The Queen Will Betray You

by Sarah Henning

  The truth Amarande should have shouted from the mountaintops slid quietly to the tip of her tongue. All things considered, now might be the only remaining chance she’d get to speak it outside the thick walls of the Itspi.

  “Ferdinand is a bastard.”

  The prince barked out a laugh. “You’re telling me your mother had a son by another man who happened to look just like King Sendoa?”

  Amarande managed a thin breath through her nose, her whole body suddenly seeming as tight as a bowstring. “He’s General Koldo’s child with my father. Yet my mother raised him as her own.”

  “Now that is a scandal,” Taillefer crowed, breathlessly. “Why on earth didn’t you escape and then drag me to the nearest market to scream at the masses? That is storm-the-castle-with-pitchforks material. Especially if you could prove your mother was the Warlord. Does she have a tattoo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Princess, love has blinded you to this opportunity.”

  Amarande drew her knees tightly to her chest, balling all her tension over her tender heart. She imagined Taillefer on the other side of the wall, her diametric opposite—lying loose and unbound, no tension in his body at all. “No, I had to get to Luca first. Mother knew of him, and of the resistance’s plan to attack the Warlord.”

  “My injuries confirm that she isn’t the only one with such knowledge.”

  Which meant that if Luca came for Amarande before her transfer to the Itspi he was walking into a trap in more ways than one. Bile clawed at her throat, her recent meal threatening a reappearance.

  Taillefer shifted, and there was a slight thud on the divider—his spine settling against the wood, all his weight in it. She pictured him, temple pressed against the partition as his head tipped to the side in that mocking way he had. “Your friend, Little Queen, she treated my injuries.”

  “No punishment?” Amarande’s voice was low; she wished to cause the woman who saved Luca’s life no more trouble.

  “She did her work in chains at knifepoint.” After a long pause, Taillefer’s voice came again. “Not that you asked, but it seems I have shattered a rib—not something anything but time can repair, I’m told, but she did her best to make me as comfortable as one can be with a bone shard mosaic embedded in at least one lung.”

  “I am surprised you let her heal you.”

  “She can’t heal me.” Taillefer paused and Amarande realized his voice didn’t sound tired but rather strained. “No one can. But … why?”

  “You know enough of the natural arts to do great damage—surely the inverse would be true. Or have you only learned to destroy, not heal?”

  Amarande expected some shade of flippant answer, lobbed at her immediately. Something that would turn into a taunt to undermine her or keep her off-balance. Something that might even hurt her—because in truth and against all odds, a trust had started to grow between them.

  She’d returned his blade after stealing it and he hadn’t tried to stab her.

  She’d eaten food he’d provided.

  She’d shared the secret of Ferdinand’s blood.

  Instead, there was a pause from his side, and with a loud rumble, shouts and curses from either direction and creaking of carriages, the caravan lurched into motion.

  As the prison cart settled into a steady pace, Taillefer responded softly, his voice not flippant or sardonic in the least. Rather, it sounded stiff, sad. “You know why I began to dabble in the natural arts at all?”

  Caught off guard by his tone, Amarande found herself replying almost in a manner she’d expect from him. “Answering a question with another question is very rude. But yes, tell me.”

  “My father.”

  Amarande settled against the wood that separated them. Her memories of King Louis-David were hazy. He’d died four years before, and she’d traveled with her father and Koldo to the Bellringe for the funeral. It was the last funeral she’d attended before her father’s, and it was the last time she’d been at the Bellringe before her very recent trip and escape.

  “I didn’t know he was scientific.”

  “He wasn’t. But—he was sick for more than two years before he passed. Most people, even Sand and Sky royalty, believe it was an infection that took him, but that was just the nail in the coffin—he’d been dying for a very long time.”

  The prince sucked in a deep breath. A cough rattled up. He steadied. Tried again.

