The Unbroken

by C. L. Clark

Tibeau was not Sahir. He had been Aziz. But maybe somewhere, another Saïd was telling someone else about his brother; another mother was missing her son. Some of the Sands were missed.

  It was only confirmation of yet another way she had failed Tibeau.

  “I don’t, no.” Touraine avoided his eyes and forced the hunk of food into her mouth.

  Saïd shrugged. “I figured. I keep hoping I’ll meet him. Or can fuck the Balladairans over for taking him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Touraine said. Hollow words to fill the warmth that had filled her, almost suffocated her moments before.

  Aranen put a hand on Saïd’s shoulder. “I’m in this mess because I fell in love with a fool.” She sat behind Djasha now, half casual affection, half support. She kissed Djasha’s braids.

  Djasha murmured, “And I was the fool.”

  On their other side, Jaghotai rested her forearms on the table, a hollowed-out crust of bread wrapped around half of a boiled egg in her hand. She stared at no one even though she faced Niwai and their lion.

  “What about you?” Touraine prodded. It felt good to strike at something she knew would spark into flames. If not the familial warmth, at least anger was heat.

  Jaghotai stuffed the egg and bread into her mouth and left, still chewing. Touraine watched her broad back all the way out of the room, imagined the slope of thick shoulders as her mother walked down the stairs and slammed the door shut. Touraine almost stood, her own legs coiled to chase after. She pictured the empty street she would see when she got outside.

  Since she was a kid, Touraine had dreamed of nothing but becoming what Jaghotai and Djasha hated most. A hero of empire who conquered for empire, who killed for empire. She had shown an aptitude for learning the geography, the history, the mathematics of warfare. She would be kidding herself to think there could be anything else in the world for her. What else could she become? Sick with vengeance and cloaked with false peace, like Djasha? Bitter and angry, holding love at a distance, like Jaghotai?

  Each path seemed like a different kind of powerlessness, but Touraine didn’t know where else she could turn.

  Touraine roused herself at Saïd’s snore, and she thought for half a second that it was Tibeau’s deep ripping breath inside the barracks. Saïd lay warm beside her, and Malika lay on her other side, rank, warm morning breath coming from her mouth.

  As far as Touraine knew, Jaghotai hadn’t come home that night. She might have had a lover in the city or stayed at her own safe house. Good. Touraine wasn’t ready to face her mother by morning light.

  She had spent the rest of the night building up a thousand conversations with Jaghotai in her head.

  “Are you a rebel because they took me?” Touraine could ask.

  “Yes,” Jaghotai might say. She might even say, “They took the daughter I loved.”

  She would also say, “They gave me back one of their tools. A dog, loyal to the wrong hand.”

  And even in her imagination, no matter what else they said, Jaghotai always told her to go home—not to the temple or Aranen and Djasha’s house, but back to the Balladairans. Scorn in dark, kohl-rimmed eyes, the same disappointment twisting wide lips. A few times, though, Touraine dared to paint sadness there. On the off chance, at least, that Jaghotai would miss Touraine if she never came back.

  Djasha slept fitfully on her mat in the corner, and the lion slept between her and Niwai. Aranen, however, was gone.

  Carefully, Touraine picked her way around the sleeping bodies and out of the riad.

  Sunlight bleached the dirt roads, the clay buildings, the temple domes. When she reached the massive temple, she let it drag her gaze all the way up to the topmost spires. It pulled her every time. Wasn’t so difficult to believe in Shāl, or any god, when she looked up at something like that. She’d never seen anything like it in Balladaire. Even the royal palace couldn’t hold a candle to it.

  “You can come in.” Aranen stood outside the small side door. Instead of the laborer’s vest and trousers, she wore loose-fitting gray pants and a bright red tunic wrapped with a gray-and-yellow patterned sash. It was simple yet elegant.

  “Shāl’s peace on you,” Touraine greeted her in Shālan.

  Aranen’s eyes lit up. “And Shāl’s peace on you.” She raised an eyebrow and kept speaking in Shālan. “And how are you this morning?”

