by C. L. Clark
Her calculations were simple.
She would give Beau-Sang a touch of power that answered to her alone. He would tighten her grip on Qazāl by working with Cantic to root out the rebels, and he would assure the nobles and merchants kept to the new workers’ laws (those agreements at least, were still right; they would slow the Qazāli’s need for rebellion—Luca knew it).
And if necessary—she hoped it wouldn’t be necessary—this would lead to support for the throne, if her uncle regent refused to cede it. Whether Luca failed or didn’t fail in the colony. The throne was hers. The more of the nobility on her side, with their money and regional militia and influence in the cities on and off Balladairan soil, the less likely she and her uncle would come to bloodshed over her rightful position.
It was a small trade.
The correct application of a tool results in its efficiency, avoiding waste.
“I’ve been looking for a suitable successor to the late Lord Governor Cheminade, and I would like to appoint you.”
His reaction was immediate and calculated. First, eyes wide in modest shock before his brows lowered in determination. Luca could have seen his every change of expression with her eyes closed. His courtly mask was so tight that not even a hint of concern or grief for his missing daughter escaped onto his face. If there was any.
“I would be honored, Your Highness, to give the Qazāli a steady guiding hand.”
Luca held in a snort. He was overplaying the role; they both knew it. She played hers in turn, nodding and leaning forward warmly. She was gambling, to surrender this power to him, but that was what it meant to be queen. Not always to be strong and rigid—like that, she would snap. To bend, to entice and trap.
Like Touraine made traps.
Like échecs, writ large.
“You would, of course, report directly to me. All orders would come from me. This is governmental, not military.”
“Of course, Your Highness.”
“I will make the announcement tomorrow in the bazaar, so that they remember the power we have and why we’re using it. I’ll send a carriage for you.”
When he left, Luca held herself stiff, her eager smile brittle.
“Like siccing a rabid dog on the hunt,” Gil murmured. “Watch yourself, lest it bite you, too.”
Luca frowned. “I know. So stay close in case I need to put him down.”
CHAPTER 27
WAKING UP
Touraine stared at the low ceiling, sweaty with nightmare, clenching her blanket and her jaw. Her jaw. She couldn’t pry it open. Rest. Let it rest. A candle flickered, giving the clay-white walls a blend of yellow and shadow. It wasn’t the room she shared with Lanquette. The room next to Luca’s. The dyed blanket scratching over her bare skin wasn’t hers.
A scar puckered her middle, smooth and shining like brown candle wax that had melted and cooled again. Her stomach lurched. She’d never seen a wound heal like this.
Nearby, people spoke in hushed voices. An earthy, spicy smell wafted to her, and her belly cramped for it. She scanned for her clothing and found the room was full of people-shaped lumps on pallets under thin blankets.
Her clothes weren’t there. She found a pair of loose trousers and one of those hooded vests instead and began to dress. There was enough slack in the trousers’ drawstring that she had to loop the string around her waist one full go before knotting it. Her only belongings were what had been in her pockets: a dirty handkerchief, a few sovereigns, a letter of writ to Luca’s account, and the pass with Luca’s seal. She shoved those in her new pockets.
Someone had also retrieved her knife. Touraine traced the leaves on the handle with her thumb. Like Luca, it had grown familiar over the last couple of months. She hesitated. Qazāli weren’t allowed to carry weapons in the city. If she had it, she’d draw attention to herself. The wrong kind. She didn’t want to leave it behind, though. She buckled it on.
Finally, she twisted to examine herself. A white jolt of pain shot from her waist to her toes. She doubled over, gasping, trying to compress whatever she had stretched too far. Whatever they had done wasn’t finished healing.
“Lodgings not to your liking, Mulāzim?”
Aranen stood in the doorway. Touraine gingerly pulled the sleeveless shirt over her head.
“Where am I? How long?”
“The temple. You’ve been sleeping for almost two weeks.”
Two weeks. She scrubbed her head with her hands. The stiff bristles were dry and had started to curl. No wonder she was starving.
“I need to go back,” Touraine said. “You shouldn’t have brought me here.”
