“A room for me and my sister.” I lifted my coin pouch out and set two pieces on the table nearest me. “And breakfast brought up.”
Her gaze lit on the pieces. “I can do that.”
She brought us to a room, didn’t ask questions or make small talk. When Eury and I were alone, I began stripping a pillow of its case. Eury stood near the door. “What’s that for?”
“Can’t parade the uniforms through the streets before we’ve got them on.”
She sat on the edge of the bed beside me. “In the southern district barracks, there’s a store room. Always spare uniforms in there.”
“I’ll check there first.”
She caught my wrist. “If someone sees you, you’re an authoritarian bastard. Be the Dorian I met that night in the Dip.”
I paused. “I’ve always been him.”Even if I’m built around the shape of you, now.
Her eyes flashed. “You sure? I haven’t wanted to stab you in weeks.”
She’s still Eury. You’re still you.
I tucked the pillowcase into my jerkin and pointed at her as I neared the door. “Eat.”
She didn’t answer except with her willful eyes.
I strode down the hall and into the quiet bar room. Outside the pub, the inner district was just waking—voices murmuring, machines coming to clanking life. I had to be quick.
As a child, I’d never been inside the barracks. I had passed it so many times with the curiosity of any boy who dreams of swords and battle. And we all did for a time, every one of us sons of scorn, even if we would later realize we were destined to spend our days surrounded by books. When I’d asked my father if I could join the scouts, he’d laughed. He was a jeweler, and so had his father been, and his father.
“You’re meant to shape metal, boy. Not to swing it.”
My father had been a very good jeweler, and not very smart. He hadn’t ever suspected his true baby had been replaced, and he’d treated me like the prized heir because he disdained women.
He hadn’t known his line had died off one quiet night in the prime of his life. Now he was gone, and I was swinging metal. The irony was, I’d rather be shaping it.
I stopped in front of the barracks entrance and the empty yard. The doors were wide open in preparation for the scouts’ departure. The buildings formed a horseshoe—several dorms, a food hall, stables, and a small building my eye nearly missed before I remembered.
The store room.
It wasn’t even locked. The door swung open to reveal shelves of supplies, neatly stacked jackets and pants and boots. The clothing was no doubt tailored after the fact, so I grabbed two of the jackets, pants, and two pins from a lineup. One of them bore threeinterlocking circles—a regiment commander’s pin. I eyed the boots and took the smallest and largest I could find.
When I turned around, someone stood at the entrance to the store room. A young man, his face shadowed by the light streaming through the open door.
“What are you doing?”
I squinted; a brown-haired man of maybe twenty-one with freckles and green eyes came into relief. Shorter than me. Not a new recruit, but not a regiment commander, either.
Not easy, but not insurmountable.
I turned toward him with the load in my arms and found the bottom of my register. “What the fuck does it look like?”
He scrutinized me with an unapologetic up-and-down. When his gaze reached my face, he straightened. I knew what he recognized there: years and years of discipline.
Gawain had given me that foundation. That, and more. All unasked for, but I couldn’t deny it when it served me.
Humans and fae weren’t so far removed from lesser animals. Men, especially. We sized each other up in ways most of us weren’t even conscious of—the cant of the chin, the straightness of the shoulders, the cauliflower ears, the height and weight difference. It all happened in a second or two.
He had challenged me. I had come out on top.
“Sorry, sir.” His hands clasped behind him. “It’s just that the regiment commander said no one’s supposed to be in the store room. And I saw the door open?—”