Scratch had never smelled exotic flowers or sat atop the edge of the world. She had spent her life in the Royal City. There had been a few expeditions—accompanying the King to the Hillen Lands or guarding a noble on a political expedition to Crather’s Keep—but those had hardly been remarkable. She had taken the King’s Road there and the King’s Road back. Most of her experience had been stomping, her only view the inside of her helm.

She didn’t even remember the Tangled Lakes. Her mother had taken her to the Royal City when Scratch was only a baby. She often thought about going back, dipping her toes in the lakes she knew only from her mother’s stories. But within that twined a thorny vine of apprehension. She had been called a Lakes girl her whole life. What if she went there and found out she . . . wasn’t? That being raised elsewhere made her something different, something even more singular?

And then there were the Western Wilds. Her mouth ran dry, remembering. “They live in trees,” she had told the commanders. Homes up high with bridges between them, wooden grins with slats like teeth. Clotheslines and pulleys strung between branches. Children nestled in hammocks like pupating caterpillars. A whole world above the ground.

Octagon had been an oversimplification. The real term was octagonal prism. Soldiers pointed out, then up, then further up still to catch fighters as they fell. Lines that weren’t lines, but angles, shapes. Soldiers in graduated groups, their bodies forming honeycombs, leaving room for the Westerners’ spears to catch only air. Climbers with daggers in their teeth and boots, clad in leather armor for close treetop combat that the Western spear fighters would never expect.

“Scratch?” Brella was peering at her. The sunlight filtered through the trees and onto her freckles, two overlaid patterns of dappling. “Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere,” she answered, and they walked on in silence.

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

When evening fell, they stopped in a clearing conveniently located by a small trickling stream. Wildflowers burst in bunches all around, tiny clumps of pinks and yellows and purples smiling up from the roots of trees and the edge of the water. Scratch watched as a small brown rabbit hopped through the glen, briefly stopping its course to munch on a flower before darting away.

She scowled. “It’s like a children’s story, James.”

“Be nice.” He gifted her a light slap on the arm before joining Vel on his quest to find fallen twigs to serve as firewood.