Tybalt was visibly disappointed, but he tried to hide it. At least that was how Mariella interpreted his rapid change of expressions after she gave him her semi-rejection.

  He always tries to be tough, Mariella thought, remembering how he had behaved after some members of the squad beat him to a pulp. So proud.

  It only made her like him more, observing his visceral reaction. The butterflies in her stomach fluttered wildly in sympathy with Tybalt.

  She had known she was attracted to him before his confession, somewhere in the back of her mind where the feelings could be safely walled off from her daily life. Attractive but off-limits. Dangerous. An inappropriate connection. Something—someone—to avoid thinking about.

  She’d been succeeding before they ran away from the squad.

  But now, alone with him, fighting for their lives together, her head was spinning. Her stomach kept doing little flips. Every sense was on edge. His masculine odor seemed to be all over her. She could still taste him on her lips.

  Yes, I feel the same way, she thought. I shouldn’t, though. Right? This isn’t… This isn’t how this is supposed to happen. Is it? For me? And it’s too soon—I mean, it can’t happen anytime, but—

  “All right,” he said softly. “I don’t think I understand, but all right. Maybe something we can sort out later, if we have the opportunity. I’m not going to keep us standing here talking about this. Our lives are in danger sitting in one place. I just needed to get it off my chest.” He pointed at the dead bodies one by one. “Let’s get those out of here, and then we can see about your injury.”

  “Get them out of here?” Mariella asked, frowning.

  “The beastfolk are going to come back to this place,” Tybalt replied. “Or look for this area, at least. They’ll want to recover their dead and find the killers. They’ll try to pick up our trail. We’re isolated from the squad, so from their point of view, we’re a good target. They wouldn’t want us to make it back to the group, because there’s safety in numbers. So they’ll hunt us, once they have more of a numerical advantage. At least, that's what I would do.

  “But this whole place looks the same from down here. Possibly from the top of the cliff too. So if we remove the dead bodies from view, they might have a harder time telling one part of the valley from another. That should delay them finding us. Since they don’t seem to be interested in negotiation right now, I think that’s our best card to play. We can think about our strategy a little more when we’re safer. I still believe trying to make common cause with the beastfolk is the right thing to do in the medium run, but…” He shook his head and looked annoyed. “We might even have to join back up with the squad if things keep playing out the way they are.”

  “I hope not,” Mariella found herself saying to her surprise. “I’m enjoying this.”

  Damn it, don’t be so forward! she chided herself. Not when you just said…

  Tybalt raised an eyebrow. “Aside from the arrow in your shoulder?”

  She let out a quiet laugh. “Yes, besides that.”

  “I’m glad to know you do like my company,” he said, giving her a thin smile.

  “More than I should,” she said before she could rein herself in. One of her hands clenched nervously at her side.

  Shut up!

  Mariella moved away quickly, aware of his gaze following her every step of the way, and went to grab the first corpse. He thankfully took a hint from her body language and did not ask follow-up questions. She sensed him move positions himself after a moment, his eyes no longer on her, and she felt a little weight lift off of her.

  I’m too honest for my own good, she thought. What’s got a hold of me? I gave him a perfectly decent rejection. He accepted it. Basically said he would give me space to figure myself out. Then I go and muddy the waters by brazenly flirting with him. Practically throwing myself in his lap! In a situation like this, I should just tell him that nothing can happen between us.

  But was that exactly true?

  As she scooped up the closest body, she tried not to think about it. They were in a survival situation. Considering whether Tybalt was a good match for her was so far from what she needed to be doing just then that it was almost comical. She had never been in such an objectively perilous position before in her life, and she was getting distracted with this. It was absolute idiocy!

  That was a nice kiss, though… She forcefully pushed the memory to the back of her mind. She didn’t want Tybalt to see her blush again that day. She was absolutely not trying to send him any signals she wasn’t willing to stand behind. I wish I could talk to Mom right now.

  “Where do you think we should go?” she asked. As she turned around, she saw that Tybalt had chivalrously taken both of the other bodies, carrying them one in each hand by the backs of their sackcloth shirts. From the way he stood, she could tell he wouldn’t be able to hold the weight of them for very long. He even had his spear tucked under one armpit. An obviously precarious position if ever she’d seen one.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  But the thought and effort he’d made to spare her having to try to use the arm on her wounded side meant something.

  With his chin, he pointed at a cave in the cliffside nearby.

  That place is probably good enough for the moment.

  They moved in silence for a few minutes, until they had maneuvered far enough into the cave that a beastfolk casually passing by would be unlikely to see them. Then Mariella was able to return her focus to the conversation that had been interrupted.

  “So, you have a class,” she said. A strange and almost implausible thought if she hadn’t seen him apply it herself.

  Tybalt nodded.

  “When did you awaken it?”

  “While we were out here,” he said after a moment.

