The Unbroken

by C. L. Clark

  Whoever they were, they knew her. The hatred in their eyes was personal.

  The blackcoats yanked sacks over their heads and looped them into the nooses. One soldier looked smug and satisfied; the other moved perfunctorily.

  Beau-Sang gestured, and the soldiers parted to reveal several Balladairans, unbound now but ragged in triumph. The hostages. Some ran immediately to relatives in the crowd. Aliez ran to Bastien. The rest stood still, fixed on—their savior? Beau-Sang? Or their captors who waited to die?

  Beau-Sang’s flair for drama embrittled the tension across the square—as if it weren’t near to breaking before.

  “Princess Luca and I will not let rebels like these divide us. They threaten your lives and livelihoods for desperate, misplaced ideals. We will not let them.”

  Luca’s stomach flipped. This wasn’t what she wanted.

  Yet there were the Balladairans she wanted to rescue, rescued. There were those responsible for their abduction, arrested. She had thought there would be more time to adjust herself to the tasks at hand.

  The rebels swung on their nooses. She was close enough to hear their necks snap, and it made her stomach heave. She clamped her teeth shut.

  This was necessary.

  CHAPTER 29

  THE MANY-LEGGED

  Be welcome, Niwai of the Many-Legged. You’ve come a long way, and the desert is dry,” Djasha said formally. Touraine had a feeling she spoke in Balladairan only for Touraine’s benefit. “Drink tea with us. Share our bread.”

  She gestured to a tray with a battered teapot and several glasses too many.

  “Thank you. You are more generous than the stories say.” A smirk stretched across the stranger’s face as they accepted the tea with their bare hand. Their Balladairan was strangely lilted and had the rolling gait of a camel.

  Jaghotai bristled. “That’s not what you said the last time you and your jackals went goat raiding.”

  “You can’t find our methods so distasteful if you call yourself Jackal.” A more wicked, knowing smile. “Oh, don’t look like that. My eyes and ears tell me many things. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? What exactly is it that you want me and mine to do?” They took the remaining chair and straddled it backward.

  Touraine could already tell that Niwai would fit right into the bickering rebellion. The rebels would be lucky to accomplish anything at all.

  “How fares the situation in the east, cousin?” Djasha asked. She seemed to ignore their jab. “Have things gotten so bad that you’re willing to fight with us now?”

  They cocked their head very much like a bird. “The Balladairans are curtailing our herd lands to build settlements and hunting our companion animals for exotic decorations. Have you tried to feed many legs with starving cattle? It’s like that from the Middle Desert all the way to Masridān.”

  “And in what capacity are you here, Niwai? Are you on your own, or do you speak for the Many-Legged?”

  They shrugged and looked sideways at Touraine. Those eyes. Where Djasha’s eyes were unsettling, a surprising and intense color, Niwai’s were unnatural. They seemed to be looking somewhere a world away at all times, and the irises were the deep orange of a desert vulture.

  “I’m not a rogue, if that’s what you mean. I serve my god as I must. Just like each of you.” Their unfocused gaze moved away from Touraine to linger on Djasha, then Aranen.

  “I mean accords.” Djasha sat up straighter, effort in her face and her voice. “If we strike one with you, will all of the tribes hold it?”

  “We are many legs of one beast. We move best when we move in concert.”

  Jaghotai rolled her eyes. Niwai turned that distant gaze onto her, and Touraine was satisfied at the shiver that passed over the other woman.

  “Imagine if you had your own jackal. I think you’d like that.”

  Jaghotai’s disgust was plain on her features. Niwai turned back to Djasha, the only person to meet that unnerving stare without flinching.

  “Whatever you want, it will take at the very least a healing trade agreement with all of the Many-Legged.”

  Aranen sucked in a sharp hiss.

  “You asked us for help. I came. Help isn’t free.”

  “Fighting the Balladairans back across the sea helps you, too. We’ve even enlisted some of the Brigāni nomads. As you said… we would move best if we moved in concert.”

  “The Brigāni. As in other Brigāni. Not you?” The desert priest cocked their eyebrow.