  “I was ten, almost eleven, when I decided I could do something about the cough that would never leave him. I devoured any book I could on herbs, tinctures, potions—even magic. I begged my mother to ship me off to train with a medikua.”

  Amarande rested her cheek against the wall. She’d never heard his voice sound so truly candid.

  “Mother didn’t, of course,” he said, anger tingeing his low tones. “She didn’t even send for your storied Medikua Aritza—your father was the one who brought her to our doorstep. It was a kind gesture, but far too late—she arrived after the final infection settled in. Within a week, it claimed his life for good.”

  It was difficult enough to process the sudden death of her father at sixteen; Amarande couldn’t imagine waking every day for two years as a much younger child and not knowing if that day would be the day to say good-bye.

  “Some nights, I can still hear him coughing in my sleep,” Taillefer said. “The sound of it came from somewhere so deep within him it was like his soul was rattling with his bones.”

  There was no sarcastic turn to this admission, no caveat, no attempted stab at self-deprecation. It was raw and honest, and the pain of it took Amarande’s breath away.

  After everything they’d been through together, the hatred she’d borne him for what he’d done to Luca, she could not help but respond to the desolation in his voice. Taillefer had exposed his heart to her and she could only say, “I am sorry, Taillefer.”

  And she was.

  After another long pause, he quietly continued. “I do not have much left of him now. Not at the Bellringe. And certainly not here with me now.”

  “You brought nothing but your potion and gold pieces?”

  “Only that and my memories.”

  There was a rustling of parchment, and then, to Amarande’s surprise, Taillefer’s ungloved hand appeared around the corner formed by the wall that separated them and through her cell bars. Held tightly in his fingers: the map.

  “Here. I want you to have your father’s map. Take it.”

  Amarande didn’t hesitate, though she was shocked to see it in his possession. “Didn’t they search you? How did you manage to keep it?”

  “Come now, I know you admire my cleverness and it was just that sensibility that allowed me to keep it. I am no less clever because we were captured—just as you are no less talented with a sword.”

  The princess slipped a finger between the folds, opening it just enough to reveal a snippet of her father’s writing in the margins.

  Warlord vulnerable at Hand—use river? Converge there?

  She traced the letters there.

  I did, Father. I did.

  And now she was the vulnerable one.

  Amarande lifted the hem of the plain tunic they’d given her—very much like what Osana had been wearing when they’d met—and tucked the folded map into the waistband of her breeches. Not as romantic as carrying Luca’s ransom note over her heart, but the size of the map and the basic nature of the clothes did not allow for dramatics, only practicality.

  They sat for the next several minutes in silence. The cart creaked along at a lumbering but steady pace, the caravan not slowing for even a brief rest in the heat of the sun. If Amarande pressed her face to the bars, squinting against the blistering light of an unfiltered Torrent, she could glimpse the extent of the caravan—an endless line of riders, carriages and carts pulled by small, hardy draft horses. It wouldn’t be long before they reached the Itspi, and her mother.

  Would she again hope Luca would come to her in the tower? Had he made it to the
resistance? Did they have a plan? She was blind to him and everything they aimed to do.

  As she settled back down against the wall, she remembered something.

  “Taillefer?” The excitement in her voice carried his name with an energy she hadn’t had since the churn of battle.

  “Princess?”

  “If you managed to hold on to the map, what about the vial?”

  He did not answer as quickly as she would have preferred. After several moments, he said, “Yes.”

  She gripped the bars, the thrill of opportunity coursing through her veins, enough so her fingers began to shake. “Use it! The locking mechanism on the cell. Do yours and then pass it over and I’ll do mine … or I’m sure the wood would react even better. We could burn a hole through the divider wall and then straight through the cart floor!”

  Taillefer didn’t answer. Amarande blew out an impatient breath. “Taillefer, give me the vial.”

  The cart lurched, men’s voices shouting out loud imprecations around them. Beneath the noise, she could barely hear his response.

  “I do not want to escape.”

