GUNPOWDER MAGNOLIA Chapter 6: Piece and Player (Patreon)

Happy New Year, Dagger Tier! 

Enjoy the sixth chapter of Gunpowder Magnolia ahead of the newsletter. Not caught up yet? Find links to previous chapters here.

General Chang had reset Captain Arza’s board of battalion pieces. Red Yao pieces stood menacingly at the border, Ro pieces traveling west from the capital and other fronts to intercept them. Soon everything would be in place for a clash of kingdoms. But the piece that occupied Lanthe was the smallest—a pebble marked in blue, representing the wagons of provisions Tenro’s battalion would need to make the rest of the journey to the Yao border. Each day she sat with the Chang family and Hyonang Yinzo, the pebble drew closer to Yansey like a flaming arrow toward a powder keg. When it hit, everything would burst into motion at once. And despite all her misgivings about their plan, Lanthe found herself longing for its arrival. Once she was moving, maybe action would blast away the doubt.

Lanthe had found some comfort returning to training with the other soldiers. The burn in her muscles helped her channel this nameless anxiety through the day. But when night fell, she faced the dark and fear that no force of arms could fight back. Not because it was formless, but because its form shouldn’t frighten her. She loved Tairo. She loved Tenro. She loved her kingdom. Yet it was the same terrible progression every night: she lay down with her thoughts squirming through the labyrinth of the mission to come—fearing all the ways it might go wrong, fearing what it meant for it to go right. Then, as logic packed away those fears with a soldier’s mantra—face that when it comes, face that when it comes—the fear changed form to something stranger. Walls closing her in. The shape of a man braced above her, hands on either side of her head, lips at her ear…

And it didn’t seem to matter that neither Tairo nor Tenro realistically represented a prison. She would wake in panic and pace the room until dawn.

Tenro surely wasn’t the first or only person to notice the circles under her eyes. He was just the one with the rank to pull her from training one morning and comment on it.

“Lanthe,” he said when she fell from the line of jogging soldiers. “You don’t look well.”

Since it wasn’t a question, Lanthe didn’t respond. She would have had to struggle for the breath to do so anyway. Here at the end of the twelfth lap around the fortress, even experienced soldiers had to work hard for each step.

“Put that down.” Tenro nodded to the sacks of rocks across her shoulders. “Walk with me.”

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