The Bridge Kingdom

by Danielle L. Jensen

  Aren didn’t let go of her until it was over.

  Smoke burned Lara’s eyes as she looked around. As she saw, for the first time, what war really looked like. Not just dead soldiers, but unarmed civilians lying on the ground. The still forms of children.

  Do you think it will be any different when your father comes with his army? Do you think they’ll show any more mercy?

  Villagers who had fled began to return to the village, mostly older children clutching babies and the hands of small children. Some of them began to sob as they found the still forms of their parents. But far too many just stood frozen, faces lost and hopeless.

  “Still believe those Amaridian sailors deserved mercy?” Aren said softly from behind her.

  “No,” she whispered as she strode toward the nearest injured Ithicanian, ripping strips of fabric from her tunic as she dropped to her knees. “I don’t.”

  17

  Aren

  Aren stared into the basin of water, its contents slowly turning red as he washed away the blood crusting his fingernails. His blood. The blood of his enemies.

  The blood of his people.

  The water trembled and he jerked his hands out of the basin, wiping them dry on a piece of toweling that had been left for him. Every inch of him ached, especially his ribs where that big bastard had caught him with the chain. Nana had informed him nothing was broken, but his side was already a livid bruise, and experience told him that tomorrow would be worse. Yet he’d take the pain a thousand times over if it meant arriving at Serrith sooner. Twenty minutes earlier. Ten. Five. Even a heartbeat sooner might have allowed him to save at least one of the villagers who’d been killed today.

  “The call to assemble the council in Eranahl has been sent and replies received. Everyone will be there by nightfall.”

  He turned to find Jor standing behind him, the bandage wrapped around his head concealing the deep gash he’d taken in the fighting. A gash that Lara, of all people, had stitched up. Of their own accord, Aren’s eyes drifted to where his wife knelt among the wounded, silently taking direction from Nana and her students. Her honey-colored hair was crusted dark with blood, as were her clothes, but rather than detracting from her beauty, it only made her seem fierce. Like a warrior. Half a day ago, the notion would’ve been laughable.

  But not anymore.

  Jor tracked his gaze, giving a deep sigh when he saw whom Aren was staring at. “She’s in possession of a problematic amount of information.”

  “There was no helping it.”

  “Doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem.”

  “She saved my life.”

  Jor sucked in a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. “Did she now.”

  “I was down and one of them came at my back. She got in the way and stuck a knife in him.” Every time he blinked, Aren saw Lara beneath that brute of an Amaridian, blood everywhere. Felt the fear of certainty that all the blood was hers. “Sort of ruins the theory that she’s here to assassinate me, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe she wants to do it herself,” Jor replied, but his voice was unconvinced.

  Lara lifted her head, as though sensing their scrutiny. Aren turned away before their eyes could meet, and the pile of dead Amaridians came into his line of sight. He’d pulled the bastard off her and slit his throat, but the man had been already dead, the knife Lara had picked up somewhere embedded with precision in his heart.

  Luck, he told himself. But Aren’s instincts were telling him something else.

  “If anything, we need to keep a closer eye on her now,” Jor said. “If the Maridrinians determine where she is and come for her, that little lass’s head is full of enough bridge secrets to cause us some serious trouble.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting that maybe she’s more trouble than she’s worth. Accidents happen. Snakes find their way into beds. The Maridrinians could hardly hold it against us—”

  “No.”

  “Then keep pretending she’s alive.” Jor had mistaken the reason for Aren’s refusal. “Get a forger to fake her letters to her father. They never have to know.”

  Aren turned on the man who’d watched over him since he was a child. “I will say this once and never again. If anyone harms her, they lose their head. That goes for you, it goes for Aster, and it goes for my grandmother, too, lest she think me ignorant to her ways. Understood?”

  Without waiting for a response, Aren walked to the pyres that had been hastily assembled on the outskirts of the village, the air thick with the smell of the oil drenching the wood. Dozens of bodies, big and small, were laid out in even rows, and the survivors stood around it, some weeping, some staring into nothingness.

