by C. L. Clark
Guérin lost her leg high above the knee. No surprise. The bite had put Touraine in mind of a cannonball wound, all splintered bone and dangling, bloody meat. Except she’d rather have the cannonball. At least it might have taken the leg clean off in one go. The teeth didn’t. The saw didn’t, either.
Luca paid for laudanum, and Guérin slept through the worst of it. When she was awake, she moaned like a madwoman, and Lanquette shadowed her bedside like a lover.
As she healed, Touraine thought always back to the Apostate’s words and the seamless scar on her own forearm. If she told Luca what she thought—that a Qazāli had healed her—could Luca make them heal Guérin, too? Was something like this even healable? She told herself it wasn’t. She told herself that even if it were possible, the rebels wouldn’t help. Fear kept the words locked in tight.
Touraine tried to tell herself Guérin wasn’t her soldier. It wasn’t her duty, and it sure wasn’t her sky-falling fault. She’d heaped enough guilt on her shoulders over her own platoons. She didn’t need any more. They weren’t even friends. They had only kept the same bunk, obeyed the same fool woman’s orders, and trained together every morning for the last couple months. She paid the guard a quick visit whenever she was lucid.
Luca was the surprising one.
The princess sat by the guard as she slept, looked in on her when she woke up. A week after the doctor amputated the leg, Touraine even caught Luca dashing moisture from her eyes as she closed Guérin’s door behind her.
Sky above, she was a sorry sight.
One day, as Luca was leaving the guard and Touraine was going to visit, Touraine reached to put a hand on the princess’s shoulder, without thinking. Luca froze. Her splotchy face darkened.
The hand dropped like a cannonball. The air between them had chilled. They were master and assistant again—however valuable the assistant was.
Instead, Touraine said, “She might make it. I have seen people come out of worse.”
She didn’t insult Luca by pretending it looked likely. She’d never seen someone half eaten by a monster like that. Touraine had never heard someone scream like Guérin had, either, and men and women screamed a lot of ways when they were shot or stabbed or hacked at with saws by their own medics. She’d screamed her own share under whips and bullets.
Luca said nothing to the aborted gesture or the comment. She turned a cold shoulder and limped down the stairs to the sitting room, thunking her cane into the ground and finding things to shove out of her way. She’d ignored Touraine like this for days. Their Shālan lessons had stopped entirely.
Instead of checking in on Guérin, Touraine trailed in Luca’s icy wake. Another feeling was creeping up, gradually replacing the pity. A familiar feeling, but one she’d kept shoved down around Cantic, down so deep she had let herself forget. Here she was a-sky-falling-gain. Worthy enough for her commander to give her the top jobs, the toughest jobs, but never good enough to be a… a what, exactly? Just a part of the whole, a real part. She would always be disposable.
The princess collapsed on one of the cushioned chairs in front of the échecs board and flicked her hand at the other. Touraine sat, obedient as a hound and hating it.
“Have you ever played échecs?” Luca asked. Her voice was rough.
Touraine blinked. “No. Never had the patience for it.”
“That’s a shame. You’re going to learn it today.”
“As you command.”
Luca glared a dose of poison at her, but she set up the board without a word. The board folded out on hinges, revealing smaller boxes housing the carved figurines. One set was carved out of wood so dark that Touraine thought it was stone, until she picked out the telltale whorls of the grain. The other was pale, slightly yellowed, like bone that had been picked over.
“These were my father’s.” Luca held one of the bone-colored camels, stroked it with a finger. “Someone made it for him when we first came south.” She put the camel in its place in front of Touraine and smiled a smile that looked more like a grimace. “Not me, but Balladaire, the armies. He told me about it later, when he taught me how to play.”
Luca said échecs in Shālan, and Touraine repeated it. The word tingled in her mouth. Like an intimate whisper. Their Shālan lessons had been on hiatus since the attack, and she found that she missed them.
Slowly, Luca’s face softened as she surfaced from the dark mood, and the tension left Touraine’s shoulders.
