“Okay,” Ula answered, unsure. “But she didn’t keep it a secret—she told both the princess and myself.”
Yes, but. Luca drew a deep breath. “I only realized it was her when I recognized the lead bandit and his men—they were her escort.”
Gazing sightlessly out the window, Ula said nothing for a moment. Finally, she asked, “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Her plan to burn the bandits with the sagardon was a good one, though she didn’t need to fetch the horses with Urtzi for it to work—we could’ve just rushed them with the jug as it was. But she did need to get away before they recognized her and even then, she wasn’t fast enough.”
Ula swallowed and Luca knew she was replaying the scene in her mind. The bandits converging on them; Osana’s fevered plan; the leader yelling in her wake that he’d seen her face. “I want to hear you say exactly what you think this means.”
Luca did not hesitate. “I worry that Osana may be a watcher for the Warlord.”
Ula froze, still as the Hand.
Luca continued, speaking quickly. “She told Amarande her father had sold her to the Warlord’s men and then those men killed her father, and escorted her to the Warlord. Which was when she would’ve seen us at the watering hole. She did not react as one would to seeing those men again. What’s more, on our journey she has made it clear she knows quite a bit about the Warlord despite being a new captive.”
The pirate chewed her lip, her golden eyes in the middle distance, jaw working as her grip tightened around her sword hilt. “If you think she’s a watcher for the Warlord, why did you accept her offer to go after Amarande? Is that why you sent Urtzi along?”
The carriage jostled, cutting him off as Luca was about to reply. Both of them got to their feet, angling for the drawn canvas. Ula pushed Luca back into his seat.
“Stay there,” she ordered in a fierce whisper.
He did as he was told, steadying himself against the seat as the carriage jolted before coming to an abrupt stop. With careful nonchalance, Ula pulled back the canvas and peered into the black night, her sword tightly concealed in her grip. A few words of Old Torrentian floated in the breeze, too low for Luca to make out.
Ula withdrew from the window, stowed her sword, and rolled the canvas back down tight. “It’s the Isilean Caravan, up ahead. We’re going to merge onto its tail.” In a lurch, they were moving again. “Beyond them is a light that can only be a fire pit.”
CHAPTER 35
EYES heavy with uninvited sleep, Amarande didn’t notice the darkness fading from pitch to pewter until the raft began to stutter, scraping soft earth below, the water petering out.
The princess hauled herself to attention, willing her eyes to focus, the torchlight long blown out. They’d run aground in another stalactite-studded cave, yet the coolness of a morning in the desert whipped at Amarande’s face.
Fresh air.
“Taillefer,” she breathed, shoving his shoulder where he lay curled up in a ball, paddle tucked under his cheek like a pillow. “Wake up. Daylight.”
Whisper quiet, she edged to where cave rock met the open sky. Thin lines of smoke curled in the near distance—campfires edging on cold. The morning was still more black than blue, though true daylight came closer with every breath.
If it was the right camp, they might get information leading to Luca and the resistance. And if not, no matter who it was, they would have horses, food, and waterskins. They had nothing left to trade or barter, Taillefer’s coin and her mangled necklace back in the saddlebags still on their horses at the Warlord’s Inn.
“A camp?” Taillefer asked, crouching next to her and peering out. “Do we stroll up to the first person we see and ask if anyone’s seen Luca?”
“You know, the wrong person might read your sarcasm as stupidity. Come on, let’s get closer. Quietly.”
The underground river trickled out of the cave and into a dry creekbed, silt soft and narrow. There were no clues about the rebels as they abandoned the raft and exited the cave—no other rafts, no footprints, no potatoes, no pottery, or any other signs of life. It was a slight disappointment—just the ghosts of their movements. No clues, a trail gone cold.
Silently, they crested the eastern bank, pressing their bodies into the russet silt, eyes peering over the side.
