Before panic could seize her, the carriage stopped.
“Shit.” Touraine stuffed her arm back in her coat and hid the bandage in her pocket just as a footman opened the door. She tried to pull herself together. If she fucked up this chance to catch the Balladairans’ attention, she wouldn’t get another one.
But even as the footman—a footman!—led her from the carriage to the governor’s house, the back of her mind spun in a panic over this new secret.
There’d been nothing but a thin line of blood on the wrap, and a thin silver scar across her skin.
It had already healed.
CHAPTER 3
THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL
Princess Luca! It is my absolute pleasure to welcome you to my home and to Qazāl.”
At the sound of her name, Luca Ancier startled in her carriage. The door had been thrown open, and a pale, round Balladairan woman with gray-streaked chestnut hair grinned at her from the ground. Luca had arrived, then, at Lord Governor Cheminade’s home.
It was a short trip from Luca’s town house in the Balladairan Quartier to the governor-general’s, but it felt even shorter.
Luca had been thinking of the hanging. How hot the sun had been. How the sky had darkened in the distance as clouds of sand threatened to engulf the city. How the old man had cried out at the last and the young woman had twitched for long seconds after—Luca didn’t know how long, because she hadn’t the stomach to watch.
Like the heat, the old man’s voice had followed her into her own town house and up to her study as she unpacked her books and placed them on the empty shelves that were waiting for her.
They were the rebels she had come to stop. Them, and men and women like them, perhaps hidden in the crowd. And when she stopped the rebellion and eased the unrest in the colony’s capital city, she could show her uncle that she had the skill to rule. She would claim the throne that was her right.
The governor-general herself handed Luca down from the carriage. Luca saw the woman glance at her leg, but it seemed less boorish curiosity and more careful concern. Luca warmed slightly toward the woman.
When Luca had both feet and her cane on sturdy ground, Lord Governor Cheminade bowed deeply. “Your Highness. It is a pleasure to meet you. Your father always spoke proudly of you when you were a child. You’ve grown into a striking young woman. My household is at your service, as am I.”
At first, Luca was put off by the effusiveness, preparing to fend off the first sycophant. At the mention of her father, she checked the impulse. Of course Cheminade would have known her father. She’d been the governor-general of the Shālan colonies for almost fifty years, as long as Balladaire had called the broken Shālan Empire her colonies. Cheminade would have spoken to her father regularly, surely. Something like jealousy bred with hopeful longing in her chest.
Most importantly, that might make Cheminade an ally as Luca worked to challenge her uncle Nicolas for her throne. First, however, she would calm the unrest in the colony.
“Thank you, Lord Governor. It’s likewise a pleasure.” Luca bowed her head in return.
The governor’s smile reached into full cheeks, plump and still touched pink by the sun. Her eyes crinkled with pleasure. “Come, come. You must be famished. I know a thing or two about ship food. That’s why I haven’t gone back home all these years.” She wrinkled her nose distastefully, then laughed.
She beckoned Luca to follow her into the house, and Gillett, the captain of the royal guard, fell in behind Cheminade. Luca’s two other guards brought up the rear. Her constant shadows.
Cheminade kept talking as she led the princess into the town house, but Luca lost the conversation entirely as she gaped around the woman’s home.
Luca was not a person to be surprised by finery, but Cheminade’s home was cluttered with the bounty of a life of exploration. A massive lion pelt nailed to the sitting room wall greeted her first. The maned head was still attached, the darker ruff sticking out stiffly at all angles, its eye sockets empty and mouth gaping to show yellowed teeth almost as long as her fingers. Shelves lined the walls, and they were crammed with trinkets of gold and silver: creatures that looked human aside from an abundance of limbs or the rears of beasts, long-spouted oil lamps, intricately patterned cups and plates—and even a small skull that Luca hoped had belonged to a monkey.
She reached out a hand to stroke the lion pelt as they passed it, and Cheminade paused the stream of her chatter.
The governor ruffled the lion’s mane casually, but her smile held the tilt of pride. “A gift from the wild tribes that roam the desert. They’re sovereign, never did bow to the Shālan emperors. They wouldn’t abandon their god, as one of their leaders explained to me. Call themselves the Many-Legged, for the animals they worship, you see.”