Pruett didn’t sit. She brandished a folded letter with a black wax seal of a rearing horse. Touraine’s heart leapt. She tore it open immediately. Her eagerness hurt Pruett. And yet she couldn’t stop herself. The most she could do was unfold the letter more carefully. As if she hadn’t been praying to Shāl and any other god for a letter from Luca. Touraine hadn’t expected to miss her so much. Hadn’t expected to miss her at all.
She read the first lines. The letter was exactly the kind of letter that Touraine didn’t want to read in front of Pruett. She refolded it without reading any more.
“Is it bad news?” Pruett asked. The note of hope in her voice made Touraine smile. It was how Pruett had spoken to her before all of this. A strain that hadn’t been there before, but the same jabs.
Touraine shook her head and peered off to the river. If she looked closely, she could imagine it had stolen a farmer’s tools or a lady’s basket. It was wide and hungry enough to take much more than that.
Pruett sighed and sat cross-legged just behind her, away from the edge of the roof. “She still wants you to go back.”
Touraine hadn’t gotten that far in the letter, but the trajectory… Dear Touraine, I don’t deserve anything of you. Not as a soldier, not as a woman.
“Will you write back this time?”
Touraine shrugged. “How’s your Shālan?”
Pruett swore in Shālan, her stormy eyes unimpressed.
“That doesn’t mean bad,” Touraine said. “It means a thousand—”
“I know. It’s just going that fucking well. I’ll be fine if you leave, though. I’ll pick it up just like we picked up Balladairan.” She paused to pick at her Qazāli-style trousers. “I knew it once before, didn’t I?” It sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
“I missed you lot so much when she took me. I thought I’d get something out of it. Something for you, something for me. I made that mistake once. I’m sorry.”
She imagined what the rest of the letter would say. The cold was wonderful; the nobles weren’t behaving. She needed Touraine. Always that sense of need, and Touraine flocked to it. She loved it when her soldiers needed her, too. They didn’t now. Some of the Sands had even found family.
Touraine wondered if it was worth it to them. Some of them had romanticized the idea and were disappointed now. She was one of them, disappointed not so much about her family but about the idea of a free Qazāl.
It had been a headache from moment to waking moment. Even her sleep was tormented by nightmares of Djasha’s corpse urging her to rebuild the city this way, to keep this man out of power, to keep that woman away from money. She was used to nightmares, but it was too much. Jaghotai and Malika looked as haggard as Touraine felt. Touraine had had to reevaluate her judgments of Jaghotai in the months after the Rain Rebellion, as people called it now.
The council was small, with Jaghotai and Aranen at the head, though Aranen still spent most of her time in a dark room, weeping. Saïd was happy to advise but kept himself bunkered in his bookshop. Committees struggled to manage various aspects—infrastructure, filling the vacant housing, calculating what wealth, if any, the city still had.
“I can’t leave until we have a system in place.”
Pruett snorted. “You’ll be here forever.”
“Anything will be better than letting the Balladairans stay.”
It was such an obvious lie that Pruett didn’t bother taking it apart.
The sky opened up suddenly, as it had done every day for—the count reached three weeks again since the last dry span. They ran back inside, Touraine stuffing the letter into her shirt to keep it dry.
The rooms still held Djasha’s things. Aranen wouldn’t move any of it, throw anything out. Sometimes, she still cried when she cooked, and Jaghotai did, too. Even their bed was in the same corner. As much as the three rebel women had made Touraine feel at home, it wasn’t her home.
She jumped when Pruett put a hand on her shoulder. “When you see her again, ask her what she thinks. Maybe she can help us.”
If anyone knew how to put a country together, it would be Luca.
“She has her own country to run.”
Pruett squeezed Touraine’s shoulder. “Just say goodbye to me this time.”
Pruett’s touch lingered even after she was long gone. Touraine watched the rain as it fell. Gentle, constant, inevitable, its soft patter soothing.
Finally, Touraine turned to Luca’s letter.
The story continues in…
Book Two of Magic of the Lost
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the professionals who have gone above and beyond making this book happen: Mary C. Moore, my agent; Brit Hvide and Jenni Hill, my US and UK editors respectively. Thanks also to Nadia El-Fassi for the advice, Angeline Rodriguez for the wrangling. To Janice Lee for showing me the glory that is a wonderful copy editor and for making a wiki. To Lauren Panepinto for designing That Cover, and Tommy Arnold for making THAT COVER—you both brought Touraine to life in a way I never imagined possible. Thanks also to the numerous people working hard behind the scenes who I haven’t met yet.
Thank you to my earliest readers: Julie, David, Yume, and especially Cairo, the first and bravest, and A.E., who did it over and over again and fielded many desperate crises of the soul.
Thank you to the teachers who taught me about the concepts, histories, languages, and cultures that shaped this novel: Samira Sayeh, Maryemma Graham, Stephanie Scurto, Giselle Anatol, Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Elizabeth Eslami, Saïd Hannouchi, Nour and Ashley (Nourshley), Azzedine, Aïcha, and Abdelaziz. And thank you to the teachers who told me to keep going: Mary Klayder and Darren Canady.
To the mentors who steered this novel closer and closer to the goal: Lara Elena Donnelly, Samrat Upadhyay, De Witt Kilgore, and Bob Bledsoe.
To Coach Bennett, whose guided runs helped me drag myself to the starting line again and again.