The camp laid out before them was massive. It curled around the Hand, which they’d been blind to before, up and to their left, its fingers collecting the coming dawn. From there, it blanketed desert landscape far enough to the east and north that it seemed to stretch past the curve of the earth.
In the distance, before them and to the right, where Amarande had thought dawn was beginning, it wasn’t just the sun lighting up the horizon. There, too, were the white flames of a massive blaze.
A fire pit in use.
Immediately, she searched the spread of tents for the large blue one she’d seen that night with Osana. Even in the low light and at a distance, she found it easily, towering against the southern edge of the camp, near the fire pit, the golden top of its center pole collecting the flame light—a blinding brass beacon.
A confirmation.
“The Warlord.”
Amarande’s blood sparked as the tyrant’s name died on her lips. She peered back at Taillefer, surprised to find his face obviously ashen even in the low light. “What?” she asked, startled—he wasn’t one to telegraph emotion. “The Warlord has no quarrel with you.”
He shook his head—that wasn’t it. When he explained, his whisper was as equally drained as his features. “You said at some point that the king’s supporters built the Hand out of the ashes of the Otxoa castle.…”
Amarande nodded. “The Otxazulo. Yes. It was burned to rubble and re-formed by the rebels to create the Hand.”
Taillefer tipped his chin the opposite direction of the camp, past the other bank of the creekbed. Amarande followed his gaze to where the Torrent’s cracked landscape pooled into a shallow, extended indentation like a thumbprint on a slice of lemon cake.
“I think this was where the castle must have stood.” He began to, very quietly and carefully, unfold his map. “I bet you that underground river fed into the castle, not only providing a water source but also possibly providing entry and exits.”
This hit Amarande as a likely truth—the tunnels they’d traveled were so well formed, they’d likely been there much longer than the resistance itself.
Taillefer had the whole map unfurled now. He pointed at something on it and the wind caught the edge, the parchment crinkling in the breeze. Amarande snatched up the corner to silence it. In the process, she took her first real look at the map—and was met with surprise.
This was not just any map of the Sand and Sky. It was the old overlaid with the new—the particulars of the Kingdom of Torrence intercut with the scribbles of more modern landmarks such as the Hand, the single functioning port in the Torrent, dozens of settlements run through with thick, inky Xs. Former settlements—now delineated as fire pits by a small notation.
“That’s my father’s ink work. Everything drawn like the slash of a blade.”
Taillefer nodded and traced a gray line that snaked out from under an intricate depiction of a castle rendered between the gaping jaws of a howling black wolf. The water and cave entry.
Time stopped for Amarande as she pictured Luca slung to Lygia’s back as she ran from the castle in the moments before it was breached and set aflame. Sloshing through the water, against the flow of the tide, eyes frantic in the dark. All gasping breath, pounding heart, sprinting and stumbling, propelled forward by adrenaline and fear.
The image was horrifying—the last-ditch effort of a woman doing everything she could to save a child.
The rest of Luca’s family had been put to the sword, their heads mounted on pikes, surrounded by the gutted bodies of black wolves, the eradication of their house symbolically complete. A whole line and their sigil turned to ash.
“Yes, you’re right,” she w
hispered.
Amarande blinked hard, tears pricking at her eyes. She was exhausted, famished, and dehydrated, and yet her stomach sank with the intense assurance that she was failing Luca.
What if she’d sent him to his death in the name of power he didn’t want? Via this Warlord, her mother, poison, or even Osana and her loyalties … wherever they might lie?
What if this time death wasn’t a ruse but the truth?
Parchment rustled as Taillefer nudged Amarande, pointing at some lines of text. “If those drawings are your father’s, then perhaps this is his handwriting?”
Wetness blurred her vision, and she pressed the heels of her hands to each eye. It still took her a moment to focus on what he was referencing. He tapped the right edge of the map with a gloved thumb. There, in the margin, were sloping lines of text, written in pieces—a list.
Rebel chain needs forest link.
Warlord vulnerable at Hand—use river? Converge there?
