The camel man grabbed Touraine’s arm, and she jerked away.
Touraine was a good soldier, and a good soldier would do her duty. She didn’t let herself imagine what the consequences would be if she was wrong.
“Attack!” she bellowed, fit for a battlefield. “To the princess!”
The Qazāli man muttered something in Shālan, probably a curse, before he shouted, too. A warning to his fellow. To more of them, maybe. Something glinted in his hands.
Touraine spared only half a glance toward the princess. That was what the royal guard was for. Instead, she launched toward the camel man, dropping her pack instead of swinging it at him. Stupid, stupid. Instinct alone saved her life. She lifted her arms just in time to get a slice across her left forearm instead of her throat.
She drew her baton to counterattack, but instead of running in the scant moment he had, the old man hesitated, squinting at her.
“Wait,” he said. “You look familiar.” His Balladairan was suddenly more than adequate.
Touraine shook off his words, knocked the knife from his hand, and tripped him to the ground. He struggled against her with wiry strength until she pinned the baton against his throat. That kept him from saying anything else. She held him there, her teeth bared and his eyes wide while he strained for breath. Behind her, the camel man’s companions clashed with the other soldiers. A young woman’s high-pitched cry. The princess or the assassin?
The old man rasped against the pressure of the baton. “Wait,” he started, but Touraine pressed harder until he lost the words.
Then the docks went silent. The rest of the attackers had been taken down, dead or apprehended. The man beneath her realized it, too, and all the fight sagged out of him.
When they relieved her, she stood to find herself surrounded. The three royal guards, alert, swords drawn; a handful of fancy-looking if spooked civilians; the general—her general. General Cantic. And, of course, the princess.
Heat rose to her face. Touraine knew that some part of her should be afraid of overstepping; she’d just shat on all the rules and decorum that had been drilled into the conscripts for two decades. But the highest duty was to the throne of Balladaire, and not everyone could say they had stopped an assassination. Even if Touraine was a conscript, she couldn’t be punished for that. She hoped. She settled into the strength of her broad shoulders and bowed deeply to the princess.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Your Highness,” Touraine said, her voice smooth and low.
The princess quirked an eyebrow. “Thank you”—the princess looked to the double wheat-stalk pins on Touraine’s collar—“Lieutenant…?”
“Lieutenant Touraine, Your Highness.” Touraine bowed again. She peeked at the general out of the corner of her eye, but the older woman’s lined face was unreadable.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Touraine, for your quick thinking.”
A small shuffling to the side admitted a horse-faced man with a dark brown tail of hair under his bicorne hat. Captain Rogan sneered over Touraine before bowing to the princess.
“Your Highness, I apologize if this Sand has inconvenienced you.” Before the princess could respond, Rogan turned to Touraine and spat, “Get back to your squad. Form them up like they should have been.”
So much for taking her chance to rise. So much for duty. Touraine sucked her teeth and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
She tightened her sleeve against the bleeding cut on her left arm and went back to her squad, who stood in a tight clump a few yards away from the old man’s camel. The beast huffed with a sound like a bubbling kettle, and a disdainful glob of foamy spittle dripped from its slack lips. Safe enough to say she had made an impression on the locals.
And the others? Touraine looked back for another glimpse at the princess and found the other woman meeting her gaze. Touraine tugged the bill of her field cap and nodded before turning away, attempting to appear as unruffled as she could.
When Touraine returned to her squad, Pruett looked uncertain as Rogan handed the older man off to another officer, who led him and the young woman away. “I told you to be careful about attracting attention.”
Touraine smiled, even though her arm stung and blood leaked into her palm. “Attention’s not bad if you’re the hero.”
That did make Pruett laugh. “Ha! Hero. A Sand? I guess you think the princess wants to wear my shit for perfume, too.”
Touraine laughed back, and it was tinged with the same frustration and bitterness that talk of their place in the world always was.
This time, when she called for her squad to form up, they did. Gold Squad and the others pulled down their field caps and drew close their coats. The wind was picking up. The sun was rising. The Qazāli dockworkers bent their backs into their work again, but occasionally they glanced—nervous, scared, suspicious, hateful—at the conscripts. At Rogan’s order, she and the conscripts marched to their new posts.
Change was coming. Touraine aimed to be on the right side of it.
CHAPTER 2A HOMECOMING
A flea storm, the Balladairans in Qazāl called it, because grains of sand lodged in every improbable place on a body, climbing into buttoned jackets and nestling into cropped hair, whistling itchy fury into every home and guardhouse, no matter how tight the curtains were shut or how low a soldier tugged their field cap. It cast everything in brown shadow.
Touraine pulled her cap lower as the storm yanked at her black uniform coat while she and the other Balladairan Colonial conscripts stood at attention in the bazaar. Their faces were neutral, but Sergeant Pruett scanned the crowd. Sergeant Tibeau kept his eyes locked obediently forward, but he was probably contemplating every anti-Balladairan feeling he’d ever had. When the order had come for Touraine’s squad to muster in the city’s largest bazaar, a plaza lined with merchant stalls, the storm had become more than just a