“You want to go back to the Balladairans so they can try to kill you again?” Aranen spoke slowly, as if she were talking to a really stupid rock.
Memory came back to Touraine in trickles, so she dammed the flow again. She would be stupider than a whole bag of rocks to go back to that.
How stupid would she have to be to stay with the rebellion she’d betrayed?
“Where’s everyone else? Djasha?” Jaghotai?
Aranen’s face tightened, and she glanced across from Touraine. Another blanket-covered figure. As her eyes adjusted, Touraine recognized Djasha. The woman’s cheeks were gaunt, her dark skin pallid, even accounting for the poor lighting.
“Is she—”
“She’s fine,” Aranen said sharply. “But running around after you is not helping her.”
Touraine had actually been wondering if Djasha was contagious. Her face burned.
“Can’t you just…” Touraine gestured at her own body.
For a second, the doctor—the healer—let worry breach her scowl. “We don’t know. I’ve tried. Whatever I do is temporary before it comes back, sometimes worse than before. Sometimes it’s dormant for months. Sometimes weeks.”
Touraine had seen Djasha over the last month. Whatever illness this was, it wasn’t dormant.
Aranen sniffed sharply. “What are your plans now, Mulāzim? Are you finally with these fools?”
“Am I being held hostage, or can I leave?”
Aranen made a noise of disgust. Touraine didn’t blame her. She sounded ungrateful and ungracious in her own ears. She couldn’t stay. This was too much.
“This way. Close your eyes.”
She dragged Touraine by the wrist until the heat of the sun warmed Touraine’s face. A door slammed shut with an echo.
Touraine opened her eyes and was blinded. The sun turned the white domes of the temple into mirrors that radiated light on everything around the massive building. A god might actually be proud of something like that. A god whose magic could keep her alive, pull her back together.
She hadn’t meant to sound ungrateful. She didn’t want to be dead. If magic is what kept her here, breathing underneath the sun, what did it matter? If she’d been given the choice, she wouldn’t have said no. All the same. She was glad she hadn’t had to make the choice.
Still, all she had left was the Sands. Maybe. She needed to see Pruett. She needed to apologize. She needed to be with them.
She pulled her hood up. The Grand Temple was in the Old Medina, but the massive fountain in front of it made the area a quiet plaza. At least, there was the illusion of quiet. She could still hear the roll of carts and shouts from vendors on the next streets over. In her head, though, she heard gunshots over it all. She shook her head and reoriented herself toward the guardhouse.
Touraine liked the heat on her bare arms, but the bright light was merciless. That wasn’t why she kept her hood pulled low over her forehead, though; the height of the buildings and the narrowness of the streets kept the sun off unless she turned into a square with a miniature bazaar.
No one recognized her as the treacherous Balladairan dog she was. With her rich imitation-Qazāli clothing from Luca bloodstained and ripped beyond repair, there was nothing to mark her as the villain but the knife at her hip.
Already, the city moved on. Like soldiers. This wasn’t callousness. It was nec
essity. You marched on. If you didn’t, you were admitting to the enemy that you’d been injured. Wounds had to be licked in private, closed off inside temple walls.
Clothes, shopping, even poets chanting their verses in the streets. Cats wove around her ankles; dogs napped in alleys, tongues lolling. Everything to distract her from the meandering journey. What did she expect from Pruett, anyway? They had always been a team. Pruett cleaned her cuts, and Touraine reloaded Pru’s gun (when the Sands were permitted them). Then they docked in Qazāl, and things went wrong one after another. Pruett couldn’t have stopped any of that. Throw Luca in the mix and it was doomed.
If she went back to Luca, she would be safe again. She would have her fancy kit back and not have to look for Rogan over her shoulder, unless—until—Luca learned that Touraine had betrayed her. Cantic, though. The general would take her back. Touraine had proven herself loyal to the army, if not the princess herself. That had to count for something in Cantic’s eyes.