Maybe it was Touraine’s own loneliness that let her see the mirror across from her, but suddenly, it was clearer than it had been, even after the ball when they’d talked together for hours—Luca needed a friend. Not an assistant, not guards. Ever since the latest broadside had come out, the cool scholar had bounced between frantic and bitter. It had only gotten worse after Bastien’s discovery. Her eyes were bruised with the exhaustion of combing through governor business and history books. If she ever rested, she had no one but Gil. She certainly hadn’t come looking for Touraine again.
“And how do you play?” Touraine picked up a square-topped bone tower. It was a near-perfect rendition of the clay-brick houses in the city, down to the tiny ladder running up the side.
Luca pointed to one of her carved black pieces, a tall, singular man. Touraine picked up the corresponding piece on her own side. Instead of a crown, layers of cloth dripped from his head. “Yes. This is the king. Your goal is to capture or kill your enemy’s king without any harm coming to your own.” Luca stared her down. Her blue-green eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, a deep line between her dark brows. “He doesn’t move well, but you must protect him at all costs. Do you think you can manage that?”
Touraine stared back. Her heartbeat ticked hard in her throat. “I do.”
They played—rather, Luca played and Touraine floundered—until the sun set. When Adile brought food, they ate it and wiped their hands on linen napkins before making their next moves. Adile lit the lanterns and closed the deep-red curtains over the windows. No one else disturbed them all day.
Touraine had never been so soundly beaten at anything since her first years in the Balladairan training yard. She learned after the first several games that charging forward with the most powerful pieces wouldn’t win shit, so she saw to her defensive tactics. Her greatest success was the last game. Instead of sending all her armies to attack, she barricaded her king in a defensive square of players. It became impractical soon, as Luca slowly winnowed away the makeshift fortress with precision. Somehow, Luca predicted Touraine’s moves before she made them, and had traps already in wait.
She gave Touraine no quarter. Not even a little mercy for a beginner. She was hard, harder even than Cantic, who had at least pretended regret when she punished the young Sands for their mistakes. There was nothing like that in Luca.
“You should move your pawns more,” Luca said, pointing to Touraine’s pale foot soldiers. “Let them guard your king and make trouble so you don’t have to spend the more useful pieces.”
She threw the comment away as she studied the board, but it made Touraine stutter to a halt. In her mind, Émeline straddled Tibeau’s lap, making fun of him while Touraine and Pruett laughed and a cook fire danced happily between them. A brief moment of happiness before the company of pawns went to fight and die for the king in his city. Now Émeline was gone.
“You would make a brilliant general,” Touraine said quietly.
Luca startled as she moved her queen several diagonal spaces from Touraine’s king. Her cheeks tinged pink, but her look at Touraine was quizzical. “Checkmate.”
Touraine swore. “Wait. That last move. What did you do? What did I miss?”
Luca smiled with such pure, wicked, girlish glee that it was Touraine’s turn to be startled.
“You should be asking what I did at the beginning. Now. I think I’ve had enough. Have you?” Luca winced as she pushed herself away from the board. “I feel a little better.”
“Better?”
“Better. Now I w
ould like to get up, undress, and lie down.”
“All right.” Touraine still looked at the end of the game, trying to remember Luca’s last moves. It was easier than thinking about pawns.
Luca smiled. “We can have tea again, if you’d like?”
Touraine hesitated, eyes still on the board, her robed king surrounded by two tiny foot soldiers and a watchtower with its ladder. She picked him up and ran her calloused thumb along the smooth, dark wood of his turban.
“The bookseller sent a message. They want to know where you stand. I think they heard about our trip.”
“And what of it?” Luca’s brief joy faded into touchy irritation. She muttered, “Fine. They’re more important now, anylight. If I can’t get to the books, it has to be the people. I need to end this. A Qazāli family was murdered in Atyid—did you know that? And later, two of the city’s blackcoats were found hacked apart.”
Touraine hadn’t known that.