  A terrifying smile spread across Djasha’s face, baring her teeth. “As in others like me.”

  “Now that is interesting. And what about this one?” Niwai turned the full weight of their gaze on Touraine. “According to my eyes and ears, she shouldn’t be here.”

  Jaghotai grunted and muttered, “That’s true enough.”

  Djasha joined Niwai with her own appraising look, but there was a question in it, too. Why are you here?

  “I fight for Qazāl now.” Touraine used her command voice, the steady one that stiffened soldiers’ backs. Just wearing that voice made her feel more certain of her steps, even as she walked on this uncertain path.

  Four pairs of eyes watched her, and she waited for one of them to tell her she wasn’t welcome. Jaghotai, with her clenched fist resting on the table, her mouth shut tight against what she actually thought. Aranen, the exhausted worry lines pulling at the corners of her eyes and lips. Djasha, with a slight smile like a card player who knows she has the winning hand. Niwai, looking at her and beyond her.

  “Very well,” Niwai said, bowing their head. “It seems we all pray for rain. When do we get started?”

  “We’re waiting on two more of our council,” Djasha said. She slumped back in her seat, which was clearly an ages-old Balladairan castoff that was only a couple months from the woodpile. “Jak. Did they tell you they’d be late?”

  Jaghotai rubbed the stump of her left arm absently, frowning with impatience. “No. I’ve told Malika before—”

  “I have a feeling,” Niwai said, “that they’re at the party in town.”

  The desert priest’s ironic lilt had Touraine and Jaghotai standing, reaching reflexively for weapons.

  “What party?” growled Jaghotai.

  “There’s a woman calling herself the queen regnant. A big man with a big nose. They’re standing on the gallows while soldiers… escort?… a small group of Balladairans. Some more are escorting—dragging, really—some Qazāli.”

  “What?” Jaghotai jumped for the door, forgetting even the lion. It was Djasha’s voice that made her stop.

  “Jak, you can’t do anything without getting strung up yourself.”

  With Jaghotai’s back toward Aranen, Djasha, and the priest, only Touraine could see the flex of anger and helplessness in the woman’s face. Touraine knew that feeling.

  Jaghotai rounded on the foreign priest. “Can you tell who the Qazāli are?”

  Niwai frowned, though their eyes remained out of focus. “A large person. A slightly less large person.” They closed their eyes tight and shook their head. “Nothing more than that. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The room fell silent, all eyes downcast, but Touraine remembered different deaths, a different war. Soldiers with the magic to inhabit an animal, to become one. She eyed the stranger in front of her. The docile—docile!—lion. The empty falconer’s glove. The trancelike stare.

  “Sky a-fucking-bove,” she swore. “No. No.”

  She jumped up and backed out of the room, fleeing to the open space of the main temple hall. Not the best place to escape from gods, she supposed, but at least there were no priests or priestesses here.

  Luca would have been thrilled in Touraine’s place. Not one but two magics—but both of them linked to gods. That wouldn’t fit with Balladaire’s notions of civilized living at all.

  The temple’s main hall smelled of incense and stale rugs. There were no ornaments on the walls or the small tables—altars?—throughout the room. They had probably
existed before the Balladairans came.

  Touraine sat cross-legged on a pouf at the back of the room, looking toward the great doors. The sunset through the slim glass windows dappled the marble floor in shades of gold and rose. Warm. She tried to let the idea of warmth banish the memory of winter nights as one of the Taargens’ war prisoners.

  “I have a feeling you’ve met our siblings in the north.”

  Touraine jumped to her feet again, backing away half-crouched, hands held out in front of her.

  The priest from the tribes came on catlike steps, their head cocked. The lioness trailed their heels, and Touraine checked her exits. She could reach the great doors if she needed to.

  At a look from the priest, the lioness found a patch of sunlight and sprawled in it.

  Touraine met Niwai’s eyes. They looked right at her, the piercing orange iris finally settling into red brown.

  “Your siblings.”

