Excerpt: THE SOVEREIGN by C. L. Clark
The Sovereign brings princess Luca and soldier Touraine together one last time in the thrilling conclusion to C. L. Clark’s beloved queer political fantasy trilogy.
Read an excerpt from The Sovereign (US), on-sale September 30th, below!
PART 1
BY PLAGUE
CHAPTER 1
GLASS
Touraine and Sabine stood behind the queen of Balladaire as she knelt on the half-frozen earth before the Royal Oak. Her cane lay on the ground at her side. She held a small gold casket between trembling gloved hands, and poured some of the dark grains of ash directly into a hole in the earth.
Thick banks of snow were heaped against the rose hedges to clear the paths. The air felt just as thick, sound muffled so even the wind in the bare branches overhead was muted.
Touraine shivered. They had been standing there for a long time.
Luca lowered the casket with the rest of Gil’s ashes into the grave. Her breath caught and she stopped with her hand above the pile of dirt and snow that would have covered all Luca had left of the man she’d loved most. Luca didn’t move but for the jerking hitch of her shoulders.
Touraine shared a look with Sabine. The marquise’s eyes were red. Touraine scrubbed her own tears from her cheek and knelt at Luca’s side. She felt Sabine drop to Luca’s other, and together, they held her.
Their touch sapped the last wall holding Luca together. She collapsed into them, burying her face in Touraine’s coat.
Around them, the guards kept their silent vigil, ensuring no one would interrupt the queen’s mourning.
They let Luca stay there until her shudders became shivers and her teeth chattered, less grief than cold. Then they helped Luca scoop the earth down onto the little gleaming casket. The metal was cold and beautiful, etched in the curling oak leaves decorating so much of the palace. Words marked the sides, but Touraine couldn’t make them out before Luca buried it completely.
Slowly, Touraine and Sabine helped Luca to her feet.
“Thank you.” Luca dabbed at her face with the back of one gloved hand and turned toward the palace.
They followed her in silence until Touraine asked, “Are your mother and father buried there, too?”
Luca shook her head, a single sharp twist, her mouth tight. “It was thought unwise to keep the ashes of the plague dead.”
A few moments later, though, softer, she added: “He would have liked that, though. To be buried with them. I wish—” Her voice broke. “I wish he could have been. That they’d all—” Luca huffed. She didn’t speak again.
At the door to Luca’s chambers, they stood awkwardly together.
“If you’d like, we could play a game of échecs?” Sabine ventured a wry smile, though her eyes were still red. “Trouncing me might cheer you up. Or tarot?”
Touraine smiled. For days, Sabine had been trying to get them to play a version of tarot that involved taking off their clothes. She hadn’t succeeded yet. Luca only ever nodded, said all right, and then—
“There’s too much work to be done. I have to write to the lords on the southern coast about ships, and then make sure the Beau-Sang seneschal has the estate under control until Aliez de Beau-Sang returns from Qazāl. If she ever returns. And then—”
“I understand,” Sabine cut in softly, but heavy with disappointment.
“I’m sorry I cannot entertain you.” Luca’s tart voice was ragged at the edges. She raked her hand through her hair and closed her eyes. Her lids were puffy with weeping and shadowed blue with exhaustion. She looked like Touraine felt.
Sabine flinched, then looked at Touraine for help, but Touraine didn’t know what she was meant to do. She shrugged apologetically. “Luca’s right.”
Touraine couldn’t relax, either. Not with fear riding her shoulder. Since Luca had told her about the Withering two days ago, Touraine couldn’t stop herself from imagining the disease stealing through the city and into her body, sucking her strength away. The havoc it would wreak just as Luca was settling into her rule. Not to mention the questions Luca had asked her.
Will you be my general? Will you be my wife?
One question Touraine had answered. One she had not.
Pruett’s letter still burned in the back of Touraine’s mind, also unanswered.
“Then I’ll go.” Sabine dipped a curt version of her flourishing bow. “I’m sure I would only be a distraction.”
“Sabine—”
“Don’t go—”
Sabine waved her hand dismissively and clicked her tongue. “No, no. I’ll leave you to it. But the world won’t fall if you spend a single day to care for your own happiness. Good day, Your Majesty. Your Excellency.”
