by C. L. Clark
Never mind that she’d blown her life apart with canister shot—shredded it into bloody tatters. Never mind that she would never go back to Balladaire, not to thick trees and snow, not to the compounds where she’d grown up.
She hated herself for missing the thunderstorms and the gray stone walls. They hadn’t felt like a prison. She hated herself for thinking—hoping, trusting—that Balladaire would reward her one day, that Balladaire was ultimately fair. How she had absorbed the cruelties, made excuses for them, thinking if she were just a better soldier, more Balladairan than not… Tibeau had been right the whole time, and now he was dead.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to lie down in the desert and let whatever rabid beasts lived there take what they wanted of her.
Instead, she put one foot in front of the other.
None of her life in Balladaire—none of her life for Balladaire—had been hers. It hadn’t really been a life. She could find a life somewhere else.
It was better for her to be dead to Balladaire, and she didn’t know a star-blinded shit about the Qazāli. A night of dancing, barely enough of the language to get herself to a toilet.
So she would head south. There were people who lived in the mountains, out of Balladaire’s reach and Qazāl’s. It was as good a place as any to start over. She bought another scarf on the way out and wrapped it around her face. Better to be safe in anonymity. Hit the southern road and hail a ride with one of the caravans to the next town, where she would stock up on more provisions. For now, all she needed was good boots and old calluses, and she still had both of those.
She left El-Wast through the Mountain Gate, the southernmost gate in the New Medina wall, but as soon as she walked through it, she froze, legs numb from no small terror. She looked back to the city.
No one came after her. Will this be my life, she wondered, always looking over my shoulder?
No. She was dead.
Even dead, she marveled at the outer wall. The intricate stonework curled in Shālan script. She couldn’t understand a word, but she gaped nevertheless before she stepped into the wild desert.
Which wasn’t wild desert at all, not exactly. The acres of yellow earth that stretched east from the Balladairan compound were tent slums to the south. She had seen them the night Luca attempted to go to the Cursed City. She wondered how Guérin was recovering. She definitely didn’t wonder if Luca thought she was dead, too.
Lean-tos that would collapse—were collapsing—under a stiff wind and proper tents alike were wedged on either side of what Touraine would have called the slums’ main road, a winding split that wove through this growth on the city’s back. She followed it.
She’d never seen slums in Balladaire. Here, they were like a village. People shouted to each other, faces covered with hoods and veils or scarves against sun and sand. Some of them wrangled children; some laundry. Children raced around her feet with none of the malice they reserved for the blackcoats in the city. A woman pounding a lump of dough on a wooden plank nodded to Touraine as she passed.
Touraine had never lived a domestic life. Never even seen one. So she’d never dreamed of one. Pruett and Tibeau were her only household; training and recovering and fighting, their daily chores.
What she wouldn’t give to punch that big man one more time.
She spun around at a yank on her shirt. Three wide-eyed children with knobby bones grinned at her. One boy held another on his shoulders.
The boy riding on his friend’s shoulders asked something in Shālan, holding both his hands out in a supplicating gesture, as if he were begging the sky for rain. Which, maybe he was. Touraine recognized the word for water, at least.
“Maybe,” she answered wryly in Balladairan. She could spare at least a little. And the bags would be lighter.
They didn’t even flinch at the language change. The third one changed with her. “We’ll carry your bag!”
So she pulled the bag off, and they cheered before taking a drink. The smallest one probably weighed as much as the bag, but he fended her off when she tried to take it back.
They followed her, chattering and singing through the slums, and her entourage of children grew. A child would take a drink from the water boy and skip along beside them. Touraine should have been irritated. She’d spent a lot of money on that water. It would be half gone before she got to the main road.
Instead, she let a little girl grab her by the hand and twirl underneath it, a tiny parody of the dances in the dancing circle.