She slowed as she reached the sector claimed by the Balladairan soldiers. Here, a sharp-boned Qazāli man swept the refuse—human and non—away with palm leaves tied into a bunch. The guardhouse rose innocuously, looking like another yellow-gray clay home—if every home had soldiers posted at its door, on its roof, and at the corners of its street. Any Qazāli passing through did so on the other side of the street.
Rogan would be here, too, or nearby. Horse-fucking bastard. She ducked her head like someone avoiding the glare of the sun and circled around to the alley behind the guardhouse complex.
As Touraine passed the back of the building, still thinking about her approach, she heard a musket click, ready to fire. She spun and crouched, then cringed in pain.
“No Qazāli here. Count of five until I shoot you.”
Touraine’s cold wash of fear became relief, then fear all over again. Pruett.
She raised her hands slowly, pulled down her hood, and looked up. She kept her hands in the air. The musket barrel held steady on her, and Pruett wouldn’t miss from this distance. Touraine swallowed, and her jaw ached in memory.
Five long seconds before Pruett lowered the gun. Touraine couldn’t see her expression well, but the silence was telling.
“Stay there.” Pruett vanished.
Several minutes later, she reappeared in the alley. “Pull your veil up,” she said before jerking Touraine by the arm. Pruett dragged her around several corners until they were in a dead-end, L-shaped alley. No one could see them from the street, and the walls of the buildings around them cooled them with shade.
Pruett pulled Touraine around so that Touraine’s back was to the alley’s mouth, and then she tore Touraine’s veil down again.
For seconds, Pruett blinked at her until finally saying, “What the sky-falling fuck?” Dark shadows marked her eyes, and her cheeks were pink with sun. The lines around her eyes deepened as she squinted, searching for the miracle. “You… I… watched you… Sky a-fucking-bove.”
“They did it. The magic. To me.” Touraine pulled at the shirt covering her healed torso.
A small bit of sun lanced into the alley to mock Touraine, shining on Pruett’s new lieutenant pins, the wheat fronds polished to a gleam. The alley smelled like stale piss and stale sex. Not quite stale enough, either of them.
“Why did you bring me here?” Touraine gagged.
“No one will come looking for me if they think I went to get laid, but whorehouses are expensive and this alley is almost as private. It’s the best we’ve got right now, so start talking.” She rested her head against the wall and looked down her nose at Touraine. “I’d hoped you were dead.”
“I’m sorry, Pru.”
Pruett looked away. “Killing my best friend’s not a shit fucking thing you can apologize for.”
“He’s my best friend, too. I didn’t want him to get hurt. It was an accident.” Touraine wanted to put her hand up to Pruett’s jaw, like she had countless times before, but she kept it against the wall. “I didn’t want to hurt you, either. None of you. You’re my soldiers. I was just trying to help—”
“Your soldiers? We were your family, Touraine. And you betrayed us—for who? For the princess? For some sand flea–bitten beggars? What do you know of them? What do they know of you that we don’t?”
Flecks of Pruett’s spit landed on Touraine’s cheek.
“I—”
“Have they seen you bleed? Have they seen you kill anyone? Does she know your voice when you’re scared? Could she pick your laugh out of a crowd?”
Touraine sagged under the weight of the accusation. Between Jaghotai and Djasha and Luca… it was laughable that any woman could come close to sharing what Touraine had shared with Pruett and the other Sands. No one but a Sand could understand where she came from.
She almost told Pruett about Jaghotai. Almost. What would she have said? I met my mother. We hate each other. She’s tried to kill me. She hates all of us. I don’t want her, but she’s here. She’s real.
The disgust in the suck of Pruett’s cheeks was too strong. Pruett had made no secret of what she felt about her own family, wherever they were, somewhere in the east of the broken Shālan Empire. She’d been sold by her own parents, and she was smart enough to know it, even as a kid. She didn’t like Balladaire, but she didn’t have high hopes about home like Tibeau did. Touraine understood that much. It wasn’t the sort of thing you forgave. Touraine and Jaghotai would probably murder each other if Touraine didn’t leave, but at least Jaghotai seemed almost as angry at the Balladairans for taking the Sands as she was that Touraine had come back.
