“Here, put those on the desk, please.” She gestured to Adile for coffee. Then she sat heavily in her chair.
“If it’s not dangerous, Bastien, why did I get a message from General Cantic about a new plague? She said soldiers are dying. Fever, rash, death.” She rolled up her sleeve to bare a patch of itchy red skin on her arm. “Why am I not dead yet?”
Bastien shook his head again. “I’m not a doctor, Luca, but this is definitely laughing pox. I don’t know what’s happening at the barracks, but it’s different.” He patted the stack of books Richard had just put down. “I take it that’s what we’re going to look for, then?”
She smiled, and he returned it with his own grin. Sky above, it felt good to be understood.
“Richard, can you read?” Luca asked the boy.
“Yes, Your Highness. I can help.” He bowed again.
“No. Take your ease. I have some books you might like downstairs. Fun books. Adventures. Adile will give you lunch and tea, whatever you need.”
Richard looked uncertainly between Luca and Bastien. When Bastien nodded, a hesitant smile curved the corners of the boy’s mouth.
After Adile led the boy down to Luca’s reading corner, Luca and Bastien got to work. It also felt good to do what she was best at.
They spent the afternoon picking through their collective texts, looking for records of a disease like the one at the compound, how it spread, and any known medicines. Luca didn’t know what it meant that the Qazāli prisoners weren’t helping much—did it mean that the healing magic was ineffective or that the prisoners were uncooperative or that there were just too many sick for the priests to cure?
Bastien hunched over the desk, tracing the lines of text with his fingertips, nose barely a handbreadth away from the page. That same lock of blond hair flopped over his hand, and he flicked it back without breaking his concentration.
She hadn’t told him what she had learned from Aranen. It felt like a betrayal of their friendship, since he had helped her in her research before and was helping her now. She suspected her desire to keep it secret was partly because she had failed. She hadn’t been able to do the magic, and she didn’t want him to think her weaker for it.
“Aha!” Bastien bolted upright, startling Luca out of her thoughts.
“What? What!”
He smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. It’s nothing, but I’m just—it seems like—here, he writes about sick people being connected. We know that already, contagious. But it also talks about sick people being connected to dirty animals. The city is full of rats, obviously. And then there are all the sky-falling cats and mangy dogs in the Old Medina. Maybe the soldiers were careless.”
He kept talking, but Luca was no longer listening. The flocks of birds that had swept down on the crops. The farm animals that had vanished without a trace, as if they’d simply walked away. What if it wasn’t just animals thrown out of their habits by the delayed rainy season?
Would the Taargens be so bold as to risk a practically brand-new peace treaty? She closed her eyes to better remember the wording on the treaty. Though the Taargens weren’t allowed to take up arms or “perform acts of aggression” on Balladairan territories and subjects, it wasn’t spelled out explicitly that they couldn’t interfere with the colonies’ food supplies using… animals.
She opened her eyes again. Bastien was staring at her, waiting for an explanation. Her eyes fell, however, on the small snake skull on her desk. Luca had taken it from the governor-general’s office on the compound. It had been one of Cheminade’s, like all the trinkets in the command office.
The late governor had said the lion pelt in her house was a gift from the wild tribes that roamed the desert. Call themselves the Many-Legged, for the animals they worship.
“Sky above,” Luca swore, jumping up and grabbing the snake skull. “Shit. Shit shit shit.” A wave of dizziness knocked her back into her seat. “It’s not the Taargens.”
“Luca?”
The call was echoed from the other side of the door as Gil knocked on it.
“Come in. It’s all right,” she said to both men. Only it wasn’t all right. “Gil? We need to see Cantic.”
Gil and Bastien looked at each other quizzically.
“We’re under attack. The rebels are using the animals.”
“Your Highness, I heard you were sick. Why are you here?” Cantic met Luca at the door to the administration building. The scarf around the general’s face was black and gold, her blue eyes fierce above it.
I am sick, Luca thought. She drew herself up and planted her feet. I am also a queen. “This is the rebels, General. We’re under attack.”
Around them, the compound’s clean orderliness had vanished. It was everything she’d been afraid of. Bodies burning on the plague fires beyond the walls. Plumes of smoke sent her back in time, to Balladaire and the Withering Death. To her parents’ funeral and the pillars of smoke that had loomed in every direction beyond the walls of La Chaise.
Only here, instead of withering into husks in their beds…
The sick bay overflowed, and blackcoats vomited and moaned outside the building. The healthy ones rushed about the compound, spare shirts or handkerchiefs or even arms over their mouths. They were bees in a kicked hive.
“It’s a plague, Your Highness—”
Luca pushed past Cantic, careful not to touch her. Just in case. Careful not to show the remnants of her own body’s weakness.
Cantic followed Luca into the general’s office, past that beautiful doe door.
“Where are the Qazāli healers?” Luca asked for Cantic’s ears only.
The general looked askance. “I pressed them as hard as I could. They went unconscious. Some of them haven’t woken back up.” She shrugged, frustrated in her helplessness. Luca knew exactly how she felt.
Luca swore. “I thought they’d be able
