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

raised an eyebrow. “A soldier who doesn’t pay attention to her enemies is a dead soldier.” She had even gone so far as to wonder if Beau-Sang hadn’t been behind the sky-falling broadsides. Him, or maybe the dear uncle Luca groused about when she thought no one was listening. Touraine asked, “Have you gotten word from the duke regent?”

Luca settled again, dancing her fingers distractedly against her legs. “My uncle claims that he’ll happily cede the throne upon my return. In every letter, he’s preparing for my coronation, he’s glad I’m getting firsthand experience, he’s certain—” She glanced nervously at Touraine, as if she hadn’t realized she was still there, listening. “Certain my parents would be proud of me. And yet every opportunity we’ve had to crown me before, he’s blocked with some excuse or another. Regents have ceded the throne to the rightful heirs as early as twenty-five and as late as thirty. Outside of Balladaire, heirs have been crowned as young as thirteen!”

Luca frowned. “But it’s only a matter of time before the letters include lectures because I’m somehow mishandling the Shālan colonies and am thus not ready to rule.”

Sitting beside her, Touraine realized how young Luca, the queen regnant, was. Clear, sharp eyes behind her spectacles and tawny hair that might not gray for years yet. Even the lines in her face when she focused on her books or winced at her leg—they hadn’t set permanently. She couldn’t be that much older than Touraine.

Touraine wanted to ask, Are you ready to rule? Instead, she asked, “What’ll you do, then?”

And as she asked the question and saw Luca open her mouth to answer without a second thought, Touraine imagined herself taking these words, all of Luca’s words, and carrying them back to the rebels. Giving them ammunition, giving them tools, terrain, traps. She wondered what her life would look like if she went down that path, but she couldn’t see anything worth gaining. Not compared to staying with Luca.

“What do you know about Shālan magic?” Luca met Touraine’s eyes full on and lowered her voice. “What did the Brigāni woman say to you when you were captive?”

That startled Touraine into stammers. Unconsciously, she cradled her left arm in her right. “Nothing? Nothing. Just—that it’s—she said it’s just rumors. She told me a story about a kid priestess who was good at healing, made it sound like it was her.” She realized she was backing into her seat, as if the Apostate were there in front of her, knife gleaming again. “She—did cut me. I thought she was going to do magic with my blood, but I think that was just to scare me.”

Luca picked up Touraine’s pen and a scrap of paper from the desk and began scribbling notes, muttering to herself.

“What about—” The princess waved her hand without looking at Touraine, trying to pluck the words from the air. “You fought the Taargens, didn’t you? What do you know about their magic?”

Touraine’s heart froze solid in her chest. She must have been silent for a long time, because Luca finally looked up. She put the pen down and really looked at Touraine for the first time that evening.

Touraine broke eye contact and started cataloging. The paper on the desk. Her wobbly Shālan letters beneath Luca’s elegant script. The oak desk, sturdy, not a traveler’s desk, not cheap. Luca’s hands, one of them so close to her own clenched fist. The smell of Luca’s perfume, rose and something darker, muskier. The musk was new. Touraine’s own sweat. Her breath, too quick. Luca’s breath, quick, too. Luca’s hands, warm, tight, clasped around one of Touraine’s fists. A squeeze.

Luca didn’t say anything, and so Touraine let the silence pass as she tried to catch her breath, the room expanding and contracting.

It had happened after a clash with the Taargens. The autumn campaign was supposed to be over, but shitty orders and bad luck meant early blizzards caught the colonial brigade undersupplied as they covered the regular regiments’ asses.

Everyone thought they’d gotten lucky when they routed a small company of Taargens. Touraine sensed something was off as they went to pick through the bodies half buried in the snow—there were too many of them. Her shoulders prickled with unease.

She locked eyes with a staring corpse, his pale blue eyes vacant over a red-brown beard. Then he smiled.

Touraine managed only one shout before he dragged her to the ground: Run.

“The magic comes from their god,” Touraine said when she could. Her voice was hoarse, her throat drier than she realized. Luca’s thumb brushed over Touraine’s knuckles, comforting.

After the Taargens had taken her and a fistful of others—Valbré and Cariste, two siblings; Omarin, one of the field medics; a few others whose faces were starting to lose their edges in Touraine’s memory—they took them back to the Taargen war camp and dumped them in their bonds next to a fire that was so warm Touraine was grateful and felt guilty for it.

Until a couple of Taargens in bearskin cloaks came up to the fire and started chanting over it. Touraine didn’t speak the language, but she felt the change in the air on her skin.

They took Valbré first, his teeth chattering, dragged him to the fire, where a Taargen—call them a priest, sure—stood, and Touraine was so sure she was about to watch them burn Valbré alive while Cariste screamed for him, for mercy. What happened was worse.

The Taargen priest held Valbré’s face close to their own and whispered something. As the priest’s eyes rolled in rapture, Valbré’s eyes rolled up, and he shook until the priest dropped him. Touraine thought he was dead as he flopped to the ground, eyes staring back at the captured Sands. But his chest still rose and fell. His mouth still opened and closed.

Then another priest used Cariste, then Omarin, both of them discarded just like Valbré.

“They take you—they take something out of you.” Touraine’s voice trembled as she related the memories to Luca. “While they’re praying,