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

looked between Touraine and the fear-tight hand around her biceps. Jaghotai was still angry from the chastisement Djasha had given her over the hostages.

“You’ll need support. I’m one of the best fighters—you know this.”

Jaghotai shook Touraine’s hand off and huffed. “I do know that. That’s why I want you with Niwai.”

Touraine stepped closer still and spoke in a hushed, definitely not desperate voice. “Is this about me and you? Do you want me to humiliate myself?”

“Mulāzim, I have no idea what you’re talking about. As much as you need to get humble, I’m not about to sabotage an entire mission to make you look like even more of a fool. You asked to help. Djasha and I said you could stay. Now you’re my tool, and I’m telling you where you’ll help.”

Touraine’s heart swam up to her throat. She looked toward the corner where Niwai and Aranen sat talking about gods while Djasha looked on with a wan smile.

She couldn’t do this. She could accept the magic as a tool, even allow that one of them would be an ally, as long as she didn’t have to deal with it right in front of her. She couldn’t help Niwai do it, though. She couldn’t watch them use that magic against the Sands. Against Luca.

But Touraine had made her choice when she returned to the Grand Temple and threw her lot in with the rebels. Who was she to tell them what weapons they could or couldn’t use? Especially when Balladaire had them so badly outnumbered and outgunned.

Really, though, none of that was the point.

Niwai watched her, their eyes glittering amid dark kohl. They cocked their head at her even as they nodded at what Aranen was saying.

The point was the heat and the sweat pricking at Touraine’s skin, the vomit creeping up the back of her throat when she thought not of Niwai but of the Taargens, murdering her soldiers for their magic right in front of her, reaching for her next—

“Please, Jaghotai.”

Something in her voice finally caught Jaghotai’s attention. Comprehension finally dawned in the other woman’s eyes. Her mother’s eyes. Had Touraine hit at some maternal instinct to protect her? Sky above, please, yes.

“I’m sorry, Touraine. That’s an order. That’s how Cantic would say it, sah? We need you there.”

Touraine clenched her jaw tight and tried to hold steady enough to glare. Instead, she bolted, to be sick in the temple green.

They stole through the nights like a plague.

The first few nights, Niwai led the way to the Balladairan-owned farms tended by Qazāli farmhands asleep for the night. Fog rolled in off the river, and their feet squelched through plowed fields watered by irrigation ditches fed by the Hadd. With the call of Niwai’s god’s magic, and clever fingers at gates, goats left their pens, and sheep followed their new shepherd. Chickens flapped, pigeons cooed, and geese honked as they followed overhead. Crows pecked at the grain fields with a voracious hunger, devouring what hadn’t already been harvested.

Even in the dark, Touraine could see the ecstasy in Niwai’s eyes as they used their magic. It made her shudder, but she followed anyway.

When a young Qazāli goatherd woke and called out in confusion to his charges, Touraine found him and silenced him with a knock to the head. It wouldn’t go well for him if people thought he’d shirked his duty, but…

A week later, after Niwai and the Shālans had prayed to their gods and slaughtered the goats, Touraine led a squad of Jaghotai’s fighters back through the city. This part was her idea. She knew how to tap the Balladairans’ fear, and the Qazāli knew the city. They brought clay jars of goat’s and sheep’s blood in on silent rickshaws and one by one covered the Balladairan districts, daubing blood on doors, pooling it through the thoroughfares, until it would be impossible for the Balladairans to move without bloodying their feet.

A suitable symbol, Djasha agreed.

Later the next day, one of the watch boys reported, giggling: the shrieks of the Balladairans were like a thousand roosters crowing—all the roosters they no longer had.

CHAPTER 30A HUNGER

Her city was on the brink of chaos. Food prices were out of hand, and already the Sands and blackcoats alike were stretched thin trying to keep her subjects from thinking too closely of rioting.

Luca hadn’t believed it when Beau-Sang came into her command office yelling about vanishing livestock, face red with bluster even as he tried to convince her that he had everything under control.

Now she, Cantic, and Beau-Sang stood in the compound’s dim storehouse, hungrily eyeing the bags of grains and beans arrayed on wooden racks that reached up the walls. Cases of salted and smoked meat stretched the length of the building, stacked in orderly rows to one side. Enough food to feed the brigade of soldiers stationed in Qazāl and its auxiliary staff for the season, Luca imagined, but not a hundred thousand civilians.

Mirroring the meat on the other side of the storehouse were crates of muskets and ammunition. Even cannons for field battles. Almost as much weaponry as food. The air smelled like a disturbing combination of cured meat and gunpowder.

“We need the meat we’ve stored here for the soldiers.” Cantic crossed her arms behind her back and glared at Beau-Sang. She still hadn’t forgiven Luca for making Beau-Sang the new governor-general.

“Your soldiers aren’t even doing their job. Our citizens’ lives and livelihoods are at stake while your men and women gamble and our food is stolen by rebels you should be crushing. My connections have found nothing.”

“Your connections?” Cantic said. “I thought you had a plan. Time for a rougher hand, wasn’t it?”

“Please!” snapped Luca. She pressed the bridge of her nose. “General. Lord Governor. This isn’t helping. We need a solution. We can blame each other later. And even the rebels can’t have caused all of this.” She had seen the birds come in. Everyone had. A flock of wild birds had picked the