At the edge of the slums, the desert she was expecting rose out of the scrubland and stretched farther than she could see. The lone road was bordered on either side by scrappy bushes fighting the desert heat to grow, barely more than tufts of grass. Rocks littered the ground randomly, some just knuckle-sized pebbles, others the size of a grown man’s torso, and it went on like that, flat and flat and flat until suddenly sharp hills rose up, too far away for Touraine to tell if they were sand dunes or not. Somewhere to her right, in the west, the river continued to wind to the south, but it and the lush mud and farmland it supported were out of sight.
It was just her and the desert.
And the children tagging along.
In the empty stretch of dirt just ahead of them, a group of older children, caught in the awkwardness between soft-cheeked childhood and gangly adolescence, jumped and shouted in imitation of Jaghotai’s fighting dance. One girl fought three boys at the same time. Her long braid whipped like an afterthought behind her body.
“Who’s that?” she asked the kids, pointing.
The little girl holding on to Touraine’s hand answered in Shālan and thumbed her chest with pride. A relative, maybe, an older sister.
Touraine didn’t completely understand, but she nodded like she did, and sat down to watch them fight.
The other children sat around her or play-fought, imitating the older ones.
That could have been me.
Here. At home. And she had lost that. The fighting girl, or at least, a girl like her, could have been her child, and that had been taken from her, too. She fought the tears until she couldn’t anymore.
“What’s wrong?” the water boy asked, still clutching his charge.
“Nothing, nothing.”
When the older ones stopped fighting, they walked over to their audience, sweaty and radiant. Touraine had never seen anything so beautiful.
“You’re an excellent fighter,” she told the girl. She pulled off her last waterskin and handed it to her. As she spoke, she reminded herself of Cantic. Technical compliments and a gift.
The thought didn’t please her as much as it would have three months ago.
The girl splashed the water into her mouth and over her face before passing it to her friends. The boy beside her already had a blue bruise opening like a rose on his cheek, but that didn’t stop his lopsided smile. Her heart faltered in her chest.
Touraine had been wrong earlier. You don’t find a life. You have to make one, with the people around you and the causes you put your strength into. She’d built a life with the Sands. They had all made the best they could out of a nightmare. But she’d been putting her strength toward other people’s causes for so long and deluding herself into thinking that she had her own reasons.
Now she had a chance to choose her own cause.
The older girl walked on her hands while the proud little girl followed her, kicking her short, chubby legs into the sky until she fell over. The older girl came out of her handstand, teasing the small one before grabbing the little girl’s legs and holding them up in the air. The little girl’s squeals of delight settled the restive aimlessness in Touraine’s chest.
The water bag came back to Touraine, and she pushed it away. “Keep it.”
Touraine left them, the young children and the old, and took the circuitous route around the slum all the way back to the city. Returning through the Mountain Gate again felt like dipping her head into a cool pool.
She was as free n
ow as she ever would be. She could choose what she fought for. She could choose who she was willing to die for.
When she arrived at the temple, the sky was bright, but the air was already cooling down. Touraine shivered. Then she braced herself and knocked on the smaller, less ornate door.
“You’re late—”
Jaghotai’s snarling face went blank as she saw Touraine. Blank only for an instant before the snarl came back.
“Why are you here?”
A good question, and after taking the long way around the city to get to it, Touraine had an answer. Still, she lowered her voice.
“I want to join up. Let me talk to Djasha.”
Jaghotai shifted to keep the entry blocked. “Why. Are you. Here?”
“Jaghotai.”
“They wouldn’t take you back.”
No. Yes. No. Touraine didn’t let the hurt show on her face.
“I’m choosing my own battles now.” Focus on that truth, and she could convince them both.
And though she narrowed her eyes, Jaghotai let her in.
As she entered the temple with her wits about her for the first time, Touraine gasped. The floor of the main hall was still littered with the detritus of using the room as an infirmary—scraps of bandages and clothes, fragments of musketry and stone—but that wasn’t what stopped Touraine’s breath.