  Someone passed him a torch and Aren stared at the flickering flames, knowing that he should say something. But any words he might offer these people that he was supposed to protect—that he had failed to protect—seemed empty and meaningless. He couldn’t promise it wouldn’t happen again, because it would. He couldn’t promise revenge, because even if raiding Amarid were a possibility for his already strained army, he wouldn’t lower himself to harming Amaridian civilians just because their queen was a vindictive bitch. He could tell them that he fully intended to send a crate full of heads along with the charred remains of the ship’s flag back to their mistress, but what did that even mean? It wouldn’t bring back the dead.

  So he said nothing, only leaned forward to touch the torch to the oil-soaked wood. Flames tore along the branches, the air growing hot, and it wasn’t long until his nose filled with the awful smell of burning hair. Charring blood. Cooking flesh. It made his stomach churn, and he gritted his teeth, wanting to flee but forcing himself to hold his ground.

  “The ships are here from Eranahl,” Jor said. “We need to start loading the survivors or we’ll lose the weather.” As if to emphasize the point, a droplet of rain smacked against Aren’s forehead. Then another and another.

  “Give them a minute.” He couldn’t tear his gaze from a sobbing mother standing too close to the now hissing flames. This morning she would’ve woken believing that by nightfall she and her family would be on the way to the safety of Eranahl, and now she’d be making the journey alone.

  “Aren . . .”

  “Give them a goddamn minute.” Heads turned at the sharpness of his tone, and he strode away from the flames. Past the injured whom Nana and her students were preparing for the journey, and down the path to the cove where the ships waited.

  Rounding the bend, he frowned at the dozen or so dead enemy soldiers that had been dragged to the side of the path when something caught his eye: a man with an Amaridian blade embedded in his chest. Backtracking, Aren examined the corpses more closely.

  Most of his soldiers fought hand-to-hand with knives and the machetes they needed to move through the dense jungle underbrush, and the wide blades made for distinct injuries. But most of these men bore wounds inflicted by the slender swords favored by Amarid, and several of them had the eight-inch knives these soldiers carried embedded in their bodies.

  They were killed by their own weapons.

  Aren stepped back a few paces to examine the scene, eyes drifting over the pools of blood mixing with rain to create growing puddles. These men had been killed by individuals they’d encountered coming up the path, not from behind by his reinforcements.

  But by whom? All of his guard had been with him in the village, as were the civilians who could fight.

  A prickle rose on the back of Aren’s neck. Hand going to the blade at his waist, he whirled around. Only to find Lara standing in the middle of the path.

  Her eyes drifted to where his hand lingered on his weapon and one of her eyebrows rose, but for reasons Aren couldn’t articulate, he couldn’t let go of the hilt. She’d killed that soldier with an Amaridian blade . . .

  But her only visible injury was a bruise on her cheek. Never mind that Maridrinian women were forbidden from fighting, the very idea that she could’ve acco
mplished this on her own was utter lunacy—his best fighters couldn’t have done it alone.

  “Where will they go?” Her voice cut through his thoughts.

  “There are safer places.” He wondered why he was being so cagey when now she knew so much. But it was one thing for her to know about the bridge. Quite another for her to know about Eranahl.

  Without the bridge, Eranahl doesn’t exist, his father’s voice whispered in his ear. Ithicana doesn’t exist. Defend the bridge.

  “If there are safer places, why don’t you keep your civilians there?”

  There were practical reasons. Keeping every Ithicanian civilian within Eranahl year-round was impossible, but that wasn’t the reason he gave. “Because that would be like keeping them in cages. And my people are . . . free.” The word caught in his throat, a sudden understanding of what his mother had been fighting for slapping him in the face. For what was Ithicana but a larger prison, those born to it forbidden to ever leave.

