In an epic political fantasy unlike any other, two women clash in a world full of rebellion, espionage, and military might on the far outreaches of a crumbling desert empire. Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she thought.
Luca needs a turncoat. Someone desperate enough to tiptoe the bayonet's edge between treason and orders. Someone who can sway the rebels toward peace, while Luca focuses on what really matters: getting her uncle off her throne.
Through assassinations and massacres, in bedrooms and war rooms, Touraine and Luca will haggle over the price of a nation. But some things aren't for sale.
Release date:
March 23, 2021
Publisher:
Orbit
Print pages:
544
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A sandstorm brewed dark and menacing against the Qazāli horizon as Lieutenant Touraine and the rest of the Balladairan Colonial Brigade sailed into El-Wast, capital city of Qazāl, foremost of Balladaire’s southern colonies.
El-Wast. City of marble and sandstone, of olives and clay. City of the golden sun and fruits Touraine couldn’t remember tasting. City of rebellious, uncivilized god-worshippers. The city where Touraine was born.
At a sudden gust, Touraine pulled her black military coat tighter about her body and hunched small over the railing of the ship as it approached land. Even from this distance, in the early-morning dark, she could see a black Balladairan standard flapping above the docks. Its rearing golden horse danced to life, sparked by the reflection of the night lanterns. Around her, pale Balladairan-born sailors scrambled across the ship to bring it safely to harbor.
El-Wast, for the first time in some twenty-odd years. It took the air from the lieutenant’s chest. Her white-knuckle grip on the rail was only partly due to the nausea that had rocked her on the water.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Tibeau, Touraine’s second sergeant and best friend, settled against the rail next to her. The wooden rail shifted under his bulk. He spoke quietly, but Touraine could hear the awe and longing in the soft rumble of his voice.
Beautiful wasn’t the first thing Touraine thought as their ship sailed up the mouth of the River Hadd and gave them a view of El-Wast. The city was surprisingly big. Surprisingly bright. It was surprisingly… civilized. A proper city, not some scattering of tents and sand. Not what she had expected at all, given how Balladairans described the desert colonies. From this angle, it didn’t even look like a desert.
The docks stretched along the river like a small town, short buildings nestled alongside what were probably warehouses and workers’ tenements. Just beyond them, a massive bridge arced over shadowed farmland with some crop growing in neat rows, connecting the docks to the curve of a crumbling wall that surrounded the city. The Mile-Long Bridge. The great bridge was lined with the shadows of palm trees and lit up all along with the fuzzy dots of lanterns. In the morning darkness, you could easily have mistaken the lanterns for stars.
She shrugged. “It’s impressive, I guess.”
Tibeau nudged her shoulder and held his arms out wide to take it all in. “You guess? This is your home. We’re finally back. You’re going to love it.” His eyes shone in the reflection of the lanterns guiding the Balladairan ship into Crocodile Harbor, named for the monstrous lizards that had supposedly lived in the river centuries ago.
Home. Touraine frowned. “Love it? Beau, we’re not on leave.” She dug half-moons into the soft, weather-worn wood of the railing and grumbled, “We have a job to do.”
Tibeau scoffed. “To police our own people.”
The thunk of approaching boots on the deck behind them stopped Touraine from saying something that would keep Tibeau from speaking to her for the rest of the day. Something like These aren’t my people. How could they be? Touraine had barely been toddling in the dust when Balladaire took her.
“You two better not be talking about what I think you’re talking about,” Sergeant Pruett said, coming up behind them with her arms crossed.
“Of course not,” Touraine said. She and Pruett let their knuckles brush in the cover of darkness.
“Good. Because I’d hate to have to throw you bearfuckers overboard.”
Pruett. The sensible one to Tibeau’s impetuousness, the scowl to his smile. The only thing they agreed on was hating Balladaire for what it had done to them, but unlike Tibeau, who was only biding his time before some imaginary revolution, Pruett was resigned to the conscripts’ fate and thought it better to keep their heads down and hate Balladaire in private.
Pruett shoved her way between the two of them and propped her elbows on the railing. Her teeth chattered. “It’s cold as a bastard here. I thought the deserts were supposed to be hot.”
Tibeau sighed wistfully, staring with longing at some point beyond the city. “Only during the day. In the real desert, you can freeze your balls off if you forget a blanket.”
