The Unbroken Read online

  Touraine smiled, even though her arm stung and blood leaked into her palm. “Attention’s not bad if you’re the hero.”

  That did make Pruett laugh. “Ha! Hero. A Sand? I guess you think the princess wants to wear my shit for perfume, too.”

  Touraine laughed back, and it was tinged with the same frustration and bitterness that talk of their place in the world always was.

  This time, when she called for her squad to form up, they did. Gold Squad and the others pulled down their field caps and drew close their coats. The wind was picking up. The sun was rising. The Qazāli dockworkers bent their backs into their work again, but occasionally they glanced—nervous, scared, suspicious, hateful—at the conscripts. At Rogan’s order, she and the conscripts marched to their new posts.

  Change was coming. Touraine aimed to be on the right side of it.

  CHAPTER 2

  A HOMECOMING

  A flea storm, the Balladairans in Qazāl called it, because grains of sand lodged in every improbable place on a body, climbing into buttoned jackets and nestling into cropped hair, whistling itchy fury into every home and guardhouse, no matter how tight the curtains were shut or how low a soldier tugged their field cap. It cast everything in brown shadow.

  Touraine pulled her cap lower as the storm yanked at her black uniform coat while she and the other Balladairan Colonial conscripts stood at attention in the bazaar. Their faces were neutral, but Sergeant Pruett scanned the crowd. Sergeant Tibeau kept his eyes locked obediently forward, but he was probably contemplating every anti-Balladairan feeling he’d ever had. When the order had come for Touraine’s squad to muster in the city’s largest bazaar, a plaza lined with merchant stalls, the storm had become more than just a dark imagining on the edge of the horizon.

  Sand skittered like dry rain against the wooden gallows in the center of the square. It flayed the Qazāli prisoners Touraine and Pruett had caught just this morning, ripping into their bare chests while they stood parched and peeling in the sun. It taunted Touraine and her squad, just like the Balladairans who called the desert-born conscripts “Sands.”

  Within the square of a horse-mounted guard, the Balladairan princess shifted uncomfortably on horseback, eyes darting between the prisoners and the Qazāli civilians in the crowd. She didn’t look nearly as confident as she had after the thwarted assassination this morning.

  Only the Qazāli took the sand with equanimity, their bright hoods raised and sand veils or scarves wrapped to protect against the dust’s assault.

  As the Balladairan captain of Touraine’s company strutted toward her, Touraine willed the scowl off her face, if only for the sake of the general at his side. Captain Rogan kept his bicorne hat low on his head to keep the wind at bay, preening and bowing toward anyone of higher rank. The general only ducked her head a little under the wind.

  “Lieutenant Touraine. You’ve done well for yourself since I last saw you.” General Cantic smiled, and Touraine’s mouth went dry. “We have you to thank for this.” The general nodded toward the prisoners awaiting their fates.

  “General Cantic is giving you the hanging. I trust you won’t botch it?” Rogan slipped in, trying to undermine Touraine immediately. His clipped, aristocratic accent curled Touraine’s lip by reflex. His blue eyes were cold and his nose short and sharp, good for looking down. He thrust the prisoners’ chain at her.

  The wind blew hard enough to snap the nooses like whips.

  “Of course, sir.” Touraine chose to speak directly to the general.

  “Excellent,” Cantic said. “Move along. The weather’s turning.”

  Touraine glanced at the sky and regretted it as stray granules of dust lodged in her eyes. She had been relieved to scuff dry land under her boots this morning, had never wanted to see another ship again. Now she wanted to get back on that wooden catastrophe and vomit her way back to Balladaire. So what if she had been born in this sand-fucked city? It was too long ago for her to remember, and she could see why she’d never missed it.

  Still. The Qazāli rebels drew Touraine’s eyes like a lodestone, and they squinted and scowled right back. The woman she had noticed, the old camel man, and three others. Five Qazāli prisoners, standing in loose dark trousers, stripped of the hoods and vests so many Qazāli wore, and chained together. Their curly hair clumped with dried sweat. The brown skin of their bare chests reddened and peeled. Brown skin, like hers, like most of the Sands’. Touraine’s nose burned at the smell of their piss. The prisoners must have stood there all day, maybe since their capture. If they hadn’t been questioned first. The sun rose slowly, peeking over the buildings to the other side of the river, the ruins of an old city, out of the storm’s reach. The chain was heavy and warm in Touraine’s hand.

