“You’re back,” Aranen said sourly over her shoulder. “They didn’t want you, I suppose?”
Jaghotai snorted. “Exactly what I said. Wants to talk to Djasha.”
Aranen’s short hair was tousled messily, but she looked a king as she brought the loaves of bread from the oven to the small table. “You’re the last thing Djasha needs.”
Without a signal, Jaghotai sat at the table and began breaking the thick discs of bread into fluffy quarters while Aranen fetched the last loaves.
Touraine watched in silence. They quartered, then carried the bread away, then came back and carried some more. Though her stomach growled, Touraine kept her hands to herself. They must have been feeding the patients.
They were all part of this system, each with their place. They knew their roles, knew how best to help.
Before Qazāl, Touraine had that. She could make herself useful and have that again. They had saved her, after all. Balladaire had tried to kill her. Would it be like trading one set of masters for another?
Aranen came back with Djasha leaning heavily on her arm.
As Djasha sagged into the chair Aranen led her to, she scanned Touraine up and down before grunting in satisfaction. “Beautiful work, my love. Thank you.” She smiled wanly up at her wife, who rolled her eyes and went back to the last of the bread. Aranen didn’t see how Djasha’s face fell, but Touraine did.
The Qazāli had saved her, but it hadn’t been unanimous. Or magnanimous.
A loud squawking echoed through the corridor, followed by Jaghotai’s gruff swearing and then a single sharp warning snarl.
“What under the sky above—” Touraine jumped up, ready to fight or flee.
Djasha waved a hand dismissively, a small smile creeping across her face.
A second later, Jaghotai stormed in, muttering. “Bastard. We don’t go in desecrating their dung temples to their wild god.” She glared at Djasha. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Touraine looked between Jaghotai and Djasha. Hardly a pair so different and yet so inseparable.
“What’re you doing?” Touraine asked.
Djasha smiled ruefully. “I’m going to start a war.”
“Correction.”
A stranger stepped through the door, a very large, very golden cat beside them. They wore pale brown trousers and a loose caftan bound at the forearms by a bracer on one arm and a thick falconer’s glove on the other. They wore their scarf differently, too, wrapped in a tight circle around their head except for what draped down to protect their neck from the sun. Their eyes looked unfocused, but their smile was wicked with glee as they scratched their lion between the ears.
“We’re going to finish one.”
The announcement was postponed by a day. As Luca had expected, Cantic had balked, and Luca had spent the day trotting out legal justifications and explanations for her decisions. More irritating was that Cantic wasn’t balking at the solution; she wanted the Qazāli in hand even more than Luca did. She just wanted to hold Beau-Sang’s leash. At least the general had stopped mentioning Touraine.
As Luca rode by carriage to the Grand Bazaar, her stomach rebelled. She blamed it on the stuffy cabin. The heat made the air inside feel dense, suffocating. She missed snow. She missed how the snowflakes dusted up against the stone walls of the palace in Balladaire. She missed the brightness searing through her eyelids, burning everything red. The tingle as her toes went numb, the burn as her fingers came back to life after playing outside. Years since she’d done that, but not so long since her last snowfall. Will I be back in time for winter?
The most she could expect from Qazāl’s seasonal shift was an increase in rain. Spending her days sopping wet or hiding indoors wasn’t her idea of pleasure. Then again, anything was preferable to this bone-leaching heat. She just wanted to wear trousers without feeling as if she’d pissed herself with sweat.
Cantic waited on the gallows platform with her usual stern mask hammered out of steel. The wood made a comforting, hollow thunk under Luca’s cane.
The colonial conscripts waited in ranks behind the regulars, thick swaths of blackcoats. The sun shone on gold buttons everywhere, but the bayonets, of course, would not be outdone, and sparkled with a vengeance.
A pair of blackcoats escorted Beau-Sang onto the platform as well. Bastien had come, too, but he hung back with the other Balladairan civilians in attendance. Waiting for her.
She traced the cracks of tension that had been cracked wider by the “Battle of the Bazaar,” as people had taken to calling it. Qazāli laborers and hawkers grouped together while Balladairan merchants and shoppers clung to each other. Where the borders of each group met, they eyed each other skeptically at best and with outright hostility at worst.