by C. L. Clark
She faltered. There was so much more to say, and nothing that she could say in public. Her heart slid into her throat, but she fought through it.
“Both nations have lost too many good people, too many children and parents, friends and lovers. I have learned that your god says, ‘Peace above all.’ So let it be.”
A smattering of applause. Less than she’d hoped for, more than she had any right to expect.
The ripple of a gasp that went through the crowd and another drop on her nose were Luca’s only warning. An instant later, as she walked toward the carriage, the sky opened up. She was soaked to the skin before Bastien could get the carriage door open. She pushed her sopping hair off her face and looked at Bastien’s forlorn expression as he dangled his bedraggled cuffs. For the first time in a long, long while, she laughed.
CHAPTER 43
WAKING UP (REPRISE)
This time, Touraine woke up in a tent. She recognized the tightness in her body—recovering injuries. And the bone-weary exhaustion that hounded her after Aranen had healed her the first time.
“Good morning,” someone beside her said in Shālan.
Touraine was too tired to jump in surprise. She rolled her head just enough to see Aranen sitting next to her pallet. The thin woman looked awful. Half-starved and haunted. Her nose was red; her lips chapped. Her knees clasped to her chest, she looked like an overgrown grasshopper. With golden eyes.
“And to you,” Touraine said, automatically responding in Shālan.
Aranen’s dry lips cracked as she smiled. She put a hand to Touraine’s forehead. “You remember the language.”
“I don’t know.” Touraine switched to Balladairan, struggling to piece her Shālan together. “I could sleep forever.”
Aranen answered in Balladairan with a pained smile. “You almost did. And after I healed you, you were sleeping for a month. I’ve been keeping you… It’s hard to explain.”
Touraine’s memories were fuzzy. She remembered her body begging to die, not much more than that.
“What did you do?”
Aranen’s lips and jaw tightened, and her eyes shone. “I would rather not speak of it.”
Touraine realized what she must have done, and her heart broke for the priestess.
“Who—why—” The questions came out even though she knew it was kinder to silence them. Djasha’s slit throat.
“Djasha gave her life to kill that bitch. I wasn’t going to let her sacrifice go to waste. If I could have slit my own wrists, I would have.”
The merciless steel of Aranen’s voice left Touraine stunned and terrified.
“Was that… all?”
“No. You… did the same thing. To the man who was going to shoot you.” She met Touraine’s gaze tenderly and put a hand over Touraine’s. “Are you a believer, then?”
Touraine wasn’t ready to answer that question.
“Is Pruett alive? She’s a Sand. Gray-blue eyes, dirty mouth?” Her tongue still felt thick, but she had to know.
“Your friend the sniper.” Aranen scowled. “She’s been teaching some of the kids to shoot chicken skulls from rooftops.”
Pruett was alive. Touraine tried to grin but turned into her pillow as sobs of relief overwhelmed her. Aranen put a hand on her shoulder.
“I have to tell you. I’ve only been waiting to say goodbye. And thank you. You risked everything to save me. Djasha loved you.”
Djasha. “Where—”
“We’ve burned her, as we do. We have that in common with Balladaire.” She looked at the floor.
Touraine blinked away her own tears to study the other woman. She looked a skip away from death. “You want us to burn you, too.”
Aranen looked away. “Yes.”
“But…” Touraine was struggling to put the thoughts together, but one thing was clear. “We need you.”
The priestess shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t anymore.”
It was a few days before Touraine could walk much farther than the tent.
Jaghotai woke her early in the morning with a brusque shake.
“Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”
They walked through the slums, toward the south, away from the city. Away from the compound, which was slowly emptying like a leaking water canteen.
They walked in silence for a long time, the wind whipping through their scarves and making their clothes billow around them.
“Are we going to let Aranen die?”
“We?” Jaghotai shook her head. “I can’t make her want to live.”
And she had tried. Touraine had heard them. Jaghotai begging for Aranen to help her put the city together. To train more priests and priestesses, to teach doctors. Begging not to be left alone.
