Kasira turned from felling one to find an injured female hunched low to the ground. The Alkatir swiped at her with claws coated in gore. Kasira dodged, bringing her blade down along its flank. It was a poor swing, barely grazing flesh. The beast could have easily escaped, but it stayed where it was, snarling. Her next strike didn’t miss.
As the Alkatir’s body crumpled to the dirt, she realized why it hadn’t moved. A downy cub cowered behind its mother’s corpse, one golden eye slashed to a bloody pulp. Kasira’s sword came forward oninstinct, but she stopped with the blade raised, unable to look away from the terrified cub.
She ought to kill it. The position of Malik was sacred. As Haidra’s chosen, only they could touch a beast without corrupting their souls. Only they were blessed to kill, and Kasira had tempted the goddess’s ire enough for one lifetime. Yet she didn’t move. Like an ember coaxed back to life, some long-smothered part of herself stayed Kasira’s hand, and she only watched as the cub darted into the safety of the woods.
Only then did she notice the silence of the battlefield. The last of the Alkatir were dead or had escaped, and the few injured Malik were being tended by the second unit’s medics.
Everyone else’s eyes were on her.
“I saw that, criminal.” Commander Dessen’s voice slithered into her ear. “You let it go.”
She turned a fraction, taking in the Commander’s roving eyes and the grip of his thin fingers on the coiled whip at his side. Even surrounded by a unit of fully trained Malik, he looked a step away from pissing himself at being this deep in the woods. How a man like him had risen through the ranks she didn’t know, but power rarely went to those who deserved it.
“She wasn’t here when they attacked, Commander,” said Jevin, a thin-faced man with the bearing of a rat. “She probably drew them here herself. The Kott can’t be trusted.”
“Beast sympathizer,” murmured someone at her back.
Revna started to intervene, but Kasira warned her off with a look. This was not the sort of thing her friend could fix with a brash word and a strong fist.
“Well?” Commander Dessen knew full well she couldn’t provide a suitable explanation. Though he had only been assigned to the Fifth Battalion two months prior, his eyes had followed her from the start. As a convicted criminal in the work-release program, being in Dessen’s good graces was the only thing keeping her out of a windowless cell, and he enjoyed exercising that power.
She would have to do something about him soon.
Commander Dessen’s voice rose to address the others. “The entireunit will take the Kott’s cleanup responsibilities for today’s kill as reward for the criminal’smercy.”
A vicious murmur circled through the clearing, and the back of Kasira’s neck prickled with the press of angry eyes. She knew what Dessen was doing: letting her escape punishment, disbursing the consequences across the unit. He wanted to isolate her, to leave her with no one to turn to but him.
There was a time when Kasira would have relished that challenge, when she would have discerned all of Commander Dessen’s strings and delighted in learning to play them. Now, her mind ran through cons like a wounded beast fleeing her sword—it just hadn’t realized it was dead yet.
The unit split into groups, some to guard the perimeter, others to haul the Alkatir corpses into a pile. The beasts would be burned with the morning sun, the sins that led to their births disintegrating into ash by the grace of Haidra’s light, and tomorrow the unit would seek its next kill. One by one, until every beast, every sin, had been eliminated in the goddess’s name.
Kasira made for the nearest corpse—the young mother she had killed—and dragged its body to the pile. She gave the beast a final shove, and it collapsed upon its fellows, one golden eye staring up at her. Alive, the Alkatir were elegant, powerful creatures. In death, they looked impossibly fragile, gleaming with silver blood.
She worked in silence, refusing to let Revna catch her eye. It wasn’t long before the air grew thick with the scent of rot, the gathering evening breeze doing little to allay the damaging autumn sun. The scent clogged her throat and nose, her muscles aching down to the bone. Others were already searching the corpses for drenga. Curved three-inch claws, silver feathers, snow-white fur—whatever part of the beasts they desired to tie to their leathers as a token of their kill.
Kasira took nothing.
The sun hung low on the horizon by the time the last of the bodies had been dragged to the pile. They returned to camp, where the air buzzed with preparations for the Paratal’s arrival the following morning. Tents had been straightened, fighting leathers cleaned, vylorblades polished until they sang. The patrols along the Isherwood had been doubled, straining their already-thin battalion. But as head of the Haidrin Church, the Paratal’s life was second in importance only to the King’s, and no expense would be spared for his protection.
“Revna, my love, where have you been?” Paskar’s smoky voice barely preceded his long brown arm draping across Revna’s shoulders. He pulled away quickly with a sound of disgust. “Whatisthat stench?”
“I believe they call it ‘defeat.’” Revna brushed a stray white feather free of her stained leathers. “It matches my new look.”
Paskar made a considering sound. “In truth, I would call it an improvement.”
Revna quipped something back at him, and they descended into a series of insults and elbows in ribs. Before long, Revna had Paskar in a headlock and was forcing him to recant every word he’d said. By the time they extricated themselves from each other, their group had reached the central square, where soldiers had gathered to eat around a roaring bonfire.
Kasira wanted nothing more than to wash the gore from beneath her nails and polish her sword in the silence of her tent, but their task had taken them past the start of dinner, and if she didn’t get hers now, none would remain. They joined the mess line, Revna recounting her kills for Paskar, who was of the second unit and therefore didn’t fight. Consisting mostly of medics, scribes, and cartographers, the second unit spent the majority of its time tending to the camp’s more skilled needs, and Paskar was their best medic.
The cook slopped a stew of barley and roughly cut root vegetables onto Kasira’s plate, half the portion he’d given the others. The man met her gaze, daring her to say something, but she only picked up a mug of thin ale and moved along.
“Are you joining us tonight, Kas?” Paskar asked once they were clear of the line. He had the sort of face that folded easily into a smile, one she had no doubt usually got him his way. It was the kind of smile she would have tried and adopted for herself once, before filing it away with all the others until she had need of it.
Revna hooked their arms together and said, “Of course she is.”
Kasira didn’t bother telling her this was a bad idea—she already knew. The people around the bonfire were first unit soldiers, their heads bent in prayer over their food. Revna was Unit One, a Malik proper, but Kasira was technically Unit Three, or the Kott, as the others called them in the northern Kalish tongue. The Nothing, for that was all criminals were in the eyes of the goddess.
Most people in Unit Three were closely watched and relegated to tasks they couldn’t ruin—little more than servants—but Kasira had proven herself a useful enough soldier to be loaned to the thin first unit, though the others never wasted an opportunity to remind her she wasn’t one of them.