Instead, throat thick, Touraine asked, “How is everyone?” She couldn’t ask the real question: Does everyone hate me?
“If you gave a ripe shit, you’d never have left.”
“I left for you.” Desperately, grasping. “I betrayed her and the rebels for you.” She had risked her life, an entire city, for them. For Pruett.
The other woman cocked her head sharply. “What do you mean?”
Touraine swallowed and shook her head. To tell the truth would mean confessing that her gamble had cost her Tibeau, as well.
“I’m here now. I am.”
“No. What the fuck do you mean?” Pruett yanked her roughly by the shirt.
Touraine looked down at Pruett’s fist clutching rough linen. The conviction that had kept her going up to this point had died with Tibeau. All she wanted to do was sink into Pruett’s arms like she had three months ago.
“I told Cantic that the rebels had guns,” Touraine mumbled. “Luca wanted peace; the rebels wanted peace.”
Pruett’s eyebrows knit together, and her lip curled in confusion. “What? If they wanted peace, what the sky-falling fuck happened?”
“I sold them out to Cantic.” Touraine hung her head. Her throat tightened, and the words were hard to get out. “Luca was going to give them guns, and then… that’s what you would have been up against. I couldn’t let that happen.”
Pruett’s hands went slack on Touraine’s shirt. Horrified? Surprised? Her wide eyes were bloodshot, supported by sleepless bruises underneath. “You can’t be sky-falling serious.”
“Why not? You just said it—neither side gives a sky-falling shit about us.”
Pruett exhaled sharply through her nose and shook her head. “So I did. Anylight, your princess is just as Balladairan as the rest of them. So the peace probably wasn’t going to last.”
Touraine didn’t like the new, wary way Pruett watched her. “What do you mean?”
“We have the honor of enforcing your lover’s new curfew laws.”
“They must be Cantic’s. Luca loves her grand ideas of noble rule too much.” Oh. An accidental slip of intimacy.
Pruett’s face darkened. “You don’t know her well, then.”
“And you do?”
“She announced it herself. Looked none too pleased with your rebel friends. Do they know what you’ve done?”
Why would Luca be angry with the Qazāli
? The Balladairans had started this and Luca knew it. Unless she thought a rebel had leaked the information about the guns. And the rebels… Touraine hoped that they thought Luca was behind the betrayal. If the truth got out, she was dead.
Pruett took her silence with a knowing nod. “Seems like you made a good play. Time for me to get back.” She tipped her field cap to Touraine and brushed past.
Touraine’s heart pounded in her chest. Her last tether slipped out of her hands. She grabbed frantically for it. “You could have killed me now, if you hated me that much.”
“Well, I fucking didn’t, did I?” Pruett’s voice broke a little before the edge came back. “You sank too low, Tour. If you want to help us, leave us alone. It’s hard enough to live with the Balladairans, and it only gets harder when the rebels get bolder. We have to show the officers we aren’t sympathizers.”
“So come with me. We’ll run—”
“You mean desert. And die like Mallorie? Like Tibeau? All of us?”
“Just you and me.” Touraine hated herself for even saying the words, but she hated the idea of being alone even more. She finished half-heartedly, her voice cracking: “Steal a couple guns—”
“Stop, Tour. Just stop.” Pruett sighed and her body sagged. “Sky above. You almost sound like Beau. Give you one last bit of advice, Lieutenant.”
Touraine clung to the way Pruett caressed her old rank with the same wry lilt as before. No, not the same. Not quite.
“Everyone else thinks you’re dead. The officers, the princess, the Sands. Keep it that way. Get the fuck out of here.”
And then Pruett walked off, hands in her pockets, baton jostling with her hip. She didn’t look back at Touraine once.
CHAPTER 28
A LINE IN THE SAND
Pruett was right. As usual.
And it hurt. As usual.
As she bought two big water bags with a whole sovereign, Touraine told herself she wasn’t running away. She was free now. She had cut her ties to both Balladaire and Qazāl in one brilliant moment, and she was going to take advantage of that.
