He led her to a larger tent, set up with tables and chairs as though someone intended to hold a dinner in the middle of a war.
"What do you want?" Averifa said. "I need to rest before the fight."
Ignoring the complaint entirely, Ares set a glass of water on the table in front of her.
"Drink it."
His expression was perfectly serious.
Averifa looked at the glass. Then she looked at him. Her mind was already moving fast, running through everything a man might want a woman to swallow on the eve of a major battle.
"What is it?"
"A tranquilizer," he said calmly. "Standard issue. Essential medicine for soldiers heading into battle." He nodded at it. "The field is a brutal place. There are men who can't hold the pressure and lose their minds out there. It happens more often than the songs mention."
She understood the grim logic of it perfectly well. She refused anyway.
"I don't need it."
"Don't act tough," Ares said. "Bravado has fatal consequences in a real war."
That struck a nerve, and the nerve was an old one.
"I'm not pretending," she snapped. "I've seen enough combat to know my own limits, thank you."
To make the point unmistakable she swept her arm across the table and knocked the glass off it. It hit the ground and the water went across the tent floor in a long dark stain.
Ares stared at the spill, genuinely stunned.
"I never intended to insult you," he said quietly.
"Then what did you intend?" she demanded. "What is this really about?"
And for the first time in either of her lives, Averifa watched Ares become flustered.
"I offered it," he said, "because I was worried about you."
The words emptied her head completely.
This man. The source of every misery in her first life, the man who had promised to end her and the child she carried and then done it, standing in a tent at dawn admitting he was concerned for her safety. She could not make the thought hold its shape. It simply would not fit anywhere inside her.
Overwhelmed, she turned to go.
He reached out to stop her, and she pulled her hand back before he could touch it — instinct, faster than thought.
She paused at the tent flap.
"Don't get the wrong idea," she said, and there was a sharp edge on it. "I'm not fragile. I don't need your pity. That's your little lover's department, not mine."
Then she was gone, and he was alone with the spilled water.
The sun came up, and personal things stopped mattering.
The army gathered on the field with its resolve set. For the pride of the empire, they would not lose this.
At the front of it, Ares raised his sword to the sky and gave a single command.
"Wipe out the enemy."
His soldiers answered with a roar that shook the ground, and the whole line went forward, their weapons glinting under the rising sun.
From a nearby hill, Averifa took her position and watched the two armies come together. Then she drew her bow, calmly, and gathered her power down into a single arrow until the shaft of it burned.
"Sacred arrows," she said. "Fly high."
She loosed it straight up.
At the top of its arc the arrow multiplied — split and split again into a blinding volley of light that came down over the enemy lines like rain, and where it landed there was chaos.
On the ground, Ares unleashed his own power. A wave of chilling ice surged out from his hands and froze whole groups of Strald soldiers solid where they stood, mid-charge, mid-shout.
The combined assault was overwhelming. With Averifa's support falling from above and Ares dominating the front, the tide of the battle turned decisively in their favor within the hour.
Then, in the middle of the chaos, a soldier in a Nozenleaf army uniform came up the hill toward her.
She saw the uniform and let her guard down. It was one second. It was a fatal one.
He lunged, and Averifa was caught completely off guard.
She went down onto the grass, stunned, the sky sliding sideways above her, and her last conscious thought was a shock colder than any wound.
There was a traitor among them.
Sometime later she came slowly back to herself.
She was not on the dusty hillside any more. She was in a dark room she had never seen before, and her hands were bound tightly behind her back.
She had been captured.
Footsteps came toward her across the floor.
"So you're awake."
A hand closed in her hair and hauled her up, and her captor put his face where she could see it. He was scarred, and he was grinning like a man who had already won.
She knew him. Every noble in Winstein had been shown that face by now.
Siwalt Grande. Emperor of the Strald Empire, and the man leading the war against them.