The Sovereign: Another Excerpt

Orbit has officially dropped its excerpt of The Sovereign, which includes Chapter 1 and Chapter 2! I already posted Chapter 1 with the cover reveal, so I decided to post Chapter 2 as well.

Enjoy. ;)

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.”