Sunrise found the squad alone in the beastfolk village, beginning to get restless.

  Those who had gone out hunting Baldwin had long ago come back empty-handed. The men were only waiting for their additional reinforcements at this point.

  What the fuck is taking the miners so long? Volusia wondered.

  The Commander wasn’t overly concerned about it. He had almost forty men, with the miners who were still there plus the surviving members of his squad. The additional miners would be just so many warm bodies. Probably less trained and experienced in fighting than even the ragtag beastfolk, they might end up getting in the way.

  It was time to move, with or without them.

  I’ll come back for them when we scour the rest of these mountains and resolve the beastfolk situation once and for all. I can’t waste this crisis. For right now, the important thing is that we go after the necromancer, on this mountain. That “Lord Andric,” as the undead child called him.

  The Commander stepped into the sick hut and faced the last soldier remaining within.

  “Private Holst, it’s with a heavy heart that I say this, but the squad needs you to stay behind here,” Volusia said.

  The man did not seem surprised, though to his credit, he did look a bit disappointed.

  “I wanted to take the fight to the furballs with you, sir, but I figured, with my condition, it was unlikely.” He had not risen to greet Commander Volusia, and given his injuries, it was unlikely that he ever would again. Holst was the man who had been most grievously crippled out of all the survivors of the beastfolk’s engineered rockslide. One of his legs had been crushed completely, to the point that Specialist Curtis had needed to amputate.

  “Sacrifice the part to save the whole,” he’d said at the time.

  Now Holst was the only man who remained bedridden. Vika’s blessing had hastened everyone else’s recovery from injury and disease. There was no one in the squad who was not fighting fit, except this man who was so permanently crippled that it would require a high level healer to change.

  “I just need you to perform one last task for me,” Volusia said. “Then, hopefully, the next thing you’ll see of our squad, we’ll be coming back with trophies, taking you back to live high on your Royal Army pension.” The Commander managed a smile at Holst, even though for Volusia, no amount of money would sweeten the sting of losing a leg.

  “Yes, sir?” Holst said, still polite and obedient.

  “Stay on watch here. The miners should show up anytime. They should have been here already, but they take their time doing things there. Damned fools want to put everything up for a ‘vote.’” He shook his head and snorted. “Well, I can’t waste more time waiting on them. The other men and I need to hurry and get up that mountain before the Blessing of the War God fades. I’m sure you’ve heard from other people how rare something like this is. We can’t assume Lord Vika would repeat this generosity.”

  Holst nodded. “Understood, sir. I will remain here and keep vigilant until the miners arrive. Then I will send them after you.”

  “Very good, Private.”

  They exchanged salutes, and Volusia stepped out of the sick hut.

  Even without his leg, Holst should be able to make his way outside on his own. He had a crutch, and Volusia wouldn’t insult him by carrying him.

  Instead, the Commander marched to the center of the village without looking back. The men were waiting in formation.

  “I have a few things to say, but I’ll keep it brief,” Volusia said. “You’ve all heard enough speeches and prayers from me already, and Lord Vika spoke up loudly enough!”

  A cheer went up. Every one of these men was riding the high from the Blessing of the War God.

  “Now we’re going up the route our scouts found, and we’re not going to stop this time even if the Veil shatters and the heavens themselves fall. We have almost forty men here, miners and hardened soldiers alike. Those who don't know my squad, rest assured: we have done far more with far less in the past! Every man among you is worth ten beastfolk, and that’s without a god giving us his personal attention. Remember that, and have courage! When we get there, I don’t want to see a single spear come away unbloodied. As a last matter, Indus is hereby promoted. It’s a battlefield promotion, necessitated by the exigencies of our situation, so we’re skipping the usual paperwork until we get back. We need a new sergeant, and he’s sufficiently experienced to be entrusted with the responsibility. If you have questions about the assault or about military regulations or anything of the kind, and I’m busy, then you go to Sergeant Indus.”

  There was a smaller cheer, just from some of the men who were actual soldiers. The miners didn’t know Indus, and some in the squad didn’t like him.

  Volusia didn’t care over-much about that. Indus would have time to win their respect himself, on this mission and beyond. The Commander spared a quick glance at the man he had just promoted. Indus looked pleased but not surprised.

  He knows he earned it with his loyalty and willingness to get his hands dirty.

  “Soldiers, move out!”

  —

  Tybalt woke with his arms still wrapped around Mariella.

  That’s… nice. That’s really nice. It felt like it had been a long time since he woke up with a woman in his arms.

  “You’re awake?” she asked quietly.

  “How long have you been up?” he said.

