad.

Up in the guest box on the north side, Duke Ramiro was actually awake this morning, wrapped in two wolfskin pelts with a steaming porcelain cup in his hand, while Captain Varga and Lord Lorenzo stood on opposite sides of the steps behind him, staring down at the clay circle.

Across the sand, Julian Falk gave me a cheerful wave with the flat of his blunt broadsword.

His left shoulder wasn’t in a linen sling anymore, though he wore a heavy hinged brace of boiled black leather strapped tight around his upper arm and across his chest to keep the joint from popping out. To his right stood Toma—a square-jawed giant with a wooden tower shield four feet high and three feet wide—and Brenn, whose six-foot steel billhook had a blunt iron crescent welded over the spike so it could hook a leg or a neck without tearing an artery open.

"Morning, Lieutenant!" Julian called out across the thirty feet of yellow sand as we lined up on our chalk mark. "Hope you didn’t eat too many lamb pies before breakfast! Toma likes to push hard!"

"How’s the arm, Falk?" I called back, resting the blunt grey bastard sword against my shoulder.

"Stiff when it rains!" Julian grinned, dropping his stance low as the warden walked to the edge of the pit and raised the red flag. "Try not to pull on it!"

"Fight!" the warden roared, whipping the flag down.

I didn’t wait half a heartbeat.

Before Toma could even lift his four-foot tower shield off the sand to lock edges with Brenn, I pushed a heavy, straight burst of heat from my chest down into my calves and sprinted dead down the center line of the pit, kicking up plumes of yellow clay dust behind my heels.

"Toma, brace right!" Julian shouted, his grin vanishing instantly into sharp focus. "She’s coming down the pipe!"

Toma slammed the flat bottom rim of his massive tower shield into the sand right in front of Julian, leaning all two hundred and四十 pounds of his bulk against the oak boards like a barn door bolted from the inside, while Brenn swung the long iron hook of his billhook from behind Toma’s shoulder to catch my ankles if I tried to slide past.

I didn’t try to run around Toma. That was what Julian wanted—if I veered left or right, I’d run straight into the path of Luckas and Nia coming up four paces behind me.

Three strides out from Toma’s shield, I planted my left heel, reversed my grip on the blunt bastard sword so my left hand held the middle of the grey steel blade and my right hand held the hilt, and jumped two feet off the clay, driving the heavy crossguard and my booted knees straight into the upper half of Toma’s oak tower shield like a falling log.

The impact sounded like a wagon hitting a stone wall.

Even a Swelled Bud fourth-year weighing seventeen stone couldn’t keep his heels planted when two hundred pounds of vanguard muscle hit the top lever of his shield four feet off the ground. Toma grunted loudly as the top rim of his own shield slammed back against his padded helmet, his boots skidding two feet backward through the yellow clay.

As Toma stumbled back, knocking into Brenn’s billhook shaft and spoiling the sweep at my legs, Julian didn’t step back to swing his broadsword at me.

While I was dropping back down to the sand in front of Toma’s dented shield, Julian reached to his belt with his braced left hand, pulled all three eighteen-inch ash stakes out of their loops at once, and threw them downward with a sharp flick of his wrist and a pulse of pale yellow Ember.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The three iron-tipped stakes buried themselves six inches deep into the packed clay in an ten-foot triangle—one behind my left heel, one to my right, and the third right behind Toma’s back boots.

The brass rings inlaid around the wood of the stakes flared with a dull, heavy ochre light. Instantly, three flat lines of yellow shimmer snapped together across the dirt from stake to stake, enclosing me and Toma inside the triangle together.

The air inside the lines didn’t burn, and it didn’t freeze. It just turned into warm lead.

The moment the yellow light touched my boots, my knees felt like someone had hung four eighty-pound sacks of wet barley across my shoulders. When I tried to lift my bastard sword to chop down at the stake by my left ankle, the steel blade moved through the air at half speed, the air resistance dragging against the flat of the metal like thick river mud.

