The Unbroken C. Clark (best books to read for self development .txt) 📖

The… artist… had drawn the two of them locked in a dancing embrace. Luca, with the same too-severe bun as before, leering at a poor likeness of Touraine—it had gotten only the short military cut of her hair and the broad shoulders right. She was dressed in poor Qazāli clothing, a ragged hooded vest and loose trousers. No one who had seen Luca recently, which was to say, at the ball, could doubt who it was intended to be.

It was captioned in beautiful calligraphy: “Queen of the Sand Fleas.”

Luca tore the paper in half, then quarters and eighths and more until they fell to shreds she would have to apologize to Adile for.

“Find them,” she growled. When neither Guérin nor Touraine left, she shouted, “Go! Send a squad to rip them off the walls and burn them.”

Luca swore under her breath. “Wait! Touraine.” The soldier stepped back in from the hall outside, eyes lowered and body wary of threat. Luca’s embarrassment was boiling into fury at her impotence. She forced herself to steady her breathing and her tone.

“Go back to the rebels. Ask them for a list of demands so that I can consider them. These aren’t… official negotiations, but they can be a start.”

“Your Highness?”

“What?” snapped Luca. “If you’re suddenly incapable…”

Touraine flinched. “No, Your Highness. I mean, I will. I’ll find them.”

“Good.” If Touraine didn’t swear the rebels to secrecy soon, the fledgling talks would never get off the ground.

CHAPTER 17LITTLE TALKS

Touraine spent the rest of the day looking for the rebels’ location near the Qazāli baker. The only people there when she tramped up the stairs, though, were a small family scared shitless.

So on the following day, she went back to the beginning, to the shop in the Puddle District where the big man had first tried to pry into soft spots Touraine wouldn’t admit existed. The shop was closed, but the first thing that caught Touraine’s eye was a broadside plastered to the wall. The broadside. Her face went hot, and she tore it off in ragged strips.

Breathing heavily, she took note of her surroundings. Maybe it was her imagination, but the fish smelled extra rotten today. The Qazāli dockworkers pretended not to pay attention to her, but she caught them looking away from her as soon as she turned toward them.

She had her knife, though, and the princess’s protection. So she squatted on her haunches in front of the bookshop and waited. And waited. Saïd didn’t come. Nor did any of the other rebels she could recognize.

Eventually, the sun sloped down, and the noise of the Puddle District grew louder, more raucous. Laborers came off their shifts for meals, for drinking and fucking and fighting. They stopped turning away from her when she looked at them. Touraine thumbed the handle of her new knife and wondered just how far Luca’s protection would take her.

Not far enough.

A burly woman who reminded Touraine of the Jackal, only more pleasant, said something to her handful of companions as they casually closed in on her. They were all built like oxen, broad backed, thick in the middle and the thighs from the burden of their days.

One of the smaller ones, a man with a close beard and twice-broken nose, said, “It’s time you moved along, isn’t it?”

With the bookshop to her back, Touraine had only so many options, and they were narrowing fast the closer these Qazāli got. Negotiation seemed like the kind of thing that went better the fewer people you killed. At least it wasn’t her fault, she would tell the princess.

“I’m just leaving.” Touraine held her hands up and sidled to her left, toward the side street.

“Meant that as a more permanent kind of thing,” the smaller man said.

He closed that side of their semicircle, blocking Touraine’s escape as they tightened in like a snake. The big woman came at Touraine from the middle, and another two closed in on Touraine’s right. They were close enough for Touraine to see the gaps in their teeth and the grime in their fingernails. They stank like sour sweat and stale smoke.

Touraine drew her knife. Sky above, she wished she’d had a chance to train with it. It was light in her hand, its balance foreign, but it was sharp so it would do.

“In the name of Her Royal Highness the princess,” she said, “I’m warning you.”

They must have thought she was just a pampered show horse, all well-turned muscles and no skill. She saw it in their smirks as they closed in. Then she saw the disbelief in their faces as she struck at the small man. She caught him across the arm, and he screamed as she ran by him.

Touraine sprinted up the side street, trying to connect it to the way back to the Mile-Long Bridge and El-Wast proper. The laborers splashed and swore as they chased after her.

Turn here, she thought, no, here—she recognized that smoking den with a bright red curtain of beads over the door—she passed it and hung a hard right. She could see the bridge, its lanterns guiding her way back to the city proper.

She returned to the Quartier empty handed.

Touraine refused to be cowed. She went back to Saïd’s shop the next day. This time, everyone watched her as she stood vigil in front of the closed shop. Before things got messy, however, a small child with tousled curls flying in a dark halo strutted right up to her. Their front two teeth were missing as they smiled and held out a small piece of paper.

The paper had the rough edge of a book’s binding on one side and a jagged torn edge at the top. Rue Tontenac, after sunset.

Touraine looked at the kid, who stared at her innocently. What a ruse. The kid was just as wary, just as keyed into the mood of the passersby as Touraine was. What a life.

“Where’s rue Tontenac?” Touraine asked.

The kid shot off an explanation that