  The pale Balladairan soldiers stood poised at attention, their musket butts digging into the earth. They formed another buffer between the princess on her horse and the restless Qazāli in the square. Touraine’s attention, however, was primarily with the general. Ultimately, only General Cantic had the power to promote her, but maybe the princess would be grateful enough to commend her.

  Cantic and a squat, official-looking woman walked up the wooden stairs, and Touraine followed, leading the prisoners by the chain. She gestured for Pruett to follow. From the new vantage point, she could see the tops of the clay buildings whose walls formed the edges of the bazaar, outlined against the approaching storm. Fine, maybe Tibeau was right. It was a little breathtaking.

  Sergeant Pruett yanked each prisoner into position behind a noose. She nodded to Touraine, her eyes half-lidded, looking more sullen than usual. The russet-brown curls poking from her field cap were plastered darkly to the sides of her skull with sweat. Then she stepped back to wait next to the lever that would drop the rebels to their deaths. Touraine waited for her own cue on the other end of the platform.

  The kick of Cantic’s boots on the gallows platform killed the rumble of conversation. Time had made her even more severe. Her hair, which had grown more white than blond since Touraine had last seen her, was pulled back into a tight tail under her tricorne. Her hand rested on the pommel of her saber, and her broad shoulders were bonier but straight, despite the approaching wall of sand.

  A woman worth studying, worth pleasing, worth staying close to. Touraine had been thrilled to learn she would be stationed at Cantic’s base. Supposedly, the general had been expanding and protecting the desert colonies for years.

  The other woman was less severe, but she cocked her head at Touraine and the other Sands in curiosity. She wasn’t in an officer’s uniform, which meant she had to be a government official. The governor. Touraine returned her focus to the general, like everyone else in the square.

  In a commanding voice that echoed across the square, General Cantic said something in Shālan, the language of the broken southern empire. The words sounded like rocks rattling in a cup, and they caught everyone’s attention. Touraine didn’t know what they meant. Like everything else Touraine had taken from Qazāl when she was a kid, the language had been culled out of her.

  Cantic continued in Balladairan. “Citizens, today we celebrate. Though the occasion is grim, justice has won a decisive victory.” She gestured to the prisoners behind her with an open palm. “These rebels are guilty of attempted murder.”

  Touraine’s eyes drifted back to the princess. She’d dismounted. Smart not to provide a raised target for more rebel assassins. The people who weren’t looking at the condemned snuck glances at Her Highness. The heir to the Balladairan throne seemed small and fragile on the ground, surrounded for her own protection.

  “With the help of the Qazāli magistrate, we have spoken with the prisoners”—there was no doubt what spoken with meant—“and we will find the other rebels involved. Anyone found aiding them or feeding them or sheltering them will die with them. However.” General Cantic softened her tone marginally. “What is justice if it is not upheld by the law and the people? If you have any information about the rebel leaders, c
ome to us. You will receive amnesty, a handsome reward, and gratitude for your dedication to our alliance.”

  The spectators craned their necks to see them: Touraine and Pruett, the general, the prisoners. Touraine and the Sands were an unspoken lecture: she was born Qazāli, but Balladaire had educated her, trained her to fight, fed her, kept her healthy. She had grown up civilized. The Qazāli could do much worse than cooperate.

  General Cantic gave Touraine an encouraging nod.

  The first of the condemned was a dark man with salt-crusted black hair that curled around his ears and a thick, close beard covering his chin. She hadn’t seen him this morning, and he refused to make Touraine’s job easier. She stood on tiptoes to loop the noose over his neck. The second person was the young woman, less bullish, delicate even. The fight in her was gone. She watched Touraine calmly and ducked into the noose, murmuring under her breath.

