The armor is constantly trying to drag her down. The extraneous weight isn’t quite as unbearable as how it limits her movement, however. Each step feels as though her feet are shackled together at the ankles. Evie was trained as warrior, not a soldier. She knows how to fight with and defend herself and others against hands and feet and weapons. She knows how to assess danger and plan accordingly. She’s never worn steel armor before, let alone a full suit of scaly plates complete with helm.

The armor doesn’t seem to bother Mother Manai. She’s removed the blades from the stump of her right wrist to more easily conceal the severed appendage. A steel glove with no hand inside it has been flame-melted to the gauntlet covering her forearm. The fingers of that gauntlet have also been flame-melted into a perpetual fist that hangs ready at her side.

The two of them march in tandem through the sprawling Skrain encampment, past pages and servants and other soldiers in matching armor who pay them no heed. They slipped in easily enough, blending with the dozens of sentries surrounding the camp being relieved by fresh bodies.

“Try not to be so stiff as you walk, love,” Mother Manai quietly urges her.

“How are you doing this so easily?” Evie asks through gritted teeth. “Were you Skrain before you were a Savage and you just didn’t tell me?”

Manai laughs. “No, but I was once accustomed to carrying half a dozen babes in one arm while I fended off the riffraff tryin’ to steal their food with the other. A few dozen pounds of armor is nothin’ to me.”

The Skrain encampment is massive. It’s at least four times the size of the one Evie was carted past alongside the other Savages en route to the meager tents and burned logs that passed for a Legion camp. There must be five hundred Skrain marching, feasting, sparring, and grooming themselves all around Evie and Mother Manai. They can’t even spot the edge of the adjoining collection of sticks and cloth that house half as many Savages.

Combined, the encampment is far too big to attempt the kind of silent overtaking Sirach and her night force inflicted on the Skrain attached to Evie’s former collection of Savages. There are too many soldiers and too much area to cover by sneaking tent to tent. Evie, with Sirach and Yacatek and the Elder Company’s input, has devised a different strategy for this assault.

“There it is,” Evie says.