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

Like everyone else, she pretended to ignore the gallows as she meandered toward the fruit stalls. No bodies hung from the ropes today.

The noise that Touraine had thought was only bickering and haggling in the market became clearer as she approached. The shouting clarified itself. Shouting for apples and oranges in both languages. And the word thief. At the center of it, a Balladairan merchant stood in front of a cart heavy with apples. They must have come from Balladairan orchards. Then again…

She didn’t notice the kid until he rammed into her gut. One apple fell from his hand and rolled back toward the crowd. He held another clutched tight in a grubby fist. He shook, and his lips trembled, his eyes already shining with tears.

“Steady on, kid,” she said. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” Then it dawned on her. This filthy boy hadn’t paid half a sovereign for an apple. Definitely not for two. And she wasn’t the only one who noticed.

A Balladairan in a well-tailored jacket dragged the boy back and smacked him in the face so hard that the boy fell and dropped the second apple.

“Sir! It’s all right. I’ll pay for them.” She tried to wedge herself between them.

The man in front of her was handsome, with gleaming dark hair and cruel dark eyes. The kind of man used to putting people underneath him. Touraine would have bet her life he was a Droitist.

He swung his backhand at her next. How dare she stand between him and his rightful duty? He would put her in her place, too. She should have let him hit her, or at the very least dodged, but she’d spent enough of the day with her head bowed, and to people who deserved it. Besides, Touraine had always preferred the offensive. One of her weaknesses.

Before she realized it, she’d blocked him with a forearm and shoved him back. He fell to the ground, half-shocked, half-furious. She looked for the boy, hoping to grab him and blend back into the crowd. He was already gone.

In his place, the crowd of Qazāli had grown. “Give us the apples,” they chanted. “Give us the apples.” It echoed through the bazaar and filled Touraine with sudden, sharp pride.

Then a volley of disciplined Balladairan musketry took out one of the men standing beside her. Another volley, and the crowd scattered. The blackcoats had come to restore order.

Touraine almost crashed into Jaghotai as the other woman was running out of Djasha and Aranen’s apartment. The other woman’s scarf was wrapped around her face, too.

“What in Shāl’s name did you do this time?” Jaghotai asked, eyes wide with fury or fear, Touraine couldn’t tell. She noticed that the two emotions tended to coincide in the older woman.

Touraine turned with her, and they loped in the direction of the bazaar. The orange glow of sunset had turned into the burn of torches and lanterns, but instead of being a sign of the cozy revelry of the city in the evening, it sent a forbidding shiver up Touraine’s back. Her soldier’s instincts screamed against it.

“Food riots finally cracked.” Touraine still hadn’t found the street boy. “And the Balladairans are taking it out on everyone.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone that’s not Balladairan.”

“What about the blackcoats?”

“They’re ‘helping’ the Balladairans, obviously.”

Jaghotai swore.

“The people know to get to the Grand Temple,” Jaghotai said between breaths. She was flagging. Sometimes Touraine forgot that the woman had to be fifty years old or near enough. “They’ll be safe there.”

“Will they? That’s where Rogan found me and Aranen, remember? It’s compromised.”

“Djasha.” Jaghotai stopped abruptly and swore again. “She and Malika went to check on the patients. Meet them there. It’s the closest thing to a fortress we have. Our people will go there for instructions if they don’t get caught up sooner. I’ll see what’s to be done in the bazaar. You organize them from the temple.”

Touraine blinked in surprise. “You’re putting me in charge of your fighters?”

“You’re not up to it, Mulāzim?” Jaghotai was ready to run off again, chest rising steadily.

Despite the situation, the other woman was poised with a seemingly unshakable calm. Like Cantic. Like Djasha. Was this something that came with age? Was that why Touraine’s stomach still roiled with guilt and anxiety at the prospect of ordering men and women into battle? She tucked those thoughts away. If nothing else, she was good enough at pretending to be calm.

“Aye, aye, Captain.” Touraine threw her mother a salute.

Touraine’s stomach sank as she came up on the temple. Outside it, a group set to battering the doors down with a low-backed couch. Only a few wore Balladairan blacks. The others looked like civilians, with bellies of comfort and long hair slicked with sweat. Their faces twisted with the effort; they laughed like drinking friends.

The Grand Temple’s glass windows had been shattered with projectiles—bullets, rocks, Touraine didn’t know. Smoke billowed from them in thick clouds, a black haze above the flames. The night was perfumed with frankincense and sandalwood, as if all the incense in the world had been lit at once, for one great prayer. Enough to appease an entire world of gods. Inside, people were screaming.

“Heave!” A broad woman at the back of the couch called to her friends. Her thick shoulders strained the coat of her uniform across her back and arms. With one arm guiding the couch, she waved the other arm like a flag. That’s when Touraine realized they weren’t just laughing. They were singing. The Balladairan imperial anthem.

After over twenty years of training and fighting and studying with them, she hadn’t managed to prove that she, that Qazāli, were worth more than this. What would it take for Balladaire to see them as more than cheap labor and cannon fodder?

Maybe watching death come for them, wearing her face.

Touraine barreled into the macabre conductor knife-first. She collided with so much force that the woman lifted off the ground and toppled into her neighbor. They all fell in a heap, and the end of the