Luca sighed and entered her rooms. She sat at the small table where she and Touraine ate together or played échecs. Right now, it was strewn with papers. Missives, requests, accountings. She buried her head in her hands, letting her hair curtain over her face.
“She doesn’t understand.”
Touraine let her shoulders sag and her head fall back. On the ceiling, more fine swirls of oak leaves, curled in plaster along the borders of it, weaving in and out of carved vines. She pressed her palms to her eyes to stave off her headache. “Maybe she’s right.”
For the last two days, Touraine and Luca had locked themselves here, in bed or at the desk, hashing out worst-cases and best-cases for the country. They’d seen only what sun came through the window, and most of the time they kept it closed against the midwinter cold. Breakfast plates would remain on the table hours later because Luca had asked not to be disturbed. Today, though, they’d taken a respite, if only for sorrow.
On cue, Touraine’s stomach growled so loudly that Luca startled. She blinked owlishly at Touraine. The smallest hint of a smile tugged at her mouth. Then Luca’s own stomach growled even louder.
“All right.” Luca pinched the bridge of her nose. “All right. Our baser natures have spoken.”
“Shall I ask for food to be brought up?” Touraine walked to the bell pull to call the lunch service back in. Or—early dinner, more like.
It wasn’t hard to get used to someone else delivering her meals; she’d rarely cooked as a Sand. What differed was the choice. The flavor. Having it brought directly to her and served at her leisure until she was satisfied. Even with fears of poison at the back of her mind, Touraine had filled out these past months, regaining muscle and softening her sharpest edges. Luxury.
The last few days, though, she’d barely tasted it at all, if she even had an appetite.
She knew what Pruett would say, if she could see the rich food, the fine wool clothing lined in silk, the eiderdown bed stuffing and goose feather pillows.
Luca didn’t seem to be listening. She stared, unfocused, over the table.
“She is right. At least a little. I’m sorry that you’re here now. While I’m like this, I mean.” She met Touraine’s eyes. “There are so many things I’d like to show you. The art in the palace, all the sculptures, the theater— Have you ever been to a play? An opera?”
Touraine shook her head, an eyebrow raised. “You know I haven’t.”
“I wish I could take you, or even hire performers.” Luca’s face fell. “It’s just that…”
“You’re afraid.”
Luca’s face went pink.
“I understand,” Touraine said quickly. “It’s not wise.” To make themselves a target in the Queen’s Box at the Théâtre Royal, or to invite strangers into the palace. Fili Guérin, who Luca called “the Rose,” was still at large, along with the rest of the Fingers. A little fun wasn’t worth the risk, no matter what Sabine said.
Luca chewed on her bottom lip.
Touraine narrowed her eyes. “What?”
By now, she knew this expression, the moment of a conflict Luca hadn’t quite worked out—usually when she knew what she wanted, but knew it wasn’t the right answer.
“We could go out anylight.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Luca seized the idea like a terrier and dug her heels in. The fervor ate up her grief. “We can. Not obviously, of course. But it’s winter. We’ll be so covered up no one will recognize us.”
“Covered up in… these?” Touraine held up the edge of her cloak on her shoulders, showing off the fine embroidery, the rabbit-fur lining.
Luca ducked her head from side to side. “Adile can find us something to help us blend in.”
There was a determined light in Luca’s eyes, and Touraine wasn’t sure it was excitement alone. There was something manic about the way she began stacking all her papers together. Occasionally, she even glanced back toward the door, as if looking for Sabine. Luca wanted to prove something.
She always wanted to prove something.
Touraine sputtered a wordless protest, and Luca stopped striding around the room. She curled an arm around Touraine’s waist and slipped behind her, resting her head on Touraine’s shoulder and kissing her once on the neck.
“Come with me,” she whispered.
Touraine took a shaky breath. “This is a bad idea.”
“All the best ones are.”
“You sound like Sabine. We could stay here, instead. I’ll make it worth it.” She tightened Luca’s arm about her, dug her nails in.
She felt the minute shake of Luca’s head against her cheek. “We’ll be careful.”
There was no changing Luca’s mind now. Touraine sighed and sank into Luca’s embrace. The warmth of it. The ease. A brave person might even call it happiness.
