Touraine knocked on Cantic’s beautiful, forest-themed door.
“Come in,” came Cantic’s muffled voice.
The general was alone, smoking a cigarette, the air clouded and smelling like smoke. It reminded Touraine of Pruett, and that, in turn, reminded Touraine why she was there. Touraine closed the door behind her.
“Good morning, General. Do you have a moment?”
The older woman’s hair was out of its usual tail and hung messily around her shoulders. Cantic raked her empty hand through it before settling her gaze on Touraine. “You sound genteel, but you look like you’ve taken up pit fighting. What are you doing here?”
Touraine ducked her head, but it couldn’t hide the bruising. “Her Highness is seeing to governor’s paperwork,” she lied.
“I see.” Cantic took another drag from her cigarette and didn’t look away. She was drawing Touraine out, waiting for her to fall into the silence. It worked.
“Sir, if you had to choose between the good of the empire and your soldiers, how would you?”
Cantic propped her elbows on the desk. Now she was listening.
“That’s a complicated question, Touraine,” she said in that same smoke-scratched voice Touraine knew from childhood. “When you get to where I am, the only thing that matters is the empire. I can’t keep an accounting of individual soldiers. However, you don’t get to where I am without your soldiers. Why do you ask?”
And Balladaire would be nowhere without its Sands.
“My old soldiers. We’ve fought for Qazāl a long time, sir. Our whole lives.”
“Well, no, some of that time was spent educating you to a civilized standard.” Cantic smiled. “We didn’t send you out fighting at ten years old.”
Touraine forced herself to smile back, but inside, she felt her resolve crumbling. Never mind. She would take her own citizenship, her own wages, and wait for Luca to give the Sands what they deserved. Those who survived the battles to come—and they would come. Touraine had no doubt that the rebels and their guns would only be the beginning. She wanted to have hope, like Luca did. She wanted peace to be around the corner.
A good leader was supposed to make contingency plans for her soldiers, and yet here she was. Letting them down. For a greater, eventual good.
“Touraine, let me offer you this piece of advice.” Cantic stubbed the butt of her cigarette into a tin tray already littered with the corpses of previous smokes. She pushed up her sleeves, revealing age-spotted forearms still ropy with muscle. “You’ve always been an exceptional conscript. As I said before, I’m glad the princess found a use for you. It would have been a shame to lose your potential so early.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You and I understand practical considerations of war. We’ve lived it. Bled for it. Her Highness is brilliant, but her hopes and ideas have no place here. They belong back home, in La Chaise. You can’t plan a campaign based on the ‘hope’ that an enemy won’t shoot you in the back. That’s why it’s best that the duke regent hold the throne a little longer. We’ll get her ready, but I don’t want you to fall into her pretty words. People like you and me have to remind people like her the difference between what’s important and what’s possible.”
Touraine felt the blood rush from her face. She had been thinking the same thing. Even though it made her heart sick to think it, Cantic’s words made sense. Luca’s belief in an easily settled peace after a quick exchange of a few guns for the promise of magic, her assumption that she could control any and all of the consequences from this one deal, made her seem naive at best, arrogant at worst, drunk with self-confidence.
Touraine felt light-headed.
“Thank you, sir. That’s good advice, sir.” Touraine ducked her head again.
And then Touraine had hesitated, glancing back toward the closed door. Toward the room where Luca had been fervently planning on these hopes and dreams. “Sir?” she’d said. “There’s just one more thing.”
Clutching the papers—the freedom—Luca had given her as they trundled to the Old Medina to sign a deal with the rebels, Touraine wondered if she had just made a terrible mistake.
Luca would never forgive her if she found out what Touraine had just done. Touraine held the crisp documents tighter and consoled herself with one simple thought: when the rebels found out that Touraine had broken their deal, they wouldn’t have the guns to fight back.
The Sands would be safe. For now.