  Niwai sat where Touraine had just been, short, thin fingers like talons interlaced. Their skin was almost as dark as Djasha’s instead of Taargen-pale, and Touraine could almost feel her brain trying to minimize her fear by contrasting Niwai with the Taargens. Surely this one can’t be as bad as them. She lowered her hands.

  “We share a god.”

  Stated so simply, as if it shouldn’t twist Touraine’s guts into nauseated fear.

  “You worship bears. In the desert.”

  “Faith has no border,” they recited, as if from a school primer. And then: “Our connection is with the living creatures of the world. There is no evil in the gifts our god gives us. Are your neighbors not also masters of husbandry?”

  “Tell that to my soldiers who had to feed their lives to your ‘siblings’ so they could—”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say it even as her mind pulled up the memory. A Taargen changing shape as his bear-fur cloak tightened into him. A roar that coincided with the shriek of a soldier’s pain. A guardswoman who had babbled through a laudanum-soaked haze about a boatman with demon eyes. Touraine realized with clarity that the Many-Legged had taken Guérin’s leg, too.

  And another part of her mind pulled up small, useless facts: the end of the war marked a tentative trade agreement, Taargen livestock, strong and easily bred, for grain and vegetable seeds guaranteed to yield twice the normal harvest.

  “There’s no act in the world that doesn’t require sacrifice,” the priest said.

  “A sacrifice is given, not taken,” Touraine growled back. “What sacrifice will you require from us?”

  “That you stop being so squeamish, for starters. I thought you were a soldier.”

  Touraine could almost feel her hands gripping around their throat. They sighed and stood, and she tensed.

  “They used the weapons they had at their disposal. The Balladairans abandoned their god, and that’s no fault of ours. They have no right to determine how the rest of us live. We have our own weapons. Are you saying we shouldn’t use them?”

  “There are guns—” sputtered Touraine.

  “If Djasha and Jaghotai had enough guns to win this, I probably wouldn’t be here.” They added with a grim smirk, “Besides, guns kill people just as dead as magic does. Sometimes less so, and that’s another kind of evil entirely.”

  Everything they said seemed like a philosopher’s wind.

  Aranen and Jaghotai stepped into the main hall—Aranen suspicious, Jaghotai smug to see Touraine on edge.

  “Is everything all right?” the priestess asked. Priestess. Not doctor.

  Jaghotai crossed her arms over her chest. “When I called you a dog, I didn’t expect you to be such a cowardly one.”

  Touraine tightened her fists until her pulse throbbed in them. A stupid goad, for puffed-up kids without real experience and sense.

  It worked.

  She was following them back into the infirmary when the small temple doors swung open.

  Malika and Saïd came in, Saïd looking cautiously over his shoulder. Malika’s normally composed face was contorted with fear, anger, pain. Anger most of all, Touraine guessed.

  In the infirmary, Jaghotai’s expression went even darker. “So it’s true, then. Who?”

  “Maru and Nanti, a young brother and sister.” Saïd sighed heavily. “Were the hostages your idea, Jak?”

  “What?” Jaghotai asked. Jaghotai turned to Djasha, shaking her head. “No. This wasn’t me.”

  Malika leaned against a wall and let her head tilt back against it. Elegant, even in distress. Djasha stared at Jaghotai with golden eyes narrowed.

  “It wasn’t me,” Jaghotai growled.

  They got their marching orders a few days later. Touraine was to go with Niwai.

  “No.” Touraine snagged Jaghotai by the arm. “I’ll come with you instead.”

  Jaghotai’s face was caught between stunned disbelief and a snarl as she looked between Touraine and the fear-tight hand around her biceps. Jaghotai was still angry from the chastisement Djasha had given her over the hostages.

  “You’ll need support. I’m one of the best fighters—you know this.”

  Jaghotai shook Touraine’s hand off and huffed. “I do know that. That’s why I want you with Niwai.”

  Touraine stepped closer still and spoke in a hushed, definitely not desperate voice. “Is this about me and you? Do you want me to humiliate myself?”

  “Mulāzim, I have no idea what you’re talking about. As much as you need to get humble, I’m not about to sabotage an entire mission to make you look like even more of a fool. You asked to help. Djasha and I said you could stay. Now you’re my tool, and I’m telling you where you’ll help.”

