Another hour or so and the hot promise of renewed total exhaustion swept into the corners of Amarande’s eyes. Her throat was so parched it seemed to throb louder than any of the other warning bells dinging throughout her body—lack of true sleep, hunger for proper food, the bump on her head. All of it.
“Can we move faster?” Amarande shot the question at the prince’s back as he picked through a thinning section of tunnel, careful to keep his torch from snuffing itself on damp rock. She’d lost her torch in the retreat from the scorpions and was stuck following him—a position she hated, naturally.
“We will make it to Luca in time, Princess.”
Amarande was still faintly surprised that Taillefer would dignify Luca with the use of his proper name, as opposed to calling him “boy” or “stableboy.” But he’d been doing this for more than a day now, which gave Amarande hope that he’d accepted Luca’s true parentage—and if he had, perhaps peers of the Sand and Sky would, too.
Or perhaps Taillefer now saw Luca as a tool of another kind. One who would accept an apology for his cruelty and be shaped into an eventual ally. Amarande would never accept such a thing after what he’d done, but she knew Luca would.
That said more about Luca’s kind heart than Taillefer’s persuasive talents.
“You’re welcome, you know,” the prince said, “for again saving you, this time from your insane stubborn streak.”
He was not wrong. “Thank you. And you’re welcome for saving you from certain death at the hands of the rebels at the inn.”
“I would have survived without you.”
“Not likely.”
He paused. “At least anyone hunting us won’t find us down here.”
That was true, though Amarande would risk any possible hunters if it meant they could find their way out of this accursed tunnel and back to the surface.
Another hour and their underground track began to angle uphill. A new burn settled into her calves and thighs and a new hope came with it—that perhaps they were climbing toward the surface and with it fresh air and a sense of direction.
At the crest, Taillefer paused for a moment to touch a particularly low stalactite that glistened in the weak firelight. He rubbed his gloved fingers together and then sniffed them.
“Taillefer, what—”
“I think it’s water.”
The princess immediately reached out to touch the damp rock. Her fingers came away wet and she sniffed—there wasn’t a trace of the sulfuric stench from the cave. “Do you think there’s more?” she asked, but Taillefer was already on the move, the torch held high, following the glistening promise of drops beading along the stone surface.
In a few lunging steps, he was jogging ahead, one hand trailing along the tunnel wall.
“More terra-cotta. There! Look. They marked it.”
Indeed, ahead the tunnel widened to a round little space, a burrow set with flat-topped rocks, jugs of pottery, and—jutting from the glistening wall—a spigot.
While Taillefer went to stow the torch upright between the flat rocks, Amarande lunged at the little steel spout, turning the lever until a trickle of water spilled out. She cupped her hands beneath, barely waiting for her palms to fill with more than a sip before gulping it down. The water slid cool and lovely down her parched throat. As she shoved her palms beneath for another delicious drink, Taillefer appeared beside her, gloves removed and two terra-cotta cups in his hands.
“This is perhaps more efficient, Princess.”
“Perhaps.”
They drank their fill—two, three, four cups—before inspecting the site further. There was no additional food, nor any additional clues as to where they might find the resistance, other than in this spot at a time that was not the present.
“May I ask you something?”
Taillefer’s voice pulled Amarande from her thoughts. “My preference in regard to answering has not stopped you from asking before.”
It was the tart reply she thought he deserved, but then when she glanced up after the words slipped from her mouth, she regretted them. On the flat rock across from her, Taillefer sat, eyes reading his hands, a blush sweeping his newly cleaned face in the firelight. Sheepish—that was what someone would call it with literally any other boy. Amarande’s smirk sank and she swallowed, waiting.
“It’s just that … is Luca really your true love or just all you’ve known?”
Amarande stared. “Of all your ridiculous questions … are you really asking me this now? Amid a days-long journey to find my true love?”
Taillefer wet his lips and turned to her, that glimpse of shyness gone, the brilliant blue of his eyes austere. “I am really asking, yes. Because I believe it’s a fair question. How many young men orbit your star, Princess?”
He helpfully picked up the torch and waved it in a little circle that framed her face—as if she were the sun and it the earth. Amarande scoffed and looked away. “There need not be any. Because I have Luca.”
His lips quirked at her stubbornness, his typical sardonic delivery building with each word. “Assuming he is accepted as the true heir of Torrence—if the resistance somehow manages to overthrow the Warlord, that is—do you plan to marry him? What is so special about him that you would risk so much, never having spent time with other eligible suitors?”
Amarande wound her arms across her chest. “Taillefer, I realize you don’t know what it is to be a princess, but you do realize that the last thing the phrase ‘eligible suitors’ typically amounts to is true love.”
“I do not deny it,” Taillefer agreed. “But I do, respectfully, wonder as to why your father allowed you, the future of his kingdom, to have a relationship of quite possibly amorous intentions with his stableboy.”
She looked him dead in the eye. “You know why. My father could see the ink on Luca’s chest just as easily as you.”
“Ah, so you do plan to marry him.”
