When Lieutenant Sperry returned to camp, she didn’t employ the same degree of stealth she had used in leaving.

  She figured she had no reason to bother.

  “I went to relieve myself,” she told the baffled guards. “You two didn’t spot me?”

  “I remember that,” said one of them, a fellow who had been in the squad for much longer than her but whose name Sperry could not immediately recall.

  The other guard quickly nodded in agreement. It was just as she had thought. Their primary concern wasn’t to guard things, per se. Just to look like they were doing their job.

  The sun was almost up already. Of course they would have noticed her leaving if she hadn’t used a skill to evade detection. But they weren’t certain. They decided to simply trust what an officer told them. She could have been replaced by a skinwalker, for all they knew!

  Sperry shook her head. I’m starting to see everything cynically. Don’t be like that. Just because you learned something bad—something terrible—about the squad, don’t start to distrust everything.

  She decided not to wait on what she wanted to do. She walked down the path and out of sight of the guards, then wove slightly around and approached Tybalt’s hut at an angle so that she was less likely to be seen.

  “Tybalt?” she called in a low voice once she was close. “I think we should talk.”

  If he wasn’t awake, she would rap on the outside wall. But she heard a stirring from inside the hut. Then she heard Tybalt’s voice.

  “You should be quieter,” he said. “You might wake up my hutmate. Markus is a heavy sleeper, but that doesn’t mean you can raise your voice without rousing him.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Sperry replied. But she spoke the words in a near whisper. She assumed Tybalt had good reasons for wanting quiet.

  “You should care about it,” Tybalt said. His head loomed out of the darkness now, barely within the confines of the hut. Despite the shadows, she got a good look at him. The sight took her breath away.

  Tybalt had a split lip, blood crusted under his nose, and bruising all over his face. As she stared at his form, she recognized the visible signs of injury all over him. His chest looked uneven through his gambeson, like he’d had some ribs cracked. His fingers appeared misshapen.

  “What happened to you?” she asked, forgetting for a moment why she’d come.

  He swallowed and looked angry—and embarrassed?—for a moment, then seemed to consciously suppress the emotions before her eyes.

  “I tripped coming out of the hut and hurt myself a little,” he said, flashing her a weak smile. “I hope it didn’t spoil my good looks.”

  “You all think you’re the gods’ gift,” Sperry replied in a carefully offhand tone, but her lips curved in a slight smile despite herself. She admired the calm way Tybalt dismissed what looked like painful injuries. “Seriously, though.”

  She waited, but he said nothing.

  “You were right,” she added. “I went to the beastfolk village we destroyed. I—I saw.”

  His eyes took on a look of sympathy.

  “I’m sorry I told you,” he murmured. “Somehow I didn’t realize how distant Volusia kept you from everything—clearly for a purpose. In hindsight, it’s obvious. I pay so little attention to what he wants from us, I missed something extremely important.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Sperry said irritably. “I don’t want to live in ignorance!”

  “Keep your voice down,” Tybalt hissed, emphasizing every syllable. His head darted side to side, looking to see if anyone else was watching this interaction.

  “Sorry,” she said—then wondered why she was apologizing to a subordinate, before the meaning of Tybalt’s body language hit her. She lowered her voice again as she asked, “Did someone in the squad do this?” She gestured at Tybalt, at his obvious injuries. “Was it because you told me? Did—did Volusia order this?”

  “Stop guessing,” Tybalt said. “It won’t do either of us any good.”

  She stepped in closer and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Even if you don’t want to talk about it, at least let me treat your injuries. You’re hurt, and—”

  “I’m supposed to be,” Tybalt growled. He spoke the words through pain that was more obvious in his voice now.

  Sperry’s hand moved unbidden to his forehead, then to his cheek—first mindlessly checking his temperature, though he clearly wasn’t sick, then trying to give some kind of comforting touch—before she realized that she was laying hands on Tybalt’s face. A fairly intimate area to grab without permission. It was somewhat inappropriate, so she wondered whether to pull her hand back.

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  She fought with herself for a moment, before he spoke up.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said softly, though he notably wasn’t recoiling from her hand. “Don’t do anything. I have to be seen to be injured, you understand? And you really shouldn’t be seen talking to me.”

  “All right,” she said after a moment. “I mean, I’ll make my own decisions about who I talk to, but I won’t bring you an elixir or anything right now. The people who did this would just hurt you again. I understand that much.”

  Tybalt nodded.

  Sperry rose, quickly walked out to the supply cart, and took some bandages, ointment, and other medical supplies.

