“No,” Touraine laughed, the edge of the dark still there. Yes. “I thought about what you said, though. You’re wrong. About Balladaire. They’re going to come for us, and they’re going to come hard. Waiting a week to prepare will mean the difference between saving anyone who isn’t fighting and throwing them all on Balladaire’s mercy. I know Balladairan mercy. It doesn’t last long.”
Jaghotai pushed herself up to sitting.
Touraine continued. “They’ll threaten you. They’re going to come for the children, the way they came for us. The last time that happened, they broke you.”
Jaghotai made a noise of protest, but Touraine cut her off with a gesture. The water had washed the fog from her mind. She could see the pieces they needed to move. It was the endgame, and there were few ways to win but a hundred ways to lose. She was done negotiating, done trusting Luca. And unlike Luca, Touraine knew battles. She knew blood and she knew soldiers under fire. She knew what it was to have faith not in power, but in the person fighting beside you. Luca didn’t have that.
She could see something else, too. She didn’t want Balladairan respect. Not after this. Maybe she had been a dog all this time, but she was ready to bite back.
“Cantic only knew about half of the gun shipment. We can move them in the dark, hide them out here, distribute them. Set people to stockpiling water, hiding it, rationing it. We’ll tighten the food rations.”
“We have more guns?” Jaghotai whispered slowly, as if saying the fact aloud would make it not true.
Touraine nodded, smiling briefly before sobering. “What about the terms of surrender? If it comes to that?” Which it probably would. She wasn’t naive about their odds.
“You mean under what conditions we’ll surrender the city?” Jaghotai sucked her teeth and breathed slowly, taking in the empty tent and the movement outside—their people, still buzzing like a kicked hive. She smiled back. “None.”
CHAPTER 36
REPARATIONS
We need to launch an offensive,” Beau-Sang said, slamming his fist on the war room’s wooden table.
Luca, the governor, and the military’s senior officers sat in the planning room where Touraine’s court-martial had been held months ago. Today, the table sat in the center of the room again, with all the puffed-up Balladairan dignitaries crowded around it, trying to figure out what to do with the seething city that had imploded almost a week ago.
Colonel Taurvide, still just as thick in his head as he’d been before, agreed vehemently with Beau-Sang. “They’re weak. Crush them now and we can crush them for good.”
“What do you call burning their homes, looting their shops, and destroying their temple?” snapped Luca. She shot the colonel a dirty look. The general maintained that none of the destruction was under her orders, but it was her soldiers—and Taurvide’s, but ultimately Cantic’s—who had escalated the riots instead of stopping them.
Gil was right. Luca didn’t want to be this kind of queen. She wanted power, yes, respect, absolutely—but her stomach turned whenever she thought of the smoking ruins of the Grand Temple’s beautiful domes. The Rule of Rule said that a feared ruler had all the means to be a great ruler. Yverte would probably agree with Beau-Sang and Taurvide if he were still alive. If Luca didn’t get the city in hand, she would never get to be a ruler, great or otherwise. She couldn’t help thinking about the two cuts on her arm. The second one was scabbed over, the flesh tender.
“There must be another way,” she reiterated.
On Luca’s right, Cantic made a frustrated sound low in her throat. “We can’t tell who a rebel is by looking at them. They don’t wear uniforms, and this isn’t an open battlefield. Anyone could be plotting against us.”
“So we round them up and make an example,” Taurvide said. He knocked on the wood with thick, hairy knuckles. “It worked with my Sands.”
“And it worked in the quarries,” Beau-Sang added. “It will work now. We’ll show them that anyone can be punished, so everyone must behave. Then they’ll police themselves.”
Luca shivered at the cruelty, but Beau-Sang had a point. The Qazāli could be frightened out of joining the rebels. A large enough swath of “examples,” and Qazāli civilians would fall over themselves to turn in suspicious neighbors, if only to protect themselves. They would be cowed. For now. Eventually, though, they would rise above the fear to fight again, and Luca would still have to live with a massacre on her conscience.