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

on the gallows while soldiers… escort?… a small group of Balladairans. Some more are escorting—dragging, really—some Qazāli.”

“What?” Jaghotai jumped for the door, forgetting even the lion. It was Djasha’s voice that made her stop.

“Jak, you can’t do anything without getting strung up yourself.”

With Jaghotai’s back toward Aranen, Djasha, and the priest, only Touraine could see the flex of anger and helplessness in the woman’s face. Touraine knew that feeling.

Jaghotai rounded on the foreign priest. “Can you tell who the Qazāli are?”

Niwai frowned, though their eyes remained out of focus. “A large person. A slightly less large person.” They closed their eyes tight and shook their head. “Nothing more than that. I’m sorry for your loss.”

The room fell silent, all eyes downcast, but Touraine remembered different deaths, a different war. Soldiers with the magic to inhabit an animal, to become one. She eyed the stranger in front of her. The docile—docile!—lion. The empty falconer’s glove. The trancelike stare.

“Sky a-fucking-bove,” she swore. “No. No.”

She jumped up and backed out of the room, fleeing to the open space of the main temple hall. Not the best place to escape from gods, she supposed, but at least there were no priests or priestesses here.

Luca would have been thrilled in Touraine’s place. Not one but two magics—but both of them linked to gods. That wouldn’t fit with Balladaire’s notions of civilized living at all.

The temple’s main hall smelled of incense and stale rugs. There were no ornaments on the walls or the small tables—altars?—throughout the room. They had probably existed before the Balladairans came.

Touraine sat cross-legged on a pouf at the back of the room, looking toward the great doors. The sunset through the slim glass windows dappled the marble floor in shades of gold and rose. Warm. She tried to let the idea of warmth banish the memory of winter nights as one of the Taargens’ war prisoners.

“I have a feeling you’ve met our siblings in the north.”

Touraine jumped to her feet again, backing away half-crouched, hands held out in front of her.

The priest from the tribes came on catlike steps, their head cocked. The lioness trailed their heels, and Touraine checked her exits. She could reach the great doors if she needed to.

At a look from the priest, the lioness found a patch of sunlight and sprawled in it.

Touraine met Niwai’s eyes. They looked right at her, the piercing orange iris finally settling into red brown.

“Your siblings.”

Niwai sat where Touraine had just been, short, thin fingers like talons interlaced. Their skin was almost as dark as Djasha’s instead of Taargen-pale, and Touraine could almost feel her brain trying to minimize her fear by contrasting Niwai with the Taargens. Surely this one can’t be as bad as them. She lowered her hands.

“We share a god.”

Stated so simply, as if it shouldn’t twist Touraine’s guts into nauseated fear.

“You worship bears. In the desert.”

“Faith has no border,” they recited, as if from a school primer. And then: “Our connection is with the living creatures of the world. There is no evil in the gifts our god gives us. Are your neighbors not also masters of husbandry?”

“Tell that to my soldiers who had to feed their lives to your ‘siblings’ so they could—”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it even as her mind pulled up the memory. A Taargen changing shape as his bear-fur cloak tightened into him. A roar that coincided with the shriek of a soldier’s pain. A guardswoman who had babbled through a laudanum-soaked haze about a boatman with demon eyes. Touraine realized with clarity that the Many-Legged had taken Guérin’s leg, too.

And another part of her mind pulled up small, useless facts: the end of the war marked a tentative trade agreement, Taargen livestock, strong and easily bred, for grain and vegetable seeds guaranteed to yield twice the normal harvest.

“There’s no act in the world that doesn’t require sacrifice,” the priest said.

“A sacrifice is given, not taken,” Touraine growled back. “What sacrifice will you require from us?”

“That you stop being so squeamish, for starters. I thought you were a soldier.”

Touraine could almost feel her hands gripping around their throat. They sighed and stood, and she tensed.

“They used the weapons they had at their disposal. The Balladairans abandoned their god, and that’s no fault of ours. They have no right to determine how the rest of us live. We have our own weapons. Are you saying we shouldn’t use them?”

“There are guns—” sputtered Touraine.

“If Djasha and Jaghotai had enough guns to win this, I probably wouldn’t be here.” They added with a grim smirk, “Besides, guns kill people just as dead as magic does. Sometimes less so, and that’s another kind of evil entirely.”

Everything they said seemed like a philosopher’s wind.

Aranen and Jaghotai stepped into the main hall—Aranen suspicious, Jaghotai smug to see Touraine on edge.

“Is everything all right?” the priestess asked. Priestess. Not doctor.

Jaghotai crossed her arms over her chest. “When I called you a dog, I didn’t expect you to be such a cowardly one.”

Touraine tightened her fists until her pulse throbbed in them. A stupid goad, for puffed-up kids without real experience and sense.

It worked.

She was following them back into the infirmary when the small temple doors swung open.

Malika and Saïd came in, Saïd looking cautiously over his shoulder. Malika’s normally composed face was contorted with fear, anger, pain. Anger most of all, Touraine guessed.

In the infirmary, Jaghotai’s expression went even darker. “So it’s true, then. Who?”

“Maru and Nanti, a young brother and sister.” Saïd sighed heavily. “Were the hostages your idea, Jak?”

“What?” Jaghotai asked. Jaghotai turned to Djasha, shaking her head. “No. This wasn’t me.”

Malika leaned against a wall and let her head tilt back against it. Elegant, even in distress. Djasha stared at Jaghotai with golden eyes narrowed.

“It wasn’t me,” Jaghotai growled.

They got their marching orders a few days later. Touraine was to go with Niwai.

“No.” Touraine snagged Jaghotai by the arm. “I’ll come with you instead.”

Jaghotai’s face was caught between stunned disbelief and a snarl as she