“You sound… oddly excited about that.” Pruett looked askance at him.
Tibeau grinned.
Home was a sharp topic for every soldier in the Balladairan Colonial Brigade. There were those like Tibeau and Pruett, who had been taken from countries throughout the broken Shālan Empire when they were old enough to already have memories of family or the lack thereof, and then there were those like Touraine, who had been too young to remember anything but Balladaire’s green fields and thick forests.
No matter where in the Shālan Empire the conscripts were originally from, they all speculated on the purpose of their new post. There was excitement on the wind, and Touraine felt it, too. The chance to prove herself. The chance to show the Balladairan officers that she deserved to be a captain. Change was coming.
Even the Balladairan princess had come with the fleet. Pruett had heard from another conscript who had it from a sailor that the princess was visiting her southern colonies for the first time, and so the conscripts took turns trying to spot the young royal on her ship.
The order came to disembark, carried by shouts on the wind. Discipline temporarily disappeared as the conscripts and their Balladairan officers hoisted their packs and tramped down to Crocodile Harbor’s thronged streets.
People shouted in Balladairan and Shālan as they loaded and unloaded ships, animals in cages and animals on leads squawked and bellowed, and Touraine walked through it all in a daze, trying to take it in. Qazāl’s dirt and grit crunched beneath her army-issued boots. Maybe she did feel a spark of awe and curiosity. And maybe that frightened her just a little.
With a wumph, Touraine walked right into an odd tan horse with a massive hump in the middle of its back. She spat and dusted coarse fur off her face. The animal glared at her with large, affronted brown eyes and a bubble of spit forming at the corner of its mouth.
The animal’s master flicked his long gray-streaked hair back off his smiling face and spoke to Touraine in Shālan.
Touraine hadn’t spoken Shālan since she was small. It wasn’t allowed when they were children in Balladaire, and now it sounded as foreign as the camel’s groan. She shook her head.
“Camel. He spit,” the man warned, this time in Balladairan. The camel continued to size her up. It didn’t look like it was coming to any good conclusion.
Touraine grimaced in disgust, but beside her, Pruett snorted. The other woman said something short to the man in Shālan before turning Touraine toward the ships.
“What did you say?” Touraine asked, looking over her shoulder at the glaring camel and the older man.
“‘Please excuse my idiot friend.’”
Touraine rolled her eyes and hefted her pack higher onto her shoulders.
“Rose Company, Gold Squad, form up on me!” She tried in vain to gather her soldiers in some kind of order, but the noise swallowed her voice. She looked warily for Captain Rogan. If Touraine didn’t get the rest of her squad in line, that bastard would take it out on all of them. “Gold Squad, form up!”
Pruett nudged Touraine in the ribs. She pointed, and Touraine saw what kept her soldiers clumped in whispering groups, out of formation.
A young woman descended the gangway of another ship with the support of a cane. She wore black trousers, a black coat, and a short black cloak lined with cloth of gold. Her blond hair, pinned in a bun behind her head, sparked like a beacon in the night. Three stone-faced royal guards accompanied her in a protective triangle, their short gold cloaks blown taut behind them. Each of them had a sword on one hip and a pistol on the other.
Touraine looked from the princess to the chaos on the ground, and a growing sense of unease raised the short hairs on the back of her neck. Suddenly, the crowd felt more claustrophobic than industrious.
The man with the camel still stood nearby, watching with interest like the other dockworkers. His warm smile deepened the lines in his face, and he guided the animal’s nose to her, as if she wanted to pat it. The camel looked as unenthusiastic at the prospect as Touraine felt.
“No.” Touraine shook her head at him again. “Move, sir. Give us this space, if you please.”
He didn’t move. Probably didn’t understand proper Balladairan. She shooed him with her hands. Instead of reacting with annoyance or confusion, he glanced fearfully over her shoulder.
She followed his gaze. Nothing there but the press of the crowd, her own soldiers either watching the princess or drowsily taking in their new surroundings in the early-morning light. Then she saw it: a young Qazāli woman weaving through the crowd, gaze fixed on one blond point.
The camel man grabbed Touraine’s arm, and she jerked away.
Touraine was a good soldier, and a good soldier would do her duty. She didn’t let herself imagine what the consequences would be if she was wrong.
“Attack!” she bellowed, fit for a battlefield. “To the princess!”