"Hold her in the box, Toma!" Julian barked, backing out of the triangle just before the third line snapped shut, keeping his left palm flat and aimed at the rear stake to feed the array with his own Ember. "Brenn, Sylvia—left wheel! Crush Vance before he sets his feet!"

Toma recovered his balance inside the yellow triangle with me. Because Julian had keyed the array to his own squad’s badges during their morning warm-up, the heavy drag didn’t slow Toma down nearly as much as it slowed me; he only lost about a quarter of his speed, whereas my boots felt like they were nailed to the floor.

Toma didn’t even try to swing his heavy wooden mace to chalk my chest—he knew that even at half speed, if he opened his shield to swing, I’d grab his wrist and break it. Instead, he just tucked his chin down behind his four-foot oak door and leaned his whole body weight against me to keep me pinned inside the ten-foot triangle while his three teammates went after my squad.

Outside the yellow shimmer, ten yards to my left, the sand pit exploded into noise and flying dirt.

Brenn and Sylvia didn’t go after Nia first—Julian was too smart to fall for the decoy trick twice in one week. Instead, all three of them—Julian with his one-handed broadsword, Brenn with the long billhook, and Sylvia with her fast short-spear—converged in a tight crescent straight at Luckas, aiming to chalk our second heavy hitter out of the match before I could break out of the tar-ward.

"Tighten up!" Luckas shouted, not giving an inch of ground as the three fourth-years hit him at a full run.

He didn’t hold back his fire this time. There were no archers on the ledges here. A roaring wave of bright orange heat rolled off his shoulders, turning the rebated steel of his longsword into a blurring ribbon of red-hot metal as he parried Brenn’s heavy billhook overhead and kicked Sylvia’s spear point aside with the heel of his boot.

"Watch the hook, Vance!" Nia yelled from three feet off his left hip.

As Luckas locked blades with Julian on the right, Brenn yanked his six-foot billhook back and whipped the blunt iron crescent low through the dust to hook Luckas’s back knee from the blind angle.

Nia didn’t try to poke Brenn; she wouldn’t have reached him in time. She stepped squarely across Luckas’s back heel, dropped onto one knee in the sand, and slammed the iron boss of her twelve-inch buckler straight down onto the flat of Brenn’s iron hook four inches before it touched Luckas’s calf, pinning the heavy polearm into the dirt for half a second while stabbing upward with her short boar-spear at Brenn’s ribs.

Brenn had to let go of his front grip and jump back a step to keep the red chalk off his vest, though Sylvia immediately darted around his shoulder and lunged hard at Nia’s kneeling shoulder with her short-spear.

Before the point could touch Nia’s leather pad, Kaelen blurred across the gap behind Luckas’s back, crossing both of his blunt shortswords like a pair of iron shears to catch Sylvia’s spear shaft, twisting his wrists to send the point digging harmlessly into the sand while driving his boot into her shin guard to push her back.

Inside the yellow triangle, Toma slammed his oak shield against my chest again, shoving me back half a step toward the left stake while sweat poured down his red face under his helmet rim.

"Stay still, First-Year!" Toma grunted through his teeth, his knees trembling with the effort of pushing against my legs even with the ward helping him. "You got nowhere to go!"

I didn’t waste my breath answering him, and I didn’t waste my core trying to push my arms faster against the magic.

WhileProfessor Maren had made me break seven glass leaves in the Crucible last month, she had drilled one very simple rule into my head during evening detention: Every external array has a knot where the caster’s breath enters the stone. If you push against the walls of the box, you feed the box. If you heat the knot, the thread snaps.

I stopped pushing back against Toma’s shield.

Instead, I let my knees bend and dropped straight down onto my back in the yellow clay right at Toma’s feet.

Because Toma was leaning all two hundred and forty pounds of his weight forward against my shoulders, the instant I vanished out from under his shield rim, he pitched forward over my chest like a felled oak tree, his heavy boots leaving the dirt as he stumbled headfirst toward the front corner of the triangle.

As his heavy leather boots passed over my stomach, I didn’t kick him.

I rolled onto my left side through the thick, syrupy drag of the ward, reached out with my bare left hand, and grabbed the brass collar of the wooden stake driven into the clay two feet behind Toma’s original heel-mark—the rear stake closest to Julian.