“If we don’t come to terms with these clandestine little meetings, the next step is war. I can barely hold Cantic off as it is. But I won’t sell my empire on the hope of a few magic seeds that never sprout. What do you think? Will the rebels listen?”
Touraine recognized the old folk warning. An itch gathered between Touraine’s shoulder blades. She knew what she wanted. And she knew what Luca wanted. Sky above, she was tired of being a pawn. Who was to say she couldn’t be a camel knight or stand at the watchtower?
Who was to say she couldn’t be the player instead?
Touraine turned the king over in her fingers, running her thumb over the smooth wood.
“It’s hard to say, Your Highness.” Touraine shrugged. There were too many things she didn’t know how to talk about. The magic. The Sands. Her own creeping discontent. “They don’t seem…”
“I’ve already asked you—be frank with me. Would you tiptoe around your soldiers like this?”
Touraine tightened her lips and shook her head tersely.
“Then open your sky-falling mouth. What do you think about the rebels? Is their friendship worth slapping the face of every noble from here to Béson?”
Luca’s temper flared like a struck match, and Touraine lit like a cannon fuse. She slammed the king on the board with a satisfying clack.
“If it wouldn’t get me hanged, I would slap the face of every noble from here to Béson and back again. It makes me sick to see you court them. You want to stop this rebellion, then give the Qazāli what they want. Free them. Do it and they might even become allies. You don’t need the nobles’ approval for it. You’re the queen.”
“Those nobles are my people, and if I don’t end this rebellion the right way, my uncle won’t even give me my throne. Then the Qazāli get nothing. Or did our dear friends tell you they’ll help me oust my uncle by force?”
Luca flicked a hand dismissively. As if Touraine couldn’t possibly understand the stakes. Touraine understood them all too well.
“Our friends? You want their magic, but what have you done for them except finally treat them like humans? They offer advice, and you ignore it so you can chase down their secrets and almost get drowned for your trouble. Is everything yours for the taking? Do you care about anyone but yourself? Guérin almost died for you—I’d bet she wishes she had.”
A muscle twitched in Luca’s jaw. Good.
“I’ve changed Qazāl for them,” Luca said through gritted teeth. “The children I sponsored have already started schooling. Qazāli are working under better conditions than they’ve ever had, thanks to me going against the nobles. Guérin has the best medical treatment in my considerable power. Because of that, she’ll survive.”
“Without a leg. Do you know what it’s like for a soldier to lose her fucking leg?”
Luca raised her chin and faced Touraine full on. She folded her hands slowly on her cane in front of her. “No. I don’t. Tell me.”
Touraine had gone too far, and she wanted to go farther still.
“You’re trapped in bed until you heal enough to get up again—if you heal at all. You struggle to learn the crutch, the balance of it all. When you feel like you can walk again, you fall flat on your face because you forget a whole sky-falling leg is gone. It doesn’t feel like it. It even itches, and you’re half-mad with wanting to scratch it. You feel weak, with nothing to stand on. Less than everyone else around you.”
Luca raised an angry eyebrow. “I have a certain empathy—”
Touraine shook her head, tears of fury on her eyelashes. Too many of her men and women had lived through this—too many of them had not. She pointed at Luca, pointed at the sky-falling queen of Balladaire. “No. No, you don’t. Take off both your legs and look at all you have left.” She threw her arms wide. Luca just stared at her. “I said, look!”
Slowly, Luca turned her head marginally, flicked her eyes right, left. Plush carpets and carved wooden tables, upholstered chairs, everything but the servants pretending not to hear the future queen and her pet Qazāli shouting to the rafters.
“You will never have nothing. Not like we have nothing. Not like the Sands have nothing, not like the Qazāli have nothing. Not like a carpenter’s daughter in Nowhere, Balladaire, has nothing.” You will never have to sell yourself to live.
She stopped to swallow away the hitch in her throat. “Guérin lived by the strength of her legs, the speed of her sword arm. You lived by them.”
Luca’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. Lamplight broke on a streak of tears on her cheek.
“And now she will live by me. She’ll have a lifetime pension. She and her family will never want for anything.”
