by C. L. Clark
Gil nodded grimly. He twitched the curtain of the carriage window sharply to peek outside. “Blackcoats and Sands. Cantic isn’t happy. What did the rebels do?”
The rebels hadn’t done anything. Unless they were planning something and Cantic’s own sources had gotten wind of it. Nothing would require this level of force, though. The rebels didn’t even have weapons, not yet—no. Cantic couldn’t know about the guns. Luca had kept that secret between her and Touraine alone. She hadn’t even told Gil.
Perhaps it was time for him to know her dashed hopes in full.
Luca took a deep breath to steel herself. “They made a deal with me. Not just for workers’ agreements and land ownership. They wanted guns. I said I would give them some if and only if they gave us magic.”
Now she didn’t even have the incriminating papers. They were lost in the smoking den for anyone to find and throw at her uncle’s feet.
Gil’s face was implacable. The concrete of it held no softness at all. “Luca. Luca, my dear, what have you done?”
So quickly, she was a desperate teenager again, trying to lift a sword too heavy for her strength. Mastering Qazāl was outside of her strength. The thought was a thorny vine curled tight around her chest and pricking at the thought that rested always at her core: that ruling Balladaire was also outside of her strength. And if that was true, then who was she?
She willed the cold walls to slam into place. She dug at the resentment she tried to keep buried and let it color her voice, too. Anger was better than this fear that made her want to hide in her rooms and weep. Anything was better than watching her work crumble around her.
“This would have worked, Gil,” Luca whispered. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Now they’ll never trust me again.”
“Your father—” He dropped the sentence with a sigh.
Always her father with him. With her, as well. Balladaire had no religion, but she worshipped a dead man whose image she held in her mind, distorted and blurry with time and bolstered with imagination. It wasn’t just his image she had distorted and reinforced with her own visions.
Luca looked out the window again. They were in the New Medina, and the streets were almost peaceful, as if the Old Medina wall were a border between two nations. Perhaps it was. It was only almost peaceful, though, because the quiet was a brittle sort—the silence of held breaths and hands clasped over mouths.
She reached for the screen again, daring Gil to stop her. “To the compound, please. Not the Quartier.” She closed the screen again and settled back. “I’m going to speak to the general.”
Touraine had gotten top marks on the military written tests as a child in Balladaire. She knew the statutes and the drill formations. She’d learned unwritten rules, too, the instincts that kept you alive.
The first of the unwritten rules that she broke was feeling relief as Sands crowded that narrow street. Relief meant you’d let your guard down. But what else were you supposed to feel when the soldiers who’d had your back for years found you with your back against a wall?
And then Tibeau swung at her with his baton. She held her empty hand out.
“Tibeau! It’s me, you fucker!” Pulled her scarf down. “There are civilians inside. Help me.”
Blackcoats and Sands scattered up and down this street and the next, and finally—finally!—Jaghotai’s fighters were cartwheeling in with their flying kicks to defend their own people.
Tibeau pulled back his next blow in confusion. “You’re a rebel.”
“Not exactly. We can talk later.”
“This is treason.”
She held his eyes, warm and brown. What she had done was treason, in so, so many ways.
There was a reason Djasha called Cantic the Blood General. What brutal efficiency. She would get the guns back, yes, and any rebels in the nearby districts. And any kid who looked likely to fight back in the next five years. She would terrorize innocent civilians into giving up their neighbors. Touraine knew better than most the bargains you could strike to spare what was dearest to you.
Maybe this would be enough. Cantic would crush the rebellion. Scare the whole colony into submission. Save Touraine’s soldiers from one enemy, at least.
And yet here she was, fighting for the other side. Because it wasn’t supposed to happen like this, she thought. The civilians were supposed to be safe. There wasn’t supposed to be blood.
“I know,” she said.
Tibeau nodded, his grin quick and troubled. “Treason it is.”
“Excellent. Let’s help.”
The city was in chaos now. Young Qazāli had begun fighting back against the blackcoats and the Sands, some of them doing the peculiar kicking dance that Jaghotai had done the night before.