  The woman was praying. Touraine had studiously ignored Sergeant Tibeau’s praying in the barracks long enough to recognize the rhythms. Nearby, Cantic cleared her throat. Touraine shuddered and cinched the rope quickly, reciting to herself from the Tailleurist lessons: There are no gods, only superstitions. No superstition can harm you. And yet when their skin touched, Touraine felt a tingling sensation across her body.

  She got through the others as quickly as she could, trying to forget the feeling. Instead, she felt only the pressure of everyone’s eyes on her, and the tickle of her own sweat down her coat. The older man was the last one. He tried gamely to stand up straight. His shaggy gray hair hung in his face. It seemed like he’d aged decades since she’d met him at the docks, smiling warmly with his camel. It wasn’t real, she told herself. He’d been a distraction, a pair of eyes. She pulled the noose around his sagging neck. As she tightened the rope, his eyes narrowed at her, then popped wide.

  “You look just like—” the man rasped, working around his dry tongue. Louder, he rushed to get the words out. “You’re Jaghotai’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  Touraine startled and looked to Pruett, who held the drop lever. Do it now! Touraine said with her eyes.

  “You’re Hanan?” The old man’s voice croaked from his throat.

  Touraine staggered back at the sound of her old name. Her heart dropped into her gut like the gallows floor, and the air caught in her lungs.

  The old man dangled.

  Except for a few desperate kicks, the prisoners hanged in silence. Touraine saluted to Cantic and jogged down to stand in front of her soldiers as if nothing had happened. As if her heart wasn’t rattled in its cage. Her men and women formed a tight square, five by five. Sergeant Tibeau caught her eye. He didn’t need words to send a cold drip of guilt sliding between her shoulder blades.

  The world felt muffled and slow. Beyond Captain Rogan, General Cantic had descended and left, leading the princess down one spoke of road. The true-born Balladairan soldiers had already marched to the Balladairan compound under their own captain’s orders.

  For the first time in over twenty years, Touraine was back in Qazāl. She looked at the swinging bodies. The old man jerked, and Touraine watched until he stilled.

  How did he know who I am?

  Rogan glanced at Touraine’s platoon and then over to the sandstorm with a satisfied smirk. “Welcome home, Sands.”

  Touraine and her squad followed Rogan and the other soldiers north and east through the city to the compound, away from the storm. It would have been a long march even without the wind and dust that managed to thread through the winding roads. Still, the storm couldn’t stop her from gaping now that there was light enough to see by and the city was coming alive.

  Everything spiraling out from the bazaar square was clearly the older part of the city. The buildings were yellowed clay lined with cracks, and the roads had once been fitted with stones but were now mostly dirt with rugged juts to trip over. Qazāli workers prodded donkeys and goats—and once, even another camel—through the narrow passages but yanked the animals aside as the Sands marched by. The Qazāli’s faces were swaddled in scarves and shawls against the stray dust. Piles of shit drew flies, and down one road, two filthy children shoveled the driest clumps into baskets.

  Like at the bazaar, the shopkeepers here were mostly Qazāli, and so were the shoppers. Touraine wondered where all the Balladairans were. There’d been enough of them at the hanging.

  You’re Jaghotai’s daughter.

  Touraine wasn’t the only one observing the city in proper daylight.

  “This is sick, what they’re doing to this place.” Tibeau covered his face with a thick forearm.

  “Huh.” Pruett grunted. “Why? What’s different?”

  “Everything. Can’t you tell?” Tibeau looked at Touraine for support.

  Touraine shrugged. “I was barely five years old. It all looks the same to me.”

  All Touraine could see in her memory were vague senses of buildings, from a very low vantage point. Maybe the buildings were yellow brown, like the ones here, but she didn’t recognize any sounds or people. For all she knew, her memories were just taking the images in front of her and throwing them back at her as if she’d had them all along.

  “They’re making us live on the scraps of the city. The Old Medina used to be beautiful. Look at this.”

  They passed through a massive, crumbling wall like the ones that surrounded the city, all carved with the curling shapes of Shālan script. Swirls and slashes and stylized squares, and how they amounted to words, Touraine would never know. The ceiling of the archway had been painted blue several times. The most recent layer had chipped to show a different shade of blue in some places, bare yellow stone in others.

