Page 88 of Dalla's Royal Guards
“Cianna is an amazing little girl. She is very brave.”
“Yes, she is. We’ve heard that you’re amazing, too,” Mario said, then leaned in with a wink.
Lissa elbowed him gently and turned to Dalla. “How are you settling in?”
“Honestly?” Dalla smiled. “I feel like I am finally home.”
She sank down next to Lissa and filled a plate, tilting her head back when Nasser brushed his hand across her shoulders as he moved to the end of the table where Musad had moved to sit with Hari and Mario. She could hear their discussion turn to current events in Kashir.
“The men in this family still try to shield me from what is happening,” Lissa murmured, her eyes haunted as she studied the fleeting expressions crossing Mario’s face.
“How are you healing?”
Lissa winced slightly as she adjusted the wheelchair she was sitting in. “Slowly. It’s going to take time.”
Dalla nodded with sympathy. “Such wounds are never fun,” she said before taking a sip of her tea.
Lissa blinked. “You’ve been shot before?”
“Several times,” Dalla replied. “I imagine modern bullets hurt just as much as the old ones. Fortunately, the medicine’s better now. Less screaming and removing limbs. I think I feared that part the most. I did a fair bit of screaming during the Reign of Terror and the Great War. Fighting changed after the invention of gunpowder. I told that stupid Daoist alchemist he was mad to make something as dangerous as black powder. He babbled on about it being the elixir of life. He learned the hard way that it wasn’t after he blew a hole in the wall of the palace.”
Lissa’s eyes widened, torn between disbelief and curiosity. “You told?—?”
Dalla took a bite of the blueberry muffin and moaned with pleasure. Her cheeks warmed when Nasser and Musad turned to look at her. She picked up the glass of juice the servant had poured and sipped it.
“Yes. I knew the last thing that Emperor Zhaozong should have is that blasted black powder. His reign was horrible. With such great internal strife and rebellion, it was only a matter of time before his dynasty fell. It didn’t help that he couldn’t control his generals or warlords in the region. The entire region was imploding. When Zhu Quanzhong assassinated him and placed Ai as Emperor, I was ready to get out of there. I should never have saved that alchemist life. The world would have been a better place.”
“But… I don’t understand,” Lissa murmured, her eyes focused on Dalla’s face.
Dalla smiled gently and continued, “Maybe if I hadn’t saved him, I wouldn’t have gotten shot saving Napoléon. That was amiserable time to be alive unless you were rich. I do love French food, though.”
She moaned again and waved a pastry in the air. “If I could have arrived either well before or well after Napoléon, life there would have been much better. Of course, it would have probably helped if I spoke the language better, too.“
Lissa choked on her drink. “You’re kidding.”
Dalla’s grin widened. “I wish I were. I was injured during the storming of a prison. Got caught between two factions arguing over what to do with a shipment of weapons. If I’d known Napoléon was going to be such an insufferable tyrant later, I wouldn’t have bothered pulling him out of that mess.”
Lissa blinked. “Napoléon?TheNapoléon?”
“I’m not sure whotheNapoléon is. The one I knew was a cocky man too smart for his own good who couldn’t hold his liquor. We made a bet one night—he lost, of course—and owed me for the liquor. Next thing I knew, I was dragging his sorry self out of an ambush. Did you know that militaries around the world ended up studying his strategies? I was shocked when I discovered that during the Great War. Le Petit Capora had made history,” she mused with a shake of her head.
Lissa’s jaw dropped. “I… I wrote a paper on that. One of Napoléon’s early letters referenced a mysterious woman with a scar on her shoulder who saved his life outside Marseille. I always assumed it was embellished?—”
“Scar’s still there,” Dalla said, pulling her shirt to the side to show the round wound from a musket ball near her collarbone.
At the other end of the table, Musad glanced over just in time to catchNapoléonandshouldn’t have saved him. It wasn’t that he wanted her to lie about herself, exactly, but he couldn’t help wanting to save her from people’s reaction to the truth.
He nudged Nasser. “Time to go.”
“I agree,” Nasser murmured.
“I believe we promised you a tour,” Musad announced, pulling her out of her chair.
“Yes—a long, luxurious one,” Nasser added, wrapping his arm around her waist.
“But—but my breakfast,” she protested, glancing at her partially eaten muffin.
“You can take it with you,” Musad said, grabbing several muffins off the tray.
