Watching, Evie’s brief and murderous reverie is broken. She slips the exposed steel of the dagger’s blade back inside its sheath and lets go of the handle, removing her hand from the secret pocket.

This is not what she came here to do.

She leaves him there, walking in a direction just out of Laython’s periphery until she can duck behind a tent.

He never even looks away from those headless corpses.

It takes Evie another few minutes of searching the camp before she finally reaches the true objective of her mission. The sight of the armory wagon overburdened with its hundreds of rusted and jagged steel and iron limbs transports Evie back in her mind to the first time she met Spud-Bar. She remembers sorting through the junk pile of secondhand weapons remaindered for the Legion, just hoping to find one solid instrument that might see her through her first battle.

That day seems like a lifetime ago from where she stands now.

Spud-Bar squats on a stubby tree stump in front of one of the wagon’s wheels, sharpening swords against a small grinding wheel the armorist has placed in front of the stump. There’s an array of mostly shoddy, poorly forged blades splayed out across the grass around the wheel.

Evie approaches the armory wagon as silently as possibly without appearing as though she’s trying to be stealthy. Before Spud-Bar takes notice of her presence, Evie has slid onto the grass beside the armorist, sitting halfway under the wagon to conceal her face and most of her body from sight.

“What do you need, Savage?” Spud-Bar asks disinterestedly.

“The same thing I always seem to need from you,” Evie says, “a favor I have no right to ask.”

The moccasin-covered foot of Spud-Bar’s powering the grinding wheel stops, but only for a few moments. Nothing else about the armorist’s outward demeanor seems to change, and soon that foot is working the wheel twice as fast as it was before.

“You can’t be here,” Spud-Bar whispers, each word as cold as a winter burial plot.

“I have to be,” Evie insists.

“They will tear you apart if you’re discovered here. Laython knows exactly who you are, Sparrow General. You tend to leave an impression. If they find you here he will give you to the worst scum in this camp as supper. Do you know that?”

“Then I advise you to keep doing precisely what you’re doing and not draw attention to us. As I said, I have to be here. There was no other choice. I have a lot of people ready to die tomorrow when this battle begins who are looking to me for a way to survive. And I can only think of one.”

Spud-Bar places the newly sharpened sword aside and takes up another place, putting its edge to the revolutions of the stone.

“I’m not involved in that.”