“Save your saliva, Luca. We won’t be to water for a few more hours. Just because you’re of Torrent doesn’t mean the Torrent will be kind to you.”
With that, Ula turned completely away and kicked her horse to raise her speed over the endless red sands.
Luca took her advice. He simply put another date into his mouth and then peeked over his shoulder at the vast desert wasteland behind them, the mountains cradling Itspi straight behind them, covered in the same golden light that haloed them every morning.
The wind echoed with emptiness as Luca moved his lips, no sound daring to come out. I’m here, Ama. I’m here.
CHAPTER
13
BY late morning, Amarande was regretting her choice of clothing.
She should’ve changed out of her evening dress and belted on something of Luca’s besides just his chest plate. Anything of his would’ve been too large, of course. But it would’ve provided more in protection than the lace that covered the whole upper half of her body. It was finely made, but even the best lace was by definition full of holes. Even with armor covering her chest and leather guards at the shoulders, her arms and back seared bare to the sun through the beautiful design.
There was a matter of its distraction, too, garnet red that her dress was. An unusual variant in the range from deep umber, to sienna, to buff and copper highlights of her surroundings as she pushed into the Torrent. Up close, it was worse, she knew. Only the highest members of society owned a dress like the one she had on. And only someone expecting trouble would be strange enough to top it with a too-large chest plate and swords crossed over her spine.
It made Amarande glad Renard’s kidnappers had forged their own trail, the oats and three fresh sets of footprints leading her along the southern side of a rock formation that jutted up like the skeleton spine of a long-ago fallen dragon—rigid, rocky, and whispering of death.
The north side held more shade in the morning sun, and thus, every few miles when the dragon’s spine dipped to its lowest point before the rock face climbed anew, Amarande occasionally glimpsed travelers going this way and that on the other side. They saw her, too.
And therein lay another problem: The Crown would be searching for her.
If not Koldo, gone to the border, then one of her seconds. Serville, Xixi, or the like. Whoever it was, he or she had been trained just as well as the princess herself. There was no getting out of the idea that this was a three-way chase. Her tracks would be much easier to follow. Fresh, and straight from the stable. There wasn’t much she could do to obscure them other than pray the winds picked up—but only after she found the next hint of Luca’s whereabouts.
Not for the first time Amarande wondered how her mother had managed to vanish completely. Queen Geneva had left in the dead of night, too, or so the story went. Stealing away while King Sendoa was off on the front, leaving her baby in the care of night maids and the hands of the Itspi.
That tendril of anger at Amarande’s father flared again in her empty stomach. For not telling her his plan, just leaving her with a puzzle of laws and the council and the ambitions of many. She was angry at herself, too—for not asking enough questions.
About his succession plan. About her mother’s disappearance. About everything.
But then again, he was the Warrior King. Invincible. Though she worried for him as any daughter would, Sendoa always returned with a scar and a story. The lack of time was not something she’d ever truly feared.
Now it was what she feared the most.
The princess swallowed that fear and pressed on as the sun made its turn for the afternoon, her stomach growling and throat parched. With each passing moment, the trail became more clear, the hoofprints fresher, the winds having less time to disturb them.
She was closing in.
Mira gamely moved ahead on sure feet, trusting herself to navigate the deep wounds scraped across the landscape, brutal skies and wind leaving parts craggy and sunken. The filly climbed nimbly over rocks when it was the best path and pressed on, the unfiltered sunshine hot on her neck. Amarande had been riding for hours and had yet to come to water, but Mira hadn’t taken a misstep, finding a way through anything.
Until the obstacle wasn’t the terrain, but the people and horses upon it.
Not long after yet another view of the road more traveled, three riders came sprinting through a gap ahead, forming a tight V and heading straight for Amarande and Mira.
The princess saw them coming before they even truly appeared, her senses always at the ready, her training at the forefront. She knew when they turned that they were coming for her, not merely carving a path back to the mountains. But Mira didn’t have the training to know that, and she drifted to the side, as if to let them pass. To go around them, and keep working her way forward at her rider’s direction.
But as Mira swerved, the riders swerved, too. Amarande drew high and hard on her reins, and the horse slowed to a stop, albeit reluctantly. As a cloud of copper dust settled over the riders, the princess held tight on her reins, appraising them.
Three horses. Three riders. Luca nowhere in sight.
Either these weren’t the bandits she was looking for or they’d ditched Luca before accosting her. Whoever they were, they stood between her and her best friend and they had to go.
Each of them had kerchiefs pulled over their noses, mottled a strange mixture of pink, from the pounding sands, and white, bleached from the hard summer sun. Their clothes were a mishmash of canvas, camouflage against the landscape, their horses all shades of cider brown like newly poured sagardoa.
The princess knew they expected a girl dressed as she was to politely request that they state their purpose in stopping her. Or maybe to announce who she was in exchange for respect that surely would be given. Or maybe to offer them gold for no trouble, or even to flip it all around and use that gold to gain an escort.
But Amarande just wanted the bastards to move.
“You’re blocking the path.”
The man in the center made it a point to look around. “I see no path. I simply see a girl in a fancy dress out for a ride on a fancy horse in a decidedly un-fancy place.”
“You’re blocking my path,” Amarande tried again, ripping down her own kerchief so that there was no mistaking exactly what she said. She didn’t yet reach for Egia and Maite, though she knew these men could not mistake the shapes of the pommels peeking out above her shoulders. The blades pressed into her back, and her blood sang to use them. She nearly whispered to them, Not yet.
Though Sendoa always told her to make the first mark, he balanced it with: Hang back and listen for the time to be right.
When one couldn’t strike first, it was best to wait for the perfect opening. Moreover, it was Koldo who was in the forefront of Amarande’s mind now. The king had never known what it was to travel as a woman, of course. He hadn’t experienced that the way a man appraised a woman—even one with steel at her back—was always something else. A sizing up having much more to do with the specifics of the situation: setting, audience, perceived station, vulnerability.
Amarande was the Warrior King’s daughter, yes, but she was also a sixteen-year-old girl riding alone. And even someone as strong as Koldo knew how that felt and what it meant. If a man had a certain lack of respect for women and a certain amount of entitlement in his heart, then another danger would add to the fray.