  Touraine’s heart swam up to her throat. She looked toward the corner where Niwai and Aranen sat talking about gods while Djasha looked on with a wan smile.

  She couldn’t do this. She could accept the magic as a tool, even allow that one of them would be an ally, as long as she didn’t have to deal with it right in front of her. She couldn’t help Niwai do it, though. She couldn’t watch them use that magic against the Sands. Against Luca.

  But Touraine had made her choice when she returned to the Grand Temple and threw her lot in with the rebels. Who was she to tell them what weapons they could or couldn’t use? Especially when Balladaire had them so badly outnumbered and outgunned.

  Really, though, none of that was the point.

  Niwai watched her, their eyes glittering amid dark kohl. They cocked their head at her even as they nodded at what Aranen was saying.

  The point was the heat and the sweat pricking at Touraine’s skin, the vomit creeping up the back of her throat when she thought not of Niwai but of the Taargens, murdering her soldiers for their magic right in front of her, reaching for her next—

  “Please, Jaghotai.”

  Something in her voice finally caught Jaghotai’s attention. Comprehension finally dawned in the other woman’s eyes. Her mother’s eyes. Had Touraine hit at some maternal instinct to protect her? Sky above, please, yes.

  “I’m sorry, Touraine. That’s an order. That’s how Cantic would say it, sah? We need you there.”

  Touraine clenched her jaw tight and tried to hold steady enough to glare. Instead, she bolted, to be sick in the temple green.

  They stole through the nights like a plague.

  The first few nights, Niwai led the way to the Balladairan-owned farms tended by Qazāli farmhands asleep for the night. Fog rolled in off the river, and their feet squelched through plowed fields watered by irrigation ditches fed by the Hadd. With the call of Niwai’s god’s magic, and clever fingers at gates, goats left their pens, and sheep followed their new shepherd. Chickens flapped, pigeons cooed, and geese honked as they followed overhead. Crows pecked at the grain fields with a voracious hunger, devouring what hadn’t already been harvested.

  Even in the dark, Touraine could see the ecstasy in Niwai’s eyes as they used their magic. It made her shudder, but she followed anyway.

  When a young Qazāli goatherd w
oke and called out in confusion to his charges, Touraine found him and silenced him with a knock to the head. It wouldn’t go well for him if people thought he’d shirked his duty, but…

  A week later, after Niwai and the Shālans had prayed to their gods and slaughtered the goats, Touraine led a squad of Jaghotai’s fighters back through the city. This part was her idea. She knew how to tap the Balladairans’ fear, and the Qazāli knew the city. They brought clay jars of goat’s and sheep’s blood in on silent rickshaws and one by one covered the Balladairan districts, daubing blood on doors, pooling it through the thoroughfares, until it would be impossible for the Balladairans to move without bloodying their feet.

  A suitable symbol, Djasha agreed.

  Later the next day, one of the watch boys reported, giggling: the shrieks of the Balladairans were like a thousand roosters crowing—all the roosters they no longer had.

  CHAPTER 30

  A HUNGER

  Her city was on the brink of chaos. Food prices were out of hand, and already the Sands and blackcoats alike were stretched thin trying to keep her subjects from thinking too closely of rioting.

  Luca hadn’t believed it when Beau-Sang came into her command office yelling about vanishing livestock, face red with bluster even as he tried to convince her that he had everything under control.

  Now she, Cantic, and Beau-Sang stood in the compound’s dim storehouse, hungrily eyeing the bags of grains and beans arrayed on wooden racks that reached up the walls. Cases of salted and smoked meat stretched the length of the building, stacked in orderly rows to one side. Enough food to feed the brigade of soldiers stationed in Qazāl and its auxiliary staff for the season, Luca imagined, but not a hundred thousand civilians.

  Mirroring the meat on the other side of the storehouse were crates of muskets and ammunition. Even cannons for field battles. Almost as much weaponry as food. The air smelled like a disturbing combination of cured meat and gunpowder.