  “What do you mean you don’t want to escape?!” She jumped to her feet, thrusting her hand through the bars and around the corner of the divider. “You literally have our chance to escape in your pocket. Unstopper it and let’s get out of here. I want to get to Luca before—”

  “You do not own the monopoly on want, Princess. I am capable of wanting just as badly as you.”

  Amarande felt that like a knife in the gut.

  For all she’d trusted he wouldn’t stab her in the back, with the next words he ran her straight through.

  “As much as you want to find Luca, I want Pyrenee. For my future, for the future of my people, stars, for the future of all the Sand and Sky,” he said. “The seed of my mother’s power is in what she stole from me—without trial, without blood, without the will of the people. She is no better than the Warlord, burning the Otxoa to rot.”

  How does someone go from being a conniving, torturing monster to empathizing over the shared loss of a parent to actually pretending to give a spit of sagardoa about anyone other than himself, much less the whole continent?

  Amarande ground her teeth in frustration. “Why did you leave then? Why not confront her? Or at least blame me and do just as you did—rescue me, double-cross me as I expected you to do, and then arrive at Bellringe with me wrapped in a bow, your title on the line? Why traipse across the continent on my whims?”

  “I thought there was time.” His own anger came through, his words acute and sharp. “I thought the Torrent could be ours—Luca’s.”

  “It still can be!” Her voice was raw with the sort of ache neither her effort nor the rush of the wind could conceal. There was doubt in her mind that the prince could hear it. “Give me the bottle and let me escape. Let me save Luca from this trap. The Torrent can be his and—”

  “No!” Taillefer shouted. Then, realizing his volume, his voice dropped into a seething whisper. “No. Not with what my mother has done.”

  “Taillefer,” Amarande started, not bothering to scrub the pleading from her tone, “come now—”

  “I did not realize my mother had the means to outsmart Domingu and claim three kingdoms without a single true battle. But she has, and I must disrupt it. I am not sorry about that, Princess. To confront my mother in this present situation, I need you with me as bait or I am a dead man.” A creak came from his side as Taillefer moved as far from the divider as he could. Away from her. Away from this argument. Away from any compromise at all. “I cannot let you go.”

  CHAPTER 42

  FOR all his love of arguments, Taillefer would not be baited.

  Amarande worked for hours—prodding him, provoking him, begging him for the fire swamp vial. Yet for all that effort her only accomplishments were a wilted voice, parched throat, and his extended silence.

  At some point, Amarande fell asleep. The stress and the sun combined to lull her into restless slumber. When her eyes blinked open, it was under a low-hanging sun.

  Mountains loomed ahead, backlit, disappearing on the edge of the bowl that was the Torrent. Not just any mountains—her mountains, the mountains of Ardenia. Dusty ivory rock, juniper clinging to the deep jags and fissures. But they still stood at a distance.

  After a quick glance to make sure no one was looking, she fished out her father’s map and turned herself away from the bars. As discreetly as possible, she unfurled it enough so that she could surmise where they were based on the distance to the mountains and how far she estimated they’d come from the Hand.

  Yes. It was possible to make it to the border of Ardenia by the end of the day. They would have to travel even faster than before without stopping, which could not be comfortable for either the riders or the horses, but when you were the Warlord no one would stop you. The mountains would slow you, though. This many carts and bodies on those steep switchbacks? That might take them a day or more.

  Which meant more time for the Warlord to dangle her as bait to Luca.

  Amarande knew she would be a distraction. Taillefer was correct. The resistance’s aim was in restoring the Otxoa and the Kingdom of Torrence. Nowhere did she fit into that plan. She was a wedge as much as she was a shield until they reached the Itspi.

  And just as she began to hope that this Warlord was greedy enough to hazard Ardenia’s mountain passes in the dead of night, the prison cart lurched.

  The entire caravan began to slow.

  “Stars and hell,” Amarande muttered, obscuring her map and checking both sides of her cage to get a better idea of where they were stopping.

