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 general’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?”