Black gold sale to Indu? Fund horses?
Next to the line about the rebels was some sort of key—one filled-in dot and one empty circle. Amarande’s eyes skimmed the map—they were spread all across the Torrent, and some even in Ardenia and the rest of the standing Sand and Sky kingdoms. Filled-in ones made up the majority and were in several places, while three empty circles sat at the mouth of the forest—the Oiartzun, by the name on the map—where she’d rescued Luca from the pirates and Harea Asps.
The empty circles were clearly the missing link—the filled dots worked in almost an unbroken line in the same way the constellations promised images.
Amarande’s attention was drawn to the eastern quadrant, near the tail end of the Dragon’s Spine—also known as the River of Stone, apparently. It was the area they’d struck out for underground before the scorpions stopped them. In that spot there was a cluster of five filled dots, and several hand-drawn lines leading out from the spine, both north and south.
Her instincts had been right. They needed to find the man with the black wolf for their best chance of locating Luca and the rebels.
“He was planning to attack,” Taillefer whispered, color flooding back into his cheeks. “This map was on top of a stack. Flat, and recently used, not rolled up for storage.”
That hit Amarande like a lightning bolt. The figurines littering the library table—black wolves with W carved on their sides. Her fingers scrambled for the map’s corners. “Did Father write anything else?”
As quietly as possible, Taillefer reversed the map, revealing the back of it. There, written more neatly with room to work, was another list, carved into the parchment in Sendoa’s knife-slash hand:
L—working with A and K
Tell A first? Or at same time?
K to T after solstice for preparation
Move before equinox
G—capture alive
Amarande read it again and again.
Her father was going to attack for Luca. With Luca.
If her father had not died, they would’ve spent this summer preparing for war. Her father’s plan. He always had a plan. All of it laid out in shorthand letters.
Still, something heavy dropped in the princess’s empty stomach as the letters swirled before her, the message undeniably clear. The only thing she couldn’t decipher was who T was. Not Taillefer, surely. Koldo would know—there could be no other K. Not that she would tell her who the T was. Not that it mattered now. The plan was dead but within Amarande it caught flame.
This plan was as much of a directive then as it was now.
She couldn’t fail Luca. Her father’s words rang in her mind with exactly what she must do to ensure her love would stay safe.
Make the first mark.
She could take her blade to the Warlord’s throat in the next ten minutes and change the course of everything.
Even if she didn’t get out alive, Luca would survive. The Warlord’s reign would fall to chaos. Her mother wouldn’t be able to revive it—not with her commitment to Ardenia so public.
The call of action was hot in her blood, her pulse thundering at her wrists, her temples, her jaw. She dropped the map, not caring for the noise it made, and drew her sword.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Taillefer’s hand shot out, going for her wrist but missing. “They will attack anyone who enters their camp with a sword at the ready.”
Amarande crested the lip of the creekbed. “I’m going to pay a visit to the Warlord.”
Taillefer lunged with both hands now, going for her legs. He snatched her ankle, voice rising in intensity as he hung on. Her boots slipped in the soft silt, unable to gain purchase. She slid down until her sword tip caught the earth, stopping his progress and leaving her shoulders and head exposed to anyone awake and alert in the camp. The princess didn’t care.
“You cannot.”
“I can and I will.”
“No.” Taillefer cuffed her shoulders and the sword tip gave, Amarande and her weapon sliding down the embankment with him. “Princess, I understand what you’re thinking. The strategy is sound—it is. It would buy Luca time and give him a reeling regime to dismantle, which would be much easier than what he’s staring down now. I’ll admit, that is bordering on genius, except for one thing: You will not make it out alive.”
“I will.”
Taillefer’s stare did not waver. For a boy who did not traffic in seriousness, the stern angles of his face were unsettling. “You heard the rebels at the inn—The Warlord shall find you in the stars. That did not sound like wishing their enemies to have tea; it sounds like the Warlord knows you’re coming.”
