Not the Sands’ lives. Not Pruett’s. She couldn’t do this math. This was the line she couldn’t cross. The Sands were her first family, and she belonged to them, despite everything between them in the last year.
Pruett stood across from her, her eyes screwed shut. Sky above. It isn’t supposed to happen like this. The last of the rebels emerged in a trickle, hands over their heads in surrender, muskets trained on their backs. Finally, Touraine spotted Jaghotai, who held both arms high. A battlefield bandage on her long arm was already soaked through with blood. She let a blackcoat cuff her hand to a long chain that linked the rebel prisoners. The soldier kicked her in the back of the knees to drop her to the ground, in line with the others.
“Jaghotai!” Touraine didn’t move toward her, but the blackcoats wrenched her arms back anyway. A blow to the head left Touraine dazed.
“Easy, Lieutenant.” Rogan called Touraine’s attention back to Pruett. To the pistol at Pruett’s head. He cocked the pistol all the way.
Before Touraine could scream, Rogan turned the pistol onto her. The strike of the flint on steel hissed through the night air. Pain ripped through Touraine’s calf, and she fell back to the ground.
“You sky-falling bastard,” she growled as the man’s smile spread across his face.
They had lost.
The next punch came to her temple.
CHAPTER 41
TO UNKNIT
When Gil at last permitted Luca to step outside, the compound, which had become a battlefield, was quiet. The shots she’d heard firing outside her window had ceased, and Cantic had given the all clear. The fighters’ shouts had died. The prisoners—except for Touraine—were cuffed and held under guard at the far end of the compound. Balladairan soldiers dragged the dead outside the compound to be carted away and the wounded to lie outside the already overflowing sick bay. Beyond the yellow walls, the plague fires still burned; the orange glow lit the sky. As if the world had broken and the sun with it, setting on the wrong side of the sky.
Their plan had worked, but at a cost.
It smelled like blood. It wasn’t coppery, like it tasted in your mouth. It was thick and heavy, mingled with voided bowels to make a stench like a thick fog that she had to push through to get to the jail.
Beneath the horror of the sight of a soldier’s guts spilling from her black coat or a rebel face half blown apart by a bullet, Luca felt a disturbing thrill of relief. She had never wanted to be so vulnerable, so close to death herself—but here she was, and she had survived. She was alive, if only because she’d hid under her table in the governor’s office with a caustic Beau-Sang. The comte had spent the entire attack threatening her with her uncle’s reaction. As if Luca needed him to remind her of what was at stake. She’d almost thrown him out to die in the cross fire.
Luca pushed into the jail, ignoring the on-duty soldier’s protests.
“Please, Your Highness, the general—”
She half turned and said over her shoulder, “Shut. Your mouth. And wait outside.”
He shut his mouth. He closed the door and waited outside. It was easy to be a villain when she felt like one inside. She was hurting herself, too, and she had to give them both one last chance to save each other.
The first time she’d met Touraine in this jail, she hadn’t been attached to anything here. Curious about the Sands, even more curious about the handsome soldier who’d saved her from assassins and been abducted by the rebels. The gloom had been harmless and temporary. Now a desperate tug drew her to the cell where Rogan had dumped Touraine, and the darkness pressed her on all sides, threatening to trap her.
“Touraine?” Luca whispered. Any louder, and she didn’t trust her voice to stay true. She had hoped for confidence, something Touraine would have faith in. Something Touraine would not doubt.
A laugh, sharp and disbelieving. “Your Highness.”
So it was back to titles, then.
“I came to check on you. To make sure… Rogan didn’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” Touraine’s voice flared with the crackling rage of fire on a new log. “He threatened my old soldiers so I would hand him my new ones. And I gave them to him.” Luca heard the waver of tears, too.
“The Sands were never in danger. I would never have let him hurt them. I just needed you to believe it; I needed you to stop. If it were me, you would have known I was bluffing—”
“Stop talking. You’re not making this better. You used them against me.”
Luca finally gathered the courage to step closer and let the narrow stream of lantern light illuminate Touraine’s sharpened cheekbones, her grief-hollowed eyes. She was half-naked, and the smell of piss wafted over.