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should have sent you to Abril. We’ll find the other half of the conduit before going near Spring again.”
    Gregg makes a muffled grunt. “Stop,” he snaps. “We both know I won’t—”
    His voice fades. Sir stays quiet too, and I want to ask Gregg what they both know. What won’t he do?
    The truth flashes through me: he won’t last the night.
    Gregg snorts, but it’s hollow, empty. “Angra put us in a work camp.”
    He wheezes and a shudder runs through me. “At first… we thought we could free them. Stage an uprising. But—” He pauses, moans, and when he starts again his voice is pinched. “Ten years. Ten years, our people have been Spring’s slaves. He treats them like cattle. Keeps them in cages—” A sob flies out of him, making Gregg sound like a child. “Like animals, and they die like animals.”
    Someone shifts and stands, starts pacing around the campfire.
    Probably Sir.
    Silence prevails for one heartbeat, two, and Gregg cries out, half a strangled howl and half a pained groan. “I saw everything Herod did to her. Every time he smirked at me. Every time she screamed. That’s why Angra released me. I’m a warning that when he catches us—” Gregg stops, panting. “I tried to stagger my path back here, so no one could follow me, but I don’t—I couldn’t—when they find us, Herod will do the same to all of you. Angra will make Herod kill each of you, so slowly…”
    Gregg breaks into sobs. Coils of pain rise through me as I listen to one of the strongest, bravest men I know weep.
    Mather shifts beside me and his hand cups my shoulder. I can’t move beneath the blanket and Gregg’s words, beneath the knowledge that I know more people dead than alive.
    A pause, then Mather nudges my blanket away and presses his face to my ear, his breath steady on my neck. “I’ll never let that happen to you,” he whispers.
    Everything in my body cools, a frigid gust from Mather’s words. His hand tightens on my shoulder and he stays next to me, his body pressed against my back. Gregg’s weeping turns to groans of pain and Mather’s breathing warms my neck and all I can think is:
    I don’t want Mather to have to protect me.
    I don’t want to sit back as everyone else helps free Winter, everyone else
belongs
to Winter, while I just watch people die in the attempt. I belong to our kingdom too, to the conduit and Crystalla and snow and every bit of Winter. And if being a soldier means my fate will be the same as Gregg’s, or Crystalla’s, or any of the countless others who have died…
    I have to do this. I have to be a soldier.
    For myself, for Crystalla, for Winter.

Present Day
Rania Plains
    There were only eight of us after that night, after Gregg succumbed to his injuries under the clear Autumn sky. And Sir had no choice—he needed me. There were so few Winterians left, our entire kingdom either dead or enslaved. The eight of us were the only hope our people had.
    Are
the only hope our people have. Because Sir will return from this mission like all his other missions. He’ll go back to analyzing me while I throw my chakram, silent until I shout at him for being so maddeningly quiet. Then he’ll say I have no patience and I’ll growl that maybe I’d control my patience better if he would let me use my fighting skills to help get our conduit back instead of just to get supplies, and he’ll leave without giving in to the argument.
    I laugh at myself. I’ve spent way too long at camp if I know exactly how my next conversation with Sir will go.
    Two fingers touch my neck. “Dead.”
    I whirl around, my chakram at the attacker’s throat a beat before I realize he’s not actually an attacker. Mather puts his hands up in surrender, his lips cocking into a slow smile, the one I’m pretty sure he knows is dangerous, because he only uses it when he wants to fluster someone. Usually me.
    I pull the chakram away from the pulsing vein in his neck. “One of these days, that’s going to get