Aurie was surprised that Enya didn’t have them run their normal route Samma’s first morning. Instead of going across the ferry after their push-ups, reciting the Loss of Mines, she brought them to the lapping shore of the lake beside the drawbridge, where their bare feet sank into the sandy mud. She regarded the two of them for a moment, eyeing Samma’s yawns and Aurie’s expectant cock of her brow. And that wasn’t the only change Aurie noticed. Enya had three steel spears—the very same as the one she had seen among Draka’s arsenal—laid on the grassy edge of the shore, waiting.

  All of them were in their training uniforms, except Samma didn’t have the wool underclothes they had to cover their womanly parts. Instead, his shivering bones were rattling enough that Aurie could hear them. She found herself wondering if they were more a privilege than a courtesy as she watched him squeeze his arms against his sides to combat the cold.

  “Right,” Enya said finally. Aurie was now awed by how she could braid and tie all that hair into a shoulder length wrap that didn’t fly apart or even look messy. “Aurie, you’re the highest ranking, so you’ll always have him on the right. Put your right arm up. Samma, move over.” He sidestepped until the tips of Aurie’s outstretched fingers barely touched his shoulder. “Perfect. Now look to make sure your straight on. Every time you form up, that’s how you’ll stand. When we get another recruit, you’ll do the same for them. Once we have the rest of the cohorts here, we’ll be a bit more formal about things, but for now, this will do.”

  “Why is it so early?” Samma rubbed at his eyes with another yawn.

  “Ssh,” Aurie warned him. “Pay attention.”

  “I hope you’ve been working those arms on your days off, Aurie,” Enya winked at her as she went to the spears and grabbed one in each hand.

  Aurie squinted at the thought of what was about to happen as Enya brought the spears to them. She took the first with one hand. Enya chuckled as she let go. Aurie nearly dropped it as the weight tugged her to almost doubled over.

  “For plowing sakes, Enya!” Aurie lifted it with both hands and straightened, though it was like trying to balance a ten-year-old. “You could’ve warned me.”

  Enya shrugged as she handed the other to Samma, who also was surprised by the weight, but held it with a bit more grace because of his farming and fisherman’s strength. Man’s strength. Enya adjusted his grip so that the spear was held at an angle from left thigh to right shoulder, the holed cylinder and point skyward, with a firm, “Like that.”

  Aurie copied the hold as Enya grabbed her own and returned to in front of them. It was that moment, as Enya called for them to begin trotting forward, with their feet sinking deep into the sandy silt, that Aurie realized what she was carrying.

  Enya called out, “Double quick step,” and Aurie knew it for sure, deep in her heart, within the grips of her sweating cold hands, held by muscles she had spent months strengthening for this very moment.

  This was her first weapon. This was her spear. And she felt the weight lighten as their trot became a run. Lighter still when it became a sprint. Instead of wincing, instead of dread for the soreness she would be feeling for the rest of the day, she was smiling with pride, with excitement. This was what she had been working towards.

  Samma didn’t feel what she felt, not the same way, and she knew that. But she understood that he had worked for what allowed him to carry that spear in a different way. He had been working those muscles his entire life, laboring in fields and on fishing boats, day in and day out. Had she been a young girl, she’d be envious of him holding that spear beside her, but instead, she understood that she had reached a point that placed her beside him as an equal in a place where he is meant to be with others like him. With other men.

  No, not in God’s eyes, Aurie was learning. Enya was proof of that. God called all of humanity, men and women, to fight. As her feet carried her, becoming heavy by the chunks of mud that clung to her feet and gathered over top of them, as her arms carried that spear, she didn’t feel separated as she once did. Womanly roles, wifely duties, those were not solely all she had any longer. Now, she carried a spear beside a man. She kept better pace than him, held it as well as him, felt as strong as him.

  Like her father before her, her feet carried her.

  Like her grandfather before him, her eyes were fixed on the commander in front of her.

