Her eyes throbbed. She took off her spectacles and rested her forehead against the heels of her palms. That stupid little book Paul-Sebastien had given her hadn’t been stupid at all. It just left her with still more questions.
She couldn’t believe that Paul-Sebastien LeRoche de Beau-Sang had written it. The intricate knowledge of the Qazāli—of Shālan customs and religion—spoke of someone intimate with the culture, someone who had spent time around Shālans, if not with them. The last time scholars had done that peacefully was before the religious bans, before half the nations in the Shālan Empire became Balladairan colonies.
LeRoche posited that Shālan magic, if it existed at all, was actually connected to the religion. The theory was flimsy, though, based only on the Taargens, Balladaire’s hostile neighbors to the east. The Taargens worshipped a bear god, and the bed tales to scare children spoke of magical bears ravaging the Taargens’ enemies after human sacrifice.
The Taargens and their animal god. The Shālans and their god of the body. Luca had heard that far to the south in the monks’ mountains, they worshipped a god of the mind. Before they’d developed their science, even Balladaire had fallen prey to its collective imagination: a god of harvests that wanted bloodletting in the fields.
It was exactly the kind of sky-falling nonsense that made Balladaire ban religion in the first place. By leaving behind religion, they were able to build an empire instead.
She wanted her people to be grateful to her for bringing magic to them. And that couldn’t happen if it was tangled up in holy wish fulfillment. Would they still be grateful if the magic came wrapped in a god’s trappings? Not a chance. If Shālan magic came from Shālan religion, her plan was finished. And yet… if the magic came from religion, was religion as uncivilized as they had been taught?
Even LeRoche stayed far from praising religion. Simply stating the facts, like a good scholar, and connecting them to completely separate and unlike things, claiming they were, in fact, related.
Most of the book was actually just history. The last Brigāni emperor, Djaya, her blind faith, and her overpowering greed. Somehow, she had managed to devastate swaths of Balladaire. There were rumors of magic here, too.
Somewhere, the Shālans had the magic to make Luca into the queen she wanted to be.
Before her father died, she would sit on his throne, try on his ceremonial crown, pretend to read his notes. She could feel the texture of the throne under her small bottom, the heavy weight of gold on her head supported by her father’s hands. Her memories might have been fashioned more by what Gil had told her than by reality, but Luca held them close anyway.
Now, when she imagined herself on the throne as an adult, she always thought of her father. He’d brought Qazāl into the empire. She wanted to be better even than him, the king who “spread his wings and covered the earth,” as a more poetic scholar wrote. She couldn’t surpass him if she wasn’t willing to risk her reputation.
A sharp rap on the door interrupted her thoughts. At some point, it had become late afternoon. Touraine hadn’t reported back yet.
“Your Highness?” Guérin looked in. “Guard Captain Gillett is here for training.”
Luca stood too quickly, and the tight muscles in her hip recoiled as she overstretched them. She hunched over, gasping. She waved Guérin away and eased up slowly. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The tingles in her ass hadn’t started up, at least. She limped down to the sitting room, where Gillett was waiting.
“I’m going to need a long warm-up today.” She sighed and went for her practice steel. “Has Touraine come back? She’s been gone all day.”
Gil shook his head tersely. “She might be taking her leisure with it. Worth speaking to her.”
Luca nodded, but deep down something felt wrong. Touraine didn’t seem the type to take her leisure with an order.
Fencing lessons with Gil were always grueling, but today she performed exceedingly poorly. Gil wormed inside her guard several times with a blunt dagger, pretending to be a footpad, and once caught her by the neck in a maneuver she should have been able to roll out of. She took too long to react every time.
He released her and squared off with her side-on. “What’s on your mind, Luca?”
Luca lowered her eyes. “What if she’s hurt?”
Gil grunted. “You knew the risks before you sent her. That’s why you sent her.”
Because Touraine was disposable. She wouldn’t be missed from the soldiers’ ranks, and she had no necessary function elsewhere. If she vanished, Balladaire could try another method to subdue the rebellion.