  Touraine hunted for the words. “I was… more good. Before. Not bad now.” She shook her head in frustration. There were so many words she still didn’t know, so many things she couldn’t express. She spoke in Balladairan instead. “Did Jaghotai come back?”

  Aranen made a knowing sound in her throat. “Give her time, Touraine. She will come around.”

  The doctor-priestess led her into the coolness of the temple, and Touraine sighed in relief. She drank the ladle of water Aranen offered from a pitcher resting on one of the ex-altars between the two rows of marble columns. Then she beckoned Touraine to follow her into the hidden area of the temple.

  Over the past weeks, Touraine had realized how deceiving the massive size of the temple was from the outside. A narrow corridor hidden behind clever sliding walls had once been used for the priests to move around the circumference of the temple without disturbing prayers, like servant corridors in a palace. Before the Balladairans came and banned religion, the priests had slept and cooked and doctored patients in the rooms within. As far as Touraine understood, the priests who hadn’t abandoned the faith still practiced throughout the city as doctors, sometimes even to wealthy Balladairan patients, but for healing—for injuries that couldn’t just be stitched and illnesses that wouldn’t pass—faithful Qazāli still came here in secret.

  “Have you sat down with her? Just to talk?” Aranen asked.

  In the hidden kitchen, a pot waited over the low coals of the stove. At the smell of roasted meat, Touraine’s stomach growled.

  “About something other than the rebellion,” the priestess added. She doled food onto plates, handing Touraine a plate of warm bread and beans. For herself, she took a kebab of meat and tore it off, chunk by chunk, with her teeth.

  “Why would I do a stupid thing like that?” Touraine asked.

  “She’s your mother.”

  “She tried to kill me.”

  Aranen paused, shifted a chunk of meat from one cheek to the other thoughtfully. “You know it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Should it be?”

  Touraine’s voice was bitter, and too petulant for her own liking. Hadn’t she claimed that the Sands didn’t need to find their blood relatives? Hadn’t she sided with Pruett, that perhaps it was best to stay close to what they knew? To what fed them, in the end? Wasn’t that why she hadn’t told Tibeau about meeting with them?

  Something in Touraine’s voice made Aranen reach over and squeeze Touraine’s arm. “Does Jaghotai have somewhere for you to be?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Come help me.”

  The priestess loaded a few more bowls of beans and bread onto a tray and shoved them into Touraine’s arms. Then she picked up a box of long matches and a box of incense cones with one hand and a candle with the other, and beckoned for Touraine to follow with her head.

  Aranen led her down the hallway and a small stairwell. The room they walked into was familiar: it was where Touraine had woken up just a few weeks ago. When her life had turned upside down.

  The infirmary was large, as big as the main hall of the temple above it. The ceiling matched the temple above, cold marble with dark veins and mosaic tiles, but the tiles here were dark—brown or black—and white. With the light of the table lanterns, it made the room feel cozy and comfortable instead of grand and expansive. Patients lay on pallets or sat on cushions, depending on their dispositions. Curtains separated certain sections, but enough were pulled back that Touraine saw there weren’t very many patients right now. They greeted Aranen and Touraine in Shālan as they entered. Some of them were older, nursing bandaged wounds. A child lay cradled against
her mother while the woman sang a gentle song.

  Aranen plucked a cone from her box, set it on a beaten metal tray on a small altar near the door, and lit it. The tray looked like it had once been a plate before meeting a spray of musket fire. The scent that wafted up was heavy and burned Touraine’s nose.

  “Why do the Balladairans let this place stand?” she whispered to the priestess.

  Anger laced Aranen’s chuckle. “They know they can’t get away with anything else.”

  “Doesn’t it just stay here as a bastion for Shālans? It’s the biggest in the empire, right? Seems like the Balladairans would want to remove the temptation.”

  “In the old empire, yes. People came to do pilgrimage here and to study at the university. That empire is broken and her people divided.” She gestured above, to the main hall. “They gutted the entire building—except the hidden rooms and the infirmary. Gold, holy artifacts—gone. We bring incense and cushions from home. We do our best.”