Touraine pointed to a pair of blackcoats dragging a kicking Qazāli man. They stole up behind them, Touraine with her knife and Tibeau with his baton. The thud on the blackcoat’s skull made Touraine shudder, even as she knifed her own blackcoat in the ribs.
Then Tibeau seized up, yelling in pain. The choking gurgle of his blood in his mouth was louder than it had any right to be. The blood trickled into the shadow of his beard. So late in the day for him to be unshaven. Maybe he’d had the day off and he hadn’t planned on leaving the guardhouse at all.
Touraine hit the new blackcoat in two steps, barreled him to the ground. His bayonet slid from Tibeau’s guts, flung Tibeau’s blood on her. His blood. Her knife underneath her, between her and the blackcoat, in his guts, now his blood. Tibeau behind her. She didn’t look back. She had seen that glassy look too many times before.
Pruett, sprinting out of nowhere to his side, musket held like a quarterstaff in front of her, bayonet bloody. Whose blood?
Blood everywhere.
Touraine lurched over. “Is he—”
“Fuck off.” Pruett shouldered her away, but Touraine shoved back and knelt beside him. Stupid to stop without cover, to sit here and wait to get shot in the head, to let him stop—
“Beau.” Pruett pushed his hair back from his forehead, cupped his cheek. She flicked his eyelids up.
Pruett pulled his jacket open and swore. A great red slit in his belly. His slick, pale guts slopped over the edge. Split with a smell like shit. Touraine’s gorge rose, and she focused back on his face. Sky above, please—
The next unwritten rule she broke was never stop moving. Even if you’re hiding, you can’t stay in one bunk forever. Someone will find you, catch you, kill you. A soldier dies when she stops. Never stop. Move. Move, Tibeau. Move.
“This is your sky-falling fault, you bastard.” Pruett cast a furtive look around while she wrapped his jacket closed. Like it could stop the blood pulsing out of his stomach. It had already drenched their hands.
“No,” Touraine said. “The blackcoat—”
Sky above and earth below. She looked up, swaying, suddenly unsteady.
Who should be watching her but Rogan, captain of the Balladairan Colonial Brigade, Rose Company, pistol leveled right at her. She didn’t have time to draw a breath before the punch of the musket ball in her chest.
It hurt. Even more than the whips. Pain all over her chest and spreading down to her hip. Even the fabric of her clothes hurt.
She reached for Pruett. “Help me, will you?” she thought she said.
Pruett grabbed her hand. Touraine tried to pull herself steady. Instead, Pruett yanked her forward and slammed a baton into her jaw. Touraine collapsed, her knife clattering away.
She couldn’t see anything through the pain. Her ears rang, but she heard Pruett whisper, “That’s for Tibeau.” Then she jabbed something into Touraine’s body right where she’d been shot.
Touraine screamed in multiplied agony, wrenching her already twisted jaw.
“And that is for the fucking princess. Bastard.”
And then Touraine felt nothing at all.
“General Cantic, what under the sky above is the meaning of this?”
Luca stormed into the ge
neral’s office, flinging open the ornate door with all the force of the anger and the blame she had stoked in the carriage.
The room was stifling with the smell of tobacco smoke, and a haze clouded everything. The burst of air from Luca’s entrance swirled it in visible eddies.
Cantic stood at the window in a frozen tableau of startled outrage. She had likely been lost in thought, perhaps even thought of the mess she’d brought on Luca’s city. She held a cigarette, and her gold left sleeve shone as she held the cigarette halfway to her lips. Half-turned toward the door. Mouth wide to curse the intruder.
And then Cantic wound it all up tight to face Luca with a curt bow.
“What do you mean, Your Highness?” The other woman’s voice was hoarse.
For more than two months, Luca had painstakingly built a relationship with the rebels in her colony. For more than two months, she had held hostilities at bay with gifts and an emissary with Qazāli blood. She had come within a hairbreadth of stopping them, maybe for good! And to getting the Shālan magic. This close to not one goal, but two—two! The two things Balladaire needed most from these colonies, and Luca would have been the one to get them. Cantic had ruined it.