He pointed at the map as proof, though he didn’t know what she did about her mother. “Amarande, there are more than a thousand people here who would cut you down, believing you are trying to finish what your father obviously was about to start and was likely killed for.”
Amarande shook her head clear, trying to deny the truth of the points Taillefer had connected. But she wanted them to go another way. Needed them to.
If Geneva killed her father, her mother—Koldo, too—had much more to do with the events that followed than even the boy across from her. Someone who suddenly could’ve actually been a pawn. She grimaced, jaw muscles firing. “That is a chance I will have to take.”
“No. You won’t.” Taillefer switched his grip to cuff the wrist of her sword arm. His eyes caught the light, shards of ice in this vast desert. “Think of Luca. He’ll die of a broken heart.”
That stopped Amarande’s breath dead in her lungs. “Taillefer, when on earth did you become a romantic?”
His eyes dropped. “I will only say that … it was very clear how much he loved you when we spent time together.”
Amarande wrestled her wrist away. That sick feeling sloshed in her gut, and she had to swallow down bile lapping at her throat. “You mean when he believed he would die at your hand? When you tortured him within an inch of his beautiful life? When you paraded him out as a cadaver to force my hand?”
“Yes.” To his credit, Taillefer looked up to answer her. “I know you won’t believe it, but I do regret my actions. Very much.”
She said nothing, but she did not move either, her sword still in her grip.
“Princess, you will win his kingdom—with him, for him. I promise.” Taillefer’s focus upon her was unflinching. She turned farther away. “But do not sacrifice yourself and your future at this moment for something that may not work. Please.”
For a long while, silence stood between them, the light wind rustling the matted ropes of her hair, the ashen dirt kicking up around them. Amarande sheathed her sword.
She met Taillefer’s relief with a tip of her chin. “Fine. We go into the camp for supplies only. Horses, food, waterskins, and, if we can manage it, new clothing for you. Your uniform is far too noticeable, even without the garnet cloak.”
The smallest of his slippery smiles kicked up at the prince’s lips.
“I hate to tell you this, Princess
, but no matter how I am dressed, all eyes will be on you.” Her lips dropped open, not sure how to answer this statement, and the realization of how it must have hit her ears crossed his face, his eyes shooting wide open. “I didn’t mean that as a compliment.”
Amarande turned her back on him and scrambled over the edge and onto solid ground. “Come on.”
CHAPTER 36
WHEN Luca opened his eyes to the indigo of morning in the Warlord’s camp, everything smelled of smoke. The Warlord letting her power linger over her people. Reminding them with every breath who held their fate in her hands.
Exhaustion deadened Luca’s limbs, as did his injuries: the wound in his chest, courtesy of Taillefer; the bite from the Harea Asp that had nearly killed him. He hadn’t had enough sleep in the last few days. Not enough for the healing he must do. Not for the night he would have to survive.
Yet he knew he slept—crammed into a diagonal on the carriage floor; Ula crunched onto her seat bench, blade hugged to her chest—because he’d dreamed of Amarande.
Of the night they’d fallen asleep at nearly the same site, side by side, under the stars. She’d insisted he sleep in the tent. He wouldn’t, though. Not because she was a princess but because it was the right thing to do. And when her stubbornness had led them to both sleeping in the open night, they’d drifted off, hands laced together.
He’d told himself he’d never let go. Not literally, of course, but that he would fight for what they had as long as he was still standing. Today would bring not the last step, but a big step.
That morning, Amarande thought she’d awoken first. But what she didn’t know was that despite his exhaustion and comfort next to her, his body ran on its usual stable schedule, his eyes fluttering open in the cold blue before dawn—just as they had this morning.
The horses had to eat, and his body knew their rhythms better than his own.
And that morning, he lay under the brightening sky, watching each ray touch her face. He never saw her off guard like that. Sweet, and silent—no one would call her that while she was awake.
The Queen Will Betray You Page 22