Jaghotai sighed. “We used to build monuments to honor those who fell in great tragedies. Before Balladaire.”
She pointed to the stones growing out of the dry earth like flowers. “When the Balladairans started taking the Lost Ones, their parents took stones from the quarry and dropped them out here.”
Touraine stopped. There were hundreds of stones, some small as her fist, others so big it would have taken two Tibeau-sized men to carry them.
“Is there a stone for me?” she asked Jaghotai quietly.
The whip of cloth was the only response for at least a minute. They passed through the field of jagged stones—marble, sandstone, even smoothed river rocks. And then Jaghotai stopped abruptly.
Touraine followed the intense focus of the other woman—Say it, you coward; your mother, she is your mother—the intense focus of her mother Jaghotai’s eyes.
“That?” Touraine pointed. A long brown stone, four hands wide and a whole palm thick. Heavy to carry so far.
Jaghotai sniffed, though as far as Touraine could tell, her mother’s eyes were dry. “Harder than carrying you for nine months to get that fucker out here. And that was before the arm.” Her voice was rougher than usual. She waved the stump of her forearm.
Touraine smiled, just barely, and they kept walking. She never thought she would mark the occasion, the first time her mother ever said, “I love you.”
Another gust of wind made her blink rapidly to keep the moisture in her eyes.
After word got out that Touraine was awake and walking, she had a stream of visitors.
The day after Jaghotai showed Touraine her stone, her mother ducked into the tent with an irritated expression.
“Someone’s here to see you,” she said with a snort.
Touraine sighed as she pushed herself upright. “Let her in.”
Jaghotai stepped out and Luca stepped in, Gil at her side. The daylight streamed in, showing Luca’s tanned skin and the sun-bleached blond of her hair.
Luca gasped when she saw Touraine. “Your… eyes.”
Touraine had almost forgotten. “Side effect of the other magic.” She started to look down, but then she realized she didn’t have the energy to be ashamed or self-conscious. She didn’t give a sky-falling shit if Luca or any other Balladairan thought she was uncivilized. “I thought you’d gone back.”
“I couldn’t. They refused to let the first ships come close enough to dock. They fired on them as a warning, and… of course, symptoms turned up.” She shook her head with bitterness. “Cantic managed to get a military ship back home before any of the passenger ships. She told them of the outbreak. Loyal, despite everything. I owe her my kingdom.”
Mention of loyalty lit a spark of anger in Touraine’s own chest, but weariness squashed it immediately.
“I go back to Balladaire soon.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know if they told you? We’re pulling out. I don’t have full authority, but I’ll be fighting for it as soon as I get back. I’ll make it official—” She stopped herself and looked down at her boots.
Touraine didn’t let her try to say it, to ask, because she knew if she let Luca ask, if she heard it from Luca’s lips, it would be that much harder to say no.
“I ca
n’t come with you.”
Luca bowed her head slightly. “I thought so. May I ask why?” There was no frostiness in her voice, but politeness covered the hurt. Touraine knew what she was really asking. Is it me you don’t want?
Touraine raised her eyebrows at Gil, who looked to Luca for instructions. The princess nodded, he left, and Touraine stood.
Gil let the tent flap close behind him to give them a moment’s privacy, and they were cast in darkness. Only a sliver of light remained to slice between them.
“I never thanked you for taking care of me when I got sick.” Luca had given Touraine everything—sacrificed her own bed, her own clothes, risked her entire household for Touraine. The night Touraine snuck away like a thief, she’d wanted nothing more than to stay there and get better and then let Luca crawl into bed beside her.
She couldn’t have that then, and she couldn’t have that now. She wanted to touch Luca in reassurance. To hold her hand for just a second. That felt like too much of an empty promise.
“It was nothing.” Luca’s voice hid a blush.
“I started a mess in this country.” This country that should have been her home. She wanted to see who she could be here, instead.
“You didn’t—”
“I helped. And so did you. I want to see it fixed. The other Sands and I—we’re going to do what we can.”
