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

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