The Unbroken by C. Clark (ebook reader .txt) 📕

A monster with a mouth longer than Luca’s arm clamped itself on Guérin’s leg while the guard hugged the support with her whole body.

A crocodile. With each lash of its massive tail, the guardswoman cried out. With each cry, Luca felt Touraine flinch.

A gunshot.

For a sickening moment, Luca hoped someone had shot Guérin out of her misery. But another thrash from the beast and it went still. A bloody hole leaked right in the middle of its head. It hung suspended on the surface of the river, bobbing against the boat before the river dragged it away.

Touraine caught Guérin’s sleeve as the woman’s eyes rolled up into her skull, slowing the woman’s sinking body enough that Lanquette could help heave the guardswoman out.

Lanquette put an ear to Guérin’s mouth.

“Is she alive?” Luca whimpered.

He nodded. Guérin’s leg, however, was a tangle of shredded cloth and flesh and splintered bone.

Only then did Luca look back toward land. Gil put away his spent pistol and pulled the other, watching the rest of the docks, which were suddenly and suspiciously quiet. She let out a strangled sound of disbelief, a close relative to a relieved sob, at the trail of bodies her guards had fought near the dock. The boatman who had pushed Guérin lay on his back, eerie eyes staring up at the moon, with his own knife jutting from his throat.

“Are they all dead?” she asked, her throat tight.

“If they aren’t, they’re about to be,” Lanquette growled. He jumped up and proceeded to heave the bodies into the river.

Meanwhile, Touraine unwrapped her scarf, took off her belt, and used the accessories and her sheathed knife to make a tourniquet above Guérin’s knee.

“Won’t you need that?” Luca asked, indicating the knife.

“I didn’t.” Touraine nodded back to the bodies, where Lanquette was dumping the last ones into the water. Touraine snapped at him, “Lanquette, come on. I can’t carry her alone.”

He came back, his face tight with fury. “I have her.”

With Touraine’s help, he hoisted Guérin across his shoulders with a hiss. He’d never looked particularly strong before. Luca had taken him for granted. And Guérin, too. If Guérin hadn’t stepped into the boat first… Luca shivered.

Gil led the way with Touraine jogging half-backward to scan behind them. Luca wished for her cane and the sword inside. When she started to fall behind even Lanquette and his burden, Touraine caught up with her and ducked beneath Luca’s arm. They weren’t invisible, but they might as well have been. No Qazāli wanted to be associated with Balladairans in trouble.

“The rebels betrayed us,” Luca hissed to Touraine.

The soldier shook her head. “No. They warned you. Why would they warn you and then—”

“Take advantage of me? Why not? It’s what anyone would do in their position.”

Touraine gave her a sidelong glance. They were too close for Luca to get a good look at her face. If Touraine turned, Luca could have even kissed her on the cheek, but that jaw was tight with effort or anger or both.

Finally, Touraine said, “It wasn’t them. Remember, they said someone else controls that territory.”

Surprisingly enough, that didn’t make Luca feel any better.

They finally made it across the Mile-Long Bridge, and Luca’s heart sank. The coach wouldn’t be expecting them so soon. It wasn’t there.

Lanquette sagged under Guérin, legs trembling, but he didn’t put her down. Touraine sucked her teeth as she weighed the situation.

“I’ll go.” She spoke to Gil, not to Luca, and waited until the guard captain nodded before lowering Luca to the ground and loping south and east, along the outer wall of the city as it curved away from the river. It wasn’t the shortest journey to a carriage, but Touraine was less likely to get lost this way. Even through her sudden exhaustion, Luca wondered what that must feel like, to set yourself free like a horse galloping across a plain. That was the whole point of the Balladairan standard. Strength, majesty, endurance.

The thought put a bitter taste in her mouth. She snapped at Lanquette. “Put her down before you drop her.”

He laid her down gently, checking her vitals once more before stepping back through the gate to keep watch behind them. Guérin didn’t wake up. Her hands were freezing to the touch.

Luca waited for Gillett to speak to her, but he didn’t. When she finally looked up from her place on the ground, he was looking south, toward the desert. Not too far away, a dark hump in the horizon indicated the edge of the slum city, full of tents and lean-tos to make a third “medina.”

When he finally looked down, his gaze drifted to Guérin and then back to Luca. His frown lines were deep with night. He sighed before turning his back on her again.

“This was unworthy of you, Luca.”

Luca held her head in her hands and pressed her palms to her eyes, as if she could push the tears back in.

They waited for Touraine in silence.

CHAPTER 21GRAINS OF SAND

A battlefield after battle was never really quiet. The wounded would keep you company until you were a mile away. They screamed or begged or wept as they died or were cut or were drugged. Touraine never did the cutting. She’d never had the stomach for it. She said it took the shittiest kind of bastard to be the army chirurgeon. Pruett said only the kindest could do it. She and Pruett and Tibeau had been sewn up more than once, but they were the lucky ones.

Not like Guérin.

Luca insisted on keeping Guérin in a guest bedroom and bringing the best doctor in the colony to her. Which meant Touraine couldn’t escape the sounds.

The doctor did his best.

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.