The jail was across from her, on the other side of the packed dirt road from the empty barracks. She didn’t know how many of the rescue squad had managed to get into the jail, but as she watched, prisoners burst from the door, Saïd at the fore with an injured arm, dragging one woman on his good shoulder.
It wasn’t Aranen or Djasha.
A sound like a sudden rainstorm made Touraine duck low. A shadow passed over the sky. A massive flock of seagulls blotted out the stars, flying toward the eastern wall. Toward Shāl’s Road, where the Balladairan reinforcements were coming from. Beneath the flapping of their wings, other sounds got sharper: gunshots farther away, outside the walls, and the yelp and snarl and bark of hyenas. The roar of a lioness.
Touraine let herself smile.
In a kinder world, she could wait for the Many-Legged to break through. Or she could look for Luca, ask her one last time to stop this. There was no time for either.
She skirted the chaos of her rebels meeting musket balls to her left, their knives and batons against Balladairan bayonets. To her right, empty training fields, the practice dummies like leering enemies in the dark. In the noise of the night, she was one lone and silent shadow slipping easily across the street and into the jail.
The jailer was dead, clearly the first casualty inside. He’d been taken with expert knife work: a stab through the ribs followed by a slice across the throat to leave him sprawled across the short entry corridor. His blood was already sticky under Touraine’s boots.
Along with blood, the place smelled like sickness. Not the clean, disciplined Balladairan prison smell she had taken for granted. Her stomach turned, and she thought about running the other way, back under the sky, but even the open air wasn’t safe today. She didn’t let herself think long on how many Sands weren’t immune to the death pox.
“Aranen!” Touraine called. “Aranen, are you here?”
She grabbed the jailer’s lamp and held it high enough to illuminate the sandstone cells as she turned into the jail’s main corridor. Their metal gates were flung open like welcoming arms. The Sands weren’t here, either. She passed cell after cell, afraid each time she looked that she would find the dead bodies of people she knew.
Where are you, you witch? Where are you, Pru?
Touraine spun around at the heavy rush of boots at the entrance. The clink and clatter of belts and muskets. A hoarse voice swearing in Balladairan, saying, “Clear it. Anyone not in a cell dies.”
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,