The Qazāli man muttered something in Shālan, probably a curse, before he shouted, too. A warning to his fellow. To more of them, maybe. Something glinted in his hands.
Touraine spared only half a glance toward the princess. That was what the royal guard was for. Instead, she launched toward the camel man, dropping her pack instead of swinging it at him. Stupid, stupid. Instinct alone saved her life. She lifted her arms just in time to get a slice across her left forearm instead of her throat.
She drew her baton to counterattack, but instead of running in the scant moment he had, the old man hesitated, squinting at her.
“Wait,” he said. “You look familiar.” His Balladairan was suddenly more than adequate.
Touraine shook off his words, knocked the knife from his hand, and tripped him to the ground. He struggled against her with wiry strength until she pinned the baton against his throat. That kept him from saying anything else. She held him there, her teeth bared and his eyes wide while he strained for breath. Behind her, the camel man’s companions clashed with the other soldiers. A young woman’s high-pitched cry. The princess or the assassin?
The old man rasped against the pressure of the baton. “Wait,” he started, but Touraine pressed harder until he lost the words.
Then the docks went silent. The rest of the attackers had been taken down, dead or apprehended. The man beneath her realized it, too, and all the fight sagged out of him.
When they relieved her, she stood to find herself surrounded. The three royal guards, alert, swords drawn; a handful of fancy-looking if spooked civilians; the general—her general. General Cantic. And, of course, the princess.
Heat rose to her face. Touraine knew that some part of her should be afraid of overstepping; she’d just shat on all the rules and decorum that had been drilled into the conscripts for two decades. But the highest duty was to the throne of Balladaire, and not everyone could say they had stopped an assassination. Even if Touraine was a conscript, she couldn’t be punished for that. She hoped. She settled into the strength of her broad shoulders and bowed deeply to the princess.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Your Highness,” Touraine said, her voice smooth and low.
The princess quirked an eyebrow. “Thank you”—the princess looked to the double wheat-stalk pins on Touraine’s collar—“Lieutenant…?”
“Lieutenant Touraine, Your Highness.” Touraine bowed again. She peeked at the general out of the corner of her eye, but the older woman’s lined face was unreadable.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Touraine, for your quick thinking.”
A small shuffling to the side admitted a horse-faced man with a dark brown tail of hair under his bicorne hat. Captain Rogan sneered over Touraine before bowing to the princess.
“Your Highness, I apologize if this Sand has inconvenienced you.” Before the princess could respond, Rogan turned to Touraine and spat, “Get back to your squad. Form them up like they should have been.”
So much for taking her chance to rise. So much for duty. Touraine sucked her teeth and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
She tightened her sleeve against the bleeding cut on her left arm and went back to her squad, who stood in a tight clump a few yards away from the old man’s camel. The beast huffed with a sound like a bubbling kettle, and a disdainful glob of foamy spittle dripped from its slack lips. Safe enough to say she had made an impression on the locals.
And the others? Touraine looked back for another glimpse at the princess and found the other woman meeting her gaze. Touraine tugged the bill of her field cap and nodded before turning away, attempting to appear as unruffled as she could.
When Touraine returned to her squad, Pruett looked uncertain as Rogan handed the older man off to another officer, who led him and the young woman away. “I told you to be careful about attracting attention.”
Touraine smiled, even though her arm stung and blood leaked into her palm. “Attention’s not bad if you’re the hero.”
That did make Pruett laugh. “Ha! Hero. A Sand? I guess you think the princess wants to wear my shit for perfume, too.”
Touraine laughed back, and it was tinged with the same frustration and bitterness that talk of their place in the world always was.
This time, when she called for her squad to form up, they did. Gold Squad and the others pulled down their field caps and drew close their coats. The wind was picking up. The sun was rising. The Qazāli dockworkers bent their backs into their work again, but occasionally they glanced—nervous, scared, suspicious, hateful—at the conscripts. At Rogan’s order, she and the conscripts marched to their new posts.
Change was coming. Touraine aimed to be on the right side of it.
A flea storm, the Balladairans in Qazāl called it, because grains of sand lodged in every improbable place on a body, climbing into buttoned jackets and nestling into cropped hair, whistling itchy fury into every home and guardhouse, no matter how tight the curtains were shut or how low a soldier tugged their field cap. It cast everything in brown shadow.