  “A few minutes, maybe a little longer. I didn’t want to wake you. I know you must still be healing from that chest wound yesterday.”

  Oh, I completely forgot about that. With the levels, the chest wound had completely closed.

  “I’m not doing too badly,” he said, running his fingers through her hair. “We have to leave right now, regardless. We need to make our way to the beastfolk village before nightfall. In theory, the beastfolk won’t be attacking us again, because Vidalia persuaded them to stop. But I’m certain the squad is going to make another attempt to advance up the mountainside and attack. We need to be there when it happens.”

  Mariella nodded. “All right. But before we go…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wanted to thank you,” Mariella said quietly. “For last night. I was angry at you, at first, when you asked about what happened. But it wasn’t… you weren’t doing it for the reasons I imagined. You genuinely wanted me to share. You…” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “You were trying to care for me. And you actually made me feel better. You think you’re a bad guy or something. I remember you said yesterday that you think I’m better than you deserve. You’ve said a few things like that, now that I think back on it. But I’m not. You deserve… I don’t know, you deserve for good things to happen to you. Any woman would want a man like you. I don’t think anyone else in the squad would have even taken my side.”

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  “Not even if they were falling for you?” Tybalt asked, trying to be funny.

  But the words landed more heavily than he’d intended for both of them.

  Mariella turned and planted a hot, salty kiss on his mouth. Their lips connected for a long time. Reflexively, he almost ran one palm over her body, but then found her hand instead and just held it, entwining his fingers with hers.

  Tybalt was the one who finally broke the kiss. The sun was well and truly up, and the light shone down on them. A part of him felt that Mariella wanted more than just to kiss him, and he was interested, but they needed to move. They needed to use the daylight to navigate. And they needed to go quickly, because the squad would be active too. It was a race now.

  Without us, the beastfolk village won’t survive. Everyone Vidalia knows… He pictured the fate that the squad had inflicted on uncounted villages in the time he’d been with them and had to suppress a shudder. Not on my watch. Not when I have the power to stop it. Though… it’s hard to say when I started to care so much about innocent casualties. Is this Vidalia’s influence on me? Or Mariella’s? Both? I’m going to kill a lot of innocent people by the time I reach my goal… I can’t afford to let this sentimentality infect me too deeply.

  He looked at Mariella thoughtfully.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, smiling.

  That you won’t look at me the same way if I try to tell you the truth, and I don’t think I can bring myself to kill you either. But tonight we’ll be with the beastfolk. A people who will have to accept me as the high priest of their god… and the only man who can protect them from the Kingdom. Their savior and their natural leader. At that point, I can tell you the truth about me safely. You’ll either accept it or try to do something about it. But surrounded by worshipers of the god who empowered me, what can you actually do? Not to mention my undead…

  “I’m thinking that I still have things to share with you,” Tybalt answered. “Tonight or tomorrow at the latest.”

  She nodded with an understanding expression. “I can wait.”

  Right. I keep forgetting, but she has known the whole time that I’m holding some things back. She just doesn’t know how big of a deal it is.

  He rose, picked up his spinal column dirk from the ground, and tucked it into his belt. She looked at it with an expression of slight surprise, and Tybalt grinned. This was something he could freely share with her.

  “Oh, last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I went down to where you defended us,” he said. “Did some recovery of bones.”

  “Plus, that hooded cloak you’re wearing,” she noted with an indulgent smile.

  “Yeah, with my complexion, I should really be making it more of a priority to keep the sun off. Anyway, I was jealous that you had a sword, so I wanted one too. The only thing is that it turns out a spinal column is shorter than a standard length sword.”

  “Your power is so useful, I’m not sure I have anything you should be jealous of,” Mariella said. “I have a sword, so you just casually make a dirk.”

  “It’ll be a proper sword once I get another spine to combine it with.”

  “Do you want to go back down to the beastfolk bodies and recover more bones? And you should make yourself some bone armor…”

  “Not right now,” Tybalt said, shrugging. Not as if there were any bodies still left in the valley, though it was interesting how quickly Mariella had accepted him desecrating corpses. “We have places to be.”

  If I had time, bone armor would definitely be next on the list of things to do, though.

  They gathered their things and then climbed the cliff face in silence.

  Almost immediately once they’d reached the top, Tybalt recognized a landmark from Vidalia’s directions, a large boulder covered in moss that grew in almost the same shape as the continent. So this was actually it; they were on the right track to find where the beastfolk lived.

