“We’re in Torrent. Prisoners aren’t unusual. There’s probably one or two among them,” the short boy answered, wetting down his white-blond hair before wrapping his whole head in a length of linen borrowed from Ula to deter the sun. Too little, too late. “No matter who they are, they likely think you’re either a criminal or a penance, and either way you’re being escorted to the Warlord to meet the fire pits.”
“If anything, they’re surprised that we’re letting you drink,” Ula added, something in her tone like a memory. The hint of it was gone as soon as it came and she turned her back, shifting the ropes that had bound him to her from her gray mare to the one ridden by their leader.
Luca took another draw of water before continuing. “And why exactly are you letting me drink?”
“Because it’s not time to kill you yet,” the tall boy answered with a ferocious grin.
Luca returned the grin in kind. “I’m no good to you dead. If you kill me too soon, my princess won’t have any reason to marry your man.”
“I said ‘yet.’”
“What my friend means to say,” the blond boy started, “is that if your princess doesn’t do as was requested in that letter, we’ll give her a nudge with your head on a pike.”
Luca stood from the creek bed. He knew his full height was impressive to most people, though he wasn’t in the habit of using it to intimidate anyone except maybe the occasional opinionated horse. He drew himself up, chin up and shoulders back, and leveled his gaze on the leader boy. “And what will you do when my princess comes for me?”
The short boy made a show of looking around at the decidedly uninterested travelers, the pounding sun and barren cargos and steep plateaus beyond.
“It’s been eighteen hours since we stole you away. That’s plenty of time. Where is she, stableboy?”
Luca didn’t let his gaze waver, though the number of hours that had passed rattled through his mind. Longer than he’d thought.
“My princess will come.”
The Eritrian boy waved a ringed finger and snatched a rope from Ula, latching it around his horse’s undercarriage—Luca was to ride with him after this break. “Sure she will, right after she finishes her tea and cake. Or perhaps her embroidery calls first?”
Ula stopped short of what she was doing and glared over the horse’s back at the blond boy. “Spoken like a man who has never been with a woman.”
The tall boy snickered, drawing the ire of both Ula and the short boy.
“Can it, Urtzi,” the short one snapped.
Ula rolled her eyes. “You know no more about women than he does.”
“I’ve been with plenty of women,” the tall boy—Urtzi—shot back.
“Lying in bed with a woman is completely different than knowing a woman.” Ula waved her hands, done. “You both talk about them like they’re inanimate objects.”
“I wake every day to your smug face—are you not a woman?” Urtzi tested Luca’s binds for slippage around the wrists where the ropes got wet.
“I am, and if this princess is anything like me, she’ll castrate you before she kills you.”
Urtzi huffed out a non-answer while using every inch of his lanky arms to deposit Luca on the horse’s back. Like his rider, this horse wasn’t cut out for the sun—a pebbled white gelding whose pink skin shone through his coat.
“If she arrives,” the leader said, mostly to Ula. As if he could get on her good side. Luca didn’t think it possible for him to talk his way out of this. He wondered why she put up with this crew at all. “I’m not questioning the girl’s strength—she’s the Warrior King’s daughter. I’m questioning how much she cares.”
“No, no you’re not,” Luca countered from atop the horse. He was aware that any one of them could knock him off in anger, his arms useless to break his fall, but it was worth it for what he had to say. “The first moment I said that she’d rescue me, you mocked me and insulted her over the basis of her ability, not because you believed she was too busy sipping tea and minding embroidery to come after me.”
The boy from Eritri simply laughed. It was loud and exaggerated, and a few fellow travelers took the time to peer over at their group. This included the Basilican girl, who Luca now saw was tied up just the same as he. Maybe the pirates were right—he wasn’t the only prisoner around. Still, that any of them had been moved by laughter but not by captivity confirmed for Luca all that he’d heard about what had become of his birthplace.
Ula pressed forward, even as Urtzi gamely tied a slip of fabric loosely around Luca’s throat. “Luca has a point. If he’s important enough to kidnap, he’s important enough to save.”
“Maybe I should gag you, too,” the short boy deadpanned.
“If you want to keep both hands, Dunixi, you won’t,” Ula said with a smile, but her tone was enough that no sane man would laugh.
Instead, the leader—Dunixi—changed the subject. “Let’s keep moving.”
“Where are we headed?”
Luca didn’t expect an answer. But all three pirates responded in near unison. “To our ship.”
That was not the response Luca had gotten when he’d asked them before. He wondered what had changed. Or maybe nothing had but their tune. “And what will we do when we get there?”
“Sail, of course,” Dunixi said, swinging up onto his horse and lashing Luca’s middle to his own. This close, his skin wasn’t just bright pink—it was burned badly enough that blisters had formed, stretching in looping rings across his skin, all up his neck, crawling beneath the linen he’d applied.
This boy was no sailor.
“I thought you’d been hired to keep me until my princess marries your man?” Luca asked. “If that’s true, why would we need to flee? Wouldn’t you return me home—in whatever state I’m to be in?”
“Ah.” Dunixi wrenched around in the saddle, grinning wide and gap-toothed at Luca. “You’re thinking she’s not coming then?”
“No, I’m asking because if you’re planning to take me on the water, you aren’t expecting for your man to get what he wants,” Luca said, “which means you actually think my princess is coming and you need to keep me from her.”
Ula cocked a brow. “Luca has a point.”
“Or I think she’s not coming and she’s not marrying our man either.” Dunixi kicked his gelding into gear with more force than necessary. Luca bit back the urge to admonish him for treating the animal in such a way. “Which means you, my friend, are up a creek.”
They left the gag dangling loose around Luca’s neck as the three horses pushed back into the full sun.
CHAPTER
18
ROCKING.
Amarande blinked her eyes open to a violent swaying that was not Mira’s practiced steps. Her vision was nothing but white. The sun’s rays seemed to pry through her skin, burning her throat, lungs, heart.
Again, her eyes closed, the unrelenting heat wrapping around her like a shroud shorn from the stars above. And then the world shriveled to a pinpoint behind her eyes, the heat evaporating, the rocking, her sense of place.