  “The New Medina used to be ours, too. Now it’s their shops, their cafés, their homes.”

  He shot a dirty look at the pristine neighborhood they were passing through. Here—where the stone pavers were carefully placed and there was barely a whiff of animal or human shit, where the buildings were freshly sealed and sturdy—were the Balladairans. They poked their heads out from wooden shutters to check the progress of the storm.

  “It’s not just Balladairans, though.” Touraine nodded toward brown faces over doublets, hair short and styled with Balladairan sleekness. “They don’t look hungry.”

  “Because they’ve sold themselves to Balladaire.”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about—”

  “Children, please.” Pruett cut in, glaring meaningfully up ahead. Rogan walked with one of his men, but they were too close for loud, philosophical bickering.

  Touraine and Tibeau slowed to match Pruett’s pace. When Pruett spoke again, her voice was low and probing.

  “So—did you recognize him?”

  “What?” Tibeau looked between them. “Who?”

  “On the gallows. The old man—he called her Hanan.”

  The look that Tibeau gave her was jealous and livid all at once. “So? Did you?”

  The question caught Touraine off guard, though she’d expected it. She hadn’t been able to let go of the memory of the man’s face the entire walk. Or the way the woman had caught Touraine with her songlike prayer. A seed of doubt, trying to root.

  She yanked it out like she always did. She was safer, stronger with Balladaire than without it. It looked like the Qazāli in this section of the city had learned that, too, and that was why they lived more happily than any other Qazāli in El-Wast.

  “Do you remember Mallorie?” Touraine asked instead of answering Tibeau’s question.

  Tibeau and Pruett both flinched. Of course they remembered. Every Sand did. Mallorie, who’d been of an age with Tibeau and Pruett, had run away when she was fourteen, just a few years after they’d been brought to Balladaire. Cantic—a captain then—had Mallorie whipped, doctored in the infirmary, and kept under watch for months. Every Sand breathed a sigh of relief, even Touraine, who was only nine years old. The moment the Balladairans eased the leash, she ran again. Five Balladairan soldiers were in t
he firing squad that executed her when they caught her again.

  “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  Silence. Tibeau and Pruett were both taller than her, but they shrank for just a moment.

  “Because I don’t.”

  Pruett sucked her teeth. “Fair point. How do you know your memory’s so sharp, anylight, Beau? It’s been two sky-falling decades. Looks like the usual I-have-some-and-I-have-none split to me. Doubt it was nice and even when it was just Qazāli here.”

  Tibeau glared at them both. “You two can both go fuck off.” He walked beside them in silence for a little while longer before falling back. His lover Émeline had already gone ahead to the compound. If she’d been here, she might have mediated better.

  Once he’d left, Pruett ducked her head to look Touraine in the face. “Tour. Love. You’re not all right.”

  “Course I am.” Touraine forced herself to meet Pruett’s gray-blue eyes.

  “You just killed someone who knew you from before. Who knew you as Hanan. You aren’t bothered?”

  It was only the dust in the air that dried her mouth, that made it difficult to tell the truth. “I’m curious, I guess, but I don’t know who Hanan is any more than you do. And that man didn’t know me.”

  What would Cantic do to her if she thought that Touraine would run to the other side?

  A smile quirked across Pruett’s lips. “You forget—I did know Hanan. She was a stubborn clod of shit. She punched the biggest kid in the balls when she was six, and she’s been insufferable ever since.”

  Touraine snorted. She did remember her first practice fight with Tibeau. She shook her head. “I was already Touraine by then. That’s me, Pru.”

  You’re Jaghotai’s… No, she wasn’t. She didn’t know Jaghotai. She didn’t want to.

  They marched through the city, covered in dust, shielding their eyes with their arms and field caps, the perfect picture of Balladairan military might. They passed from the New Medina through another massive archway etched with stylized script in the shape of what might have been the sun. From there to the north, small town houses were clustered together like sheep. Directly east from the city gate loomed the yellow-gray walls of the Balladairan compound, constructed some fifty years or so ago.