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

battles to come—and they would come. Touraine had no doubt that the rebels and their guns would only be the beginning. She wanted to have hope, like Luca did. She wanted peace to be around the corner.

A good leader was supposed to make contingency plans for her soldiers, and yet here she was. Letting them down. For a greater, eventual good.

“Touraine, let me offer you this piece of advice.” Cantic stubbed the butt of her cigarette into a tin tray already littered with the corpses of previous smokes. She pushed up her sleeves, revealing age-spotted forearms still ropy with muscle. “You’ve always been an exceptional conscript. As I said before, I’m glad the princess found a use for you. It would have been a shame to lose your potential so early.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You and I understand practical considerations of war. We’ve lived it. Bled for it. Her Highness is brilliant, but her hopes and ideas have no place here. They belong back home, in La Chaise. You can’t plan a campaign based on the ‘hope’ that an enemy won’t shoot you in the back. That’s why it’s best that the duke regent hold the throne a little longer. We’ll get her ready, but I don’t want you to fall into her pretty words. People like you and me have to remind people like her the difference between what’s important and what’s possible.”

Touraine felt the blood rush from her face. She had been thinking the same thing. Even though it made her heart sick to think it, Cantic’s words made sense. Luca’s belief in an easily settled peace after a quick exchange of a few guns for the promise of magic, her assumption that she could control any and all of the consequences from this one deal, made her seem naive at best, arrogant at worst, drunk with self-confidence.

Touraine felt light-headed.

“Thank you, sir. That’s good advice, sir.” Touraine ducked her head again.

And then Touraine had hesitated, glancing back toward the closed door. Toward the room where Luca had been fervently planning on these hopes and dreams. “Sir?” she’d said. “There’s just one more thing.”

Clutching the papers—the freedom—Luca had given her as they trundled to the Old Medina to sign a deal with the rebels, Touraine wondered if she had just made a terrible mistake.

Luca would never forgive her if she found out what Touraine had just done. Touraine held the crisp documents tighter and consoled herself with one simple thought: when the rebels found out that Touraine had broken their deal, they wouldn’t have the guns to fight back.

The Sands would be safe. For now.

CHAPTER 25A FAMILY, BROKEN

Luca couldn’t hide her triumph as she entered the empty smoking den on the Old Medina side of the Old Medina wall. Almost empty but for a table already set with water pipes and small cups of steaming mint tea. A table tall enough for chairs.

Djasha and Jaghotai already sat around it, along with a man Touraine had called the bookseller. Saïd. Jaghotai had a deep-purple bruise along one cheekbone, but even she exuded the same jovial air of a job well done. Of peace.

Touraine, who still looked ill, was the only one who didn’t. At least her presence was a comfort. With a gentle hand at her back, Luca bade her sit before following. Saïd poured them both fresh cups of pale tea, thick with the smell of sugar. He also set new coals on a water pipe before handing the tube to Luca.

She pulled from it. The tobacco was laced with rose, and it couldn’t have been sweeter.

“My people have a watch on the warehouses now. They’ve confirmed your security measures and the contents,” Jaghotai said. She dipped her head begrudgingly, long dreadlocks dipping, too. She smoked from her own pipe. “She told the truth.”

“So we have a deal?” Luca said from within a cloud of smoke. She pulled out her own copy of the treaty document she’d drawn up.

Jaghotai smoked and jerked her head at Djasha. “Your turn, witch.”

The Brigāni slowly turned to look her companion dead in the eyes and held Jaghotai in her gaze for five eternal seconds. A look like that would have made Luca apologize, at the very least. Jaghotai only smirked around the tube at her lips.

“Don’t take all day,” Jaghotai said. “I want my new toys.”

“We have a deal.” Djasha pulled out the wax tube Luca had given her last night and uncurled the paper. “We’ll send one priest to you when we have the weapons. They’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

“Very well.” Luca pulled out a pen and a small bottle of ink. She laid both contracts out and copied the Apostate’s amendment to her own.

When she finished and held the pen out for Djasha to sign, the Brigāni woman’s golden eyes were hooded and unreadable. She clutched her robes to her, as if she were cold.

Luca leaned closer, felt herself falling toward the woman, toward a depth she knew was hidden just out of reach. She was a child again, peering over the edge of a boat into the lac de Solange to see what lay in the dark. There was no one here to pull her to safety if she tipped.

“Do you know our history, Your Highness?” Djasha asked finally.

“Of course. All the way back to Empress Djaya at least, but the… curse… on the other city leaves much of that occluded. The Blood and Wheat Treaty, signed by my great-great-great-grandmother after your empress went mad. The Technological Trade Agreement, signed by my great-great-grandfather, that got plumbing and irrigation for you and surgical techniques and vaccinations for us. Then—”

Djasha cocked her head. “And then your father, who dissolved all of it.”

Luca’s recitation had been rote, as if Djasha were one of her tutors and she were just a child. She was cut off like a child, too.

“And in any case, I’m not talking about your version of our history.” Djasha paused. She closed her eyes, as if