  Tybalt creatures followed at a distance, as close as they could without being seen. They had climbed the cliff face just after he and Mariella did. The monsters were passively following and would go wherever Tybalt did until he gave them other instructions. He had enough of them nearby to pose a major threat to Mariella or the squad, with Tybalt’s leadership, as long as Mariella wasn’t fighting with the squad. Twenty-four undead, not counting Baldwin and Hieron, who were both too far away to be of use.

  Baldwin had updated Tybalt on what was happening as Tybalt and Mariella climbed. The squad was on the move. The necromancer had ordered the revenant to kill the man they’d left behind and then follow after the others from a distance to keep him updated.

  “It’s this way,” Tybalt said, pointing out another sort of minor landmark, a tree that gave him a heading to go off of.

  Tybalt and Mariella walked, mostly in silence, but with occasional bursts of chatter. It wasn’t awkward. The couple had grown much more comfortable with shared quiet. They held hands almost the whole way. Tybalt didn’t even bother making excuses or jokes about how they needed to do it because of how cold the mountain air was. They just wanted to be as close as possible. If not for the fact that they both knew they might be attacked or at least surprised by hostile beastfolk or soldiers, they would probably have been taking breaks to kiss.

  During one bit of conversation, Mariella told Tybalt a little more about her family.

  “I remember that my stepmother, Lena, described how she and my dad started their relationship once,” Mariella recalled. “She said that after saving each other’s lives over and over, being in dangerous situations day after day, and a lot of flirting, the boundaries between professional respect and personal affection started to blur. I…” She blushed. “I couldn’t imagine, at the time, what that would be like. But now… well, now I can imagine.”

  Tybalt smiled. “Oh, have our boundaries started to blur?”

  Mariella rolled her eyes but smiled.

  “Actually, there’s something else I wanted to tell you,” she said. “About my family…”

  Hm. Nothing she’s keeping secret could be as bad as what I’m hiding.

  “All right. Go for it.”

  “I’ve been keeping it secret from almost the whole squad, but I trust you, and it feels a little dishonest that we’ve gotten so close without you knowing.” She took a deep breath, then said, “My father is General Vespasian.” She looked at him nervously. “You know who that is?”

  The bottom dropped out of Tybalt’s stomach.

  No… Is this some kind of joke?

  “Are you kidding?” he asked, plastering a smile on his face to disguise his shock.

  One of the Kingdom’s most respected and decorated generals. Mariella had mentioned that her father came from nothing and earned a noble rank. She hadn’t said that he was the Count of Sevenhills.

  The Count held the highest noble rank a commoner had ever been appointed to. He was also well connected to the country’s religious leaders. The largest temple outside the capital was in Sevenhills.

  Tybalt had no direct experience of the man, but if there was an opening on the Royal Council of Niet, the necromancer had no doubt that General Vespasian would be on the shortlist to fill that space.

  It would take a lot for her to betray the Kingdom when her father is that important. She probably had a religious upbringing, too. Even the military corruption angle I’ve been playing, she could go to her dad and ask him to fix it. And he might actually try. That’s his reputation, at least. A good man. She’s just been unable to tell him anything while we’ve been out here. No wonder she has so much faith in the authorities to ultimately do the right thing… If her father is really Vespasian, then literally the only reason she’d have to go against the Kingdom and not just the squad, is… personal affection for me. How would that outweigh her loyalty to her own family? Two loving parents who have every reason to believe in the Kingdom. Maybe Baldwin was right. Maybe I should have steeled my nerves and just killed her last night. Not spent so much time… getting attached to her.

  “Not kidding,” she said with a slightly guilty smile. “Sorry I took so long to tell you.”

  “Calling yourself Sperry?” he managed to ask, getting only half a question out.

  But she understood.

  “Yeah, I’ve been keeping even my surname secret since officer training. I know it sounds strange. Most people would want everyone to know that he was their father. But it’s the only favor I ever asked my dad for after I decided to join. He understood. If I paraded around calling myself Mariella Sevenhills, some men would definitely approach me just trying to get to him, or to arrange a match based on who he is. So I’ve been using my mother’s maiden name instead. Commander Volusia found out who my father was somehow, and his first reaction was trying to figure out a way to make my dad owe him something.”

  Tybalt continued giving her his sickly smile and nodding along, feeling queasy and hollow inside.

  “Now it makes sense how you were thinking about honoring your family’s legacy,” he heard himself saying. “Who could have guessed your father’s legacy in particular was so distinguished?”

  She only seemed to half hear him, which was good, because Tybalt thought he sounded a bit like someone had punched him in the balls.

  “Oh, that’s a weight off my shoulders,” Mariella said, letting out a little sigh. “It sounds silly, but I thought you might be annoyed I didn’t tell you sooner.”

  “Oh, no.”

  I’m keeping much worse secrets…