It couldn’t last.
This wouldn’t last.
The warmth of Touraine’s hand in hers. The wonderment in Touraine’s eyes as she watched the street performers act out a tale from the Chevaliers des Fruits for the first time, while snowflakes caught upon her long lashes.
Even the laughter of her people as they enjoyed the show. Soon, they would know what she knew, and it would all crumble around them.
Luca shouldn’t have let Sabine’s words prick her like she did, but she was glad they had come out. She didn’t want to spend the day locked up with the ache in her heart. Still, she kept her plain scarf pulled high on her cheeks, and her coat was simple enough to belong to a merchant. Touraine stood out a little more, as a Qazāli with golden eyes, but—as Touraine tilted her head back and crinkled those eyes in laughter, Luca couldn’t quite bring herself to care. The risk was worth it.
They slipped away at the end of the show, and Luca saw Deniaud and Mareau, also in plain clothes, peel away from their posts and follow along at a discreet distance. Luca didn’t have her cane with its sword today; instead, she used a crutch. It would help to differentiate herself from the queen with her cane, but, and she hated to admit it to herself, she was relying on the aids more than she used to. The crutch was more supportive.
They stopped at a stand for piping-hot crêpes filled with preserves and cream. It wasn’t the kind of thing the palace kitchen served. Luca moaned as she ate it and caught Touraine’s mischievous look. Luca couldn’t help it: she laughed. Holding the rest of the crêpe in front of her face and trying to keep her food in her mouth, she laughed. Touraine laughed, too, and they might have been nothing more and nothing less than two women in love in the days before the world ended.
Because this would not last.
But Luca could try to make it last as long as possible. She was queen. She could do that much.
Touraine shivered pleasantly with cold as she and Luca left the stables. There’d been no incident while they were in the city, though her neck had prickled and she’d tried not to glance over her shoulder too often. She had her own pair of guards now, to shadow her around like Deniaud and Mareau. She trusted them well enough, but she didn’t trust anyone over her own senses and instincts.
Whenever this ended, whatever it was, she didn’t want it to be because of a knife in the back.
Still, Touraine had enjoyed the street show, and the crêpe after, and even the small cup of drinking chocolate, though it was still too sweet for her taste. It made her think of Ghadin with a sharp twist of guilt. She would visit the girl tomorrow, maybe. She had a lot to explain to her, including the upcoming marriage—
Icy wet thudded into Touraine’s back. She ducked, rolling out of position and onto her knees, reaching for the knife hidden in her boot.
Several paces behind her, Luca hiked her arm back to throw a ball of snow, while Deniaud prepared another with her usual devoted concentration.
Touraine shouted in outrage and scooped up her own handful. The snow trickled in her bare hands, but it was sticky and easy to press into shape. She launched it and grinned; it would hit true—then Mareau jumped in front of Luca, taking the blow in the chest.
“That’s cheating!” Touraine looked to her own guards, fanned out behind her. One of them raised a dubious eyebrow. His name was Aubrille. “Cover me.”
Aubrille’s mouth fell open as if he were going to protest, but Baudriel grinned. She was younger, and eager. “Yes, Your Excellency.”
Touraine ran for Luca and her tiny army, ducking under a wild throw from Luca, dodging a more precise one from Deniaud. Before Deniaud loosed her second volley, she was hit by one of Touraine’s guards and fell to the ground in surrender. Luca backed away, holding her empty hand in front of her, bent over with laughter.
Touraine almost skidded to a stop at the sight. The queen of Balladaire, giggling. The split grin on that usually condescending mouth, the haughty glare now flushed with exertion and the bite of the wind. It made Touraine’s chest too full to take a proper breath.
She didn’t stop, though. She crashed into Luca, scooping her up and barreling her into the pile of snow the groundskeepers had shoveled aside. Luca squealed—Queen Luca Ancier fucking squealed—while Touraine peppered kisses all over her face.
Then they sobered and the real world threatened to smother them, held off only by the thick snow and the cold. The heat between them made it easy to ignore a little longer. Luca pored over Touraine, her mouth parted with their heavy breathing, a cloud of mist. Touraine kissed her slowly, pressing her deeper into the snowbank.
