The knowledge that she is now part of that machinery settles like a dull blade in her gut. The idea that her first battle in that supposedly nonexistent yet very real war may very well be her last is more sobering than the coldest water.

She rubs the crusted sleep from her eyes, a sickly bluish-green color filling her vision for a moment until she pulls her hands away. Evie blinks in sudden horror and slides back against the rough ground, splaying her fingers in front of her. Her hands are pocked with strange discolored shapes, and for one wild, forgetful moment Evie rubs them together in a frantic effort to remove the stains.

Then it comes spilling through the cobwebs of half sleep, the memories of being force-fed the blood coin and the sight of the resulting runes on the other Savages.

The other Savages, like me, she tells herself, and the thought almost brings on a new panic.

In that moment it’s all too real, and Evie has to arrange her body in a cross-legged position and assume a meditative state over her mind to help calm it.

You’re here with a purpose, she reminds herself. Stick to that purpose. Remember your training. Remember you’re not one of them, not really.

Calm slowly cascades down through her torso and limbs, filling her body and reining in her sleep-addled emotions. Evie quickly dresses and outfits herself with the gear she’s scrounged for the fight. Upon exiting the tent she finds her fellow Savages in ruins, most of them either running around lost and frantic or deathly ill from the Revel. Evie walks past a young woman vomiting wine into the mud, feeling for her, but in no fit state to play nursemaid to anyone, least of all herself.

She spies the older people gathered around a burning fire, awake, yet quiet and sullen. The rest of the camp ignores them.

Laython walks among the tents, throwing back flaps and shouting within.

“We muster in five minutes! Any one of you still sleeping I’ll butcher in their bedroll like a diseased piglet!”

The Elder Company is in no particular hurry. Lariat leads Bam and Mother Manai through the center of camp like a slow ceremonial procession, a junkyard triumph of the vagrant elite. They may be ragged and armed with weapons a B’ors tribesman would shun, but to watch them strut through the mud you would think they were Skrain field generals on the crest of a final, war-winning victory.