Touraine pulled her cap lower as the storm yanked at her black uniform coat while she and the other Balladairan Colonial conscripts stood at attention in the bazaar. Their faces were neutral, but Sergeant Pruett scanned the crowd. Sergeant Tibeau kept his eyes locked obediently forward, but he was probably contemplating every anti-Balladairan feeling he’d ever had. When the order had come for Touraine’s squad to muster in the city’s largest bazaar, a plaza lined with merchant stalls, the storm had become more than just a dark imagining on the edge of the horizon.
Sand skittered like dry rain against the wooden gallows in the center of the square. It flayed the Qazāli prisoners Touraine and Pruett had caught just this morning, ripping into their bare chests while they stood parched and peeling in the sun. It taunted Touraine and her squad, just like the Balladairans who called the desert-born conscripts “Sands.”
Within the square of a horse-mounted guard, the Balladairan princess shifted uncomfortably on horseback, eyes darting between the prisoners and the Qazāli civilians in the crowd. She didn’t look nearly as confident as she had after the thwarted assassination this morning.
Only the Qazāli took the sand with equanimity, their bright hoods raised and sand veils or scarves wrapped to protect against the dust’s assault.
As the Balladairan captain of Touraine’s company strutted toward her, Touraine willed the scowl off her face, if only for the sake of the general at his side. Captain Rogan kept his bicorne hat low on his head to keep the wind at bay, preening and bowing toward anyone of higher rank. The general only ducked her head a little under the wind.
“Lieutenant Touraine. You’ve done well for yourself since I last saw you.” General Cantic smiled, and Touraine’s mouth went dry. “We have you to thank for this.” The general nodded toward the prisoners awaiting their fates.
“General Cantic is giving you the hanging. I trust you won’t botch it?” Rogan slipped in, trying to undermine Touraine immediately. His clipped, aristocratic accent curled Touraine’s lip by reflex. His blue eyes were cold and his nose short and sharp, good for looking down. He thrust the prisoners’ chain at her.
The wind blew hard enough to snap the nooses like whips.
“Of course, sir.” Touraine chose to speak directly to the general.
“Excellent,” Cantic said. “Move along. The weather’s turning.”
Touraine glanced at the sky and regretted it as stray granules of dust lodged in her eyes. She had been relieved to scuff dry land under her boots this morning, had never wanted to see another ship again. Now she wanted to get back on that wooden catastrophe and vomit her way back to Balladaire. So what if she had been born in this sand-fucked city? It was too long ago for her to remember, and she could see why she’d never missed it.
Still. The Qazāli rebels drew Touraine’s eyes like a lodestone, and they squinted and scowled right back. The woman she had noticed, the old camel man, and three others. Five Qazāli prisoners, standing in loose dark trousers, stripped of the hoods and vests so many Qazāli wore, and chained together. Their curly hair clumped with dried sweat. The brown skin of their bare chests reddened and peeled. Brown skin, like hers, like most of the Sands’. Touraine’s nose burned at the smell of their piss. The prisoners must have stood there all day, maybe since their capture. If they hadn’t been questioned first. The sun rose slowly, peeking over the buildings to the other side of the river, the ruins of an old city, out of the storm’s reach. The chain was heavy and warm in Touraine’s hand.
The pale Balladairan soldiers stood poised at attention, their musket butts digging into the earth. They formed another buffer between the princess on her horse and the restless Qazāli in the square. Touraine’s attention, however, was primarily with the general. Ultimately, only General Cantic had the power to promote her, but maybe the princess would be grateful enough to commend her.
Cantic and a squat, official-looking woman walked up the wooden stairs, and Touraine followed, leading the prisoners by the chain. She gestured for Pruett to follow. From the new vantage point, she could see the tops of the clay buildings whose walls formed the edges of the bazaar, outlined against the approaching storm. Fine, maybe Tibeau was right. It was a little breathtaking.
Sergeant Pruett yanked each prisoner into position behind a noose. She nodded to Touraine, her eyes half-lidded, looking more sullen than usual. The russet-brown curls poking from her field cap were plastered darkly to the sides of her skull with sweat. Then she stepped back to wait next to the lever that would drop the rebels to their deaths. Touraine waited for her own cue on the other end of the platform.