The brass ring on the wood was humming like an angry hornet, hot and greasy with Julian’s ochre Ember.

Out in the open ring, Julian felt my hand touch his anchor pin. He broke off his slash at Luckas’s shoulder, spinning half around while pumping a fresh surge of yellow light down his braced left arm to reinforce the stake before I could pull it up.

"Brenn, the rear pin!" Julian barked. "Keep her hand off the brass!"

"I’m not pulling it, Falk!" I grunted from the dirt.

I didn’t try to yank the iron point out of the packed clay with my slowed muscles. I kept my palm flat against the brass inlay on the stake, pictured the three locked doors in my left arm—shoulder, elbow, wrist—and instead of dumping a wide blast of heat that the ward would swallow, I drove a single, white-hot needle of concentrated thermal energy straight into the thin lead solder holding the brass rune-ring around the ash wood.

Pop.

The lead solder melted instantly into tiny silver beads. The brass ring split open down its seam with a sharp metallic ping, curling back from the scorched wood like a peeled apple skin.

The yellow triangle didn’t fade away slowly; it popped like a soap bubble, releasing a gust of warm, dusty air that blew the loose sand outward across the circle.

Suddenly, my arms didn’t weigh four hundred pounds anymore.

Brenn was halfway through his turn to run back and kick my hand off the stake when I came off the clay floor.

With the heavy drag gone from my legs, the sudden release of resistance felt like somebody had cut the ropes on a catapult. I covered the twelve feet between the broken stake and Brenn’s back in two heartbeats, arriving half a second before he even got his billhook shaft turned around to face me.

I didn’t swing at his weapon. I caught the middle of his six-foot wooden shaft in my right gauntlet as he turned, shoved it straight up toward the sky so his arms went over his head, and dragged the flat red-chalked edge of my bastard sword horizontally across his unguarded stomach from hip to hip.

"Brenn is dead!" the south wall judge shouted, waving his red flag. "Step out of the ring, Cadet!"

Now it was four on three—in our favor.

Toma was still scrambling up off his knees ten feet behind me where he had tripped over my drop, his big tower shield tangled sideways against his knee guard, while Sylvia found herself trapped between Kaelen’s twin shortswords on her left and Nia’s iron buckler and short-spear on her right.

Julian saw his line collapsing. With his left arm still stiff inside its leather medical brace, he couldn’t fight Luckas and me at the same time once Brenn was out. He made the only smart call left on the board: he tried to take Nia out with a suicide rush to force a sudden-death tie before I could turn around.

Julian faked a high slash at Luckas’s head, took a glancing red-chalk graze across his own left thigh from Luckas’s counter-cut without slowing down, and lunged past Luckas’s hip with his heavy broadsword aimed straight at the center of Nia’s padded vest.

"Nia, back!" Luckas roared, spinning on his heel to chase him.

Nia couldn’t back up without stepping out of the chalk boundary line behind her, which counted as a ring-out elimination.

She planted both boots wide in the yellow clay, tucked her chin into her collar, and met the Rank Seven fourth-year head-on.

When Julian’s heavy steel broadsword came whistling down at her chestplate, Nia didn’t try to block the flat of his blade with her spear shaft—Julian was twice her strength and would have sheared right through her guard. Instead, she angled the round iron boss of her twelve-inch buckler inward, caught his descending edge four inches below his crossguard so the steel skated sideways off the curved iron dome into the space between her left hip and her ribs, and clamped her left elbow down hard against her own side, trapping his sword blade flat between the back of her iron buckler and her leather-padded ribs.

The impact knocked Nia flat onto her back in the dirt with the wind blown clean out of her lungs—though the sharp red chalk edge of Julian’s sword never touched the front of her torso; only the clean, unchalked flat of the steel was pinned under her arm.

And because she held onto her buckler with both hands as she fell, twisting her shoulders into the sand, she yanked Julian’s sword arm down with her, pulling the tall fourth-year completely off balance over her knees.

