The guard let her dangle. The Warlord tilted her head and stared at Naiara. “Tell me, old woman, or she will be lost to the flames.”
The healer watched the stars. “The Luca I know was just an injured boy. He’s not the Otsakumea. Just a child who sought my care.”
The Warlord gripped the dais railing, leaning farther forward over her own flames. Señe’s pleas came harder now, her body flailing. “He did not have ink on his chest?”
“I did not see.”
“But you did see that he was with the princess?”
“He was with a girl—I never learned her name.”
This was a lie. The healers could not have missed her name in conversation—he’d called her Ama at least twice, while she’d only called him Luca in their presence once. That he was conscious for, anyway.
“Yet you call her ‘Little Queen’? Do not deny it. Fifty people here can attest to that truth, including two of my guards.”
The Warlord did not give her time to answer, raising a hand. In coordinated movements, Señe was pitched over the side and Naiara was wrenched farther forward, her guard’s dagger at her throat.
Luca panicked, watching the healer sway against the blade as the sandy footing beneath her crumbled with her weight and movement. Her apprentice was clinging to soft ash, trying to climb. Trying not to slide. The flames were so close to her he could not see her legs below the knees, the inferno blinding any view.
“Where are they?” he whispered to Ula.
Her eyes roved the crowd. “They’re here. They’re ready.”
“Are you sure?” His heart pounded in his ears, his jaw set.
“Yes. But it’s not—”
“I can’t let her burn.”
He did not come here to hide. He’d been hidden away his entire life. By those who loved him. And he would no longer stay in the shadows.
Luca found Amarande across the way, hand still pressed tightly over her mouth, eyes glistening. Naiara struggled against the guard’s grip, and a line of blood oozed from the kiss of the blade.
Luca removed his hat and pressed it to Ula’s hand.
“No, wait, don’t—” Ula clutched for his arm, but even her strength was not enough to stop him.
He lunged forward, shouldering people out of the way, trying to get closer, into the light. The Warlord leaned forward, next question on her lips, or perhaps an order, as no answer appeared to be coming from Naiara. It was now or never—the Warlord expected him to be here. This was for show. She never actually needed the answers.
“I am Luca!” he yelled, raising his arms above his head, signaling as best he could as he pushed toward the firelight. “I am the Otsakumea!”
The crowd gasped, and those closest to him parted as if he’d waved a torch at them. Suddenly he was completely illuminated by the flames, the bright and open space enough clearance that he cast a long shadow.
His head was bare. His face was bare. There could be no question that he was the voice in the crowd.
The Warlord twisted his way, and for just that moment he thought she might be unsure. “Boy, do you think this is a joke?”
Luca aimed his words straight at the Warlord. He knew Amarande could see him now—Taillefer and Naiara, too. “Do not burn her. I am Luca!”
“Well, healer?” the Warlord asked. “Is he?”
Naiara did not answer.
The fire crackled and spit.
Amarande, bless her, had not moved an inch. Hand pressed to her mouth. Eyes reading his face. The Warlord surveyed the princess, surveyed Taillefer, Naiara, too.
Her disbelief was not something he’d anticipated. “Into the fire with you, simply for this stunt.”
The Warlord motioned to the closest guards, but before they could even take a step Luca took a deep breath and tore aside the collar of his tunic.
Those same terrible, tortuous leaping flames illuminated his tattoo.
Five points. The black wolf. Right over his heart.
Unmistakable.
The crowd gasped.
“I am Luca!” he yelled again.
His periphery picked up Amarande as a blur of movement—lunging and shaking the bars of her cage—but he did not dare move his attention from the Warlord, pacing like a tiger across the fiery chasm. “I am the Otsakumea. The last of the Otxoa. I am Luca!”
More guards fell in, pushing forward as the crowd rolled with the buzz and snap of surprise.
Ula stepped in front of Luca. But her dagger stayed in her sheath. Instead, she fed a hand through the tunic ties across her sternum. “I am Luca!” she screamed. “I am the Otsakumea. The last of the Otxoa. I am Luca!”
There, over her paw print, was carefully finished ink, exactly in the same shape and location as Luca’s own.
The Warlord laughed. “Do not play, girl—”
“I am Luca!” A man’s voice.
“I am Luca! I am the Otsakumea!” Another.
“I am Luca! The last of the Otxoa!” A girl’s voice.
“I am Luca!” A collective voice.
From all around the fire, men and women, boys and girls, stepped forward, announcing themselves as the wolf cub and producing an identical tattoo.
Five points. The black wolf. Right over their hearts.
Unmistakable.
Everywhere the Warlord turned, there was another call. Another flash of skin and ink. From her dais, her head spun. The caravan crowd buzzed, louder than the flames and Señe’s dying wails.
Hundreds of people suddenly appearing with the same tattoo. The same call. Thousands, really, but the Warlord didn’t need to know that.
And when screamed decrees and flashes of skin melded into a crescendo of voices and movement and shirking caravan members, making room, elbowing away, trying not to be muddled together with those who would dare be part of this coordinated trickery, the Warlord finally realized that this was not a stunt.