“Of course. Nothing but her leg.”
Luca sniffed, but Touraine could see her jaw working as her teeth ground. The ice was cracking.
“I just wish I knew… If we had access to Qazāli magic, maybe we could have healed her. Or maybe our own magic could have helped. That’s why I’m doing this, Touraine. Don’t you understand? It’s not just about this city or these rebels. My people have been plagued by disease and war for decades. I would do anything for the power to save them.”
Touraine’s fists shook as she turned.
What was Touraine willing to do for the Sands, these pawns? What would she give up to keep them on the board a little longer? Everything.
Behind Touraine, a palm slammed against a table, and a chess piece clattered on the board.
“Touraine.” Luca’s voice cracked, and Touraine stopped midstep.
Touraine’s pulse throbbed somewhere low in her stomach. It made her want to throw up. She turned slowly.
“The magic is real, Luca.” Touraine slid her sleeve up her forearm so the silvery brown of the scar shone in the lamplight. “I don’t know if it does more than this or how it works. All I know is that I was hurt, and the cut shouldn’t have healed as quick as it did.” Her only theory was that the girl on the gallows had done it. The tingle as their skin had touched, when Touraine slipped the noose around her neck. The girl’s prayer. Could it be as simple as that?
“The problem is,” Touraine continued, “I don’t trust them. I don’t trust the Jackal. She wants a fight.”
Luca stared at Touraine in silence, her lower lip caught in her teeth. Her eyes trailed from Touraine’s arm to her eyes and back again.
“Say something,” Touraine whispered after a full minute of silence.
Luca held Touraine’s eyes and drew out the tension a moment longer. Finally, she said, “Tell them… tell them I’ll give them one hundred guns. For the magic. I want to know how it works. I want teachers—or healers or what have you. Nothing less.” Luca began to right the échecs pieces she had knocked down.
“What?” Touraine stepped forward, unsure she’d understood. “You want to give them guns? What about the Jackal? I just said—”
“One hundred guns,” Luca repeated. “They get the message that I trust them, but they won’t do more than scratch us if they decide to attack. Trust me.”
“But—�
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“Enough,” Luca snarled. “That’s my decision.”
Touraine froze. Then she snapped to attention, as if the habit were activated by the command in Luca’s voice.
“As you command, Your Highness.” Touraine bowed. When their eyes met, Luca’s lip was trembling. Touraine glared to keep her own angry tears at bay. “How will they get them? They’ll want to know details—”
“I don’t have details yet. Just tell them I will. I need time to figure out the rest. And if that’s not enough for them, walk away. I’m done negotiating.”
One hundred guns. Pitiful, compared to the thousand Balladairan soldiers garrisoned just outside the city. And yet more than enough to ruin Luca if anyone found out.
Touraine walked into the meeting and dropped a basket of food unceremoniously in front of the Apostate. The Jackal half rose from her sprawl. Malika and Saïd frowned.
The witch straightened. “She’s made a decision.”
Touraine nodded. She’d tried to shake off the piss-poor mood, but it clung like the smell of shit to a latrine pit, even though she had good news for once. She nodded her chin at the Jackal.
“She says a hundred guns. A hundred and five, more likely, because they’re packed in crates of fifteen. That, or we’re done here.”
The silence held. Dragged.
“One hundred?” the Jackal finally snarled. “Why doesn’t she add a handful of couscous and call herself generous?”
“She did.” Touraine pointed to the food at her feet. The wicker basket steamed with the fresh grain mixed with vegetables and spices. It would have smelled delicious if her stomach hadn’t been knotted up with hurt and anger. “Do you even have a hundred people who can shoot?”
“We have enough who can teach.”
The Apostate’s raised palm silenced them both. “And if I recall correctly, you were an esteemed lieutenant in the Balladairan army. That should help.”
Touraine snorted. Good luck talking her way out of that treason, even with Luca’s help. “Where can I teach fifty people to shoot without accidentally hitting some poor shit in the foot?”