Logan shifted from one foot to the other. “I hate it when you do that. You could’ve let me get to it in my own time. I was going to—hey, where do you think you’re going?”

Kylar kept walking. “You’re stalling.”

“All right. Just stop. I was just thinking that sometime we ought to pull out the old fisticuffs,” Logan said.

Fisticuffs. And people expected that someone so big to be dumb.

“You’d beat me black and blue,” Kylar said, smiling the lie. If they fought, Logan would ask questions. He’d wonder. It was unlikely, but he might even guess that it hadn’t truly been nine years since they’d last fought.

“You don’t think I’d win, do you?” Logan asked. Ever since Logan had been humiliated in the fight at the stadium, he’d gotten serious about training. He put in hours every day with the best non-Sa’kagé sword masters in the city.

“Every time we’ve fought you slaughtered me. I’m—”

“Every—? Once! And that was ten years ago!”

“Nine.”

“Regardless,” Logan said.

“If you caught me with one of those anvils you pass off as your fists, I’d never get up,” Kylar said. That was true enough.

“I’d be careful.”

“I’m no match for an ogre.” Something was wrong. Logan asked him to fight about once a year, but never so strenuously. Logan’s honor wouldn’t allow him to push a friend who’d made a decision clear, even if he didn’t understand why. “What’s this about, Logan? Why do you want to fight?”

Lord Gyre looked down and scratched his head. “Serah’s asked why we don’t spar with each other. She thinks it would be a good match. Not that she wants to see us get hurt, but . . .” Logan trailed off awkwardly.

But you can’t help but want to show off a little, Kylar thought. He said, “Speaking of good matches, when are you going to march to the headsman’s block and finally marry her?”

Ogre breathed a big sigh. All of his sighs were big, but this was a proportionally big sigh. It took a while. He grabbed a stable boy’s stool and sat on it, oblivious of his fine cloak dragging in the dirt.

“Actually, I spoke with Count Drake about that a couple days ago.”

“You did?” Kylar asked. “And?”

“He approves—”

“Congratulations! When’ll it be, you big about-to-be-un-bachelored bastard?”

Ogre stared at nothing. “But he’s worried.”

“Are you joking?”

Logan shook his head.

“But he’s known you since you were born. Your families are best friends. She’s marrying up in terms of title. Way up. You’ve got great prospects and you two have been practically betrothed for years. What can he possibly be worried about?”

Logan fixed his eyes on Kylar’s. “He said you’d know. Is she in love with you?”