Before Julian could wrench his trapped broadsword free from under Nia’s elbow to mark her chest, Luckas’s blunt steel blade came down with a solid thwack across the back of Julian’s padded shoulders, and Kaelen slid in on one knee from the left to press his chalked shortsword firmly against the side of Julian’s throat.

For half a second, nobody moved except Toma ten feet away, who stopped halfway through standing up when he saw his captain pinned over Nia’s knees with two blades on his neck.

The arena warden blew three long blasts on his silver whistle and threw both flags into the air.

"Halt! Two eliminations—Brenn and Falk!" the warden bellowed over the sudden, deafening roar from the stone benches. "Match concluded! Time: two minutes, fifty-four seconds! First-Year Squad Seven advances to the Semifinals!"

Up in the first-year bleachers, twenty cadets threw their grey wool caps straight into the air while the upperclassmen sections erupted into a loud, chaotic argument as dozens of silver marks changed hands along the aisles.

Down in the sand, Nia slowly unclamped her left elbow, letting Julian pull his broadsword free, though she didn’t get up right away. She just lay flat on her back in the yellow clay with her eyes closed, sucking in long, wheezing breaths of cold winter air through her teeth.

Julian rubbed his right wrist where the wrench had twisted his tendons, looked down at the red chalk stripes across his shoulders and thigh, and let out a short, rueful laugh. He reached down with his good right hand and offered it to Nia.

"That was a dirty trick with the elbow clamp, Valerius," Julian said warmly, hauling her up onto her feet and dusting a clump of clay off her shoulder pad. "Who taught you that? Master Bram?"

"My older brother," Nia rasped, holding her left ribs with one hand while she caught her breath, a crooked, triumphant grin breaking across her dusty face. "He used to do it to me in the barn whenever I tried to hit him with a broomstick. Only works once."

"Once was plenty," Julian said. He turned and looked at me as I walked over and picked up the peeled brass ring off his broken warding stake, dropping it into his palm. "You melted the solder on the collar instead of fighting the earth-line."

"Professor Maren said I needed to work on my small heat," I told him, wiping the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve. "Good box, Falk. If Toma hadn’t tripped over me, it would’ve held another minute."

"Next month in the Apex Hall, I’m hiding the engineering folios before you come upstairs," Julian grinned, clapping Luckas on the shoulder as he and his squadmates gathered their stakes and walked off toward the eastern gate to a polite round of applause from the fourth-year benches.

We didn’t get five steps inside the western staging tunnel before we ran into our welcoming committee.

Master Bram wasn’t alone by the coal brazier anymore. Standing ten feet back from the pitch kettles, where the smoke wouldn’t get on their sky-blue wool coats, were Lord Lorenzo of Sospurro and two of his gold-corded cavalry captains.

And standing just inside the archway on the opposite wall, with his arms crossed over his chest and his thin dark mustache twitching in the draft, was Captain Varga, who had clearly walked down the private stairs from the Duke’s box the second Brenn got chalked out.

Neither of the Sospurro factions looked at each other. Both of them looked straight at us as we walked in from the sand.

"A remarkable display of close-quarters discipline, Lieutenant Elvit," Lord Lorenzo said, stepping forward with a smooth, practiced court bow that included Luckas—whose family name he certainly knew—while barely glancing at Nia and Kaelen. Lorenzo was in his late thirties, with neatly trimmed dark curls, a silver signet ring on his pinky finger, and cold, intelligent grey eyes that didn’t match his polite smile at all. "My cousin, Count Matteo of the Southern Hills, was most impressed by your bridge crossing on Monday. Now that your unit is guaranteed a spot in the top four—and therefore a spring frontier commission—I wanted to extend his personal invitation before the brackets conclude on Saturday."

I stopped by the weapon rack, setting my blunt grey tournament sword back into its wooden slot, and looked at him without bowing. "An invitation to what, my lord?"

"To attach your squad directly to the Royal Escort at Castle Sospurro in April," Lorenzo said smoothly. "The capital garrison is thirty miles south of the river marshes. Clean stone barracks, triple crown pay in silver bullion from the southern mines, and no mud trenches. A talent like yours—and a scion of House Vance—should not be wasted sitting in a wet timber blockhouse watching peasant conscripts dig ditches."