  She was a soldier now. Not for Utrecht. Not for a Lord Taggerty. Not to fight over something that no one would remember or care about once it was done. She was a soldier for God. She finally felt like what everyone has been calling her for months: A Paladin.

  They passed where the river fed into the lake through foaming rapids and continued toward the westward canal. When the shore narrowed into the water, Enya led them to run splashing through it, but Aurie found herself enjoying that, too. It was no longer working toward being a Paladin. It was part of the fun of being one. She even made herself leaping with her running steps to make her splashes bigger, laughing into cackles when both Samma and Enya jolted from the icy water climbing their backs and sides. And then they stopped.

  Aurie wasn’t sure where to put the spear while doing their normal Loss of Mines exercises.

  She crinkled her brow at it. She didn’t want to put it down. She refused to let go of it. It was hers now. She was catching her breath, staring at it, when Enya leaned on hers like a staff with Samma following suit. He was wheezing. Poor boy had probably never run so hard in his life. But Aurie was barely out of breath. Her spear. Her weapon against demons. Against Lilith.

  “What is…he…doing?” Samma asked between gasps for air. He was rocking his shoulder against the spear.

  Aurie had to wrestle her attention away from the spear in her hands to see what they were looking at. At first, she thought they were looking ahead of them, but their heads were turned to the river they had been running beside. She followed to find Draka standing chin deep within the foaming rapids, his golden eyes focusing on the bucket tugging against the hard current, pulling him by his outstretched arm—that arm!

  Aurie dropped the spear and leapt into the river after him.

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  “Aurie!” Enya called after her, drowned out by the splash as icy water surrounded and swept Aurie sideways.

  Aurie reached, clawed. The water was carrying her. Numbing her skin with pins and needles. She swallowed, choked. Kicked. She was being swept in the current. It was too strong.

  Draka wasn’t strong enough for this if she wasn’t! What was he thinking? She was being carried away, twisting and sputtering through blurred shapes. He’ll only hurt himself.

  Arms wrapped her. Hands grabbed under her arms and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around something thick as she was lifted against a whirlwind of water. Air filled her throat, her lungs exploded water and filled again with air. Her eyes found golden ones glaring into them.

  “The hell, Aurie!” Enya shouted from the shore. “Are you out of your bloody mind?”

  Aurie had her hand around Draka’s neck. Her other hand was a fist clenching his shirt beneath the water. Their noses were touching. The shivers weren’t just because of the icy water as she felt his glare piercing her. She couldn’t look away. She didn’t want to look away. She didn’t want to pull her legs from around him.

  “What are you doing?” Aurie said with clattering teeth. “You’ll only make your shoulder worse, you fool.”

  Her eyes sank from his. If she could, they would have found his lips. She wanted to find his lips. Lord, forgive me, she thought as she loosened her legs from around him.

  Draka’s glare softened. He sidestepped toward the shore, turning her toward it once she felt the water lower to just above her waist. Then she felt his right hand flatten on her stomach. Her eyes widened as he cocked a brow with a facetious grin.

  And he launched her from him, flailing her arms, to land hard on her rump at the edge of the river with a splash. Without looking back, he returned to what he was doing, chin deep in the rapids with that tethered bucket.

  Aurie felt the welling in her eyes. Even as Enya stood over her, yelling what she would later wish she could remember what was said, she couldn’t stop the flow from within her heart spilling out of her.

  He didn’t look. Not a glance. No turn of his eyes. Nothing. He had thrown her aside. Cast her away. All she wanted was to know. One cock of a brow, a nod, a slight change in that cold, stoic expression on his weathered face. On that handsome, perfect face that had crept its way into her dreams and stayed there for months, changing everything she had ever known and loved in her life.

  She felt the emptiness in her arms, in her fingers even as they grasped the spear again, in her legs as they numbly followed Enya back to the bailey. Her skin, prickly and burning with the freezing wetness, was numb as her heart was becoming by the time she returned to her room. Was she still shivering? She wasn’t sure she cared in that moment.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” Enya was pinching the bridge of her nose after slamming the bedchamber door behind her.