  Touraine followed Aranen with the tray of food from patient to patient as Aranen changed bandages, threw the used ones into a reed basket, and offered reassurances in that mélange of Shālan and Balladairan that was common in the city. Sometimes, Aranen put a hand on them, closed her eyes, and prayed. Sometimes, the patient joined her.

  The sheer religiosity of it made her nervous. The whip scars on her back tingled.

  One patient, a young man lying flat on his back with a broken arm in a sling, passed out after Aranen whispered with him.

  “What happened to him?” Touraine murmured.

  “He fell in the quarry. The Balladairan overseer left him for dead.” The priestess gently adjusted his legs, tugging them slightly. “Broken back, broken legs. Healing so much damage takes a lot out of a patient. And the healer.” Aranen sighed wearily as she pushed herself to her feet and headed to the child and her mother.

  Touraine stared grimly into the last two bowls of food. “A long time ago, you told me that Shāl was a just god. What’s just about this? Why would a god let all of this happen?” Touraine waved her free hand to encompass all of Qazāl.

  Aranen’s dark eyebrows lowered over her deep brown eyes. “Shāl is balanced. Technically, that’s the Second Tenet.”

  Balance sounded nice. Something out of reach but worth working toward.

  Touraine reached to hand the bowl to the child with a smile, but all thoughts of balance vanished when she realized the kid was covered in patches of rash. She flinched and held back the bowl, afraid to seem afraid, but also afraid of disease. Touraine might not have been Balladairan, but she had grown up with the same healthy fear of the Withering, of any contagion, that every native Balladairan had.

  Aranen raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Surely you’ve already had the laughing pox?”

  “Uh,” Touraine stammered. The kid was staring at her, wide brown eyes watery and pitiful. “I don’t know?”

  Aranen chuckled again and took the bowl from Touraine. “It’s okay. It’s very contagious but mostly harmless. We usually expose children to it on purpose so that they don’t get anything worse. Jaghotai will know if you had it or not.” The priestess shared a comment in Shālan with the kid’s mother, and they laughed together as Touraine’s face heated. The mother and child took their bowls with thanks.

  By then, the incense had diffused through the hall, no longer cloying and intense but relaxing and sensual. Aranen led Touraine back upstairs through the priests’ corridor and into the kitchen. The roasted meat still smelled delicious, even mingled with the incense clinging to their clothing. They sat in the rickety chairs, Aranen with her long legs stretched out.

  “Don’t look so disappointed,” Aranen said to Touraine when she caught the soldier eyeing the kebabs. “I need it for my work. Short supply.”

  “Your work? You mean healing them. Like you healed me.” Touraine held her left forearm out so the thin scar shone. “The girl I—the assassin did this. How does it work, exactly?”

  Aranen traced the scar with a sad smile. She considered Touraine carefully before answering.

  “Shāl requires flesh to mend flesh. That’s what the meat is for. We eat it, we pray, and if Shāl blesses us, we heal.”

  “Or you use it like Empress Djaya. To destroy. Djasha said—”

  “No,” Aranen said harshly. “That’s forbidden.”

  Touraine bowed her head in acknowledgment. “Anyone can do it, though?” she asked shyly. “Heal, I mean.”

  “No. It is and always has been a matter of faith. And training. If you don’t know the body, you can’t knit it back together properly.”

  Touraine dragged her eyes from the lamb and picked a stray incense cone up from the table, rolling it between her fingers. She thought of balance again. The balance of a flawless knife. Of standing steady and strong on one leg. Finding your place between two parts.

  The cone of incense broke in half, one part a solid chunk. The other half crumbled to a smear of fragrant dust against Touraine’s skin. “If I wanted to pray, could you teach me?”

  “What?”

  Touraine clenched her fist around the broken cone, crushing the other half as she fought her embarrassment.

  Aranen took Touraine’s hand and opened it, letting the powder fall to the floor. “It’s all right. I just thought you would have asked Djasha instead.”

  Touraine snorted and dusted her hands on her trousers. “She only tells me stories about the old empress.” The Apostate, overall, didn’t seem to approve of Shāl.

  The priestess glowered at Touraine. “What about her? Empress Djaya was a fanatic and a murderer. Don’t take her for a model of faith.”

  “She took on the Balladairans with Shāl’s magic.”