Across the narrow stone tunnel, Captain Varga let out a harsh, ugly bark of laughter.

"Thirty miles south of the river, hiding behind your cousin’s silver wagons while the northern line takes the Viganator siege guns in the face!" Varga spat, stepping off the wall toward us. "Pay no attention to this court peacock, Cadet! Duke Ramiro commands the River Vanguard at Fort Oakhaven. That is where the real fighting will be when the ice breaks in March, and that is where the Imperial War Ministry is sending the first-tier Academy squads!"

Lorenzo turned his head slowly toward Varga, his polite smile thinning into a razor edge. "Your uncle’s fort at Oakhaven has four hundred men on the payroll and less than two hundred rifles in the racks, Captain Varga. Everyone in the War Ministry knows Duke Ramiro sold half his winter powder reserves to pay off his gambling debts in the capital last autumn. If you send Academy cadets to Oakhaven in March, they won’t even have dry cartridges for their carbines."

Varga’s hand shot down to the silver hilt of his curved saber, his face turning purple. "You treasonous little—"

"Enough," a quiet, gravelly voice said from the shadows behind the coal brazier.

Neither of the Sospurro nobles had noticed Master Bram picking up a four-pound iron sledgehammer from his anvil bench until the old quartermaster tapped the flat head of the hammer once—very loudly—against the side of the iron pitch kettle.

The ring echoed down the stone tunnel like a church bell.

"This is an Imperial armory tunnel, not a tavern in the wine provinces," Master Bram said, squinting at the two foreign officers through his thick spectacles. "If you draw three inches of silver steel down here while my cadets are unstrapping their pads, I’ll break both your kneecaps with a fuller rod and tell the Headmaster you tripped on the stairs. Take your politics back up to the velvet seats."

Lord Lorenzo took a slow breath, smoothed the front of his sky-blue coat with two gloved fingers, and offered me a tight, formal nod. "We will speak again after Saturday’s final, Lieutenant. Think carefully about where you want your squad standing when the river floods."

He turned and walked briskly up the side stairs toward the gallery, with his two captains trailing behind him. Varga glared at Bram’s hammer for two seconds, spat into the sawdust beside the brazier, and stalked out the opposite door toward the stable yard.

Once their boots faded up the stone steps, the tunnel went quiet except for the bubbling of the pine tar on the coals.

Luckas sat down heavily on the wooden bench, unbuckling his padded chest vest and letting it drop between his boots. "Well. Four hundred men on the payroll, two hundred actual soldiers, and the Duke sold the gunpowder to pay off his card games. No wonder Orlov looked so cheerful on Monday."

Nia sat down beside him, holding a cold wet sponge from the water bucket against the bruised ribs under her left arm where Julian’s sword had pinned her. "If we win the semifinals tomorrow, do we actually get to pick which of those two idiots we work for in the spring?"

"Neither, if I can help it," I said, sitting down on the nail keg to unlace my muddy boots while Kaelen handed me a tin dipper of cold water from the barrel. "If the northern forts have no powder and the southern lords are hiding thirty miles behind the lines, anyone attached to a Sospurro commander is going to get left behind the first time a Viganator steam tractor crosses the bridge."

I drank half the dipper of water, poured the rest over the back of my hot neck, and looked at the three of them.

"Tomorrow morning we beat the semifinal squad, and Saturday we take first place in the brackets," I said, setting the tin dipper down on the keg. "According to the War Ministry pamphlet Luckas gave me, the number-one squad in the Winter Trials doesn’t get attached to a foreign officer. They operate under an independent Imperial scouting warrant—answering only to the 7th Legion’s western command."

Luckas looked up from his bootlaces, a slow, genuine grin spreading across his sweaty face. "Commander Erula."

"Commander Erula," I confirmed. "She might send us into a sinkhole, and the food will be terrible, though at least she won’t sell our gunpowder to buy plumed hats. Now get your pads off and go hit the cold tubs—we have twenty-four hours before we go back in the sand."