“You would rather coat your hands in blood than accept that peace can come without your army. Is that it? Are you afraid you’ll become old and obsolete if you’re not murdering? Is that why you and Cheminade didn’t get along, General?”
The general wasn’t wearing her tricorne, and her hair was pulled back tight in a white-streaked tail. Her dour expression was uncannily similar to the first broadside drawing that Luca had seen. The only thing missing was the ink-as-blood dripping down her fingers.
Cantic pinched out the burning flare of her cigarette with bare fingers.
“Your Highness, I only thought about your safety and that of the citizens. I had information—”
“My safety? You jeopardized my safety! I was in the city, my city, when your soldiers went marauding door-to-door and terrifying my subjects. What if someone had been able to capture me in retaliation?” As Jaghotai would have, if not for Touraine.
Cantic nodded acceptance. “I apologize, Your Highness. That’s yet another reason I think it would be prudent if you remained in the Quartier.”
“My guards would be enough if they didn’t need to protect me in a war zone. Is this how you handled Masridān? The Brigāni? No wonder we have rebels. My father would be ashamed.” Or maybe he wouldn’t. The truth wasn’t the point. She paused for a breath, half weighing the next words before throwing them out, as well. “I’m sure your family would be, too.”
“Luca!” shouted Gil, so surprised that he overstepped his public bounds.
Luca waited for the words to have a visible effect on the other woman, but there was nothing. Somehow, she was immune to the worst Luca had to offer, and that added reckless heat to Luca’s anger. She took a breath to try something else, but Cantic spoke softly, her voice the hush of waves on sand.
“Perhaps, Your Highness. Perhaps. But never forget—the blood on my hands coats yours as well. Everyone who has ever died at my order has died for the empire. For King Roland. For you. When you sit upon that throne and not before that, I will accept your judgment. Until then, I’m going to hold your colony together, because you don’t seem to understand what that takes.”
It was so silent that surely all of them had stopped breathing, not just Luca. Surely time had stopped. Surely the world had stopped spinning? Even Gil’s lips hung parted beneath his gray mustache.
Cantic moved first. She went to rest her hands upon the desk, which was carved as immaculately as her door. Another forest scene, with rabbits and birds and deer. Easy to see even the leaves of the trees blowing in an unfelt wind. Easier than meeting Cantic’s eyes when the general looked up from the desk’s surface.
Luca thought of Guérin’s daughter, an apprentice carpenter now, in La Chaise. Guérin would be home soon.
“Maybe you’re right. I should just soak my hands in it, then.” Then, feeling it like the confession of a crime, Luca added, “Like my father.” She looked between Cantic and Gil. They stared back at her like statues, unblinking but ever judging, weighing her. Gil at least had a touch of warmth. She turned away from it.
“No, Your Highness.” Cantic curled her hands so that her knuckles rested on the table instead. “I wade through the shit and the blood so that you don’t have to. So that you can build something better from it. That is what our families wanted.”
Luca looked away, to escape the words without lowering her head. Through the window, she saw the bare dirt of the compound.
What good could come from blood and shit? Harvests, of course, with proper seed. What Balladaire was known for. Was it necessary, though? Like this?
Then the general cocked her head. “But, Your Highness—I don’t understand. What exactly did you plan to do when Lieuten—when Touraine told you the rebels had guns? Let them keep them? They would have used them on us, maybe even on the civilians to force our hand.”
“When Touraine told me—” Luca caught herself in time. In the back of her mind, the scholar in her extrapolated beyond the general’s words, finding motives and consequences all before the woman could find the breath to ask the question that the scholar already knew the answer to.
The call of orders and running boots outside of Cantic’s office came back in a too-loud rush. She reached unconsciously toward her ears, as if blocking the sound would block the unwanted knowledge. Touraine had told. Touraine was the leak.
“I’m sorry, General. I didn’t realize. I suppose that changes everything.”
