“Ya’ve got a bird on ya,” Lariat chides her.

She looks up the gruff old man, dozens of knuckle-size blades strapped to his every joint effectively turning his entire body into one lethal fist. The razor-edged triangle blades of his katars are casually shoved through his belt and other than the leather strops crisscrossing his chest his torso is bare and exposed.

Evie shakes her head. “You will never make a soldier, old man,” she launches right back at him, “and I’m eternally grateful for that.”

Lariat laughs, his mustache dancing above his upper lip.

“It’s very becoming for a General,” Diggs assures her.

“Thank you.”

Evie looks from them to Bam, ever expressionless and still hiding beneath his hood. He does, however, reach out and tap a finger against her chest and the sparrow’s eye there.

“I like your bird,” he says quietly.

“Thank you, Bam.”

“It’s time,” Sirach informs them all.

“Then let’s not be late!” Lariat hollers loud enough to be heard by the ranks.

The de facto commanders jog to the head of their columns and lead the army out.

They don’t have far to travel. The Skrain have drawn their battle line a mile from the eastern road and five miles from the garrison keep and the Crachian border. They seem determined to keep the Sparrow General’s Savage Rebellion from ever touching Crachian soil.

Evie and her combined forces mass a hundred yards across the valley from the enemy line. Their rogue Savages serve in their usual capacity as vanguard. Everyone knew that this battle would hinge one way or another on Savages fighting Savages.

In fact, they can’t even see any columns of Skrain for all the Legionnaires gathered in front of the Crachian line in their usual jumbled, frothing, chaotic formation, as if they are a single organism undulating in heat. Many of the Legionnaires with their half-faces painted blue are also wearing bright red bands of cloth around their neck.

“Is that what we look like from this side?” Lariat asks Sirach.

“Uglier when you were over there, but essentially, yes,” she informs him.

Lariat guffaws through his nose. “Well, yer first mistake was always waitin’ for us ta come ta you.”

He coils his gnarled, scarred pugilist’s fists around the horizontal handles of his matched katars, drawing them both, and holding his arms aloft with those deadly triangular bladed extensions of his hands effectively turning his arms into swords.

“Savages!” he growls fiercely and loudly with every bit of breath from his lungs. “I want my heads!”

The rogue Legionnaires raise whatever weapon they’ve been issued, be it sword or ax or mace, and cry their bloody intentions across the field at their former brothers and sisters.