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“So they just…sit? Like ducks?” Signaling the enemy where you were going? Bringing along your valuables and leaving them undefended? Revni shook her head. “Your army doesn’t sound very smart.”

Eavus bristled. “They’re smart enough to have conquered half the world.”

“Not my world.” Revni edged off the road, almost stumbling into the wide ditch that lined its sides. “Not this one.”

Revni got far enough from that heat-baked stretch of stone that she could only barely make it out between the trees, and then waited, willing her face to cool and her racing heart to calm. Her palm itched, but she resisted rubbing it.

“Hey!” Eavus protested, but she knew he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. There were streams here for water, places to hide. But the road…

Did Isfolj armies travel in such ways? Her inexperience stretched before her like that tongue of flattened stone. She had only been involved in raids—when the Byrdyttr clan attacked their village when she was twelve, their boats sliding silently through the dark water, and then the raids she’d gone on herself to take their revenge. But those had all been small: two, maybe three dozen soti, leaping out of boats at dawn or dusk, setting fires and snatching what they could, stirring up trouble more than anything. She had never seen a true war. Aleteria knew war so well they prepared for it years in advance. Sowing its seeds the way she would crops.

“If you want to get to Colcium,” Eavus pointed, “we follow the road.”

“We can follow from here.” She was being peevish, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

“The road was built specifically for walking. We can cut our travel time in half. Maybe more.”

She had smelled fire on the wind all day. It was a bad omen—like the orange sky, the constant twitching in her fingers to take up the ax at her back, as if her body knew something she didn’t. The road was too wide, too precise. It was like the monastery: completely foreign.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he asked. “To find an Isfolj Council? To find your people?”

“I thought you were taking me to your regiment,” she countered. She shouldn’t take it out on him, but he was the one pushing.

“Well, yes, of course. But…after.” He ran a hand over his scalp.

Revni squinted. Something else wasn’t right—something different than the road and the smell of smoke.

“You’ve spit on it,” she reminded him.

“What?”

That knot of fear in her stomach flexed.

“We are shield-siblings now. You and me.” Revni pointed between the two of them, but he only looked at her like she was crazy. He had promised. He had spit. The nervous flutter that had begun when she saw that terrible machine of a road traveled up to her throat. It can’t be the way, it can’t be, she begged the gods. But the gods didn’t reward cowards.

“What— I still don’t know what that is.”

“Weapons, together.” She wasn’t making sense now, but she didn’t know how to explain. She had given him back his sword, every time. “The gods are watching,” she sputtered. “If you can’t keep your bargain, we go our separate way.”

“You can’t go your separate way.” Eavus gestured to the rope she carried at her waist, his voice growing wilder. “You’re my prisoner, if you haven’t forgotten. The only reason you’re not tied up right now is because it slows us down!”

“You haven’t tied me up because you need me to help you fight. And translate. You’ve lived here months, and you still don’t speak the language,” she shot back.

“I haven’t lived here.” Eavus gestured again, broadly. “I’ve lived with my cohort! In Aleterian forts and Aleterian camps! Not with barbarians, hacking survival out of the wilderness! I had food! And orders! And a bed!” His voice cracked. “And now—we’re on the run from Caerdeneii, indebted to Dinaeii who knows what they’ll do if I screw up, Hirene-only-knows how many other tribes stalking us, there’s demented deserters that’ll chop my arm off for a few octavi—you’ve delayed us at least an extra day if not two⁠—”

The absolute gall of him to blame anything on her. To doubt the timing of the gods.

“And you want to take the scenic route because you don’t like the smell?! We follow the road!”

“Or what?”

The air smacked out of her lungs as Eavus slammed her into a trunk. “OR I SMASH YOUR HEAD IN LIKE I SHOULD HAVE DONE WHEN I MET YOU!”

His rage-filled face filled her vision. Everything went blank beyond the dig of his fingers into her shoulders, the dig of her ax handle into her spine.

And then, just as suddenly, the space around her cleared. Eavus had stepped backward, panting, his shoulders hunched. Her arms ached from his grip.

“Is that how you want me to be instead?” His voice was rough.