Maybe two of them, probably three. They hadn’t seen her yet. She had the element of surprise. She took a deep breath, gripped her long knife tighter, and sprinted around the corner. Poke them hard. Cut with the sharp side. Fast, fast, fast.
She hit the closest blackcoat point-first in the stomach. The blade swooped under the barrel of the blackcoat’s musket and disappeared. It came out through the soldier’s back. Touraine barreled through. Her momentum pinned a second blackcoat against the wall while the first one bled out between them. She anticipated the blow from the third blackcoat behind her and ducked. Her blood-coated knife came with her. The third assailant’s musket butt hit the first blackcoat’s corpse in the face, while Touraine slid her blade into his side. He fell to the ground.
Touraine turned back to the second blackcoat. The woman had lost her human shield, slumped in a heap at her feet. She held her side, where Touraine’s knife had nicked her through the first blackcoat’s body. Her other hand hung slack around a musket, fixed bayonet gleaming in the shadows.
“Please,” she whispered. Her lip trembled. Her dark eyes were wet with terror or pain.
And Touraine hesitated. This blackcoat wasn’t an officer. She hadn’t given the order to kill anyone outside a cell. But she was a part of this, and she had never stopped it. She was Balladaire’s pawn.
So were you.
“Get out,” Touraine growled in disgust that was half directed at herself. “And don’t come back.”
The blackcoat nodded and started to run.
“Leave the gun,” Touraine barked.
The other woman dropped the musket and fled into the night. Touraine got back to her search but kept her ears open for more visitors.
She found Djasha and Aranen embracing in the last cell at the end of the corridor. Tears streaked the women’s faces in the brig’s lamplight. Relief weakened Touraine’s knees.
“Ya, Mulāzim.” Aranen pulled away from Djasha and wiped the Brigāni woman’s tears away with a thumb. Aranen’s usually short-clipped hair was a thicket of overgrown weeds. Her voice sounded sick and hoarse.
“We’re breaking you out, if you haven’t noticed,” Touraine said. She would find Pruett and the rest somewhere else. Maybe Jaghotai had already freed them. She let herself hope. She couldn’t bear the alternative. “Let’s go.”
The two older women shared a glance. “Can you make it, love?” Aranen said softly.
Only then did Touraine see how much Djasha leaned on her wife. “I can make it far enough.”
Outside, shots still popped in the air, but they were slower and one-sided.
Her back ached under the contortion of supporting Djasha and carrying the dead blackcoats’ muskets, but they couldn’t stop.
“Go ahead,” Touraine huffed. She pointed straight ahead. “The southern wall, southeast corner. I’m going to help Jaghotai.”
Aranen nodded.
Around them, her soldiers—no, not her soldiers, Jaghotai’s soldiers, the rebels and a handful of Sands—were dying. The growls and cries of animals outside the walls had died down, but the number of blackcoats in the compound seemed just as thick as before. She wasn’t sure she had anything under control.
Djasha hadn’t moved. Her feet were planted as she stared down the wide dirt road that led to the gate. The blackcoats had formed a line two rows deep and were taking turns shooting at the rebels, who used the barracks and supply building as cover. Touraine and Aranen could both see, in the flash of musket fire and torchlight, who had caught the Apostate’s attention. Cantic’s golden sleeve was a flag in the night.
Standing behind the line and barking orders was the Blood General. She was like a matchstick in the dark, her thin figure a dark silhouette, her blond-white hair and its flying strands like a flare. The cords of her neck bulged as she shouted to fire, load, change weapons, over and over. Firing on Touraine’s people. She understood the struggle on Djasha’s face.
“No.” Aranen tugged Djasha’s wrist, the word already broken with loss as she said it. “Djasha, come with me. Please.”
Djasha took a dazed step toward Cantic anyway. Touraine threw her arm in front of Djasha to stop her, and the Brigāni woman wrapped her hand around Touraine’s forearm. Touraine almost screamed at the burn of the woman’s touch. She jerked her arm away.
Djasha turned back to Aranen and gripped Aranen’s arms with both hands, as if her touch wasn’t fire.
They spoke in Shālan too rapid for Touraine to follow, but the plaintive look on both of their faces told Touraine enough.