“You aren’t the only one who’s grown here, Your Highness. If you won’t compromise yourself, why should I? Why should the Qazāli wait on your mercy, wait for you to have your crown? This is their home.”
“Not yours?”
Touraine tilted her head up to look at Luca. Luca shifted the lantern to better see the disdain, but there was none. She wished there were. She wished there were anything to make her feel like Touraine would fight for her life. Luca saw only a torso full of bruises, bones jutting where they shouldn’t, bloody wounds wrapped in bloodier clothing. Touraine needed medical attention.
“I don’t think I’ll live long enough for it to be.” The soldier leaned back against the wall, her right leg stretched out, her left knee pulled against her bare chest.
“Please. Think about it.”
Touraine pursed her lips. She tapped at her knee with one hand. The other hand was palm up, eerily still against her other thigh.
“If you can pardon me, can you pardon them, my soldiers, the rebels?”
She’d known that would come, and she knew her answer, as well. “No. That many proven enemies—no.”
“Then it’s probably best not to spare even one.”
“Touraine, you’re not—I’m not—”
“Please, Your Highness. I’d like to pray alone.”
Pray? Since when does she pray? She waited, stunned into silence, before she realized she’d been dismissed. Rejected and dismissed. Touraine always did have that tendency, of dismantling Luca and making her want more at the same time.
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow. I hope your god answers your prayers.” And talks sense into you where I could not. If that was how the gods worked.
Luca wanted to jump into the cell with that idiot woman and hold her, to stand between her and Rogan and Cantic, but she turned and started up the corridor.
“Wait! Luca!” Touraine’s voice sounded so small now. “When I’m gone, do me one favor. Give Djasha a proper funeral.”
The thickness in Luca’s throat kept her silent as she left.
After Luca left, Touraine did try to pray. She whispered the small, easy-to-remember prayer that Aranen had taught her. She hummed the song she had always hummed. She did everything she could not to think about Luca’s offer.
“Fuck you,” Touraine said. The words bounced back at her.
If Luca cared for her, Touraine wouldn’t be waiting to die here. Luca was smart; she was calculating. If she couldn’t find a way to keep Touraine alive, it was because she didn’t want it badly enough.
Luca had made an offer, though. All Touraine had to do was watch the rebels—her soldiers—die while she walked away, in chains but alive.
She wasn’t in the position to do much other than die standing or surrender. Something in her shoulder was broken badly enough that she couldn’t raise her right arm. She’d stanched the bleeding in her calf with cloth from her own trousers. Her other ankle, her other knee would barely hold her weight. She couldn’t fight back, and no one was there to fight for her.
It wasn’t that death was so hard to grapple with. Every battle she’d fought in had been possible death. It was always a roll of the dice, a chance of the cards. This time, she had been unlucky.
Still, she had meant every word she had said to Luca. For the first time, she had faced death for a reason of her choosing. She would die for Djasha’s vengeance. She would die for Aranen’s temple. She would die for young Ghadin and her friends. She would die here, because she chose to. She couldn’t ask for more than that.
Touraine barely registered losing consciousness—no one could call the pain-addled visions of her death “sleeping”—before Rogan’s voice woke her again.
“Good morning, Lieutenant. It’s a beautiful day to die, don’t you think?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m not interested, thank you. We have an appointment to keep.”
“I’m not interested, thank you.”
His pistol clicked and was echoed by a chorus of cocked muskets. “You can die down here if you’d like. I don’t think that suits you.”
She hated to prove him right.
Climbing to her feet and walking out of the cell helped her inventory her pain yet again. Shoulder, ankle, calf, knee, shoulder, ankle, calf, knee. A litany of injuries that distanced her from what waited.
In the brig corridor, more men yanked her arms behind her and tied them so tight her wrist bones creaked and something in her shoulder popped again, forcing out a grunt of pain. Rogan smiled. She spat on his boots—Stop smiling, you bastard—but he only grinned wider, his blue eyes crinkling.
Then he punched her in the side of the head, and light winked in her eyes as she staggered and fell. The brig spun.
“Make sure you get the two women she was with,” he told his men without looking away from her. “When we’re done, we’ll display the bodies in the bazaar.”
Tears burned her eyes. He wanted a reaction from her, clear as day. It was hard to know he was telling the truth and not react. She could only hope Luca would do that one thing for her. The other rebels would hang, covered in crows that pecked at the softest bits of them. They would begin to reek in the sun.
An audience waited for her in the middle of the road that split the compound. Blackcoats, some of them sick or wounded but able to stand. Balladairan civilians who worked on the compound. Civilians who didn’t, who wanted the protection of the walls, who couldn’t afford to flee the pox.
The compound was such a strange, hybrid place. Governed by Balladairan ideas of might and cleverness but still at the mercy of the natural laws of Qazāl—it was made of heat and dust and sand and clay. It would never be Balladaire, no matter how much wood they shipped in or stone they demanded from the quarries.
Two rows of bound figures waited in front of the crowd, some in Qazāli clothing, some still wearing the black Sands’ coats. She counted nineteen. Not
