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“Nae that anyone’s heard,” Lulach replied. “Nobody kens what’s going on. But I’m the only son she haes, so…”

“You’re fifteen years old!”

“Sixteen next month.”

Which was still even younger than Nicki had been when the six of us followed Jacqueline to Tailliz.

Gervase held up a hand. “What’s the Levy?”

The Levy might be notorious in the country where I was born, but to the rest of the world it was an obscure clause buried in a twenty-five-year-old peace treaty. The king had been born and raised in Tailliz. There was no reason for him to have any idea what we were talking about.

“It’s part of the agreement Ecossia made with the Red Empire,” I said, “to end the war, back in the day. If the emperor asks, every noble household has to send a son to serve in his army. It’s never been used. Everyone was kind of hoping he’d forgotten about it.”

Gervase frowned. For once, I didn’t find his expression difficult to read. The Red Empire, again. It would be foolish to assume they’d come up twice in as many days by sheer coincidence. Something was afoot, and it was putting people I cared about in danger.

“Do you want us to hide you?” I asked Lulach. “Are you running away?”

He shook his head. “If I dinnae go, Mither could be executed. I was just…hoping someone else would hae an idea.” He gazed at me with wide, pleading eyes. “I cannae be a soldier. When would I conduct mah research? Who would catalog all the cartilaginous fish?”

It was difficult to imagine Lulach in the military. Honestly, it was difficult to imagine him surviving his first skirmish. I’d seen him training, and any weapon he held was generally knocked out of his hands five seconds into a sparring match. He was the only person I’d ever known to lose a battle to a practice dummy. His sword rebounded into his helmet with such force that it knocked him unconscious.

I didn’t know what I was about to say until I said it. “I’ll go in your place.”

Chapter Six

Fish Out of Water

Lulach stood there blinking at me, his mouth hanging open.

“What?” he said.

“They’ve got no idea who you are or what you look like,” I answered. “Not in the Red Empire. No one’ll know the difference.”

“How could ye possibly…I mean, ye’r nae…” Lulach gestured vaguely at me. “Jules, ye’r, um…”

I rolled my eyes. “We all dressed as men when we first came to Tailliz. No one saw through it.” Well, hardly anyone. “The only tricky part was finding a private place to piss.”

The Red Empire military only admitted men. Just like the army of Tailliz before Jacqueline came along. But while my homeland of Ecossia didn’t have anything as organized as a standing army, it did have a long tradition, dating back to its earliest days, which dictated that anyone capable of slicing another person open should be handed a sword and taught how. The fact that we had a whole population ready to commit mayhem on our foes, rather than just half of one, was probably why we’d managed to hold off the Red Empire for so long back in the day.

I’d been keeping my hair short as it was. And sometimes, much to the consternation of the Tailliziani court of nobles, I even put trousers on when I was out and about on my knightly duties. I wore them almost as often as I wore skirts or verging-on-scandalous tunics.

Besides, I wanted to go. I was surprised by how much I wanted to go. How keenly I was anticipating everything about it.

During the recent coup attempt, I’d accomplished very little. Other knights had done great deeds, slaying monsters and defending the king, but I hadn’t managed any feats of note. Not with my second-rate powers. I wanted to do something valuable. Something that justified my position as a magical knight. Lulach’s dilemma sounded like my best chance to have an adventure all my own.

“Thank ye sae much!” Lulach said. He crushed me in an awkward hug. “I cannae tell ye how much I—”

“Stop,” Jacqueline said, taking a step forward. She waited until Lulach detached himself from me, then addressed us both. “I’m sympathetic to your plight, Lulach, truly I am. And, Jules, you’re always free to leave my service at any time. But I’m already missing one of my knights. My strongest knight.”

She meant her twin brother, Sam, who’d departed a year ago to start a romance with a truly terrifying sorceress. I missed him, too. “This sounds like a bad idea, I know,” I told her. “But—”

“There are assassins on the prowl. It’s a bad time for me to lose yet another.” That was flattering, but the truth was, she didn’t need her most useless knight at her side.

“We’d be losing two,” Gervase put in. “Don’t forget Yudit.”

“You’re right,” the queen said. “Please don’t do this, Jules.”

All right, so it wouldn’t completely be an adventure of my own. That wasn’t possible for me. I can’t say I was thrilled by the fact, but Yudit was the one sister I could never leave behind. One of us would have to go as the other’s squire. We could flip a coin for it. Though, to be honest, it was a coin flip I very much hoped she would lose.