“Oh, they are that. I promise you. You’ll be glad of ’em on the field.”

“But if they’re that good, why waste them in the Savage Legion?”

Spud-Bar shrugs. “Never could tame ’em, I suppose. Oh, we conquered ’em right good. Took their land, what little they had that wasn’t land. Killed ’em by the thousands. But the B’ors wouldn’t be slaves or conscripts. They’d rather die, to a man, given the choice. So they send a few of ’em here now and again. Though they’re always careful not to give any one fighting force too many from a B’ors tribe.”

“Afraid they’d try to take over?” Evie asks.

“Oh, deathly certain of it,” Spud-Bar answers, definitively.

Laython’s voice cuts through. “You all have one minute… exactly one mother-lovin’ minute… to muster at the ready, or I’ll leave you where you stand, only in more pieces than I find you!”

Evie takes a deep breath, exhaling what feels like ice. She realizes she doesn’t want to leave Spud-Bar. She feels the safest she’s felt since being carted from the Capitol when she’s near the armorist. Spud-Bar is like a tether in a snowstorm.

“I got no advice worth givin’ ya,” Spud-Bar says, seeing the hesitation in Evie. “Alls I can say is, whether you live or die is up to you. If you want it bad enough out there on the field, you’ll live. If you give up, even for a second, well, I’ll have to forge myself a new dagger.”

Evie smiles, just a little. “That sounds like worthwhile advice to me.”

Spud-Bar shifts uncomfortably. “Yeah, well…”

“Thank you,” Evie says quickly. “For the dagger.”

“No worries. Any soul who appreciates good steel, y’know?”

Evie nods, and they leave it at that, no further good-byes or well-wishes.

She musters with the rest at the edge of camp, Laython riding large circles around them astride a giant beast of a horse, corralling them.

“Dyin’ time, children!” he calls to them when he’s certain their full force is massed. “Let’s go meet your executioners!”

The Savages don’t march, but rather shuffle in a loose formation. Surrounded by taskers and with Laython leading them, they slouch off to meet their fate.

Evie sees them arriving just as the Savages are funneled out of camp: the Skrain, resplendent in their iron scales of armor, the Crachian ant painted on the breast. Their mounted riders carry poleaxes with sweeping three-foot blades. Their foot soldiers march in perfect formation, gauntleted fists toting horse-cutter spears. All of them carry curved swords of the finest steel sheathed from their hips.

Before she turns away, looking to the field ahead, Evie’s final thought is how she’d give her left hand for just one of the Skrain’s weapons.