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

Harsh training, but easy to learn, to fall in. To do well and keep your doubts to yourself.

It was Balladaire where they’d celebrated the harvest season every year with the smell of baking bread and roasting vegetables wafting across the compound to mix with the wonderful rot of autumn leaves. Their mouths watering during drills. The race to bathe and get to the table for the feast.

It was the mountains and the trees she had fought for, the bread and the herbs her soldiers had died for.

It was home. And she was drifting farther and farther away from it.

Deep down, maybe she’d thought that her promotion would show the other Sands that it really was best to stay with Balladaire. That there was fairness. That loyalty really would be rewarded and there was logic to the world.

“Argh!” She slapped the wall in a burst, and the sting echoed up her forearm.

“Said shut your fucking mouth, didn’t I? Or I’ll come shut it for you!”

If Cantic found her guilty and executed her, she’d prove Touraine wrong. And why should the Sands stay then?

CHAPTER 9THE COURT-MARTIAL

Two days later, or maybe three, or maybe just one, things got worse.

The jailer was speaking to someone, but she couldn’t make out specific words. Only a familiar honking bray. Touraine recoiled from the bars, like she could hide somewhere in the cramped cell.

“You’re looking well, Lieutenant Touraine.” Rogan raked Touraine up and down with his eyes. He turned to the jailer with a smirk. “Did you manage to have any fun before the trial?”

Touraine made out the disgust on the jailer’s face in the light of his lantern. The man had the single wheat stalk of a sergeant pinned to each side of his collar.

“Best not to mix with the like, Captain,” he said.

Touraine was offended and comforted at the same time. Without another look at her, the jailer unlocked her door and cuffed her wrists behind her back. The skin was healing slowly from the rebels’ ropes, thanks to the medic’s ointments and quiet tsks.

Rogan led Touraine out of the jail, his fingers tight on her arm.

The sky was blindingly bright with late-morning blue; the sun warmed her immediately. Soldiers and aides and all the others who made an army run smooth marched or scurried through the compound, from barracks to mess hall, from sick bay to barracks, from training yard to sick bay. They barked orders that would be followed half-heartedly, delivered bad news, practiced drills they should have known better. It looked different here in Qazāl, all bare sandstone and clay, dirt and sand, but this was the world that made sense to her. She knew her place in it.

But it came with problems she couldn’t escape on her own. When she glanced sideways at Rogan, his expression was professional, a consummate soldier following orders. His words, however, were his own.

“I haven’t forgotten what I owe you,” he said.

They fell in smooth step together, as soldiers do. That alone was intimate enough to make her stomach churn.

“Your trial will not go well. The general will hear your testimony, and she’ll be gravely disappointed. She’ll want to believe you. Until I testify. And when the court finds you guilty, I’ll pay you a special visit in your cell. I’m sure the jailer will turn a blind eye despite his opinions on mixing with… the like. How does that sound? Even Cantic won’t care what I do with a condemned woman.”

Her pulse beat like a frightened rabbit’s, and she hated herself for it.

A blackcoat opened the door of the administrative building, and Rogan pushed Touraine through. Aides and soldiers alike stared at them as Rogan marched her inside and down to Cantic’s office. He didn’t say another word, but the damage was done. She couldn’t possibly win.

“Touraine. You’re accused of treason against the empire and murder of a Balladairan soldier. How do you plead?” General Cantic leaned forward, elbows on the long table at the front of the small audience room, her hands steepled.

Touraine. Just Touraine, the name unadorned, the way the Balladairans had handed it out to her as a child, along with her new clothes and new bed and new language. She had never disliked the sound of her name before that moment. She sat in a stiff-backed wooden chair, her arms wrapped around it and her locked wrists dangling. She was going nowhere. She wondered if the Sands had been told about her trial, or if Pruett and Tibeau had been left to wonder.

Cantic wore her formal uniform, all black except for the gold left sleeve. The four other gold stripes presiding wore their formals, too. They sat arrayed to Cantic’s left and right at the long table. The room they all sat in was probably where they all came together to discuss strategies when they weren’t glaring disapprovingly at soldiers, waiting for them to answer for their crimes. It lacked the usual attempts at martial decor, no mounted swords or old muskets on the walls, no war tapestries. Maybe they kept those in another room. The starker, the more frightening.

The princess was in the small room, too, waiting. The heir wouldn’t come to a simple court-martial for murder. That meant Cantic was taking the charge of treason seriously. The young woman’s face was stern and haughty, lips pursed. The elegant woman Touraine had met before looked cold and intimidating. The effect was enhanced by the two royal guards flanking her and the captain of the guard standing at the door. They wore black coats, but their button panels were gold and the buttons black. Their short gold cloaks hung still, as if the cloaks, too, were waiting for Touraine’s answer.

Touraine had always had faith in Balladaire, or at the very least, Cantic. She hoped that faith wasn’t misplaced. She took a breath, deep as her healing ribs would allow.

“I’m innocent, sir.”

“Then explain yourself for the jury.”

“As I said before, sir, I got lost