  “You’re not thirteen.”

  Tybalt gave her an amused look as if he wanted to make a sarcastic remark. But he held it in and shook his head instead. “Unfortunately not. This would have solved a lot of problems for thirteen-year-old me.”

  “How exactly did it happen?”

  There were legends about people getting a class later in life, but only a few well known and verified methods, none of which could apply here. Going by the most fantastical legends, this Bonesaw class might be some kind of legendary power granted to one chosen personally by a deity.

  That probably wasn’t the case, of course, but it was an exciting thought.

  “I wish I understood it myself. When Baldwin healed me, I just woke up with a system announcement.” He threw his hands up. “I’ve been worried this whole time.”

  Kind of a lame chain of events. He gets attacked, he gets healed, and he just wakes up with a class. I guess that’s possible, though… The gods work in mysterious ways. Maybe they decided they needed Tybalt to be a little more powerful for some reason… It could even have been because they expected he would try to fight the corruption in our squad. Perhaps he was hand-picked by Vika or Astara to enact justice in their names.

  Something he had said suddenly struck her.

  “Wait, why were you worried? This is amazing news! When you’re raised to an officer rank, which is what should happen after a little extra training now that you’ve awakened a class, your… your social position is going to change drastically, um, for the better.”

  She was fortunate that they were in the near darkness of the cave, because she found herself blushing again and stumbling over her words a little. There was more between the lines there than just being happy for Tybalt. But he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I guess,” Tybalt said. “If my class isn’t considered some kind of blasphemy against the gods or a dangerous variant or something. I know it’s really unusual that I didn’t get it at thirteen.”

  It was true that the Divine Trust—the anti-heresy authorities that roamed the land searching for and destroying evil—sometimes pursued and executed people who had misused their class skills. Beast tamer skills, for instance, could be turned to taming and controlling savage monsters instead of normal animals. Where that happened, the tamer’s personal power grew, but inevitably, their pet beasts would want to feed on human flesh. So the Trust stepped in.

  But Mariella couldn’t think of a reason why Tybalt’s class itself would be considered blasphemous. Classes were granted by the gods, whether directly to a worthy recipient or, more commonly, through divinely favored bloodlines. That was the basis for much of the world’s order. Most noble houses and rulers had classes in their blood, even if dormant for a generation or two. A class that went against the gods was almost a contradiction in terms.

  Unless the class was granted by an evil god or somehow created by a pact with a demon. There were such legends.

  “You’re not just lying to me, right?” she asked, her blush fading. “You didn’t get it some other way? You’re not leaving out some epic story?” She tried to keep the smile on her face, but she felt a tiny twinge of concern.

  The idea that Tybalt just woke up with these new powers felt more sudden and accidental—perhaps even contrived—now that she had remembered the existence of the Divine Trust.

  He looked her straight in the eyes and held her gaze for a long few seconds. “If I lied to you, Mariella, it would be about something important to my survival. Not something small. After what we’ve been through together, I wouldn’t do it lightly. Only for a truly good reason.”

  That’s not a ‘no,’ exactly, she noted.

  But she nodded. “All right. I believe you.”

  Honestly, I want to believe you, even though I’ve never heard of something like this happening, Mariella thought.

  “Is Bonesaw not the class that runs in your family—your father’s family?” she asked.

  Tybalt shook his head again. “Nature mage. Maybe if I’d had this back then, though, my father would have taken more of an interest.”

  Mariella had heard of a few noble houses with that class. It wasn't especially rare, in part because the noble families who inherited such a useful power found it easy to make marriage alliances with the many others who wanted more fertile lands.

  So, he’s not even just some kind of a late bloomer…

  Mariella frowned as the latter part of Tybalt’s statement hit her. She knew the vague outline of Tybalt’s background. But she didn’t know any of the details. She had never fraternized much with the enlisted, after all. She guessed this was a sensitive subject. Volusia had said something once that implied Tybalt was unwanted by his family. Maybe that was just the Commander being irrationally vicious toward Tybalt, but it was probably connected to something in Tybalt’s actual life story.

  “If you want, we can talk about that a little,” she said, placing her good hand on his shoulder. “You can tell me more about your life before, I mean. We don’t have to just talk about the next steps in our plan for dealing with the beastfolk and the squad.”

  Her heart beat a little bit faster as she spoke. She knew she was getting more personal, and she thought it was probably a mistake, but it was one that she found it difficult to avoid. Tybalt had become fascinating over the last few days, and never more so than he was just then.

  “Let’s… shift the bodies back further into the cave, and then I’ll take a look at your arrow wound,” he said.

  Mariella decided not to press the matter for the moment. She just nodded, and they walked together into the darkness.

  Patreon! Ahem, me... follow me, why are you looking at that other girl?!

  Patreon, too, but... ugh!