With an effort, Valyn turned his attention to the task before him. The latrine had to look right, or Adare would refuse it, and so for the next hour he dug furiously, tamping down the earth around the hole, piling the stones neatly to the side, then arranging the elaborate wooden seat over the hole. The seat weighed half as much as Valyn himself. It was a ludicrous thing to bring on a campaign, and yet there it was, a concession to the tenderness of Adare’s royal behind.

As he settled it in place, it occurred to him just how different their two experiences of the world must have been. While Valyn and Kaden had followed divergent paths, both of them had been trained, tested, and tempered by people and institutions utterly indifferent to their birth. Adare, on the other hand, quite obviously lived the pampered life of Annurian nobility. The thought kindled an unexpected anger inside him—he had seen his friends murdered, been forced, himself, to murder and treachery, all in service of the empire, all to avenge his father and protect his brother. Meanwhile, what had Adare been doing? Lounging in a private pavilion while footsore soldiers dug her privy.

He’d expected her to help change the newly imposed order, and suddenly it turned out that she was the newly imposed fucking order. It was even possible, he realized, a chill prickling his skin, that she’d been a part of the original plot. The sister he remembered from growing up hadn’t seemed the scheming, murderous sort, but then, change had come for them all.

He shoved aside his suspicions and misgivings. There was no point speculating when he’d have the information that he needed within a few hours. He stowed the shovel at the base of one of the tent walls, then checked over the space a final time. He couldn’t be sure exactly how it was supposed to look, but there weren’t too many moving pieces to arrange. If he’d missed a detail, the blame would land on the soldiers he had relieved.