The leader barked out a single laugh. “Your path? This is the Torrent, dearie. Nobody owns anything except the Warlord in this dump.”
This was true. From what she understood, shiny things bought much in the way of favor in the Warlord’s realm. If not from the Warlord himself, from other souls within it, trying to get ahead.
The man inched his horse forward. “But you, my lady, seem to own quite a bit for these parts. Pretty horse. Pretty dress. Saddlebags fat with more than sandy air.”
Beneath her, Mira stirred, looking for a way out, but Amarande would not run. The princess tipped her chin up, defiant.
“I shall give you nothing but my gratitude if you let me pass.”
“I wasn’t asking what you’d give me,” the leader said, before nodding to one of the men beside him. “How much do you think we could fetch for those yards of lace? Five years free of tax? A dozen moons in the nicest carriage available, no matter the caravan? Passage on a ship straight off this blasted rock of a continent?”
Amarande didn’t blink. Every educator she’d ever had—her father, Koldo, old Zuzen—told stories of the Torrent filled with men like these. Bandits with aims forged while living under a single law: Survive or die. Of starvation, dehydration, or at the hands of the Warlord as an example. The storied fire pits were not for show.
The man answered without hesitation, “I’d say double any of that for the dress itself.”
Neither man looked away. The third one joined in with his own unblinking appraisal.
A curl of fear spread through Amarande’s empty stomach. They would take her clothes and her armor and most likely the diamonds they’d find underneath. They’d leave her naked in the roaring sun. Or they wouldn’t leave her at all. Amarande wasn’t aware as to whether the Warlord had a sanctioned, active slave trade, but she knew enough of the world to know there was more than one way to sell a girl who’d come of age.
It was time to draw her swords.
Though they’d been made for a much larger person, Egia and Maite felt right in her hands. With them drawn and raised, she knew she looked intimidating, and if anything, that was a way to survive. Look larger than you are and don’t back down—if it was a valid way to survive a mountain lion, it had to work with run-of-the-mill highway robbers.
The leader laughed again.
“I don’t give a damn about those swords. It’s three against one—the numbers don’t give a damn either.”
They came without hesitation, without a signal between them. The leader and his clothing-appraising second each aimed for Egia and Maite with long swords of their own.
The princess met them both in a high block, the men much taller and using their leverage to press down upon her.
“The thing about having two arms,” the leader said, grinding his teeth as his mask fluttered aside, “is that one is always weaker than the other.”
Rather than trying another blow, both men bore down as hard as they could. Amarande’s arms began to quiver in their lace, accustomed to the constant motion of a fight—not the relentless press of two men twice her size.
She couldn’t see where the third man had gone, and she couldn’t worry about that. If she didn’t change tactics right that second, her own steel would soon be hard against her unprotected forehead, their blades behind it.
“That’s the thing about arms,” the princess said. “They aren’t all we’ve got.”
Amarande placed her right foot on the leader’s horse and shoved with all the might of her own strong leg. At the same time, she immediately dropped her sword on that side, swinging low and away. The leader was suddenly left leaning forward off his horse with no purchase, his sword heavy and touching nothing but air.
Before he could catch himself, his far leg slipped out of his stirrup and he plummeted face first toward the ground, his hands stuck uselessly around the sword grip. The leader’s horse bucked wildly, stunned at the loss of its rider, front legs crashing down upon the man as Amarande turned her attention to bandit number two.
She brought her right sword up and around, slashing. The meat of the man’s shoulder flashed in the relentless sun, exposed with the hard blow.
His sword clanged to the ground as he reacted, and Amarande thrust a sword tip immediately to his throat. Her left-hand sword was pressed blade side against the meat of his belly—no armor there.
Amarande felt the knowledge hard in her gut: She could kill this man.
She knew how using either sword. A quick slash of the jugular and his life force would tumble out in less than a minute with no way to stop it. A stab to the liver and this man would languish for days, fading yellow with jaundice before gray with death.
Still, she wasn’t sure she could do it. Not yet.
“Have you seen a group of three riders with a hostage?” Amarande asked him, needing him alive to answer.
The man seemed to look past her. “Nope.”
WHAM. The stiff leather sole of a boot heel connected with her knuckles. The sword in Amarande’s left hand tumbled out of her grip and bounced off the rib of her chest plate as her hand stung with pain, white and hot. The falling sword caught the second’s unprotected side, slicing open the fabric and skin there as the man yowled, before it clattered all the way to the ground.
Someone was clawing at her free hand now, trying to pull her off the horse. She knew if he managed that she would most assuredly lose her dress, her diamonds, and maybe more.
Beneath her, Mira reared onto her hind legs, fighting for herself. That had the desired effect of dislodging Amarande’s hand from whoever yanked upon it but also sent the princess scrambling to hang on to her reins, her other hand still clutching a sword. She wrapped her throbbing fingers around the reins just in time, as Mira reached her full height with a cry.
But just as the horse hit near vertical, there was something else Amarande felt—this from behind. She wrenched around to look over her shoulder only quick enough to watch both her saddlebags slide off Mira’s backside, belt sliced free, the third robber catching them in his thick hands.
The third man ran to his own horse, already mounted with the hanging form of the injured leader. He slid atop the saddle with all her provisions and kicked off into the afternoon. The second followed, one hand pressed to his bleeding gut, the other awkwardly holding his retrieved sword. The pack of bandits aimed themselves straight south across the open terrain.
Breath straining hard against her bodice, the princess surveyed the site. Blood was splattered on the ground, but none of it was hers. Not much of it was theirs either. The third horse had run off, and if they let it stay missing, Amarande knew the horse wouldn’t survive long—it’d likely broken a leg as it stomped on the lumpen shape of its master.
To her relief, her missing sword was at Mira’s feet. She climbed off the horse to grab it and collapsed into the dirt, her legs giving out, shaky with the kind of adrenaline she’d never before felt.
Red dust swirled around her as she shook out of the heap she’d become. Crawling, she retrieved the sword—Maite, love—grateful to have it once more in her hand. On her knees, she sheathed both swords in their cross at her back and then pushed herself to standing. Her legs held, and she dusted off the length of her dress. She immediately regretted doing so, both palms caked in russet powder.