The ceiling was made of arching stone and patterned with tiles in shades of blue and green, in white, in gold. Two rows of impossibly delicate marble pillars ran from either side of the main doors to the back of the temple. Sunlight from the windows glinted off the golden caps of the pillars and the shining stones. When a cloud passed and the room sank into shadows, the intricate designs on the ceiling made its height seem unfathomable.
Their boots echoed in the wide, empty hall.
Jaghotai grunted. “Nice, isn’t it?”
Touraine snorted.
They followed sharp voices and the smell of fresh bread into an open panel in the wall leading to an almost-secret corridor. If the door were closed, it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the wall if you didn’t know to look for it. That must have been why Aranen had covered Touraine’s eyes. The corridor must have been for the priests, before the Balladairans banned uncivilized behavior in the city. Jaghotai led her into a small room, where Aranen stood tall and haughty near an oven.
“You’re back,” Aranen said sourly over her shoulder. “They didn’t want you, I suppose?”
Jaghotai snorted. “Exactly what I said. Wants to talk to Djasha.”
Aranen’s short hair was tousled messily, but she looked a king as she brought the loaves of bread from the oven to the small table. “You’re the last thing Djasha needs.”
Without a signal, Jaghotai sat at the table and began breaking the thick discs of bread into fluffy quarters while Aranen fetched the last loaves.
Touraine watched in silence. They quartered, then carried the bread away, then came back and carried some more. Though her stomach growled, Touraine kept her hands to herself. They must have been feeding the patients.
They were all part of this system, each with their place. They knew their roles, knew how best to help.
Before Qazāl, Touraine had that. She could make herself useful and have that again. They had saved her, after all. Balladaire had tried to kill her. Would it be like trading one set of masters for another?
Aranen came back with Djasha leaning heavily on her arm.
As Djasha sagged into the chair Aranen led her to, she scanned Touraine up and down before grunting in satisfaction. “Beautiful work, my love. Thank you.” She smiled wanly up at her wife, who rolled her eyes and went back to the last of the bread. Aranen didn’t see how Djasha’s face fell, but Touraine did.
The Qazāli had saved her, but it hadn’t been unanimous. Or magnanimous.
A loud squawking echoed through the corridor, followed by Jaghotai’s gruff swearing and then a single sharp warning snarl.
“What under the sky above—” Touraine jumped up, ready to fight or flee.
Djasha waved a hand dismissively, a small smile creeping across her face.
A second later, Jaghotai stormed in, muttering. “Bastard. We don’t go in desecrating their dung temples to their wild god.” She glared at Djasha. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Touraine looked between Jaghotai and Djasha. Hardly a pair so different and yet so inseparable.
“What’re you doing?” Touraine asked.
Djasha smiled ruefully. “I’m going to start a war.”
“Correction.”
A stranger stepped through the door, a very large, very golden cat beside them. They wore pale brown trousers and a loose caftan bound at the forearms by a bracer on one arm and a thick falconer’s glove on the other. They wore their scarf differently, too, wrapped in a tight circle around their head except for what draped down to protect their neck from the sun. Their eyes looked unfocused, but their smile was wicked with glee as they scratched their lion between the ears.
“We’re going to finish one.”
The announcement was postponed by a day. As Luca had expected, Cantic had balked, and Luca had spent the day trotting out legal justifications and explanations for her decisions. More irritating was that Cantic wasn’t balking at the solution; she wanted the Qazāli in hand even more than Luca did. She just wanted to hold Beau-Sang’s leash. At least the general had stopped mentioning Touraine.
As Luca rode by carriage to the Grand Bazaar, her stomach rebelled. She blamed it on the stuffy cabin. The heat made the air inside feel dense, suffocating. She missed snow. She missed how the snowflakes dusted up against the stone walls of the palace in Balladaire. She missed the brightness searing through her eyelids, burning everything red. The tingle as her toes went numb, the burn as her fingers came back to life after playing outside. Years since she’d done that, but not so long since her last snowfall. Will I be back in time for winter?