It was an attack.
“Don’t stand there! Get them!” she yelled to no one and yet everyone all at once.
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
CHAPTER 49
HEART in her windpipe, Amarande could not recall her last breath.
The complete disbelief of Luca calling out to the Warlord—revealing himself, revealing the tattoo—had flamed out, replaced by the complete disbelief that he’d done such a thing and was still breathing.
At the Warlord’s order, the entire churning mass moved to chaos, but the dictator’s followers were already a step too slow. Her voice still echoing against the distant mountains, sleeping darts shot through the air.
Not from her side, but the resistance.
Lodging themselves into soft spots of anyone drawing a blade or cuffing their own dart pipe to their lips. Men and women dropped as smoothly as the one Koldo had killed at her back, but no blood shed.
This was exactly how she went down for the man with the black wolf—so very quick. The opposition immediately nulled the Warlord’s swiftest power, simply by having the distraction and wherewithal to strike first.
Make the first mark.
Indeed they did.
Amarande pressed herself against the fireside cell bars, searching for Luca. Where he’d been standing was now a swarm of bodies, churning and moving. It was the chaos of the wedding after she’d killed Renard, but literally a thousand times more frantic. Families raced for the paths leading away from the fire pit, spokes on a wheel, and suddenly just as clogged as they were in the minutes before the lighting ceremony began.
When she’d met her first set of bandits in the Torrent, Amarande had walked away with her life and a sense that she’d finally tasted battle.
That wasn’t battle—this was.
Blood spray, bodies tumbling into the pit, the fire roaring and coughing smoke with each addition. Daggers and swords met in violent, reverberating clangs. Boots crunched bones, and live bodies, shrieking to the stars.
But she needed him.
“Luca!” Amaran
de screamed his name with all the love she had, knowing that he would hear that note, along with the anguish and fear that thrust it into the air.
The world seemed to yell back.
He’s coming. He knows I’m here.
Survive the battle, see the war, her father had said, but which was she?
Across the way, the Warlord roared into the air in every direction as the resistance closed in. Five of her guards covered her in round-robin style, the dais creaking under their collective weight. These women had their backs to her directive spew, their swords out front, aimed at anyone who would dare rush at her with a blade.
They dared, of course.
The Warlord’s guards circled her, a moving target aboard the dais, as rebels with blades closed in on the raised platform.
It was protection, yes. But it was also a mistake.
They should have sheltered her on a retreat the moment the fighting started, not let her launch orders into the night. Now they were sitting ducks.
And the rebels knew exactly how to attack.
With practiced precision, members of the resistance turned their sleeping darts on the Warlord’s dais. Aiming for the guards closest to the railing that hung over the lip of the fire pit.
One. Two. Three. Three women dropped like flies.
The first, straight on the railing where the Warlord had leaned, splitting it in two with her weight as her crumpled body lost the balance it could not control and tipped over the edge and tumbled into the inferno below.
The other two fell right on the edge. The weight of the blow and the guard going over, in combination with these two dropped bodies, tipped the dais. It was still up on cartwheels, at a higher center of gravity than the princess’s wheel-less cage. Just an extra couple of feet, but enough that the whole thing teetered.
The Warlord and remaining guards stumbled backward, toward the bodies and the fire pit. Their presence only served to make the dais heavier, and suddenly there was a great crack as the wheels farthest from the fire pit inched off the ground while the piece of the dais with the new weight splintered.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Boards began to split as the Warlord and the three remaining guards tried to gain purchase. One tripped over a dropped guard, her boot catching on her fallen form. That sent her flailing back. Her arms windmilled, one catching the Warlord’s own outstretched arms.
A bolt of blue, she lost her center, wheeling around at the sudden blow.
The sand beneath one of the pit-facing wheels gave out then, the whole dais-cart lurched, and the Warlord was sent headfirst into her own flames.
Amarande’s breath caught.
The Warlord was gone.
Dead.
Screamed the whole way down.
“That’s a rather apropos way for a Warlord to go out.”
Those were the first words she’d heard Taillefer say in quite some time, and she actually agreed with him.
“Taillefer, time to use your fire swamp. Let’s go.”
“I’m saving it. And besides, this is probably the safest place to be at the moment. It’s nearly impossible to tell one side from the other unless it’s your love facing you down.”
The tattoos were all obscured now, it was true. But that was a stupid argument.
“Yes, but out there we can help.”
Amarande rushed the bars facing away from the pit. No sign of the general and the keys she was hunting, but the princess screamed for her anyway. “Koldo!”
“You seriously think your general can hear you over this ruckus?”
“Why don’t you help me? Use your voice. She’ll help you, too.”
“Or she will kill me for kidnapping you or rescuing you or whatever crime she prefers to prosecute.”
Stars, why did Taillefer choose to revert to the most infinitely irritating version of himself in this moment? Frustration zapping any kindness from her voice, she played to his stated aim. “You have my word that I will protect you and help defeat Inés.”
She could almost hear the fox smile cross his regal face. “We both know the word of another noble in the Sand and Sky is worth less than shared blood, and that’s barely worth anything at all.”