Luca smiled against Touraine’s mouth. “You know, we have a bed. And a fire.”
And so they went inside the palace, to bed and fire and all the other warmth between them.
Luca dreamed of it ending. She dreamed of it ending often these days. She dreamed of Touraine in Le Fontinard, arrested by Luca’s own soldiers. She dreamed of burning Touraine on the plague fires, as she’d burned her parents. She dreamed of holding a knife to Touraine’s throat until a deep-red line split the skin while Touraine begged her, please don’t. In the dream, Luca tried to pull back, but her arms were leaden.
Luca jerked awake. She sensed the emptiness of the bed immediately, but reached with grasping fingers regardless. The other side of the bed was still warm.
“Touraine?”
“I’m here.” Touraine’s voice came from the window, quick and soothing.
Luca rolled over in the bed to watch her. Her strong profile was shadowed against the light of the moon reflecting on the snow. Luca admired the sleek play of the Shālan robe against Touraine’s broad back and the curve of her backside, at odds with the twisting agony of her dreams. Touraine was here, alive. This was real. Her sigh of relief was loud in the silent night.
“Bad dreams?”
“Yes.” Luca went to Touraine, digging her toes into the soft rug, avoiding the bare patches of stone. The fire had died down to its coals, but the room still had enough of its heat that Luca didn’t flinch—too much—at the air on her naked body. “You?”
Touraine chuckled darkly and turned, sweeping Luca in close. Luca buried her nose in Touraine’s neck and inhaled. She smelled so good. Of sex and sweat and the last lingering of a smoky cologne.
“Aye. What this time?”
The truth caught in Luca’s throat. How did you tell the woman you were sleeping with that you dreamed of killing her? With a history like theirs, with a possible future like theirs—it was better to keep some secrets.
“Him,” Luca lied. Which him she meant, it was hard to say. Gil. Nicolas. Her father. Sky above, poor Tiro, even, or Bastien. It wasn’t much of a lie. They all haunted her nights. Just not every night. Just not tonight.
“I’m sorry,” Touraine murmured into Luca’s hair.
“Don’t apologize.” Luca squeezed Touraine’s hip. More honestly, she said, “Every morning I wake up and think, this is only the beginning. There will be more pyres soon, and it’s my job to fix it.” She felt herself winding up again and dispelled the building pressure with a sigh and a shake of her head. “What woke you?”
Touraine turned back to the window, her chest rising against Luca with each deep breath. The night outside was dark, but the spillage of light from La Chaise made the horizon glow as if it were sunrise. Luca wished she could set her life to this steady rhythm.
“I dreamed about my soldiers. The war—the Taargen War. The rebellion.” She sounded as if it were nothing, but Luca felt the tension Touraine held between her shoulder blades.
She rubbed the spot until it relaxed. When Touraine regarded Luca, though, her dark brows were knit with worry.
“We should tell Aranen and the High Court tomorrow. I’ll send word to Qazāl. We just have to decide when.”
Luca hesitated. “It will be winter festival soon. People are always looking for omens winter will end soon—not that they would admit it aloud.”
Touraine snorted. “Uncivilized.”
“Mm. We could be that good omen. A reason to celebrate before…”
“It’s fine.” Not dismissive, quite, but unbothered.
“And the other matter?” Luca pushed.
“General of Balladaire’s armies.” Touraine’s voice was husky and low. “You want to make another Cantic out of me.”
“Not a Blood General.”
“Is there any other kind?”
The question caught Luca off guard, her mouth hanging open. She grew serious. “Everything and everyone is threatening my throne. I need you to help me keep it.” She searched Touraine’s face steadily, grave as an oathtaking.
Touraine sat with that gravity a moment, then smiled sadly. “It’s what I always wanted.”
Luca pulled back. “It’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
Instead of elaborating, Touraine swept her hands up Luca’s waist and to her breasts as she pulled her into a kiss, deep and hungry for answers. For certainty. As if she’d find it in Luca, when Luca was lost in a fog herself.
They were rulers. They couldn’t afford uncertainty.
Luca hiked Touraine’s robe up to her hips and backed her against the windowsill. Touraine gasped beneath her touch.