Touraine fluttered into consciousness and immediately wished she could go back under again. So much pain. She groaned.
Pain shattered through her jaw. She wanted to scream, but animal instinct kept her jaw immobile. Dislocated, if not broken entirely. A throaty growl escaped.
Someone was carrying her. She swayed with the rock of a litter. A jostle as they met stairs and then the cool darkness of a building.
“Unghh.” Another ripple of pain and the too-loud grind of bone against bone. Broken, then.
“Ya, my teacher, ya, madame—” A man went on in Shālan. Touraine didn’t understand the rest. People were speaking Shālan everywhere. She caught only snippets of the most basic—
“Here!”
“No, there!”
More jostling. More groaning. Through the fog in her brain, her nose was attacked by smoke and spices.
“Touraine?” Djasha.
Touraine blinked her sticky eyes open enough to see the Apostate leaning over her. Beyond Djasha, a tall ceiling swirled and made Touraine dizzy enough to close her eyes again. She wished she were dead. Or at least unconscious.
“Touraine, can you hear me?”
Touraine tried to croak, without moving her mouth, “Not… Luca.”
“What?” Djasha switched to Shālan and yelled above the noise in the echoing hall.
There was only one place they could be. So many voices speaking over each other, shouting, chanting, praying in Shālan.
“Ya, Aranen!” Djasha’s shout made Touraine wince.
Above her, Djasha had a sharp conversation. Touraine recognized a few words—princess, it’s necessary, Shāl. Aranen’s voice came into focus, frustrated and exhausted. Finally—
“Fine, okay. Touraine, we’re going to move you one more time. We have—field doctors. They’re—”
Touraine opened her eyes enough to see Djasha exchange a long look with her wife. Aranen’s eyes were bloodshot and red rimmed.
“Touraine.” Aranen put her hand on Touraine’s sweaty forehead. “We’re going to do surgery. Shāl willing, all will be well.”
I don’t need false hope, she tried to say, but her jaw—sky-falling fuck! Tibeau! She lurched, climbing the other woman’s sleeve to sit up.
Aranen pushed her back down with surprising force—or maybe Touraine was just weak. Her torso was on fire. Her vision spun wit
h dizziness.
“Ti… veau… Ti… veau!” Touraine’s jaw wouldn’t form his name, no matter how hard she tried. Her face was wet with tears.
More Shālan above her:
“What?”
“I don’t know—come on.”
Someone held her down as she tried to sit up again. Moved her. Laid her on a stone. Tibeau was lying in the dirt in the street. Cold seeped into her skin. Into her chest.
Aranen took a knife to a makeshift bandage of dirty fabric—no, it was Touraine’s own clothing, her fine shirt from Luca thick with blood.
“Don’t die on me now, Mulāzim,” Aranen grumbled. She slipped between Balladairan and Shālan as she muttered and prepared for the surgery. Touraine couldn’t help thinking about Guérin, missing a leg. The guard would never fight again. She flexed her own hands and feet in panic, just to make sure she still could.
“If my scheming wife says we need you, then we need you. But this war… this cruelty!” Aranen’s voice broke, and she took a deep breath.
The room was heavy with incense and roasted meat.
The next time Aranen spoke, the quality of her voice had changed. Like a song, joined by a few other voices. Like the woman on the gallows. Then Aranen’s fingers plunged into Touraine’s wound and sent her back into blackness.
PART 3
REBELS
CHAPTER 26
A DUTY
When Touraine didn’t return to the Quartier, Luca went to look for her at the main guardhouse. That other woman met her at the door. Lieutenant Pruett.
When Luca asked for Touraine, she wasn’t prepared for the full-body visceral reaction the lieutenant gave, a great flinching, like something taut cut loose.
“Her body wasn’t recovered.” The lieutenant frowned, as if the news disappointed her. “Is there anything else? Your Highness?”
Luca caught herself on her cane, barely. “Her… body?”
The soldier edged back, warily. Suddenly, she was hesitant. “You didn’t know.”
“How?”
“She was shot.”