“I see.” Luca bit her lip. Then she held out her arm for a soldier’s clasp. Surprised, Touraine took it weakly. Luca squeezed until Touraine was forced to strengthen her grip. “Thank you for everything, Touraine.”
Touraine couldn’t quite loosen her fingers, though. Her resolution was coming undone with the feel of Luca’s pulse under her fingertips. Luca’s fingers on her skin. Would it be so bad if she just—?
With her other hand, Touraine pulled Luca’s head closer and kissed her. She smelled like rose water and sweat and ink and tasted like coffee. Touraine was breathless when they finally pulled away.
Luca looked stunned, even though one hand was still warm against Touraine’s waist.
“And you’re—”
“Staying.”
The sun was shining, and there were joyous rain clouds on the horizon the day the Qazāli tore the gallows down.
As the last Balladairan ship filled with soldiers, and the princess left with her household, Qazāli and Brigāni and Sands alike took turns with the axes.
They hacked and cheered and sang and drank and ate and celebrated as the rain came down.
EPILOGUE
TO KNIT
Touraine sat on the rooftop that used to be Djasha and Aranen’s, and watched the rain change the city. The streets were always, always, always yellow-orange muck. Touraine had stopped wearing her boots, because it was easier to wear sandals, or no shoes at all, and rinse her feet off. The city was full of people, almost claustrophobic compared to the fear-spawned emptiness of half a year earlier. Farmers and nomads and the homeless all sought shelter or dry land in the city at the top of the hill. The city wasn’t especially dry, but the river hadn’t swallowed it whole. Qazāl’s flatlands—and Briga’s on the other side—had drowned.
The river raced to devour it all, like a soldier to her rations between long marches. Touraine smiled ruefully, remembering marches with Pruett and Tibeau at her side. Before she was promoted and could order them around. Before they came here.
Someone cleared their throat behind her. Touraine recognized Pruett’s rattle of phlegm. Touraine gestured to the spot on the edge of the roof next to her. Pruett’s hair was slicked to her forehead, only just starting to dry. She still kept it soldier short. She looked even more dour than usual, which was saying something. Touraine hadn’t seen her smile much since the Balladairans pulled out of Qazāl. Only barely when Touraine had woken from her coma.
It was possible that Pruett just didn’t want to smile around Touraine. That would have been more than fair. Tibeau was dead because of her. Touraine had cast Pruett aside for a Balladairan princess, and when Touraine cast the princess aside, she hadn’t come back for Pruett.
They had tried each other again once in the last few months. Several cups of Shāl’s holy water between the two of them and they fell into each other like a tongue in the groove. Even excellent craftsmanship wears under enough strain, without maintenance. They got far enough, but the touches were wrong. They fell into awkward silence after. Since then, though, the relationship had warmed. A little. It was as if knowing what they couldn’t be made it easier to learn to be friends again.
At least, that’s what Touraine had thought.
Pruett didn’t sit. She brandished a folded letter with a black wax seal of a rearing horse. Touraine’s heart leapt. She tore it open immediately. Her eagerness hurt Pruett. And yet she couldn’t stop herself. The most she could do was unfold the letter more carefully. As if she hadn’t been praying to Shāl and any other god for a letter from Luca. Touraine hadn’t expected to miss her so much. Hadn’t expected to miss her at all.
She read the first lines. The letter was exactly the kind of letter that Touraine didn’t want to read in front of Pruett. She refolded it without reading any more.
“Is it bad news?” Pruett asked. The note of hope in her voice made Touraine smile. It was how Pruett had spoken to her before all of this. A strain that hadn’t been there before, but the same jabs.
Touraine shook her head and peered off to the river. If she looked closely, she could imagine it had stolen a farmer’s tools or a lady’s basket. It was wide and hungry enough to take much more than that.
Pruett sighed and sat cross-legged just behind her, away from the edge of the roof. “She still wants you to go back.”
Touraine hadn’t gotten that far in the letter, but the trajectory… Dear Touraine, I don’t deserve anything of you. Not as a soldier, not as a woman.