Touraine dreamed of it ending.
She’d lied to Luca.
She hadn’t dreamed of soldiers. She’d dreamed of a scaffold in Qazāl, a warm breeze across the back of her neck. Dry dust from the east swirling with the damp river air from the west. Grit beneath her boots and the raucous sound of voices cheering.
Pruett was at the lever, as she had been when Beau-Sang was executed, as she had been when they killed the rebels that first day in Qazāl. Only, it was Luca’s neck that Touraine tightened the noose around. Pruett smiled. And then, in the fucked-up way of dreams, it was Touraine’s hand on the lever, pulling it, at the same time as she watched Luca drop right in front of her, her neck snapping.
Naked and still breathless with pleasure, Touraine fought sleep. Tried to remember this feeling, right here.
Instead, she thumbed her grief rings and thought guiltily of Pruett while Luca breathed peacefully, curled into Touraine’s side.
Touraine and Pruett hadn’t always been lovers. They hadn’t even always been friends. The first time they’d fucked had been right before they marched off to fight the Taargens. Fear of the fighting to come, frustrated helplessness that they had no control over their lives, and all the pent-up sexual tension of their forced proximity, bursting like a blister.
Touraine hadn’t told Luca everything in Pruett’s letter. Pruett wanted Touraine to join her. To help her lead Masridān. A place of their own, for the Sands, where no one would look down on them.
She didn’t need to tell Luca that because she wasn’t going to leave Balladaire, not after the promises she’d made to Luca and the Qazāli.
Moonlight spilled lovingly over Luca’s skin, subtle light, blurred light. Touraine stroked the short hairs curling around Luca’s ears. Luca’s mouth, usually pinched and condescending, was slack. She was soft now, like this. All her rigidity gone for this one secret moment.
It was so fragile, this thing between them.
Fragile and beautiful and stained with blood.
How could it possibly last?
CHAPTER 2
THE WARLORD
The sun shone bright into the Conqueror’s Square, onto the heads of the remaining soldiers of the King’s Own. Out of a hundred men and women, twenty-four remained. They’d fought like dogs to the bitter end, Pruett could say that much for them. Among them were the Masridāni blackcoats who’d remained loyal to Balladaire. Also like dogs to the bitter end. They stood in their ranks, bound hand and foot before the statue of General Rosen Cantic in the center of Samra’. A breeze ruffled Pruett’s coat. A red coat, slashed in black.
“A day for justice,” Pruett muttered to herself.
From her right side, Noé gave her an unreadable look. “Are you sure?”
She wished he wouldn’t ask her that.
“It’s what Cantic would do. It’s what she did do. That’s why there’s a giant fucking statue of her right in front of us.”
Both of the Sands gazed up at the general. Her stone tricorne, that implacable frown. The fucking woman had shaped everything Pruett had ever done even down to this moment.
“I’m with you, Qā’id.” Kiras was a steadying presence at Pruett’s left side, hushing the second and third thoughts threatening to swallow Pruett up.
Many of the Samra’een watched from windows and rooftops above, from their carts and their stalls. Some huddled together in fear and suspicion, some cheered and shouted victoriously, some even pelted rubbish at the once-conquerors. A marked turn from a city that had gone belly-up for the Balladairans to start with, but maybe that was the way of it here—allegiances molting for the newest season.
Opposite the ranks of prisoners stood the Masridāni blackcoats who’d sworn that allegiance to her. Red paint daubed on their coats or red patches sewn into the sleeves.
How quickly things changed.
How dull that they were still so much the same.
Pruett raised her hand, and the blackcoats—her blackcoats—raised their muskets to their shoulders.
“Please, Qā’id! Mercy, please!” A sobbing voice erupted from the front row of the prisoners. Governor-General Yoroub dropped to his knees, dragging down the prisoners tied to him. The Balladairan soldiers sneered down at him in disgust. All his sucking up to them, and they still didn’t think he was worth a rank shit.
Granted, neither did Pruett.
“Please, Qā’id! I can help you, I know this city better than anyone else, please—”
“Hold.” Pruett lowered her hand.