The most she could expect from Qazāl’s seasonal shift was an increase in rain. Spending her days sopping wet or hiding indoors wasn’t her idea of pleasure. Then again, anything was preferable to this bone-leaching heat. She just wanted to wear trousers without feeling as if she’d pissed herself with sweat.
Cantic waited on the gallows platform with her usual stern mask hammered out of steel. The wood made a comforting, hollow thunk under Luca’s cane.
The colonial conscripts waited in ranks behind the regulars, thick swaths of blackcoats. The sun shone on gold buttons everywhere, but the bayonets, of course, would not be outdone, and sparkled with a vengeance.
A pair of blackcoats escorted Beau-Sang onto the platform as well. Bastien had come, too, but he hung back with the other Balladairan civilians in attendance. Waiting for her.
She traced the cracks of tension that had been cracked wider by the “Battle of the Bazaar,” as people had taken to calling it. Qazāli laborers and hawkers grouped together while Balladairan merchants and shoppers clung to each other. Where the borders of each group met, they eyed each other skeptically at best and with outright hostility at worst.
She took a steadying breath and stepped forward. The crowd fell quiet.
With this moment, I make my name.
“Citizens of Balladaire. The Battle of the Bazaar is an unfortunate stain on the relationship between Balladairans and Qazāli. The rebels have capitalized on a divided nation and wish to sow discord where there is none.” That part of her speech was inspired by a speech she’d read from another ruler. She couldn’t remember quite where or who. She tried to make more spit in her desert mouth.
“The rebels threaten the lives of Qazāli and Balladairan alike. To protect you from this threat—coercion by violence, by blackmail, by any number of things—you need a dedicated governor to replace Lord Governor Cheminade. I have appointed the new governor-general, Casimir LeRoche, comte de Beau-Sang. He will be my hand in the governing of Qazāl with an eye for justice and thus for peace.”
> She repeated this again in Shālan, the sharp, articulated Shālan of poets and histories she had read with her tutors.
Then Beau-Sang stepped forward, resplendent in his well-tailored coat. He bowed almost to Luca’s knees before turning to the assembled.
As soon as she stepped back, her hands began to tremble, and her leg threatened to sink beneath her. She dug her cane into the wood. She wished that she could grab on to Gil for support.
Beau-Sang wooed the Balladairans in the crowd. They cheered or clapped politely by turns. How does he manage it?
She answered herself: A careful chain of power checks and balances, the strategic application of gossip and other useful information to manipulate reputations for his own benefit. She could quote for herself the scholars of courtly intrigue by rote, and yet applying them in her own life proved difficult.
A gasp rippled through the crowd, followed by the movement of a hundred heads turning. Luca snapped her attention back to the square. Blackcoats dragged two struggling prisoners through the crowd.
That shocked Luca cold. What was going on? Where had he gotten them? She tried to avoid the thought that burned brightest: Do I know them?
Luca glanced at Beau-Sang, hiding her confusion and anger with a carefully arched eyebrow. He only nodded. Either Cantic wasn’t surprised, or she feigned a better face than Luca would have expected.
Beau-Sang was the picture of grim determination, a father doing what must be done, no matter how distasteful.
“Princess Luca and I want to prove to you that we can deliver upon our promise to end the rebels who terrorize the city. We protect those who are ours.”
Luca’s cheeks went tight. She tried to keep the surprise off her face. To keep her sudden nausea from showing. As the soldiers dragged the prisoners up to the nooses, the Balladairans began to applaud. To applaud her. She hadn’t even done anything.
Yes, she had. She had given Beau-Sang this power, and he had named her so no one—not even she—could pretend she wasn’t complicit.
Up close, the blackened swelling of the prisoners’ faces distorted any sense of recognition. One, a woman, head half-shaven and fierce, had a scabbing cut across her biceps. The man’s face was least recognizable, his lip three times any normal size. They both limped, trousers twisted and barely done up. Luca looked at their feet—No, look up. They deserve that much.