  Aurie was standing, dripping into a puddle at her feet, unsure how she even got there. She didn’t remember going up the stairs or down the hallway. When did they cross the drawbridge? Did they send Samma to his room or follow him there first? She looked down at the puddle. She was still holding the spear as if she were running with it.

  “He’s still married, Aurie,” Enya growled, “That should be a deterrent in and of itself! Let alone who he’s bloody married to!”

  “I asked for forgiveness when I realized,” the words were numb, too.

  “You’re playing with fire, Aurelie Clevlan!” Enya jabbed a finger toward the window. “That is not your man! The Holy Spirit will revoke you if you don’t get control of yourself around him. And it will—mark my words, Aurie, because I have seen it happen with my own eyes—it will kill you. Not in a nice, while you’re sleeping—way. In a cruel, while you need it the most—way. We aren’t held to the same standard as normal people. We are Paladins. Paladins, Aurie!”

  “I know.”

  Enya stomped towards her, stopping only when she was looming over her with the harshest glower Aurie had ever seen. “I don’t think you do. This is your last warning. After this, I will move to corporal punishment to get it through that stubborn skull of yours. I don’t know what you need to do, but if you can’t keep your hands off of him, you best keep a distance far enough that there’s no chance of it. A single kiss, Aurie, and I will flog you. You do worse and may God have mercy because I won’t have a chance to. Adultery is one of the big ones.”

  Aurie was able to focus when she said that. She was shivering the tears down her cheeks.

  “You’ll make us lose two Paladins at once, one of them the highest ranking in all Christendom,” Enya shook with disgust. Or maybe it was worry. Disappointment? After a long breath and a growl, Enya softened. “I can’t flog you, but I have to punish you somehow if it goes too far. Don’t kiss him. Don’t let it go too far. Don’t commit adultery. And stop coveting him.”

  Aurie nodded. She was trying. Every day it was getting more difficult. Each fleeting glance, each brushing touch, each stray gesture, she was losing herself to him. It was as if she was being consumed by him the way Balor once did after he had named Maud and she decided…

  “For all that is holy,” Enya stepped away, turning with her arms flapping through the air in frustration, “We’re waiting until we have the embattlements completed around the Abbey and are entrenched with fully staffed cohorts before we dissolve his marriage. The moment he’s divorced, we’re expecting a bloody scourge like nothing we’ve seen in centuries. He’s married to the literal Mother of Demons. That’s why we’re waiting. That’s the only reason. We’re using it as the initiation of battle.” As if pleading, she said through clasped hands, “Please, please, stay vigilant, Aurie. I beg you. If the battle starts before we’re ready, this whole village will be slaughtered and possibly Christendom with it.”

  “I will,” Aurie felt her knees rumbling together. “Is he…?”

  “You worry about yourself,” Enya huffed. “Last thing I want to do is give you encouragement. Keep. Your. Hands. Off. And your mind pure. Bloody chickens on a stick, that was close.”

  “I love him,” Aurie said it before she could stop herself.

  “I certainly hope so, otherwise it’s just lust and you wouldn’t be worth the steel to gut you with,” Enya shook her head.

  Aurie furrowed her brow. The dripping from her clinging trousers was slowing down to a trickle down her legs into that puddle around her bare, pink and red feet.

  “It’s more than lust,” she couldn’t say above a whisper.

  “You two just need to hold on a little longer. The crusade might be called. Queen Isabella might be bringing all we need, but there are plenty of Paladins and Clerics who will come this way to get points on their stars,” Enya thinned her lips with a nasally sigh, “Get dried off and change into your other training uniform. Today, you start learning to fight.” She opened the door and took a step out.

  “And I know just who will knock some sense into you,” Enya said with a harsh glare as she closed the door.