She met his dark eyes. He was pitiful. His robes were stained with weeks’ worth of prison grime; his once carefully shaven face and strong chin were covered with a thick growth of matted beard. His luxurious curls were knotted now. Even begging, he didn’t drop his Balladairan cadence. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe the accent was as ingrained in him as it was in her.
Silence so deep that the click of her boots on the stone pavers echoed through the square. Even the myriad growls and chirps and hisses in the back of her head went quiet. Pruett went to a knee in front of him. Her lip curled into that fishhook smile.
“I asked you for help once,” she said. How stupid she’d been, hoping for something like welcome. “You called us savages.”
“I didn’t know—”
“You sent soldiers in the night to ambush us.”
Yoroub only sobbed. He’d earned this for himself. Now he’d die as he lived—leashed to Balladairan heels.
Pruett stood and looked for one other prisoner. General Marquis de Moyenne was held between two Sands, apart from those about to be executed, and bound in irons instead of ropes. He was too valuable to throw away, as much as Pruett wanted to get rid of him.
In a murmur for nearby ears only, she asked him, “Have you considered my terms? You could spare your men and be well on your way to Balladaire in the bargain.”
“A Moyenne does not surrender.” Moyenne tried to spit at her, but he was so dehydrated no moisture came out. Say that for the noble, he had a bigger pair on him than Yoroub. “And only the duke regent can cede territory to an invading army.”
Pruett’s fishhook smile grew more vicious. “You and I both know that’s not true.”
The rights of the Balladairan military hierarchy had been drilled into her deeper than her own desires. As an active field general and a member of the High Court besides, Moyenne outranked all the Balladairans at the other garrisons in Masridān. Pruett needed to secure Samra’, and Masridān as a whole, but without Moyenne’s cooperation, she was looking at one bloody battle after another, and the other cities wouldn’t fall as easily as Samra’.
Well, she thought. Let the blood begin.
She spun on her heel to the blackcoat lieutenant waiting for her signal.
She raised her hand. She let it fall.
As the Conqueror’s Square filled with blood once more, Pruett raised her eyes to Cantic’s immortal stone gaze.
Congratulations, you old bitch.
The next day, Pruett was in the Governor’s Hall, where she’d made her base, when a young Masridāni messenger knocked on her door. He saluted eagerly when she opened it. Kiras kept between them. He was young, a recent recruit—not a blackcoat under Balladaire, but an eager malcontent who’d been waiting for a chance to overthrow those bastards, if only anyone in Samra’ had had half a spine like the qā’id.
“What?” Pruett snapped.
“Captain Noé is at the Old Hospital. He told me to fetch you, sir.” He spoke in Shālan. The Masridāni dialect slithered away from Pruett and took a few extra seconds to parse. When she did, her heart plummeted to her stomach.
“Is he hurt?” Pruett didn’t give the young man a chance to answer, her long strides forcing him to chase her. As ever, Kiras followed.
“It’s not him, Qā’id,” he said, trotting at her side. “Just some people. They’ve gone… funny.”
“Funny?”
The kid ducked his head into his shoulders. “Ill, I mean.”
Pruett’s palms itched with that Balladairan-bred fear of disease. Anyone else, it would have been called superstition, but civilized people didn’t have those.
They wound through tight roads of high buildings, a mix of gray stone and the famous red-clay brick. Pruett pulled out a rolled cigarette from the gold case she’d commandeered from one of Moyenne’s men. The burn in her lungs gave her something to focus on that wasn’t the dread in her belly or the fear-scraped faces staring out at her from every corner.
It also dulled the consistent throb in the back of her skull.
“What’s your name, soldier?” Pruett exhaled a plume of smoke into the winter day. Warmer than it would be in Balladaire this time of year, but still cool enough for her jacket.
“Saqr.”
“Is that what you called yourself with the Balladairans, or after I came?”
“It’s my name.” He straightened his shoulders.
“As you like.” Not her business either way, whether he’d named himself for a hawk or his parents had. She remembered her old name. She didn’t wonder if her parents had named her imagining a happier child. A happier life. That girl was dead. Sold and long, long gone. No sense trying to puppet her corpse around.
