Touraine startled and looked to Pruett, who held the drop lever. Do it now! Touraine said with her eyes.
“You’re Hanan?” The old man’s voice croaked from his throat.
Touraine staggered back at the sound of her old name. Her heart dropped into her gut like the gallows floor, and the air caught in her lungs.
The old man dangled.
Except for a few desperate kicks, the prisoners hanged in silence. Touraine saluted to Cantic and jogged down to stand in front of her soldiers as if nothing had happened. As if her heart wasn’t rattled in its cage. Her men and women formed a tight square, five by five. Sergeant Tibeau caught her eye. He didn’t need words to send a cold drip of guilt sliding between her shoulder blades.
The world felt muffled and slow. Beyond Captain Rogan, General Cantic had descended and left, leading the princess down one spoke of road. The true-born Balladairan soldiers had already marched to the Balladairan compound under their own captain’s orders.
For the first time in over twenty years, Touraine was back in Qazāl. She looked at the swinging bodies. The old man jerked, and Touraine watched until he stilled.
How did he know who I am?
Rogan glanced at Touraine’s platoon and then over to the sandstorm with a satisfied smirk. “Welcome home, Sands.”
Touraine and her squad followed Rogan and the other soldiers north and east through the city to the compound, away from the storm. It would have been a long march even without the wind and dust that managed to thread through the winding roads. Still, the storm couldn’t stop her from gaping now that there was light enough to see by and the city was coming alive.
Everything spiraling out from the bazaar square was clearly the older part of the city. The buildings were yellowed clay lined with cracks, and the roads had once been fitted with stones but were now mostly dirt with rugged juts to trip over. Qazāli workers prodded donkeys and goats—and once, even another camel—through the narrow passages but yanked the animals aside as the Sands marched by. The Qazāli’s faces were swaddled in scarves and shawls against the stray dust. Piles of shit drew flies, and down one road, two filthy children shoveled the driest clumps into baskets.
Like at the bazaar, the shopkeepers here were mostly Qazāli, and so were the shoppers. Touraine wondered where all the Balladairans were. There’d been enough of them at the hanging.
You’re Jaghotai’s daughter.
Touraine wasn’t the only one observing the city in proper daylight.
“This is sick, what they’re doing to this place.” Tibeau covered his face with a thick forearm.
“Huh.” Pruett grunted. “Why? What’s different?”
“Everything. Can’t you tell?” Tibeau looked at Touraine for support.
Touraine shrugged. “I was barely five years old. It all looks the same to me.”
All Touraine could see in her memory were vague senses of buildings, from a very low vantage point. Maybe the buildings were yellow brown, like the ones here, but she didn’t recognize any sounds or people. For all she knew, her memories were just taking the images in front of her and throwing them back at her as if she’d had them all along.
“They’re making us live on the scraps of the city. The Old Medina used to be beautiful. Look at this.”
They passed through a massive, crumbling wall like the ones that surrounded the city, all carved with the curling shapes of Shālan script. Swirls and slashes and stylized squares, and how they amounted to words, Touraine would never know. The ceiling of the archway had been painted blue several times. The most recent layer had chipped to show a different shade of blue in some places, bare yellow stone in others.
“The New Medina used to be ours, too. Now it’s their shops, their cafés, their homes.”
He shot a dirty look at the pristine neighborhood they were passing through. Here—where the stone pavers were carefully placed and there was barely a whiff of animal or human shit, where the buildings were freshly sealed and sturdy—were the Balladairans. They poked their heads out from wooden shutters to check the progress of the storm.
“It’s not just Balladairans, though.” Touraine nodded toward brown faces over doublets, hair short and styled with Balladairan sleekness. “They don’t look hungry.”
“Because they’ve sold themselves to Balladaire.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about—”
“Children, please.” Pruett cut in, glaring meaningfully up ahead. Rogan walked with one of his men, but they were too close for loud, philosophical bickering.