Luca didn’t say anything, and so Touraine let the silence pass as she tried to catch her breath, the room expanding and contracting.
It had happened after a clash with the Taargens. The autumn campaign was supposed to be over, but shitty orders and bad luck meant early blizzards caught the colonial brigade undersupplied as they covered the regular regiments’ asses.
Everyone thought they’d gotten lucky when they routed a small company of Taargens. Touraine sensed something was off as they went to pick through the bodies half buried in the snow—there were too many of them. Her shoulders prickled with unease.
She locked eyes with a staring corpse, his pale blue eyes vacant over a red-brown beard. Then he smiled.
Touraine managed only one shout before he dragged her to the ground: Run.
“The magic comes from their god,” Touraine said when she could. Her voice was hoarse, her throat drier than she realized. Luca’s thumb brushed over Touraine’s knuckles, comforting.
After the Taargens had taken her and a fistful of others—Valbré and Cariste, two siblings; Omarin, one of the field medics; a few others whose faces were starting to lose their edges in Touraine’s memory—they took them back to the Taargen war camp and dumped them in their bonds next to a fire that was so warm Touraine was grateful and felt guilty for it.
Until a couple of Taargens in bearskin cloaks came up to the fire and started chanting over it. Touraine didn’t speak the language, but she felt the change in the air on her skin.
They took Valbré first, his teeth chattering, dragged him to the fire, where a Taargen—call them a priest, sure—stood, and Touraine was so sure she was about to watch them burn Valbré alive while Cariste screamed for him, for mercy. What happened was worse.
The Taargen priest held Valbré’s face close to their own and whispered something. As the priest’s eyes rolled in rapture, Valbré’s eyes rolled up, and he shook until the priest dropped him. Touraine thought he was dead as he flopped to the ground, eyes staring back at the captured Sands. But his chest still rose and fell. His mouth still opened and closed.
Then another priest used Cariste, then Omarin, both of them discarded just like Valbré.
“They take you—they take something out of you.” Touraine’s voice trembled as she related the memories to Luca. “While they’re praying, I think. And use it. To…”
“The bears,” Luca said softly.
Touraine nodded. The bears. She’d seen the priests’ monstrous transformations into the animals they worshipped. Watched the bears run in the direction of her own soldiers. “Wolves, too. Then when they finish, you’re gone. Just empty.”
“Dead?”
Touraine shook her head. If only. If only. “We had to…” It had been Pruett who’d saved her that night. Again. As always. Together, they had put to rest the empty, breathing husks of their friends.
Luca didn’t pick up the pen to take notes, and Touraine was grateful. Even if that did mean she was still holding Touraine’s hand. Maybe because it meant she was. Touraine swallowed. If Pruett could see this now, she would regret ever saving Touraine. Still, a part of her wanted to unclench her fist and let Luca lace their fingers, pen-calloused against baton-calloused. So she pulled her hand away with the excuse of putting her head in her hands.
“I see.” Luca laced her hands with each other instead. “My idea was that I could bring Balladaire something valuable. Something like magic. Something to stop the Withering, or to manage it better when it comes. Sabine—a friend of mine, one of the few—is worried that we’ll be due for another plague soon. My uncle will run, like he did last time. I won’t abandon my people, Touraine. But I also don’t want to come to them empty handed.”
So you’d steal from someone else, just to give it to Balladaire. Touraine didn’t say it, though, didn’t dare. Even if she would never go over to the rebellion, being with them dredged up complaints she had buried, the kinds of things Tibeau went on and on about but she put aside in favor of sanity. She could see the shape of empire in Luca’s words.
“What are they like?” Luca asked. “The rebel council.”
Touraine snorted. “One is an asshole who’s going to wreck every overture you make. The bookseller is kind and Malika is savvy, but it’s the Brigāni woman… She’s the dangerous one.”
“The Brigāni witch that Cantic is hunting.”
“That’s the one.”