  The bars to the south revealed a sliver of the River of Stone slicing through the distance—they were quite a bit north of the massive line of red plateaus, rather than alongside it as she had previously traveled.

  Taking pains to covertly unfurl the map, she walked her fingers back from the ink that signified Ardenia’s edge and up from the massive line of plateaus.

  And there, clear as day, was one of her father’s sword-cross Xs.

  A former city. A fire pit.

  But not just any fire pit—likely the one where she and Luca had been rounded up by Renard and his men.

  Taillefer was on the opposing side then. Now, she didn’t know where he stood.

  There was no dismissing the fact that his refusal to help her—despite all they’d been through, despite the tenuous trust they’d built—was a betrayal.

  One she would not so easily dismiss.

  Amarande quickly stowed the map and crawled to the farthest forward section of her cage to look about further. The prison cart was positioned in the first third of the caravan. The rest of it curved like a scythe, the tail stretching so far that the shadows of the Torrentian bowl devoured them. She could also see, at close range, Taillefer’s ungloved hands gripping the bars of his cell. She ignored him. For now. He was lucky for that.

  As they came to a complete stop, shouts rose from the direction of the Warlord’s carriage at the very front of the caravan. Like her tent, the vehicle was sky blue, opulent, and heavily guarded, mounted guards positioned in phalanx two or three deep on every side.

  A figure emerged dressed in vibrant blue silks—the same hue but three shades darker than the color of the carriage. The Warlord, or perhaps a decoy—there were many advantages to being a leader behind a mask, none of them good for opponents and supporters alike—climbed up onto the footboard of the carriage. With great fanfare, the figure grasped the chain of a steel bell held aloft by two of her men and rang in three great chimes.

  A whoop went up, followed by a surge of movement in every direction, every step practiced and familiar as the caravan came to halt for the first time on their journey. Guards secured the camp, barking orders as lesser minions set up cooking pots and started fires and others watered the horses.

  Before long, Amarande noticed two of the Warlord’s guards riding straight toward the prison carriage. With barel
y a pause, the men addressed the guards who drove their cart. “The Warlord requests the pleasure of an audience with the prince and princess.”

  From beyond the divider, Taillefer clucked his tongue in a disappointed way. “If it is a request, then I refuse it. Send the Warlord my best wishes but I’m afraid all this traveling has left me quite exhaust—”

  Of course it was not truly a request—Taillefer’s reply was cut short as the drivers pulled the cart out of position and carefully drove it forward to the front of the caravan where the Warlord awaited them.

  The princess gripped the bars, taking in what she could about the layout of the camp, searching out the tents that held stores and provisions as well as the corral where the horses were kept. Even without the fire swamp, she would find a way out—and to Luca.

  The Warlord was ready and waiting for them as they arrived, standing outside her great blue tent, already erected. The cart drivers slowed the horses that pulled them in such a precise way that when they stopped, Amarande’s prison bars were perfectly in line with the Warlord’s slight form.

  Though her face was obscured by cloth, Amarande was sure she was smiling.

  “Did you enjoy that display, Princess?” the Warlord asked, a note of pride thick in her voice. “We move as one better than even what has been called the greatest army in all of the Sand and Sky, no?”

  No. Unpacking was not akin to battling as one.

  Amarande said nothing, gazing steadily at the masked figure but not responding in any way. The Warlord drew in an annoyed breath—yet again, she wished for a hostage who played along.

  “If that did not impress you, perhaps tonight’s fire pit ceremony will—I will see to it that you have a front-row seat.” The Warlord turned away but paused, as if she had forgotten to mention something. “Perhaps your precious Luca will attend.”

  CHAPTER 43

  THEY’D hammered out a plan on the long journey. It was solid. But it also meant Luca did have to hide—if only for a little while. He’d only show his face when the time was right. Ula ran point on everything. Setting up camp with the others, reluctantly stowing away the horses in the corral, and mapping the site as it stood.