GUNPOWDER MAGNOLIA Chapter 8: Foreign Dirt (Patreon)

Hi Dagger Tier!

Here's the eighth chapter of Gunpowder Magnolia ahead of the newsletter. Not caught up yet? Find links to previous chapters here.

Tairo had always been a beat slower to wake than Lanthe. He was still coming to, stumbling, as rough hands hauled them both to their feet.

“We—um…”

“Surrender,” Lanthe said for him, seized by a sense of urgency as rough hands jerked her arms back. “We surrender.”

General Chang always said that a commander must read the collective energy of a group of soldiers. Not succumb to it, but note it, understand it, and respond wisely. Lanthe may never have learned to read written language, but she had learned to read soldiers, and the energy from these Yao put her on high alert. There was something anxious about them—excitement on the edge of wrath. Lanthe could feel it in the syncopation of their breath. In the over-alert way they watched her and Tairo, eager for a wrong move. In the way their hands jerked at her arms, the man on her left out of step with the one on her right, as though half-wanting to tear her in two. These men were itching to hurt something. Lanthe just needed to ensure that when that simmering inevitability boiled over into violence, it wasn’t on Tairo. He was the key game piece here. Her job was to make sure he reached the capital unhurt.

While two Yao held Lanthe still, a third unfastened her belt and patted her down for concealed weapons. The binding must have felt more or less like a man’s chest through her quilted armor because the hands didn’t linger on her breasts with any curiosity. Unwise, Lanthe thought. She would have searched a captive down to his undergarments, but she got the sense that these men weren’t particularly well-trained. There was a looseness and chaos to their movements that would have put them out of step in a line of Ro—or even in the ranks of the Yao who had attacked Yansey. These were not their country’s finest.

“There’s a hunting knife in my boot,” Lanthe told the man before her, then jerked her head back at Tairo. “His too.”

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