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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.
opening line
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
we meet Luca
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.
repeatedly
“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.
they meet
It taunted Touraine and her squad, just like the Balladairans who called the desert-born conscripts “Sands.”
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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?”
Rogan glanced at Touraine’s platoon and then over to the sandstorm with a satisfied smirk. “Welcome home, Sands.”
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.
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.
It was the sense that she had been walking a broad path along a cliff only to find it was a bayonet’s edge. She was just waiting to be pushed.
If Cantic thought Touraine had sympathized with the woman, this could be a different meeting entirely. One that ended with her own neck at the end of a rope. Touraine was long past the age when they were only whipped for sneaking prayers and hiding holy beads.
One day, she wouldn’t tiptoe through compound halls. She would belong there. Her soldiers wouldn’t be at the mercy of horse-faced bastards like Rogan. She’d have the certainty and safety that came with rank.
We think that your presence—the colonial brigade—will have a positive effect on the citizens. To show that they can have power of their own if they’re cooperative. When we open the ranks to Qazāli, I’ll need experienced officers I can trust.”
If the Qazāli could see how the Sands benefited from Balladairan employment, they wouldn’t want to rebel. And if others were recruited, it meant being a conscript would become a job, not a life they were bound to. A choice. With rewards. And her, a captain over her own squad of Qazāli. She could make them a company to be reckoned with. “You can count on me, of course.”
The guardhouse where Cantic had stationed Touraine and her squad had once been a home, “borrowed” from a “generous” Qazāli merchant and repurposed by the Balladairans.
The narrow streets would make a good defense for a smaller force, and whoever had the rooftops would have the advantage.
Good. He needed to know she wasn’t fucking around. She wouldn’t give Cantic a reason to question her loyalty, and that meant he couldn’t, either.
But Touraine knew Balladaire. She knew its systems, and she knew how to be what it needed.
Tonight would change everything. She was going to become someone.
Like the heat, the old man’s voice had followed her into her own town house and up to her study as she unpacked her books and placed them on the empty shelves that were waiting for her.
And when she stopped the rebellion and eased the unrest in the colony’s capital city, she could show her uncle that she had the skill to rule. She would claim the throne that was her right.
Of course Cheminade would have known her father. She’d been the governor-general of the Shālan colonies for almost fifty years, as long as Balladaire had called the broken Shālan Empire her colonies.
Most importantly, that might make Cheminade an ally as Luca worked to challenge her uncle Nicolas for her throne. First, however, she would calm the unrest in the colony.
The governor ruffled the lion’s mane casually, but her smile held the tilt of pride. “A gift from the wild tribes that roam the desert. They’re sovereign, never did bow to the Shālan emperors. They wouldn’t abandon their god, as one of their leaders explained to me. Call themselves the Many-Legged, for the animals they worship, you see.”
Where Cheminade’s grin was open and enthusiastic, Beau-Sang’s smile was sharp, his lips thin. Luca watched his broad back as he departed. Beau-Sang owned the quarries, which meant anyone who needed sandstone or quartz had to pay him for the pleasure. Which meant he was one of the most powerful men in the colony, even if he didn’t have the highest rank.
Even, to her greatest surprise, the Sand from the hanging, the one the old man had yelled at, was there, wearing a crisp black uniform. Luca realized she was holding her breath and had clenched her cane in her fist. With effort, she released the air and her grip and followed the footman to her seat.
Down the table, the dowager marquise de Durfort was complaining loudly about the arrangements—“The indecency of sitting like barbarians!” Luca smiled privately, thinking of Sabine de Durfort and how, after one of their nights together, the new marquise contemplated where, exactly, to send her mother to get the old woman out of the way. Apparently, Qazāl was not far enough.
The woman wore a lieutenant’s double wheat stalks on her collar—not near high enough to accompany Cantic to a meal with the elite Balladairans of the city under normal circumstances. Was she Cantic’s protégé? The Sand sat quietly, observing the flow of conversation. She had steady, dark eyes, a sharp jaw, and black hair cut close to the scalp. She easily imitated Cheminade’s unique way of eating the Qazāli food, folding the bread and scooping the chickpeas with tidy efficiency. She seemed completely unflustered by her return to her home country, the almost assassination, and the hanging.
So who invited her?? Not luca!
Whenever she had thought of her father’s addition to the Balladairan Empire, she had imagined something more beautiful. More adventurous. More benevolent. The hanging alone was a sharp contrast to those visions, as were the dirty, disheveled masses of people her carriage had navigated through to get here.
“Which colonial teaching method did you use, then, General? Droitist, I take it?” Cantic looked surprised at first, then she frowned in disgust and shook her head. “No. The Droitists are cruel. They have no idea what it takes to run an army, let alone foster loyalty.” “So you’re a Tailleurist?” Luca asked her.
talking about teaching them, as if it's a school for dogs
The Tailleurists like their ideas of pruning and encouraging. I developed a suitable combination of the two, I think. Cut off the most undesirable traits and encourage them in other ways. Look at the orphan schools run by the Droitists in the empire—there’s one in southern Qazāl, if you ever visit. The children are miserable wretches. Half-starved for the slightest infraction. If the children had a chance to escape or kill their masters, they’d have no reason not to take it.”
The lackey was a young Qazāli boy, not more than ten years old, with somber brown eyes. As he refilled Beau-Sang’s wine, Luca noticed he was missing two of his fingers. The knuckles were covered in thick scarring.
The general cleared her throat and glared the conscript into silence. Luca was impressed, though. Whatever the general’s strategy had been training the Sands, it seemed to have worked. The lieutenant was articulate, competent, and restrained. Not the most diplomatic, but soldiers weren’t known for their tact.
Luca bit her cheek to keep her surprise from her face. Husband. The governor-general of the Shālan colonies had married a Qazāli.
The lieutenant was a little shorter than Luca but broader. Handsome, with a hard jawline and striking, dark brown eyes. She bowed deeply.
“Lieutenant.” Luca returned the bow with a gracious nod. “I owe you a debt of gratitude. If there is a boon I can grant you, please ask.”
“What is it?” Luca asked. “Oh, nothing.” Cheminade smiled mischievously at Luca. “I was just thinking about how useful it would be to have a conscript we could send as an envoy of sorts to the rebels. The general doesn’t like to relinquish control of her troops, but we are just as much a part of the empire as she is.”
Still, she found it cozy rather than cramped. She kept a small, trusted staff and had a room for her office with a desk and most of her books. That was all she really needed.
Luca views it as cozy/cramped but it's the largest home around. very different perspective when Touraine visits and sees it as huge
The captain of her guard, her chief advisor, her second father joined her at the window. His boots were quiet on the thick carpet. He clasped his hands behind his back under his gold cloak. Gil had been King Roland’s guard captain and lover until the Withering Death took the king and queen. Gil hadn’t left her side since.
“If I don’t solve the problem here, do you think Nicolas will be so eager to move his ass? If I don’t fix Qazāl, we’ll have a succession trial at best. I know how that will go. We’re not the first royal family to have a contested succession. Not even the first Anciers.” Luca snorted and gestured out the window. “And all of that assumes I’m not murdered here.”
Despite his words, however, they both knew there was the possibility that she would fail. That she would make an utter mess of it and he could make a case to the nobles that she wasn’t fit to rule.
