The Unbroken by C. Clark (ebook reader .txt) 📕

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