The cart shook as yet another pack of terrified people barreled past, the corner of the princess’s side edging closer to the fire pit lip. It was the side where her door was, opposite where the wooden divider separated them. If she was headed out the door, it would need to be soon—too late and there would be no safe exit.
Amarande searched the non-pit side for signs of Koldo but found none. Still, she stayed on that side, trying to keep as much weight as possible away from the inferno. Though, it wasn’t much help with the press of bodies. Something hard crashed against the cart and tossed her back. Then another slam. And another. Despite her weight on solid ground, the cart inched closer to the edge, an entire corner of her cell now hanging over the flames, nothing but air and death below it.
“Taillefer—the fire swamp! Burn a hole through the divider.” The cart shook more from Taillefer’s side, as if a pair of fighters had taken up residence on his door side. “I can crawl through, and we’ll have more weight on that side—my cell is creeping over the edge. It’s going to be a massive problem if we don’t—”
Her voice died at another hard thud. A rattling cough and a spit of something wet—more blood. “Taillefer?”
There was the rattle of chains, the squeak of hinges, and for a moment the whole cart seemed on solid ground, anchored on Taillefer’s side. She craned against the bars, angling for some way to see what was going on.
The sound of knuckles pounding flesh came next. A cry. A sword flew in her direction from the exterior. Men rushed past, no one lunging for the abandoned weapon—though Amarande did, striking her fingers through the bars. The bars squeezed her elbow less than a hand’s length from where the Basilican sword lay dormant on the ground.
It wasn’t Koldo’s weapon—and she didn’t think it would be. Koldo would come for her before Taillefer. Even though she’d told her she didn’t want her to.
“Taillefer! Can you grab the sword? We can get out of here if you can—”
“I have my own problems, Princess.” Face smashed against the bars, as she leaned for the weapon, Amarande wrenched around at the sound of his voice. Strangled. Hurt. Stressed. Yet she could see nothing.
Just when she returned her attention to the weapon, two bodies tumbled past. Blond hair, the same prisoners’ garb as hers. The other was another light-haired boy, wrapped in a cloak much like the one they’d stolen, but underneath was a flash of the darkest aubergine.
Pyrenee. They’d truly come for him.
Taillefer struggled, hands in a fury, going for all the soft spots on the soldier’s face—ears, eyes, lips. The prince’s forearm caught the boy’s windpipe, and his head flew back with a crack, sucking cry escaping from his lips.
Taillefer used that opportunity to wedge his knee against his chest and kick the soldier as hard as possible with almost no room. It gave him enough space that he dove for his sword.
As he wrenched it away from Amarande’s outstretched fingers, she felt her chances evaporate, the sword his for his survival alone.
But.
In one quick aside, Taillefer shoved the sword between the bars, straight into her hands.
For a moment their eyes met. “The sword? As you wish.”
Then a huge, hulking arm in aubergine jerked him away. Taillefer spun, ducking, grabbing a dagger straight out of the chest of a fallen man, and, as he was angling for the Pyrenee soldier, was devoured by the retreating crowd.
Amarande blinked as if he’d been swallowed yet again by quicksand, shocked that in that moment he’d helped her. She stared at the sword, almost believing it was a trick. But no, it was true Basilican steel.
A soldier’s sword. That soldier’s sword. The mountain lion crest of Pyrenee stamped at the hilt.
Another blow to the cart knocked the inaction straight
out of her. The cart leaned.
She had to get out.
Putting as much of her weight toward the front as possible, Amarande began hacking away at the divider panel. It was thinner than the bars. If she could just bust a hole, she could break open this thin board. She could do it.
She could get out of here. To Luca, somewhere out there, fighting.
A couple of pointed swings of the blade and a narrow hole appeared, Taillefer’s cell and the gaping door free.
“Ama!” Koldo’s voice. She had an entire key ring now, but Amarande’s locked door was now three feet over the edge of the pit. All her weight was in the remaining four feet of her side.
“I changed my mind. Please get me out of here.” She held up her sword. “Help me hack away at the partition.”
Without a word, Koldo sprinted to the opposite side of the cart and began to hack away at the partition with both her dagger and sword. Amarande worked from the corner out toward the center, where the general stabbed the wood with everything she had.
Within a minute, they had two good-sized holes there, but they needed to come together.
“Stand back! I’ve got it,” Amarande announced, lining her blade up with the thin bit of remaining wood. One targeted strike would do it.
The princess wrenched back the sword. On impact, a chunk of wood flew away, creating just enough of an opening that Amarande was sure she could squeeze through.
At once, Koldo came into view. She was bloodstained, wounded in the shoulder and thigh, but standing there, a rare smile on her face. Koldo leaned forward, gloved hand out. “Ama, I am here for you. Not for her. I promise. I will explain—”
The ground shook and the general was tossed to the side. Amarande, too—hard enough that the sword tagged the bars and fell from her grip. It slid to the dangling locked-door side, the blade roasting over the fire.
The Queen Will Betray You Page 29