The kick of Cantic’s boots on the gallows platform killed the rumble of conversation. Time had made her even more severe. Her hair, which had grown more white than blond since Touraine had last seen her, was pulled back into a tight tail under her tricorne. Her hand rested on the pommel of her saber, and her broad shoulders were bonier but straight, despite the approaching wall of sand.
A woman worth studying, worth pleasing, worth staying close to. Touraine had been thrilled to learn she would be stationed at Cantic’s base. Supposedly, the general had been expanding and protecting the desert colonies for years.
The other woman was less severe, but she cocked her head at Touraine and the other Sands in curiosity. She wasn’t in an officer’s uniform, which meant she had to be a government official. The governor. Touraine returned her focus to the general, like everyone else in the square.
In a commanding voice that echoed across the square, General Cantic said something in Shālan, the language of the broken southern empire. The words sounded like rocks rattling in a cup, and they caught everyone’s attention. Touraine didn’t know what they meant. Like everything else Touraine had taken from Qazāl when she was a kid, the language had been culled out of her.
Cantic continued in Balladairan. “Citizens, today we celebrate. Though the occasion is grim, justice has won a decisive victory.” She gestured to the prisoners behind her with an open palm. “These rebels are guilty of attempted murder.”
Touraine’s eyes drifted back to the princess. She’d dismounted. Smart not to provide a raised target for more rebel assassins. The people who weren’t looking at the condemned snuck glances at Her Highness. The heir to the Balladairan throne seemed small and fragile on the ground, surrounded for her own protection.
“With the help of the Qazāli magistrate, we have spoken with the prisoners”—there was no doubt what spoken with meant—“and we will find the other rebels involved. Anyone found aiding them or feeding them or sheltering them will die with them. However.” General Cantic softened her tone marginally. “What is justice if it is not upheld by the law and the people? If you have any information about the rebel leaders, come to us. You will receive amnesty, a handsome reward, and gratitude for your dedication to our alliance.”
The spectators craned their necks to see them: Touraine and Pruett, the general, the prisoners. Touraine and the Sands were an unspoken lecture: she was born Qazāli, but Balladaire had educated her, trained her to fight, fed her, kept her healthy. She had grown up civilized. The Qazāli could do much worse than cooperate.
General Cantic gave Touraine an encouraging nod.
The first of the condemned was a dark man with salt-crusted black hair that curled around his ears and a thick, close beard covering his chin. She hadn’t seen him this morning, and he refused to make Touraine’s job easier. She stood on tiptoes to loop the noose over his neck. The second person was the young woman, less bullish, delicate even. The fight in her was gone. She watched Touraine calmly and ducked into the noose, murmuring under her breath.
The woman was praying. Touraine had studiously ignored Sergeant Tibeau’s praying in the barracks long enough to recognize the rhythms. Nearby, Cantic cleared her throat. Touraine shuddered and cinched the rope quickly, reciting to herself from the Tailleurist lessons: There are no gods, only superstitions. No superstition can harm you. And yet when their skin touched, Touraine felt a tingling sensation across her body.
She got through the others as quickly as she could, trying to forget the feeling. Instead, she felt only the pressure of everyone’s eyes on her, and the tickle of her own sweat down her coat. The older man was the last one. He tried gamely to stand up straight. His shaggy gray hair hung in his face. It seemed like he’d aged decades since she’d met him at the docks, smiling warmly with his camel. It wasn’t real, she told herself. He’d been a distraction, a pair of eyes. She pulled the noose around his sagging neck. As she tightened the rope, his eyes narrowed at her, then popped wide.
“You look just like—” the man rasped, working around his dry tongue. Louder, he rushed to get the words out. “You’re Jaghotai’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Touraine startled and looked to Pruett, who held the drop lever. Do it now! Touraine said with her eyes.
“You’re Hanan?” The old man’s voice croaked from his throat.
Touraine staggered back at the sound of her old name. Her heart dropped into her gut like the gallows floor, and the air caught in her lungs.
The old man dangled.
Except for a few desperate kicks, the prisoners hanged in silence. Touraine saluted to Cantic and jogged down to stand in front of her soldiers as if nothing had happened. As if her heart wasn’t rattled in its cage. Her men and women formed a tight square, five by five. Sergeant Tibeau caught her eye. He didn’t need words to send a cold drip of guilt sliding between her shoulder blades.
