The night went quiet except for their desperate huffing breaths as she followed him back to rue de la Petière.
émeline was dead before they reached the guardhouse. Tibeau had run silently with her in his arms, but Touraine knew they’d shared at least some of the same thoughts.
Don’t die. Of course she’ll die. Please don’t die. This is my fault. Fuck the rebels. Fuck Balladaire. Fuck me. Please don’t die.
It was hopeless, as she’d known it would be. émeline and Thierry lay in the courtyard on blankets someone had sacrificed for their bodies. She didn’t even know when or how Thierry had fallen.
Touraine let the cold night air cool her flushed body. Her jacket was stiff and stinking with blood and waste. She balled the collar into her fist and let the hem drag through the dirt. Her hands were bloody to the wrists. She waited for everyone to bring in a cup of beer from the Sands’ common room. （Had they been there all together just a day or two ago?） Tibeau looked to the corners of the courtyard, avoiding everyone’s eyes, but especially hers. Pruett stood next to him, a quiet hand on his elbow.
The night had turned cold, but some soldiers stood with their coats unbuttoned, pale undershirts spotted with sweat. Some still had them buttoned to the throat.
Touraine took her usual place at the feet of the dead, and the rest of her squad circled off her. She hated this part of battle, of course. No one but a sadist could like this. Still, it reminded her why she did fight. As long as the Sands went into battle, she would go beside them.
She imagined that some of her soldiers prayed, forbidden as it was. Touraine didn’t, but she had an old Qazāli song she remembered, and the hum of it in her throat. As she stared at the bloody hole in émeline’s stomach, Touraine thought about her promotion. They’d died coming after her. Being their captain wouldn’t stop moments like this.
A jostling at the guardhouse entrance—tipsy carousing, a bawdy joke—interrupted the vigil. Captain Rogan and a couple of other off-duty captains swaggered into the courtyard. Rogan might even have been sober. He stopped at the edge of the circle. Stared right at her.
“Lieutenant!” Rogan’s voice was bright and cheery. “So glad to see you’ve been retrieved.”
Touraine let him take in the scene behind her, the circle of friends around their fallen.
He tsked. “Sacrifices must be made. A pity.”
“Will they be burned, Captain?”
Rogan flicked his eyes to the bodies, lips pursed in false concern. “I don’t think General Cantic will spend the little wood we have. You’ll have to do with a field burial, I’m afraid.”
Cantic wouldn’t waste the wood on a couple of Sands is what he really meant. Never mind that they could fire horseshit to burn the bodies. Never mind that the desert was dry and packed so dense that a shovel would bounce back up.
Rogan went to his rooms, his friends chortling behind him like geese. She wanted to scream at him, but she bit her tongue on the words, blinked away the burning fury in her eyes, and took a deep, shuddering breath.
A finer person, like Tibeau, would feel some pure selfless grief. Or like Pruett, a tender empathy for the grieving. She would know how to comfort them. Touraine felt only rage.
As long as Rogan was in charge, this was their lot. Nothing but humiliation. Tibeau’s dreams of revolt were—the product of a weak mind? Uncivilized thinking? She couldn’t bring herself to blame him, but the dreams were flimsy, in any case. The Sands, the Qazāli, wouldn’t win that battle, and no one in their right mind chose starvation over food and pay. The problem here was Rogan and his ilk, not Balladaire.
And yet a small voice said at the back of her mind, if the Sands didn’t have to be soldiers at all, they wouldn’t have to die. If only they were given the choice.
Touraine raised her cup to push the thoughts away, and the other Sands followed suit. They drank as one.
Then, as if a string knotting them together had been cut loose, the Sands went their own ways, to bunks or the small infirmary. Tibeau and a few others wrapped the bodies to ready them for transport to the compound. Noé, a small man with a handsome voice, sang a sad Balladairan song they all knew as they worked.
“As it whistles through the mountains, as it tickles blades of grass, as it pulls me from my bed, again, the wind, it cries your name.”
Everyone found their own dark corners to mourn in. Someone’s arms, the bottom of a cup. Touraine decided on her bunk. She trudged up the stairs alone and slammed the door shut behind her—tried to. It caught on Pruett’s propped boot.