This was the decision Jaghotai and the others had come to while Touraine was gone. A good thing, too. She would never have agreed.
And yet…
How far would you have gone, if you could have saved Aimée and Tibeau?
From across the circle, Djasha caught Touraine’s eye, then stood and left the circle of light. Touraine left Noé and the others at her fire and followed. One by one, the rebel council slipped away.
The darkness swallowed them up. Above them, the millions of stars scattered like shrapnel across the blackness. On the edge of the desert, away from the desperate joy, Touraine and the rebel council and their foreign priest gathered in a circle around the dead body of a blackcoat. Jaghotai helped Djasha to kneel over the dead woman. Niwai’s head was cocked to the side, their vulture perched on their thick glove.
Then the Apostate began to pray.
Jaghotai, Saïd, and Malika were silhouetted against the darkness by their lanterns. The flames carved their faces into sharp-cheeked masks. They looked more like Touraine felt. Queasy. Uncertain. Not for exactly the same reasons, but Touraine appreciated that much.
She was still grappling with what they were about to do here, and what that meant for later that night. She had never forgotten Djasha’s threat after she and Jaghotai had taken her. To use Touraine’s own blood against her. She hadn’t forgotten the Taargens stealing her soldiers for their own rituals. And she definitely hadn’t forgotten the lesson that was beaten into her—or out of her—in Cantic’s training: Uncivilized. Uncivilized. Uncivilized.
Touraine’s stomach clenched but held steady as Djasha made her first cuts along the body.
No one else had to be here, Djasha had said. And yet here they were, all of them. What did that say about the rest of them? Not Niwai, who had made their own sacrifices to appease their god—but the rest of them? The Qazāli had cut themselves off from the Brigāni sect of Shāl because of this exact use of magic. Because of the Emperor Djaya and her bloody use of Shāl’s gift.
The magic wasn’t a corruption itself, Djasha had explained to Touraine when the plan was decided. Every god had two sides, like a coin, and each gift had a price. Knitting and unknitting—which required animal flesh and human flesh respectively, the life’s blood. Other gods governed elsewhere, just as costly. Farming and plague. Hunting and husbandry. Wisdom and madness. Empress Djaya had reached too far, forgetting Shāl’s One Tenet. That was all.
“Aren’t you worried about reaching too far?” Touraine had asked Djasha before, in Jaghotai’s tent.
“I’ve reached this far before.” Djasha had grimaced. “Shāl’s mercy be upon me as I deserve.”
Her tone of voice had made it clear what mercy she thought she deserved: none.
“I thought you couldn’t do Shāl’s magic anymore?”
The Brigāni woman had sniffed hard, fiddling with the golden ring in her right nostril. “I couldn’t. I lost my faith in Shāl when he took my family from me. I lost my magic. I found a new god with the monks, and then I lost that one, too. And yet here I am.”
“The Apostate.”
The older woman’s golden eyes had flashed as she grinned a jackal’s grin. “We’ll see.”
A desert wind made Touraine pull her borrowed robe tighter in the darkness far from the bright celebrations. She knew what her fascination said about her.
Despite everything, a part of her wanted this.
As Djasha cut, she prayed. Jaghotai prayed. Malika and Saïd prayed. Even Niwai closed their eyes and murmured in their own language.
Touraine watched.
Even in prayer, Jaghotai didn’t relax fully. She did soften. Anger turned solemn. Touraine could tell that it was no idler an exercise than training, though. It comforted Jaghotai, as much as the Jackal could be comforted.
Touraine had gone so long without comfort. The people she’d trusted to do that before were dead or in prison. And sky above did she need something.
Djasha’s prayer rose to a pitch as she cut out the blackcoat’s heart and raised it to her lips. The sharp coppery tang of blood filled Touraine’s nose and coated her tongue, even though she kept her mouth clenched tight against rising nausea.
A thrumming in the air tingled over Touraine’s skin and through her chest, like lightning striking too close and the clap of thunder that follows.
Touraine knelt.
The compound wasn’t home.
It had never been home, but it reminded her of home. The layout of the desert compound was a yellowed mirror of the compound in Balladaire, but tonight, in the dark, she could almost pretend they were the same.
Touraine crouched on the walkway of the compound’s southern wall, where the soldiers on guard duty patrolled the perimeter. Djasha had climbed up first and unraveled the patrolling soldier’s heart. The silent death unnerved Touraine more than watching a soldier blown apart by cannons. Then Djasha crouched beside Touraine, eyes glowing golden, even without the stars. It was bizarre to see the once ex-priest with so much strength.
“I can’t maintain this for long,” Djasha murmured as if she could read Touraine’s thoughts. Perhaps, Touraine thought with a start, the other woman could.
While the others climbed up the ladders and onto the ramparts in their dark clothes and veils, Touraine surveyed the place that was not her home and yet held her heart in its fist. To her left, the gate in the west wall facing the medinas. A bare dirt road ran from the gate and split the compound neatly into north and south: the infirmary in the northwest corner, where even now Touraine wretchedly hoped Balladairan soldiers were dying and the Sands were not; the brig in the northeast corner, where Touraine had spent more than enough time and where Djasha would rescue Aranen; between the infirmary and the brig, the administrative building, where she had been court-martialed, where Cantic gave orders and Luca wrote laws and Touraine had tried desperately