  Then she returned to Tybalt’s hut.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he half-whispered, half-growled, eyes darting to his hutmate to verify Markus was still asleep.

  Sperry frowned at the swearing and tone but answered nevertheless.

  “I’m not going to let you get an infection, and we should wrap any broken bones so they’re less likely to re-break after they heal.”

  “What, did you get medic training?”

  “Officers take a class in the basic stuff,” she replied defensively.

  How do I always end up justifying myself with him? I should really just order him to do what I want in this situation…

  “You think I need healing that badly, that I require your half-baked skills?” Tybalt asked scornfully. “Like I’m a soldier dying on the battlefield. When you…” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head.

  When you’re the one who got me into this? Sperry felt the silent reproach of what he had consciously chosen not to say. This is your fault, for going straight to Volusia like an idiot. Why would I trust you to fix it?

  It must have been something like that in his mind. And he wasn’t wrong.

  “The more you argue, the more likely Markus wakes up,” Sperry said in a quiet, insistent tone.

  “Just make it quick, then,” he replied.

  Sperry nodded, then pulled Tybalt’s shirt up without asking permission.

  As she saw his bare skin, she couldn’t stop herself from gasping at the mess of purple, black, and blue scattered all over his chest. The lumps from bruises and clearly broken ribs. There were shallow cuts and gashes, too, as if someone had raked him with a blunted blade.

  Then she caught the expression on Tybalt’s face as he looked away: humiliation.

  He’s embarrassed to be hurt, she recognized. To be vulnerable… I have to control myself, not show these obvious reactions. Not make this worse for him.

  In the back of her mind, she added this to what she thought she had already learned about Tybalt and Baldwin seemingly trading shirts—meaning that Baldwin had been the one injured, but Tybalt had pretended it was him. That made even less sense, knowing this—then shook her head. Why was she still treating Tybalt as if he was the suspicious one in her mind? Over some shirt? The whole squad was involved in committing horrendous violations of the King’s Code. Including violently assaulting a loyal soldier.

  What got into me over that shirt issue, anyway?

  She began applying ointment and bandages to the worst of his wounds, moving slowly and carefully—and trying to forget that she was running her hands over a man’s body. She didn’t generally get so close to men outside her family, and Tybalt was different, for obvious reasons. Sperry worked efficiently despite the slight awkwardness of handling a member of the opposite sex—and despite not having much training as a medic.

  Soon she had to go back out to get more medical supplies. She had underestimated the severity of Tybalt’s injuries—and she was probably bandaging them a little more heavily than was actually necessary.

  “Take off your pants,” she said once she had returned.

  He gave her a look somewhere between surprise and annoyance—more of that wounded pride from earlier—then lowered his gaze.

  “I could tell they hurt your legs, too,” she said.

  He reddened slightly but still kept his eyes averted from her. Again, she felt bad for him, and she decided to compromise.

  “All right, you can keep the pants on, just roll the legs up, please?” she asked.

  You got hurt because of me, she thought. Please let me make it a bit better.

  A little of that sentiment must have come through in her tone, because Tybalt’s eyes darted up to her, and then he began to pull his pant legs up. Finally, Sperry could directly see the bruising and slow bleeding in parts of his legs.

  Gods… There was more of that brutal black and purpling. They had hardly spared any of him. His lower legs had gotten the worst of it, though. The bit of his thighs that was visible appeared to be fine—which made her glad that she had not insisted on him removing his pants entirely. But it was disturbing to think of how thoroughly the Army had punished one of their own. What else would they do to cover this up?

  Sperry repeated the job that she had done with his chest on his legs. She was pleased to note that Tybalt didn’t seem to be suffering much pain from the ointment. Hopefully her delicate touch was successfully mitigating some of its sting. The patient wore an expression of begrudging gratitude.

  Sometime in between that and her getting to his raw, semi-smashed fingers, he broke the silence that had settled over them.

  “Do you mind if I ask your first name, Lieutenant?”

  She considered the question for a moment. It was a form of fraternization—of befriending the troops rather than commanding them—for them to refer to you by a first name rather than your title. Still, they had already been rather personal. Sperry had seen ninety percent of Tybalt’s body in the last ten minutes, though she had tried to pretend she was practicing medicine on a dummy rather than on a fit, handsome young man.

  And part of her strict policy against fraternization had been directly inspired by the Commander. She was feeling less inclined to respect his wisdom today.

  “It’s that obvious?” Sperry asked.

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