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

The next unwritten rule she broke was never stop moving. Even if you’re hiding, you can’t stay in one bunk forever. Someone will find you, catch you, kill you. A soldier dies when she stops. Never stop. Move. Move, Tibeau. Move.

“This is your sky-falling fault, you bastard.” Pruett cast a furtive look around while she wrapped his jacket closed. Like it could stop the blood pulsing out of his stomach. It had already drenched their hands.

“No,” Touraine said. “The blackcoat—”

Sky above and earth below. She looked up, swaying, suddenly unsteady.

Who should be watching her but Rogan, captain of the Balladairan Colonial Brigade, Rose Company, pistol leveled right at her. She didn’t have time to draw a breath before the punch of the musket ball in her chest.

It hurt. Even more than the whips. Pain all over her chest and spreading down to her hip. Even the fabric of her clothes hurt.

She reached for Pruett. “Help me, will you?” she thought she said.

Pruett grabbed her hand. Touraine tried to pull herself steady. Instead, Pruett yanked her forward and slammed a baton into her jaw. Touraine collapsed, her knife clattering away.

She couldn’t see anything through the pain. Her ears rang, but she heard Pruett whisper, “That’s for Tibeau.” Then she jabbed something into Touraine’s body right where she’d been shot.

Touraine screamed in multiplied agony, wrenching her already twisted jaw.

“And that is for the fucking princess. Bastard.”

And then Touraine felt nothing at all.

“General Cantic, what under the sky above is the meaning of this?”

Luca stormed into the general’s office, flinging open the ornate door with all the force of the anger and the blame she had stoked in the carriage.

The room was stifling with the smell of tobacco smoke, and a haze clouded everything. The burst of air from Luca’s entrance swirled it in visible eddies.

Cantic stood at the window in a frozen tableau of startled outrage. She had likely been lost in thought, perhaps even thought of the mess she’d brought on Luca’s city. She held a cigarette, and her gold left sleeve shone as she held the cigarette halfway to her lips. Half-turned toward the door. Mouth wide to curse the intruder.

And then Cantic wound it all up tight to face Luca with a curt bow.

“What do you mean, Your Highness?” The other woman’s voice was hoarse.

For more than two months, Luca had painstakingly built a relationship with the rebels in her colony. For more than two months, she had held hostilities at bay with gifts and an emissary with Qazāli blood. She had come within a hairbreadth of stopping them, maybe for good! And to getting the Shālan magic. This close to not one goal, but two—two! The two things Balladaire needed most from these colonies, and Luca would have been the one to get them. Cantic had ruined it.

“You would rather coat your hands in blood than accept that peace can come without your army. Is that it? Are you afraid you’ll become old and obsolete if you’re not murdering? Is that why you and Cheminade didn’t get along, General?”

The general wasn’t wearing her tricorne, and her hair was pulled back tight in a white-streaked tail. Her dour expression was uncannily similar to the first broadside drawing that Luca had seen. The only thing missing was the ink-as-blood dripping down her fingers.

Cantic pinched out the burning flare of her cigarette with bare fingers.

“Your Highness, I only thought about your safety and that of the citizens. I had information—”

“My safety? You jeopardized my safety! I was in the city, my city, when your soldiers went marauding door-to-door and terrifying my subjects. What if someone had been able to capture me in retaliation?” As Jaghotai would have, if not for Touraine.

Cantic nodded acceptance. “I apologize, Your Highness. That’s yet another reason I think it would be prudent if you remained in the Quartier.”

“My guards would be enough if they didn’t need to protect me in a war zone. Is this how you handled Masridān? The Brigāni? No wonder we have rebels. My father would be ashamed.” Or maybe he wouldn’t. The truth wasn’t the point. She paused for a breath, half weighing the next words before throwing them out, as well. “I’m sure your family would be, too.”

“Luca!” shouted Gil, so surprised that he overstepped his public bounds.

Luca waited for the words to have a visible effect on the other woman, but there was nothing. Somehow, she was immune to the worst Luca had to offer, and that added reckless heat to Luca’s anger. She took a breath to try something else, but Cantic spoke softly, her voice the hush of waves on sand.

“Perhaps, Your Highness. Perhaps. But never forget—the blood on my hands coats yours as well. Everyone who has ever died at my order has died for the empire. For King Roland. For you. When you sit upon that throne and not before that, I will accept your judgment. Until then, I’m going to hold your colony together, because you don’t seem to understand what that takes.”

It was so silent that surely all of them had stopped breathing, not just Luca. Surely time had stopped. Surely the world had stopped spinning? Even Gil’s lips hung parted beneath his gray mustache.

Cantic moved first. She went to rest her hands upon the desk, which was carved as immaculately as her door. Another forest scene, with rabbits and birds and deer. Easy to see even the leaves of the trees blowing in an unfelt wind. Easier than meeting Cantic’s eyes when the general looked up from the desk’s surface.

Luca thought of Guérin’s daughter, an apprentice carpenter now, in La Chaise. Guérin would be home soon.

“Maybe you’re right. I should just soak my hands in it, then.” Then, feeling it like the confession of a crime, Luca added, “Like my father.” She looked between Cantic and Gil. They stared back at her like statues, unblinking but ever judging, weighing her. Gil at least had a touch of