  “If you come to gods seeking power, you’ll only find ruin. Has Djasha done something?”

  A dark weight on the word done.

  Touraine looked away, focused on the incense dust under her fingernails. “Did Cantic really kill her family?”

  “Yes.”

  “People say a Brigāni… destroyed Cantic’s company after that. Was that Djasha? Did she really?”

  “Yes.”

  “With the magic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why she can’t do Shāl’s magic anymore?”

  Aranen looked sharply at her.

  Touraine shrugged. “I figured it out. Is it why she’s sick, too?”

  Aranen rubbed her hands over her knees, almost as if distracted. “When she lost her family, she lost her faith. That’s why she’s called the Apostate. We don’t know if it’s why she’s sick. Maybe something of Shāl’s curse on Djaya lingers, passed on in the blood.”

  “I’m sorry,” Touraine said softly.

  “Don’t mistake me. Shāl isn’t dangerous. Shāl is balanced. Shāl is… so many things. I can’t teach them all to you. But Shāl values peace above all. That you should understand.”

  “I do.” In theory. The first thing Djasha and Jaghotai had done was beat her, after all. Touraine gathered that Jaghotai was only marginally more devout than the Apostate. What she didn’t understand was what place a god of peace had in war if he wasn’t going to end it.

  “You need to get out more. Listen less to Djasha’s theology lessons. Come here instead.”

  After a few moments of silence, Touraine couldn’t help asking, “What is wrong with her?”

  The priestess inhaled sharply and closed her eyes. Her exhalation came out with a visible shudder. “Essentially, her body is attacking itself. I can’t stop it. I have to help the patients who may actually survive. She and I both know this. I was thinking to stay home with her tomorrow, though.” Her hands trembled.

  Touraine hesitantly reached out and squeezed them.

  “I’m sorry,” Aranen said. “You can’t possibly…” She looked up, but instead of seeing Touraine, she was looking somewhere else. The frown lines around her mouth were deep, but so were the smile creases in her cheeks. “This is what I do. This is what I have.�
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  Then Aranen snapped herself upright and alert. She pointed at the dirty basket of blankets and scraps of cloth from bandages that she had carried upstairs from the infirmary, and then to the pot on the fire. “Next, we need clean linens, and I’ve got to prepare the people’s lunch.” She meant the free food the rebels made sure all the Qazāli could have, even with the food shortages.

  Touraine nodded, realizing the pot on the fire held only hot water. Her nose twitched at the familiarity of the grim stains and smells wafting up from the basket. How long since she’d been on campaign against the Taargens? A little more than a year?

  “I can handle it,” she said.

  While Aranen stacked a tray of empty bowls, Touraine poked the coals until the water was boiling again and then dumped in everything that would fit into the pot. She stirred with a long, heavy stick. The methodical stretch and pull of the muscles comforted her, and she lost herself in the quiet camaraderie of their work.

  CHAPTER 33

  A FAMILY, BROKEN (REPRISE)

  Then a heavy knock resounded through the temple. It wasn’t loud to the ear, but Touraine felt the vibration through her body. Aranen looked up sharply.

  “Expecting someone else?” Touraine asked her.

  Aranen frowned. Her eyes were alert, but her shoulders sagged with weariness beyond the day’s efforts. “Shālans use the side door.”

  “Excellent,” Touraine grumbled. She pulled the heavy stirring stick from the water, letting it drip onto the ground.

  Aranen reached into one of the little kitchen boxes and pulled out a small knife. She tucked it into the gray-and-yellow sash around her waist.

  Together, they left the hidden priests’ passage for the main hall. Aranen sealed the door behind them and headed briskly to the main doors just as they echoed again with another knock. This time, the sound was like a god clapping in her ears. Maybe that had been the intent of the architect.

  “You’re still not supposed to be alive,” Aranen said as Touraine trailed her. “Stay back. If I need help, I’m sure you’ll know.”

  Touraine nodded, fighting the impulse to say, “Yes, sir.” She took her stick and hunkered down behind one of the marble columns, still close enough to hear what happened at the door. She pulled up her hood and covered her face with her scarf.