  Lara went very still, her head cocked and eyes unblinking, as though his answer had dug deep into her thoughts, leaving no space for anything else. “Their freedom seems to come at a significant cost.”

  “Freedom always has a price.” How much larger would the price be to allow his people the freedom of the world?

  “Yes.” The word seemed to stick in her throat, and she shook her head once, her eyes going to the dead men lining the path. Aren watched her closely, searching her expression for any clue that she was somehow complicit in their deaths, but she only appeared deep in thought.

  “You should head down to the cove. The boats are waiting.”

  Tearing her eyes from the corpses, Lara walked toward him, silent as any Ithicanian as she navigated the slick slope. His heart skipped then accelerated, the steady thump thump rhythm it took when he was heading into battle or trying to outrun a storm. The thrill that, despite knowing he should not, Aren had sought all his life.

  Lara stopped in front of him. Her hair was wet from the rain, a stray lock plastered against her cheek. It took all his self-control not to brush it away.

  “Once the boats are loaded, I’m leaving for a . . . meeting. You’ll stay with my grandmother until I return for you.”

  Lara frowned, but rather than arguing, she reached up and placed her hand on his, her skin feverishly hot. Then, with surprising strength, she pushed down, snapping his blade back into its sheath.

  “I’ll wait by the water.” Without another word, she stepped over a puddle and made her way down the path toward the beach.

  18

  Lara

  War Tides.

  That’s what the villagers on Serrith Island had called it. The two coldest months of the year when the Tempest Seas were calm enough for Ithicana’s enemies to attack.

  And this year War Tides had come early.

  So early that the villagers had not yet been evacuated to the mysterious location where they spent the season, which was probably why the Amaridian navy had twice risked getting caught in a late storm. For while a well-defended singular location could be protected, countless little civilian outposts were another matter.

  It was the best time to attack, the cold, strategic part of Lara thought. When Ithicana’s army would be forced to split their efforts between protecting dozens of small villages and protecting the bridge. And if it came to it, she knew Aren would put his people’s lives first. It had been written on his face when those horns had sounded, the panic and desperation. The willingness to risk everything to save them. And the dead look in his eyes as he’d surveyed the massacred village and known that he’d failed.

  They aren’t your responsibility, she viciously reminded herself. Your loyalty is to Maridrina. To the civilians of your homeland who suffer under Ithicana’s monopoly on trade. To the Maridrinian children who have nothing on their plates but rotting vegetables and rancid meat, if they have anything to eat at all. They are dying as surely as if Ithicana were slitting their throats.

  The thoughts were enough to turn her mind to the matter of smuggling information out of Ithicana. While it might be possible for her to code short messages into her letters to her father, she didn’t dare attempt to include any of the details she’d learned about the bridge. If the codebreakers noticed them, she’d be lucky to get out of Ithicana alive, and everything that she’d done would be for naught. Aren knew where she’d been and what she’d learned. It would be easy for them to shore up the defenses, and there would be no catching them by surprise.

  No, she had to gather the information she needed, and then smuggle it out all at once. The question was how.

  Instinctively, she knew that the way had to be through the King of Ithicana himself. Her thoughts went to her cosmetics box, within which the ink Serin had given her was hidden. Not only did she need to entice Aren to write a message to her father, she needed to steal it for long enough to write her own, never mind the problem of resealing it without anyone noticing that it had been tampered with.

  “Quit plotting and help Taryn with the dishes, you lazy tit.”

  Nana’s voice ripped Lara from her thoughts, and she turned to scowl at the old woman. “What?”

  “Did you not hear, or did you not understand?” Nana’s hands were on her hips, a large snake wrapped around her neck and shoulders. It lifted its head to regard Lara, and she shivered.

  “This is my island,” Aren’s grandmother barked. “And on my island, if you wish to eat, you work. On your feet.” She clapped her hands sharply.

  Lara rose, instantly annoyed with having obeyed, but to sit back down would be childish.

  “Out.”

