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

was so mixed with Shālan that it was hopeless. “Can you show me?” She mimed with her fingers a person walking. “Take me?”

A grubby palm shot out, waiting. Fair enough. Touraine fished out a half sovereign and dropped it in the kid’s hand. It vanished. Then the child took off, bare brown feet slapping against the street. Touraine sprinted after.

Rue Tontenac was in the heart of the Qazāli districts. The buildings were cracked clay brick, and the road, once paved with stone, was now mostly dirt. Most of the traffic seemed to go in and out of a café or smoking den. The whole street smelled like rose smoke and the burnt bean water that Luca liked so much. There wasn’t a single Balladairan. Now Touraine just had to find the right building.

She turned to the kid, but they were already gone.

Touraine weighed her options. Thinking about the youth who’d been smoking outside the baker’s oven the other day, she assumed that same casual lean against one of the buildings and glared moodily at nothing, pretending to be lost in her thoughts. It was easiest to go unnoticed if you kept to your own business. She’d learned that the hard way in the Balladairan barracks.

After an hour of sweating in the midday sun, she noticed one building had so few visitors as to be odd.

The note said after sunset. That was hours away. She went in anyway.

The cool darkness almost made Touraine sink to her knees in relief. The narrow entry led to the sun and a courtyard on one side and up a narrow flight of stairs on the other. The ground floor was quiet. She poked her head around the corner just to be sure. The small courtyard was empty. She hiked up the stairs and paused outside the first door she came across.

Heated voices rose inside.

“What do you mean you can’t heal her?”

That was the Jackal, deep and accusatory.

“You think I’m not trying?” An unfamiliar voice responded, full of pain and frustration. “Shāl is there, the magic is moving, but—nothing is happening in her.”

Magic. Heal her. Touraine reached unconsciously for the scar on her forearm. She’d just started to believe she’d imagined the cut’s quick healing, convinced herself that the wound was shallower than she’d thought. She suddenly felt nauseated.

Inside the room, the voices stopped abruptly. Touraine just had time to straighten when the door swung open and she faced the Jackal yet again. This time, her scarf was hastily wrapped around her head and face, leaving thick graying dreadlocks only half-wrapped.

The woman filled the doorway, and when she caught Touraine trying to glance behind her, she stepped out of the room and closed the door. Then she filled the stairwell instead, backing Touraine onto a lower step.

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t strangle you now,” the Jackal growled. Touraine didn’t doubt the woman could manage it, even with one hand.

Touraine stared her down. “I have a response from the princess.”

“I said a good reason. Your princess can eat my shit.”

“That’s not what your friends said.” Touraine nodded at the door. “Will she be all right?”

“Fuck off.”

“Are you going to listen, or should I wait and talk to someone who actually gives a shit about making peace?”

The stairwell was lit only by a window higher up and the open doorway below. The resulting shadow made it almost impossible to see the Jackal’s eyes at all.

The older woman snorted and said, “The only real peace’ll come when all of those bastards are gone. If I have my way, these little talks are over.” She took another few steps down the stairs, forcing Touraine back again.

The Jackal was a familiar type. Dogged and persistent, like her namesake, and she respected only force met with force. She wasn’t like Luca or even like the Apostate, bent on outsmarting people with words. Touraine and the Jackal were similar in that way. They knew there was a time and a place.

Touraine stepped up a stair. The Jackal didn’t move.

“I know you don’t really give a shit about me or the other conscripts. I know you’d rather gut me here.”

“Right on all counts—”

Touraine stepped up another stair. “I’m glad you framed me for that murder. If not for you, I wouldn’t have my new position.”

The words were a bluff, but even as something twisted guiltily inside her, Touraine knew it was true. This was a better position than dying on the front lines as a conscript. The fate she’d left to all her friends. She pushed the guilt down deeper.

“Frame you?” The Jackal chuckled. “That was a coincidence. We couldn’t care less, though if they’d executed you, we might call it justice done.”

The confession caught Touraine off guard, but she pushed that away, too. She climbed up one more step, putting her in reach of the Jackal’s strength.

“Then go ahead. Strangle me. Get your justice. You kill me, she loses nothing, but you—you lose the friendship of the one person in all of Balladaire who doesn’t want to kill the rebels outright.” The only person Touraine had ever heard speak of the rebels with something other than disdain. No, Luca and Cheminade. “She’s already given you an act of faith.”

“Good faith, from the faithless? She doesn’t even have the authority to make deals with us.” The Jackal sneered.

Faithless. She said it the same way Cantic said “uncivilized.”

Touraine hitched her chin up. “Even so. Faith is better placed in real people, backed up with real actions. And she’s backed by the duke regent.” Touraine wasn’t totally sure about that particular, but the Jackal didn’t need to know that.

“We have other friends. The Qazāli aren’t the only ones unhappy with your masters.”

Touraine stared up at the slash of black shadow where the Jackal’s eyes hid just above the lower sweep of her scarf.

“The thing is, Jackal, if you could beat us, you already would have. These ‘little talks’ could save your ass and all the people you care about.” If the bitch cared about