“Will you write back this time?”
Touraine shrugged. “How’s your Shālan?”
Pruett swore in Shālan, her stormy eyes unimpressed.
“That doesn’t mean bad,” Touraine said. “It means a thousand—”
“I know. It’s just going that fucking well. I’ll be fine if you leave, though. I’ll pick it up just like we picked up Balladairan.” She paused to pick at her Qazāli-style trousers. “I knew it once before, didn’t I?” It sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
“I missed you lot so much when she took me. I thought I’d get something out of it. Something for you, something for me. I made that mistake once. I’m sorry.”
She imagined what the rest of the letter would say. The cold was wonderful; the nobles weren’t behaving. She needed Touraine. Always that sense of need, and Touraine flocked to it. She loved it when her soldiers needed her, too. They didn’t now. Some of the Sands had even found family.
Touraine wondered if it was worth it to them. Some of them had romanticized the idea and were disappointed now. She was one of them, disappointed not so much about her family but about the idea of a free Qazāl.
It had been a headache from moment to waking moment. Even her sleep was tormented by nightmares of Djasha’s corpse urging her to rebuild the city this way, to keep this man out of power, to keep that woman away from money. She was used to nightmares, but it was too much. Jaghotai and Malika looked as haggard as Touraine felt. Touraine had had to reevaluate her judgments of Jaghotai in the months after the Rain Rebellion, as people called it now.
The council was small, with Jaghotai and Aranen at the head, though Aranen still spent most of her time in a dark room, weeping. Saïd was happy to advise but kept himself bunkered in his bookshop. Committees struggled to manage various aspects—infrastructure, filling the vacant housing, calculating what wealth, if any, the city still had.
“I can’t leave until we have a system in place.”
Pruett snorted. “You’ll be here forever.”
“Anything will be better than letting the Balladairans stay.”
It was such an obvious lie that Prue
tt didn’t bother taking it apart.
The sky opened up suddenly, as it had done every day for—the count reached three weeks again since the last dry span. They ran back inside, Touraine stuffing the letter into her shirt to keep it dry.
The rooms still held Djasha’s things. Aranen wouldn’t move any of it, throw anything out. Sometimes, she still cried when she cooked, and Jaghotai did, too. Even their bed was in the same corner. As much as the three rebel women had made Touraine feel at home, it wasn’t her home.
She jumped when Pruett put a hand on her shoulder. “When you see her again, ask her what she thinks. Maybe she can help us.”
If anyone knew how to put a country together, it would be Luca.
“She has her own country to run.”
Pruett squeezed Touraine’s shoulder. “Just say goodbye to me this time.”
Pruett’s touch lingered even after she was long gone. Touraine watched the rain as it fell. Gentle, constant, inevitable, its soft patter soothing.
Finally, Touraine turned to Luca’s letter.
The story continues in…
Book Two of Magic of the Lost
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the professionals who have gone above and beyond making this book happen: Mary C. Moore, my agent; Brit Hvide and Jenni Hill, my US and UK editors respectively. Thanks also to Nadia El-Fassi for the advice, Angeline Rodriguez for the wrangling. To Janice Lee for showing me the glory that is a wonderful copy editor and for making a wiki. To Lauren Panepinto for designing That Cover, and Tommy Arnold for making THAT COVER—you both brought Touraine to life in a way I never imagined possible. Thanks also to the numerous people working hard behind the scenes who I haven’t met yet.
Thank you to my earliest readers: Julie, David, Yume, and especially Cairo, the first and bravest, and A.E., who did it over and over again and fielded many desperate crises of the soul.
Thank you to the teachers who taught me about the concepts, histories, languages, and cultures that shaped this novel: Samira Sayeh, Maryemma Graham, Stephanie Scurto, Giselle Anatol, Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Elizabeth Eslami, Saïd Hannouchi, Nour and Ashley (Nourshley), Azzedine, Aïcha, and Abdelaziz. And thank you to the teachers who told me to keep going: Mary Klayder and Darren Canady.