Instead of answering, she asked, “Did you?”
“No, I came to Ardenia with my mother as a baby. This is the first I’ve seen of it.”
Ula’s attention shifted to her blade. She held it up close to her face, inspecting its new sharpness. Once satisfied, she spoke. “It’s beautiful. This part. The coast. All of it.”
“I believe you.”
Ula accepted that with a chin tip, eyes so much like his own glued on the firelight. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above the exhale of a breath—as if the Warlord himself could hear the shape of her words. “I’m going to get it back.”
“The Torrent?”
“Torrence. That’s its name, you know. The Kingdom of Torrence. Ruled by the Otxoa family for a thousand years.”
Luca nodded. The Otxoa—the Wolf. It was actually a whole clan of them, a royal family ruling just as long as Amarande’s.
“What happened to them? The Otxoa?” Luca knew what the people in Ardenia had told him—that the Warlord rose to power in such an insidious way that by the time the coup physically happened, everything outside the wolf den had already turned. The disease of dissent against the Otxoa was so thick within every city, town, settlement, that by the time warning bells were rung, the people ringing them were the last loyalists to pick off. The Eradication of the Wolf, the Warlord’s people called it. They even destroyed the castle—Otxazulo, rendered to ash and rubble.
He knew all that, and yet he expected Ula to have a different point of view. She did.
“Your king left them to rot, that’s what happened.”
This wasn’t the King Sendoa that Luca knew, but he held his tongue and let her continue.
Ula kept her words low and swift, the rumble of pain a tremor beneath it all.
“Your king, exalted protector of the Sand and Sky, found it too difficult to restore order here.” When Luca didn’t balk or go on to defend King Sendoa, she continued. “Oh, he made a show of it in the beginning, when you and I were babes, running for our lives on our parents’ backs, as our towns crumbled and our homes burned. But then he lost his queen and he gave up. Didn’t do anything more than run interference. Kept raiders at bay from the kingdoms ringing the lands the Warlord took but never struck at the root of the problem.”
Luca frowned. King Sendoa had met with the Warlord. That was how he had gotten the scar on his face.
The wind kicked up beyond the fence and Dunixi rolled over in his sleep. When all had settled again, Ula sheathed her sword.
“You know what I think? I think your king didn’t think it was worth it, to save the Kingdom of Torrence. So he let a royal family like his disappear into dust. Let the people fall to ash.” Ula’s eyes flashed to Luca’s. The undercurrent of anger in her whisper was matched now with sadness. She didn’t answer when Luca asked about her family and what she’d been through, but clearly none of it was good. His life hadn’t been roses, but his situation at the Itspi had never let him feel lost, displaced, unloved—all the things that Ula didn’t say. “No Ardenian diamonds here. No Pyrenee gold. No Basilican iron or steel, or pearl-rich Myrcellian beaches. Just people cowering beneath the shadow of a tyrant in a place without anything but the forever sun.”
Ula nodded to herself, grimace set. Something as deep as the sea shifted in her golden-brown eyes.
“This is my home. And even if your exalted leader didn’t care to save it, nor did any of the other men ruling this continent, I do. I care. And I’m not alone. The Otxoa are the rightful rulers of this land, but in their stead it belongs to the people who loved them. It belongs to us. And eventually we will regain it.”
Luca met her gaze, which didn’t flinch. Ula was nothing if not solid and sure. Unblinking, he repeated his earlier affirmation: “I believe you.”
CHAPTER
20
THE guard’s howling would not stop, and five minutes after he’d been beaten by Amarande the men left to find aid. They turned their backs on the princess and the other prisoners, leaving only their binds and fear to hold them.
It was their mistake.
The second the guards disappeared around the rock formations and into the maze of tents and to a roaring fire beyond, Amarande began testing her bindings. As she did, the steel wire structure they were attached to shuddered, bending slightly toward where the guards had been stationed. The princess stomped to the end of her bindings, dug in her boot heels, and pulled. The structure more than shuddered—this time it definitely wavered.
The light was weak, the only source distant fires, but it was enough to reach through the crevices between the rock walls. The illumination proved the structure was crudely mounted—something lightweight the Warlord’s caravan could easily dismantle and haul from place to place, using it to stabilize prisoners from one edge of the Torrent to the other.
They must not think highly of their prisoners. Or maybe it was this specific set of prisoners—all girls. All around the same age—middle teens. Pretty. All likely dumped at the Warlord’s feet as payment of one kind or another. The wolf man’s craggy voice came to her—penance. The bandit’s sneer—tax.
There was likely a single use for so many girls of a similar age to a man as powerful as the Warlord.
That only made Amarande want to flee more.
If she could escape, she could steal a horse and be on her way.
Back to Luca. Always to Luca.
“Help me pull,” she whispered, eyeing the other prisoners, all slumped in their chains against the structure.
No one stood to join her. No one answered. Many of the girls had their eyes closed, and the ones who were awake simply eyed her as if she were speaking ancient Torrentian.
Fine.
Amarande braced herself again and pulled. The wall quivered.
“What’s the point?” one girl asked, the whites of her dark eyes flashing from the far corner. “You’re just going to tire yourself out before we’re marched into the fire pit.”
The fire pit. Of course. That was how the Warlord kept his power.
Supposedly, these fire pits dotted the Torrent landscape, waiting for their turn to host the Warlord. Only he was allowed to light them—do it yourself and risk your own death within the flames.
The pits were all a day’s ride from one another—spread across the Torrent in roughly the same formation of where its cities and towns had once been. And kindling was scarce in the tree-deprived Torrent. Rumor had it that the fires were lit with the most abundant flammable substance around: human flesh. One sacrifice going before all others to literally get the party started. The others coming at intervals all night long to keep the flames licking the sky until dawn.
If they were to be sacrificed, the princess didn’t want to think what the Warlord might do to them before they stoked the flames. Not one use as she’d guessed—two. One, and then the other, final one.
Amarande looked the girl right in the eye with everything she had. “I’d rather march to my death exhausted than full of energy I’ll never use again. Wouldn’t you?”
Rather than wait for an answer, the princess turned and pulled at the end of her chain a third time.
Again, the wall moved. But as strong as she was, her leverage wasn’t enough without more support.