Even some of the newer buildings they passed, the ones made of paler clay, had been painted red to imitate the older ones. Stone, too. Pruett had asked about it after they arrived. Fitting, in a way, for a city soaked in as much blood as Samra’. From her own takeover to Cantic’s, and probably all the way back to Emperor Djaya and beyond. It was why she’d chosen the color of her coat. The color of the flag if they ever made one.
The hospital was one of the original red-clay buildings, old and big. It looked like original Shālan work, with the great keyhole doors and ornate stone tiling. The motifs were different from the ones in Qazāl—Pruett swore the shapes in the Masridāni tiles swirled into animals—but you could tell there was a shared history between the two countries. In the small courtyard at the center, water bubbled from the stump of two sandaled stone feet, and around it, people were tended on pallets.
Saqr led her past this courtyard and to a side room. Noé stood in the corner, speaking to a concerned pair, their gazes drifting to a figure lying on the ground.
“What’s going on?” Pruett asked.
Noé nodded down to the handful of people in the room. Some darker skinned, some pale, some richly dressed, some not, in Balladairan style or Shālan. The one thing they had in common was the blank stare they leveled at no one. They registered neither her arrival nor her words.
Pruett jerked back in revulsion. “Fuck me.”
It was exactly like the Sands who’d been taken prisoner in the Taargen War. When Pruett recovered them, they’d been like this. If they were conscious, they stared, unseeing, not reacting. Better at least, when they slept, if you could call it sleeping.
Suddenly, she felt cold. Like it was that sky-falling awful winter all over again.
A spike of pain lanced through Pruett’s skull, bringing with it the sickly-sweet scent of dung and the taste of hay. She pressed the heels of her palms against her temples and growled.
When the pain passed, Pruett bent down to better look into one young man’s face. She snapped her fingers in front of him. Nothing. He didn’t even twitch his eyelids.
“Oy!” she yelled. Nothing. She backed away. “Put them out of their misery.”
The order was met with silence.
“I said—”
Kiras stepped close to her, her hawkish nose brushing Pruett’s cheek as she whispered, “Look.”
She flicked her head to the side and Pruett followed. The man and woman Noé had been speaking to held each other, mooning at her with weepy eyes and snotty noses. She looked between them and the young man on the pallet.
Pruett grunted. “He yours, then?”
“Our brother,” the man said in Balladairan, and the woman said, “Mercy, please.”
Pruett walked over to them, gave them a long look up and down. Noé’s tender disapproval followed her. She needed another smoke.
“When?”
“We found him like this three days ago.” The woman glanced uncertainly at her brother. “We thought he’d hit his head working—a fall, from a building—but when he didn’t get better, we brought him here.”
“You know what’s wrong with him?”
“No, my lord.” The man’s voice quavered only a little.
“You know how to fix him?”
“No, my lord.”
“Then I’ve got bad news for you. This is it for him. Something in him is gone. He’ll never answer to his name again, never recognize you, never speak—” Pruett’s voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “He’ll never speak to you again. Never smile. You want that for him? You want that for you? Death is a mercy.”
That’s what the Balladairan officers had said, before shooting the Sands Pruett had risked her life to rescue. Something had been gone in them, too, broken by whatever the Taargen priests had done. The other Sands hadn’t even been given the choice to take care of them. It was either kill them quick or leave them to starve to death, alone in the no-man’s-land between Balladaire and Taargen.
“We’ll take care of him as best we can.” The man lifted his chin and looked down his nose at her. There was love there. Loyalty. Devotion.
Made her feel like shit.
Pruett sucked her teeth. “Good. Then you’ll take care of them all. These and any more that come up. Samra’ thanks you.”
Pruett didn’t bask in their shock. She stomped out of the hospital, Kiras falling in beside her.
Outside again, in the clean air, she could breathe again. The noise of the animals grew louder in the back of her head, but it was better than facing her past in those blank stares.
“You seen anything like that before?” Pruett asked quietly.
“No,” Kiras said. A thoughtful line appeared between her thick eyebrows. “Head injuries, yes. People born… different, yes. But awake and not awake at the same time?” She shook her head.
“I have. One time. One cause.”
Kiras looked sideways at her as they walked, eyebrow cocked, waiting. She wore a gold ring in it now. It was handsome. The gold suited her brown skin. Gold bangles on her wrists, too, in the Masridāni custom. Pruett dodged around a donkey. Touching an animal accidentally was a sure way to call down a migraine, if it didn’t knock her unconscious.