The world felt muffled and slow. Beyond Captain Rogan, General Cantic had descended and left, leading the princess down one spoke of road. The true-born Balladairan soldiers had already marched to the Balladairan compound under their own captain’s orders.
For the first time in over twenty years, Touraine was back in Qazāl. She looked at the swinging bodies. The old man jerked, and Touraine watched until he stilled.
How did he know who I am?
Rogan glanced at Touraine’s platoon and then over to the sandstorm with a satisfied smirk. “Welcome home, Sands.”
Touraine and her squad followed Rogan and the other soldiers north and east through the city to the compound, away from the storm. It would have been a long march even without the wind and dust that managed to thread through the winding roads. Still, the storm couldn’t stop her from gaping now that there was light enough to see by and the city was coming alive.
Everything spiraling out from the bazaar square was clearly the older part of the city. The buildings were yellowed clay lined with cracks, and the roads had once been fitted with stones but were now mostly dirt with rugged juts to trip over. Qazāli workers prodded donkeys and goats—and once, even another camel—through the narrow passages but yanked the animals aside as the Sands marched by. The Qazāli’s faces were swaddled in scarves and shawls against the stray dust. Piles of shit drew flies, and down one road, two filthy children shoveled the driest clumps into baskets.
Like at the bazaar, the shopkeepers here were mostly Qazāli, and so were the shoppers. Touraine wondered where all the Balladairans were. There’d been enough of them at the hanging.
You’re Jaghotai’s daughter.
Touraine wasn’t the only one observing the city in proper daylight.
“This is sick, what they’re doing to this place.” Tibeau covered his face with a thick forearm.
“Huh.” Pruett grunted. “Why? What’s different?”
“Everything. Can’t you tell?” Tibeau looked at Touraine for support.
Touraine shrugged. “I was barely five years old. It all looks the same to me.”
All Touraine could see in her memory were vague senses of buildings, from a very low vantage point. Maybe the buildings were yellow brown, like the ones here, but she didn’t recognize any sounds or people. For all she knew, her memories were just taking the images in front of her and throwing them back at her as if she’d had them all along.
“They’re making us live on the scraps of the city. The Old Medina used to be beautiful. Look at this.”
They passed through a massive, crumbling wall like the ones that surrounded the city, all carved with the curling shapes of Shālan script. Swirls and slashes and stylized squares, and how they amounted to words, Touraine would never know. The ceiling of the archway had been painted blue several times. The most recent layer had chipped to show a different shade of blue in some places, bare yellow stone in others.
“The New Medina used to be ours, too. Now it’s their shops, their cafés, their homes.”
He shot a dirty look at the pristine neighborhood they were passing through. Here—where the stone pavers were carefully placed and there was barely a whiff of animal or human shit, where the buildings were freshly sealed and sturdy—were the Balladairans. They poked their heads out from wooden shutters to check the progress of the storm.
“It’s not just Balladairans, though.” Touraine nodded toward brown faces over doublets, hair short and styled with Balladairan sleekness. “They don’t look hungry.”
“Because they’ve sold themselves to Balladaire.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about—”
“Children, please.” Pruett cut in, glaring meaningfully up ahead. Rogan walked with one of his men, but they were too close for loud, philosophical bickering.
Touraine and Tibeau slowed to match Pruett’s pace. When Pruett spoke again, her voice was low and probing.
“So—did you recognize him?”
“What?” Tibeau looked between them. “Who?”
“On the gallows. The old man—he called her Hanan.”
The look that Tibeau gave her was jealous and livid all at once. “So? Did you?”
The question caught Touraine off guard, though she’d expected it. She hadn’t been able to let go of the memory of the man’s face the entire walk. Or the way the woman had caught Touraine with her songlike prayer. A seed of doubt, trying to root.
She yanked it out like she always did. She was safer, stronger with Balladaire than without it. It looked like the Qazāli in this section of the city had learned that, too, and that was why they lived more happily than any other Qazāli in El-Wast.
“Do you remember Mallorie?” Touraine asked instead of answering Tibeau’s question.
Tibeau and Pruett both flinched. Of course they remembered. Every Sand did. Mallorie, who’d been of an age with Tibeau and Pruett, had run away when she was fourteen, just a few years after they’d been brought to Balladaire. Cantic—a captain then—had Mallorie whipped, doctored in the infirmary, and kept under watch for months. Every Sand breathed a sigh of reli
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