And when the blackcoats found Tibeau, they would kill him.
Touraine found herself short of breath just thinking of it. She didn’t know how it could be more terrifying than leading them into battle after battle, and yet…
Balladaire was a land of gifts and punishment, honey and whips, devastating mercies.
When she was a child and new to the green country full of massive trees and covered in grass and flowers, she ate too much. Always afraid the food would be taken away—or that it would run out. Such luxury, to sit at a full board every day. One day, she ate herself sick, and a young Cantic carried Touraine in her arms like a baby to the infirmary for a miracle medicine. Perhaps she hadn’t been so far from that. A baby.
Then there was the first time she’d fought with Rogan, ended up on the wrong side of a midnight brawl. If Pruett and Aimée, Tibeau and Thierry hadn’t come to rescue her, Rogan would have had his way with her a long time ago. The next morning, their captain （Cantic was long gone by then） led Touraine to the infirmary. She’d scarcely believed her luck! For one delusional moment, she’d thought Rogan and his flunkies would pay. Justice was sweet enough to ease the shame of her helplessness.
The whip snaps and the screams filtered in through the infirmary’s open window. She couldn’t see outside, but she knew Pruett’s raised voice. She knew Tibeau’s yell and Thierry’s shriek and Aimée’s swearing growl, and Touraine had to listen to them all as she wept into her bandages.
They’d all been whipped when Mallorie “came home,” too. While Mallorie watched. Before they executed her for desertion.
Harsh training, but easy to learn, to fall in. To do well and keep your doubts to yourself.
It was Balladaire where they’d celebrated the harvest season every year with the smell of baking bread and roasting vegetables wafting across the compound to mix with the wonderful rot of autumn leaves. Their mouths watering during drills. The race to bathe and get to the table for the feast.
It was the mountains and the trees she had fought for, the bread and the herbs her soldiers had died for.
It was home. And she was drifting farther and farther away from it.
Deep down, maybe she’d thought that her promotion would show the other Sands that it really was best to stay with Balladaire. That there was fairness. That loyalty really would be rewarded and there was logic to the world.
“Argh!” She slapped the wall in a burst, and the sting echoed up her forearm.
“Said shut your fucking mouth, didn’t I? Or I’ll come shut it for you!”
If Cantic found her guilty and executed her, she’d prove Touraine wrong. And why should the Sands stay then?
CHAPTER 9
THE COURT-MARTIAL
Two days later, or maybe three, or maybe just one, things got worse.
The jailer was speaking to someone, but she couldn’t make out specific words. Only a familiar honking bray. Touraine recoiled from the bars, like she could hide somewhere in the cramped cell.
“You’re looking well, Lieutenant Touraine.” Rogan raked Touraine up and down with his eyes. He turned to the jailer with a smirk. “Did you manage to have any fun before the trial?”
Touraine made out the disgust on the jailer’s face in the light of his lantern. The man had the single wheat stalk of a sergeant pinned to each side of his collar.
“Best not to mix with the like, Captain,” he said.
Touraine was offended and comforted at the same time. Without another look at her, the jailer unlocked her door and cuffed her wrists behind her back. The skin was healing slowly from the rebels’ ropes, thanks to the medic’s ointments and quiet tsks.
Rogan led Touraine out of the jail, his fingers tight on her arm.
The sky was blindingly bright with late-morning blue; the sun warmed her immediately. Soldiers and aides and all the others who made an army run smooth marched or scurried through the compound, from barracks to mess hall, from sick bay to barracks, from training yard to sick bay. They barked orders that would be followed half-heartedly, delivered bad news, practiced drills they should have known better. It looked different here in Qazāl, all bare sandstone and clay, dirt and sand, but this was the world that made sense to her. She knew her place in it.
But it came with problems she couldn’t escape on her own. When she glanced sideways at Rogan, his expression was professional, a consummate soldier following orders. His words, however, were his own.
“I haven’t forgotten what I owe you,” he said.
They fell in smooth step together, as soldiers do. That alone was intimate enough to make her stomach churn.