Lieutenant Pruett bowed, just barely within propriety, stepped to the side, and stood at attention, staring into the middle distance. Luca wanted to slap her across the face. As she turned, however, Luca noticed the sheen on the other woman’s eyes and recognized the tension in her jaw. It was the look of someone trying very hard to keep a neutral face. Luca couldn’t help the irrational spike of jealousy—that Touraine should be hers alone to mourn. Stupid and cruel, of course, but then, everything inside her was twisting into something horrible.
“Your Highness.” The bitterness in the other woman’s voice made Luca slow to turn. The woman’s gray-blue eyes clouded over with the kind of rage that would sink ships on the open ocean.
“Yes?”
“Is hers the only body that matters to you?” Lieutenant Pruett’s breaking voice was the soft scrape of boots on sand. “Sky above knows we’ve got plenty more.”
Luca gripped her cane until pain flared sharp. The words were ambiguous, but there was insult enough in referencing both a sexual relationship with Touraine and the neglect of her army. She stepped to the woman, raked her up and down with the calculated condescension she’d learned from years protecting herself in the noble court. Took in the crisp uniform, the slight shoulders, the sharp eyes. She stepped closer.
“That bitch abandoned you. If she was half the commander she needed to be, maybe you’d have fewer bodies to scrape off of the sand. She was a traitor, and I gave her a second chance. I will not be that kind again.”
She fired her words to hit the woman’s vitals, and judging by the lieutenant’s bared snarl and clawed hands, she had aimed true. It was only later, after the rage had thawed, that Luca acknowledged the wound she’d given herself. She had trusted Touraine. And Cantic lauded the woman as a hero. It turned her stomach.
And yet she remembered the feeling of Touraine’s arms around her at least one hundred heart-stopping times a day.
And at least one hundred times a day, rage tried to start her heart beating again. So far, it had failed.
A gentle knock on Luca’s door cut through another nightmare. A variation on the theme she’d been sleeping to since the bazaar.
Smoke, choking the sky lit red—corpse fires. Her father riding into the flames, her mother dancing into them, and now Touraine falling into them. If she was lucky, she woke up then. If she wasn’t lucky, the fires leapt from their pyres and devoured the city while she ran too slowly to escape. She would feel the heat on her back, teeth of fire nipping at her heels, until finally, burning, she woke.
She was not lucky last night.
Another knock. She shoved the sweat-soaked sheets aside, repulsed by their damp. Her hair was stringy against her face, and she pulled it up into a hasty bun. A scattering of correspondence she’d neglected for a week fell from her bedside table: a letter from Sabine, a note from Cantic, all of it ignored after opening.
“Come in,” she said. Of course, that wasn’t what came out. She hadn’t spoken to anyone in days. It was a croak, an ugly whisper. She cleared her throat and kept it simple. “What?”
Gil opened the door. He took one look at her and came inside, closing the door behind him. “Luca.”
She held a hand up. “Don’t.” She wanted no sympathy or wisdom or pity. It would only be lemon in the wounds.
He inhaled sharply, gray eyebrows bunched together, but he exhaled without a word. Smart man.
“What did you want?” Luca asked hoarsely as she wrapped up in her robe.
“You have a visitor.”
She stopped with the robe half on. “No.”
She couldn’t. Even sitting upright was a heroic effort too great to bear. The thought of having to face someone else, someone who would want something from her that she couldn’t give—a presentable royal, for example—made her want to collapse onto the floor. She held on to her changing screen.
“Luca, it’s time to—”
“No, Gil.”
“Luca, you have to—”
“I can’t!” It came out a growl.
“Luca, it’s Paul-Sebastien. He won’t leave. He’s been standing outside the town house for an hour.”
Bastien. The man who shared her passion for research, for Shālan history. A minor noble, but well placed to help her cement important alliances with the other nobles in Qazāl. He knew the Qazāli and the Balladairans, understood the dance between the two factions of the city. He might even be able to help manage his father, the comte. A friend.