  Glowering, she stepped out into the morning air, catching sight of Taryn, who sat next to a washtub, up to her elbows in soapy water. The young woman was the only one of Aren’s guards to remain with her—the one to have drawn the short straw, she’d readily griped to Lara on her blindfolded walk back through the bridge to Nana’s island, which was called Gamire. A group of unfamiliar soldiers silently trailed them. Lara had thought it Taryn’s reluctance to spend time with her, or perhaps disappointment over not going to wherever Aren had scuttled off to, that had made the role undesirable, but after a night spent in Nana’s house, the real reason was apparent.

  The old witch was an obnoxious, bullying harridan, and Lara had no idea how she was going to keep from murdering the bloody woman in her sleep.

  “You’ll get used to her, after a while.” Taryn dunked a plate into the steaming basin. “Helps that most of us have been patched back together by her at least once.” Letting go of the dish, the woman lifted up her undershirt to reveal an oval-shaped series of scars that covered the better half of her ribs. “I fell into the water during a skirmish and a shark had a go at me. If not for Nana, I’d be dead.”

  A knife or a sword or an arrow—those were wounds Lara could fathom, but that . . . “Nasty creatures.”

  “Not really.” Taryn dropped her undershirt and returned to the plate. “They’ve been trained to be man-eaters, but it’s not their preference.”

  Taking the dripping plate and rubbing it with a towel, Lara thought of the Amaridian sailors being dragged beneath the surface. The blooms of blood. “If you say so.”

  Pushing back her long dark ponytail, Taryn smiled, revealing straight white teeth that must please Nana greatly. “They are brilliant creatures. There are a few who stay with us always, but most of them are only here during War Tides. That, more than the weather, is how Nana knows when storm season is coming or going. The fishermen notice their numbers.”

  Did her father and Serin know that? Lara chewed the insides of her cheeks, considering the information. One of the risks of attacking at the beginning of the calm season was that there was no way to predict exactly when it would begin.

  “They always congregate at the places where raiders attack the most, like at Midwatch.” Taryn swirled a rag inside a chipped mug before handing it over. “There are myths that say they are guardians of Ithicana’s people
, which is why it is forbidden to harm them unless absolutely necessary.” She laughed. “It’s just a myth, though. They come to be fed, and they don’t discern between us or our enemies. Anyone in the water is fair game.”

  Lara shivered, setting the dry cup in a clean basin with the rest.

  “Quit your chattering,” Nana barked from a distance. “There’s other chores that need doing.”

  Taryn rolled her eyes. “Want to escape?”

  “Is escape from Nana possible?”

  A wink. “I’ve had lots of practice.”

  True to her word, after the clean dishes were put away, Taryn managed to have them assigned to a task that sent them down into a village Lara hadn’t even realized was there. She took in the Ithicanians bustling about between the stone houses or cajoling children who were shirking their chores. “Why isn’t it evacuated?”

  “They don’t need to be. Gamire Island is safe.”

  Find the civilians. Lara remembered Serin’s words, the back of her neck prickling as two children ran past her, sacks of oats in their arms. Her eyes took in the village again. There were groups of men gutting fish, but her nose picked up the scent of baking bread, of red meat on the grill, and the faint tang of lemon, though not once had she seen a fruit tree in this place. Which meant it had all come as an import via the bridge.

  “Those living on the other islands . . . where do they go for War Tides?” she asked, because not asking would be more suspicious. And because she was deeply curious where this mystery location might be.

  “That’s for the king to tell you.” Taryn gave her a sideways glance. “Or not, as the case may be.”

  “He’s not particularly forthcoming.”

  Shrugging as a way to silence that line of questioning, Taryn led Lara down a narrow path through the jungle. They walked until the breeze rose and the scent of salt filled the air, waves loud where they crashed against the cliff walls. Lara didn’t see the shipbreaker until the older soldier manning it shifted next to it. Pleased recognition gleamed in his eyes at the sight of Taryn, but his gaze hardened as it landed on Lara.