Amarande snatched the torch from his hand and began to stalk away, deeper into the tunnel the direction they had been going, her voice stubbornly tossed over her shoulder. “He is a prince—and one coup away from being a king. Therefore, a marriage between us would fulfill the necessary requirements as dictated by law allowing me to rule Ardenia. If I must marry for my power, my true love is the obvious choice. My father knew that.”
The prince didn’t immediately follow. Taillefer avoided fights; he lashed out with words instead—she could feel him winding up like a catapult, all tension and inert energy. He had truly been thinking on this for a long time. Amarande sped up.
“You are telling me you believe your father staked the future of his kingdom and legacy on the hope that you’d found your true love in a hidden prince. And then the two of you would beat a system designed for strategy and not love to create a marriage that joined two kingdoms, including a fallen one?” He had the gall to laugh. The sound reverberated off the walls. “I am one for long games, Princess, but that, my dear, is unfathomable.”
Amarande slowed briefly. When presented that way, it did seem rather far-fetched. Luca had expressed similar doubts to her in the captain’s quarters of the Gatzal but in a much softer presentation than Taillefer’s sardonic tone.
“You did not know my father.”
“Oh no, I didn’t, not really. But you know very well what kind of environment raised me.” Amarande recalled her meeting with Inés. The Bellringe was truly a viper’s nest. It did not excuse his tendencies. “And I can tell you that even if Sendoa was playing the long game, this belief of yours makes little sense. At any moment he could’ve marched that vaunted army of his to the Torrent, killed the Warlord, and returned home in time for supper.”
Taillefer’s argument was so sound it was nothing more than infuriating. The narrow pass she’d etched through her father’s actions—and particular inaction—seemed now but a trick of the light. She’d been so sure upon learning of Luca’s birthright that her father had always intended this.
He had a plan. He
always had a plan.
“He didn’t change the law.” Even to her ears now, this argument was cobweb thin.
The prince laughed darkly from behind, gaining ground. “Likely he didn’t change the law because he didn’t expect to be assassinated. He thought it wouldn’t matter. By the time his reign ended, you’d be long married—maybe to your true love, or maybe in a political alliance, but either way it would not matter.”
“He had a plan.” Her voice broke—audible, unmistakable.
Amarande trudged forward, almost jogging now, her steps lengthing as the trail tipped downward again. The tunnel on this side of the water stop was at least twice as broad as the one they’d been in for hours, and there was room enough for Taillefer to walk alongside her if he dared.
Yet there were no footsteps coming from behind now. Taillefer’s progress had stopped altogether. She didn’t have to look back to know he was watching her and the light race away. From him, from her insistence that this was what the Warrior King had planned, from all of it.
When he spoke again, his voice, for once, wasn’t brimming with sarcasm or laced with the joy of a private joke. Instead, it was cool and straightforward, and his words stayed in her mind rather than being rejected outright.
“Amarande, you can go over and over your father’s plans in your mind, but the idea that he was protecting your heart while giving you the task of overthrowing the Warlord in order to rule your own kingdom is wholly unlikely.”
The princess halted, her frustration welling into solid, indominable sadness. She stood there, breathing hard, the underground air too warm and stale for any relief. When Taillefer reached her, she screwed her eyes closed and swallowed the sob that had settled in her throat. “It is all I have, Taillefer. It is what I have to believe.”
Amazingly, the prince let that sit. And in that silence came another surprise.
The distinct rush of water.
It was distant yet unmistakable. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, and then they were running. Full-bore, down the shaft, as fast as the weak light and terrain would allow.
They stumbled around another bend of the tunnel and found themselves in a cavern twice the size of the one underneath the quicksand that had swallowed them whole. And there, banked against the far side, was an underground stream—wider than the Cardenas Scar. The water pushed south, its current flowing into the mouth of a dark, high tunnel.
Propped against the nearest wall were a few man-made rafts, formed from the strange, spindly deciduous trees of that bizarre forest where Amarande had rescued Luca from the pirates.
If the stars could see her heart from here, perhaps one would deliver her straight to Luca and the resistance.
“A much more comfortable way to travel,” Taillefer said, inspecting the raft nearest to where they’d entered. “This one should do nicely. Grab us paddles, would you?”
It took less than a minute for them to carry the raft to the water, retrieve the most viable paddles from a nearby pile, and arrange themselves and their torch in such a way that they could push off the bank. The water moved at a lazy clip, but even if they eventually became too tired to paddle, it was going to be a faster mode of transportation than walking, and yet another confirmed sign that they were on the right path to Luca and the resistance.
Perhaps it was that certainty that sparked within Amarande the need to finally repay Taillefer and his curiosity with questions of her own.
“Taillefer, why did you not simply escape into the ether? You say we’re each other’s greatest hope and yet you have proved thus far that you won’t die in the elements without putting up somewhat of a fight. You could have very easily left me, disarmed and disoriented in that cave, and made your way out on your own. Why didn’t you?”
“Come now, we both know you would’ve bashed my head in with a rock before I got too far.”
She squinted at him, watching his eyes in the torchlight. “Why put yourself in a bind where you know you are dead if you go, and might die if you push forward? Never mind the fact that I cannot control what Luca may do to you once we finally reach the resistance—his talents with a blade rival mine and he has more than one reason to make sure you die an excruciating death.”
