Everything became black.
* * *
AMARANDE awoke to darkness and dirt. Her back and neck ached; her skin burned; her throat was dry. Blinking into the new night, she sat up—she’d lost all of the afternoon and most of the evening.
Gone, in an instant.
Luca.
The princess’s head swam as she righted herself, and it was only then that she realized her hands were bound. Her feet weren’t strung together, but there was a manacle around one boot, a long chain tying her to some sort of wire wall erected against a rock face. The wire curved in a half-moon within the bounds of three rock formations that formed somewhat of a gapped circle. A holding pen.
Around her, a half a dozen girls sat, awake but unseeing, visions of what was to come next in the faraway looks in their eyes. All were young, all were bound in the same way, and all but Amarande were dressed in dirt-clogged linens.
Across the way were two men. They appeared to be guards, lacking uniforms but clearly there to mind prisoners, mugs in their hands and gossip on their lips. There were no horses near, and her stomach dropped with the realization she’d likely lost Mira. Sold off along with her by the man living on the plateau with the black wolf.
Those words stitched together were one impossible improbability, and yet here she was.
Amarande swallowed, Koldo’s voice in her head. Know your surroundings as well as your opponents.
Next to the guards was a cart, piled high with items that weren’t theirs, collected and likely to be shuttled away. The hilt of a sword, maybe one of her father’s, stuck up from the pile. Maybe the other and Luca’s chest plate underneath. Maybe. With some relief, Amarande realized they hadn’t found her boot knife or her necklace, still safe under the high collar of her dress. If she had any luck in this, it was in that.
Her movement got the guards’ attention.
“If the lady isn’t up from her beauty rest,” one of the guards said, not really to her but to the other man. “That’s quite the dress.”
Up until this point in her journey, Amarande had thought she wouldn’t voluntarily give up her identity at any point. The most important thing was Luca, and her name almost seemed like a hindrance to finding him. But given they’d stripped her of her weapons, her horse, and her best chance to stay on Luca’s captors’ tails, her name might be all she had to use.
True that she still had her knife and her diamonds, but the second they were revealed any advantage they gave her would be lost. If they didn’t work, they’d disappear. But her name—that was one thing that couldn’t be physically removed. Her title, too.
Amarande stood, and the world spun slightly—the sleeping poison’s last gasp. With a steadying breath, she tested the length of the shackles at her ankle. Three feet. Maybe. Her throat was still parched, but she gathered what she could of her voice and projected it proudly, like she had the day of her father’s funeral. Yesterday.
“I look like a lady because I am one. A princess, in fact—and I demand to speak to your leader at once.”
The guard who’d spoken first pushed off the wall, discarding his cup on a toadstool boulder. “That’s quite a lot of privilege to toss around with little proof. I was having a laugh at your expense when I named you ‘lady’—a nice dress doesn’t make you a believable princess.”
Amarande gritted her teeth and set another gamble. She had no clue how she’d gotten here and if Mira had been with her. But it was worth a shot before showing her final hand. “My horse’s saddle and horseshoes are marked with the royal brand of—”
“So you stole a horse.” The man laughed, and so did his friend, cutting her off. “If I check its teeth, will it cry your name? Pledge fidelity? Offer proof?” The man advanced until he was right in front of her, the bootleg sagardoa on his breath heavy and sour. “No? Perhaps there’s more than one way to extract the truth.…”
The guard’s curved finger ran the length of her jaw, the other hand moving toward her chest—covered now only by thin lace and the sturdy boning of a well-made bodice.
The guards had tied her hands together, yes, but they hadn’t bound them to her body or wrenched them behind her back.
Which was their mistake.
Now wasn’t the time for the knife, not yet, but there was still much she could do bare-handed and bound.
Amarande’s arms shot up, crashing into the man’s forearms and breaking through his reach. Surprised, the guard fell forward, his hands paused at his sides. In that space of hesitation, Amarande’s hands were reset for another strike, and she thrust the heels of both palms out and upward, dislodging the man’s nose from its spot on his face with a bloody crunch.
“Aiyyyy!” The guard stumbled back, voice misshapen along with his face. His partner rushed forward to grab him, and Amarande advanced as far as her foot chain would allow, threat clear.
“Your leader,” she spat at the uninjured guard as he stumbled under the weight of his shrieking friend. “Or you’re next.”
The man looked up from his cohort long enough to bare his teeth at her. They were whiter than most and would bloody nicely. “The Warlord doesn’t take kindly to mouthy brats.”
Amarande’s breath hitched for the barest of seconds—she was in the Warlord’s camp.
The Warlord who met her father years ago and released him. If he could survive, then so could she.
“And I don’t take kindly to anyone who calls me a mouthy little brat. Make sure the Warlord knows my name—Princess Amarande of Ardenia, daughter of King Sendoa, long may he rest.”
The guard who hit her started laughing but then thought better of it, howling as that decision sent more blood streaming out his nostrils and down the bare-knuckle jags of his chin. His cohort tried to calm him, righting the man and tugging him away. “We’ve heard some lies on this caravan, but that one is massive enough to win a fistfight with the Hand. The princess has never left Ardenia. Locked in a tower the day her mother ran away. Even the spiders crawling the Hand know that.”
Amarande drew in a thin breath. Was that really what others thought of her? Locked away, a prisoner in her own home?
“Nice try, mouthy little brat.”
CHAPTER
19
BY nightfall, the pirates were pointed along a new track.
Luca didn’t know if they had a ship; all he knew was that there was absolutely no harbor in the direction they were currently headed. The Port of Pyrenee would’ve been the closest, and even that was far. Torrent’s single functional port was to the north and west, but it was still a week away at this rate. Maybe.
But then, just as the dark settled in tight, stars guiding their way, Luca saw that they’d changed course not to find their ship but something else—a ranch of some sort. One with a main house and little outbuildings. More than one campfire flickered through the privacy fence encircling the property.
“I thought all of the Torrent was nomadic. This looks like a compound,” he whispered to Ula, who’d taken him back from Dunixi a few hours before. No permanent settlements, only caravans, as dictated by the Warlord. Control by chaos, as old Zuzen called it in his Itspi lessons—move or die. If one stopped long enough to make a stand, he or she was already dead.