“When we fought in the war—”
“You and the other dāyiein?”
Pruett snorted. They’d been lost, all right. “Aye. When we fought the Taargens, if they captured a Sand, they didn’t kill us. They… used us. In some fucked-up ritual that let them turn into bears or wolves. It left the prisoners—” She shuddered and jerked her head back toward the hospital. “Like that.”
The line between Kiras’s brows didn’t deepen, didn’t relax. She took it in stride. Pruett laughed bitterly. Of course Kiras wasn’t fazed. She was an Eater.
“Everything that made them who they were, they took it, gone.” Pruett snapped her fingers.
And now it was here, in her city.
Kiras said something solemnly in Shālan that Pruett didn’t understand.
“What?” They were approaching the marble steps of the Governor’s Hall.
“Rouh,” Kiras repeated slowly. Her accent was thick when she spoke Balladairan. “What makes you you and me me. Like a breath, the difference between a corpse and a person. The Taargens take that from people, for their magic?”
“Oh. The soul. That’s what the theorists in Balladaire call it. What separates man from the animal and allows us to be civilized. Always thought it was a load of bearshit.”
Now Kiras’s frown did deepen. “Why would a soul be bearshit?”
“Well, for one, the Droitists didn’t think Shālans had souls. We couldn’t be civilized naturally, so they had to beat it into us like dogs.”
Kiras’s lip curled, showing off one sharpened canine. “I’ll slit whoever told you you don’t have a soul from cunt to crop.”
Her vehemence surprised Pruett.
“And now?” Kiras tilted her head back toward the hospital. “That changed your mind?”
“No. This did.” Pruett tapped her temple. “Now I know they were full of shit. Animals are loads more civilized than we are.”
She waited for Kiras to probe deeper, to pick and pick at her, but all Kiras did was rake her hand through the messy side sweep of her curls and say, “I’m sorry.”
“Aye. But what’s more fucked,” Pruett said, lowering her voice, “is that a Taargen priest is here. Or was. Spies or worse. I’m not giving up this city, Kiras. Not to them or anyone else.”
Kiras’s golden eyes bored into Pruett’s. There was a flicker of something in there, but Pruett couldn’t read it for the life of her. It was what she liked most about Kiras. That inscrutableness. The steadiness. Slow and careful, unlike someone else Pruett could name.
Speaking of animals. Pruett felt Sevroush in her head before his winged shadow swooped above her. She held out her arm with the bracer and the vulture settled comfortably. He waited, head tilted, for her to give him a piece of fresh meat, but all she had was the dried meat in her pouch. He couldn’t frown, and yet his disapproval was clear. He snapped the meat up anylight, then stuck out his leg.
Pruett took the scroll to see what news Sev had brought from Touraine.
She read through it once and her stomach dropped, but there was no reason to be upset. A final peace treaty signed between Balladaire and Qazāl. The princess was now the queen. And then the last lines—not saying, “Yes, I’ll come” or “No, I won’t come” but “I have business here for Qazāl.”
It was Touraine, all buttoned up in duty and obedience, and it wasn’t Touraine. It was a stranger, and she was hiding something.
“It’s good?” Kiras asked in a low, careful voice.
“Yes,” Pruett said tightly. “It’s good. Everything is good.”
Luca is the new queen of Balladaire. Her empire is already splintering in her hands. Her uncle wasn’t the only traitor in the court, and the Withering plague will decimate her people if she can’t unearth Balladaire’s magic. The only person who can help her wants the only thing Luca won’t give—the end of the monarchy.
Touraine is Luca’s general. She has everything she ever wanted. While Luca looks within Balladaire’s borders, Touraine looks outward—the alliance with Qazal is brittle and Balladaire’s neighbors are ready to pounce on its new weakness. When the army comes, led by none other than Touraine’s old lover, Touraine must face the truth about herself—and the empire she once called home.
A storm is coming. Touraine and Luca will stand against it together, or it will tear them apart once and for all.
Magic of the Lost
The Unbroken
The Faithless
The Sovereign