“Ah, yes, I suppose he will save none of his storied kindness for me.”
Amarande looked him in the face and lied because she loved Luca and knew that with the torture Taillefer had inflicted upon him the prince would never fear his victim, no matter how his power grew. “No, he won’t, and neither will the rebels supporting him.”
“Yes. Perhaps I am doomed if I stay or if I go.…” Taillefer turned and the torchlight caught the angles of his face, softening in a way that almost made him appear like a child. Not a sixteen-year-old boy with blood on his hands and a bounty on his head. “Princess, I chose to free you, follow you, and stay with you not because you’re my greatest hope—that was a bit of a stretch, I know. Rather … it is because I have never been alone.”
Taillefer looked away as if something resembling shame bent his neck and rounded his shoulders.
“I know I had a direct hand in Renard’s death. I did horrible things to Luca because I wanted you to help me achieve the dream I’d held tightly for far too long. That the crown would be mine, and I could rule. I cannot tell you how many nights I fell asleep to plots and plans and urges to clear my brother out of the way. Perhaps not in the brash manner of Domingu, but to forge my own path to the crown I so desperately wanted.”
His voice softened to near a whisper. “Those schemes fed me for so long that when they came true, I was blind to the reality of what they meant. I’d lost my other half, my constant companion, the person who was with me every day of my life. And he was … until he wasn’t.”
The weight of his words hit Amarande hard enough her breath hitched. To her astonishment, the ice blue of Taillefer’s eyes shone wet in the firelight, though his voice did not betray his tears.
“Princess, have you ever wanted something so much it filled you up, every crack and crevice within you, and when it finally happens and the want falls away, all that is left is ash?”
“Yes,” Amarande whispered.
Taillefer turned away. There was nothing left to say.
They paddled onward, into the winding dark.
CHAPTER 34
THEY left without word from Osana, Urtzi, or Amarande. This did not sit well with Luca. But the plan could not wait. After seventeen years, this was a window that could not be gambled.
And so he sat with Ula within the body of a carriage, meant to look the part of a Torrent-burnt caravan vehicle, watching the sliver of night splicing shadows across their space.
Their tight-knit unit was full of dedicated watchers. Tala leading—his black wolf left behind, of course—along with twenty others, all assigned for their acumen and specific skills in communication, strategy, dart making, sword fighting, and the like.
Together, they rode to join the Isilean Caravan. With the help of loyal members of the resistance who had been planted in the caravan years earlier, they planned to slip in with it as cover to enter the Warlord’s camp for one final reconnaissance before the planned uprising.
Still, as the plan became closer to being a reality, Luca could not ignore the fear in his stomach that something had gone very wrong for Osana and Urtzi. Apparently, Ula was thinking about it, too.
“I should have been the one to get Amarande. Not Osana. I could’ve gone alone. I know the way, and I wouldn’t have needed a babysitter,” Ula grumbled, as they sat in silver silence, the fabric tightly drawn across the carriage’s windows to protect their identity—this was the dangerous part. Five carriages did not a caravan make, and until they were with a larger group, they were extremely suspicious. Then, much more quietly: “I wouldn’t have let you down. I swore my life and I meant it.”
It wasn’t Ula’s oath that worried Luca. It was Osana. There was something about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and he
wished he had asked more questions of Amarande about her during those few hours they had together on the Gatzal. Though it was just him and Ula in the carriage, he found himself lowering his voice. “Do you know how Osana came to join Renard’s party?”
Ula, who had been sharpening her sword, stiffened. “Why?”
“Tell me and then I’ll tell you.”
Ula stared at Luca speculatively. “She was with the Pyrenee party when they came upon Dunixi, Urtzi, and myself. I remember her saying something to Renard and then we were surrounded. There weren’t any other girls.”
Luca nodded, working through the scene in his mind. The scorching Torrentian sun, Renard’s desperation to find Amarande, and the prince’s likely elation at discovering the kidnappers she’d sought, fought, and escaped. “Is it possible she was identifying you? When she was speaking to Renard?”
Ula squinted at him, trying to read his face in the shadows before answering. “I never asked, but yes, perhaps she was identifying us. When we were tasked with guarding the princess’s tent at the Pyrenee camp, I was prodding Amarande about why on earth she would go with Renard, because she obviously loved you as much as you loved her. Osana chimed in—saying she’d seen us at the watering hole, and that she wouldn’t forget the way you loudly spoke of Amarande.”
Ula continued. “I do remember a girl there. It must have been Osana if she was imprisoned with Amarande at the Warlord’s camp. But I never asked.” A little smirk crossed her lips. “I was distracted by saving you.”
Luca ignored Ula’s teasing, his mind stuck on the leader’s words during the attack at the resistance outpost.
“We saw your face, girl! You can’t hide from the Warlord!”
They’d been stuck in his mind for days now, tumbling around with the man’s sneering familiarity. All of it festering together until his uncertainty became something more tangible—and problematic.
“It’s just…” he started. “It was Osana at the watering hole. I remember her now, but I didn’t realize it until after the attack at the outpost. She never mentioned it to me.”
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