She laid the necklace on the bug-eaten stump of a long-dead tree, unsheathed one of her swords, and knelt close to her workspace. Raising the weapon, she brought the butt of it down hard on the soft gold setting, which served as the framework necessary to keep three pounds of diamonds—a hundred carats—clinging in their arrangement. Over and over she went like that, wiggling diamonds free and stowing them in the hidden pockets within her skirt as she went—she’d need a pouch of some sort eventually; pockets were not a safe place for loose diamonds, even of these carats and weight.
“Amarande?”
At Osana’s call, the princess scooped the last diamonds into her pocket, sheathed her sword, and shot to standing, fingers scrabbling to dump and hide the mangled golden setting. She dropped it within a narrow hole in the trunk. A handful of silt earth stuffed over it was all she could do to hide it from view before the girl appeared, holding her horse by the reins.
“I thought you might have run afoul of a Quemado Scorpion. They like the water.”
Amarande rushed out a lie. “No, just thought I might have seen a quail egg. The light and my hunger playing tricks.”
The girl chewed on that. “If there was ever an egg to be found here, a Harea Asp has already claimed it and its mother.”
Amarande stilled. She’d been so distracted by the obvious threats—the people, the terrain, dehydration—that she’d completely discounted the animals lurking here.
Beware or be dead.
It was her father’s rule number one, and she hadn’t applied it. Even after her brush with the black wolf. Quemado Scorpion. Harea Asp. Osana had pointed out two immediate threats in less than a minute and both were as deadly as the men possibly following them. Or as deadly as they could be to each other.
“They like the rare vegetation as much as we do,” Osana added when Amarande didn’t respond.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Amarande grabbed Mira’s reins and realigned herself with her course—through the water, up the other bank, and cutting back into the sun. When the girl followed, sloshing through the meager water, Amarande mounted and then hesitated before kicking Mira into action.
It was dangerous enough that Osana knew her name and title. If she’d been bought and sold within the halls of her own castle, the same could and would be done here. She’d misjudged when she’d shared with the guards. And having a companion she barely knew was another danger.
She looked the girl in the eye, suggestion in her tone. “Are you sure you don’t have somewhere to go?”
Osana pushed her dark hair behind her shoulders. Like Amarande, she wore it loose, letting it blanket her neck from the sun. “We left Basilica in debt, moving our sheep over the mountains.” Into the Torrent. “That lasted a year.”
Amarande’s mouth dropped open, her heart clenching at what must come next. The girl’s words didn’t have the skew of a lie. “The Warlord’s men?”
The girl smiled tightly. “None other. My father sold me off as penance for squatting unapproved.” Penance. Again, that word. Osana continued, her eyes meeting Amarande’s in a heavy way. “But I wasn’t enough, so they murdered him anyway.”
The princess’s heart, already so low, dropped further. Their meager trust had grown in the daylight, to be sure, but it was still fledgling. Discomfort rose in Amarande as she processed this new information. Sharing like this was an invitation. And Amarande had already shared enough. Still, she asked more. “And what of your mother?”
“Somewhere in Basilica—new family, new life.”
Amarande nodded and let the girl follow.
CHAPTER
22
A FEW hours later, the sun high and Mira’s black coat burning to the touch and baking into the silk of the princess’s skirts as she rode bareback, a compound rose above them. A mirage. It must be.
A rambling building of blocked mountain stone, plunked down in a blanket of basin-flat desert terrain. Though she’d yet to see the fabled Hand in person, this house was possibly an even more stark anomaly against the flats of red earth. Almost as amazing, a barrier made of wood—wood!—stood tall in a large, circular wall around it.
“Is this place real?” Osana asked, her voice barely above a dry whisper beneath the cowl she’d made from a ripped scrap of her pant leg.
Amarande tugged away her own cowl, fashioned from her skirt hem. The one she’d made from the kerchief hadn’t been with her when she had awoken in the Warlord’s camp. “I believe so—you knew about the Cardenas Scar but not this?”
Osana pulled down the fabric, licking her lips and shrugging. “My captors took me to the watering hole and called it by name.”
In answer to Osana, Amarande simply tapped Mira forward in approach.
Ten horse lengths from the compound’s entrance was a sign meant to address anyone looking to enter, written in the chicken-scratch equivalent of the etched text found on steel historical markers throughout the standing kingdoms of the Sand and Sky. Only this message was written in what appeared to be blood—human or otherwise, it was a commodity that had been used to paint over and over as the sun bleached the words away.
ONE AT A TIME AND YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE.
Amarande dismounted and tied Mira to the post. She tipped her chin at Osana. “Stay here.”
The girl didn’t protest, and Amarande felt confident she couldn’t steal away Mira without Amarande hearing and preventing her from getting far. Feeling the weight of the girl’s stare against her father’s crossed swords at her back, she tested their modicum of trust and walked away.
As the princess’s boot heel hit the single-plank step leading to the building’s shade portico, a voice came from within. “Remove your weapons before entering.”
Amarande hesitated, her father’s swords pressing into her back.
“I see those swords, girl. Drop them where you stand.”
The princess brought both boots back to solid ground. The voice came again, male and even. “I am alone and unarmed and so shall you be. Or you won’t enter at all.”
The princess directed her words, clear and just as stern as the man’s, at one of the two front windows situated on either side of a massive wooden door, both shaded and dark from the overhang. “How do you expect me to enter weapon-free when your sign clearly states my life is on the line?”
“Enter that way or don’t. I expect your wits to be the sharpest thing in the room.”
Egia and Maite each came out of her makeshift scabbard with a quick metallic swish. She set them gently on the wood slats of the portico, marveling again at the materials this man possessed in such a place. In all her father’s stories of the Torrent, nothing like this had ever been mentioned. It was nearly as big a surprise as the black wolf.
Feeling naked without her weapons, Amarande entered, blinking, her eyes adjusting from the fierce sun to extreme shade. The building’s windows were nothing but pinpoints of light within, thanks to the portico overhang. As the door slammed shut behind her, a dozen lit candles within flickered from their positions atop built-in ledges and pedestal tables.
As the flames recovered and grew, she saw she was standing in some sort of grand entry, the rest of the structure peeling off in a series of closed doors. This room, though, was a presentation of wealth, each candle strategically placed next to a fine vase, shade plant, plush chaise. At the very center, at a slight angle from the door, was a broad marble-topped desk, and a man sitting behind it with his elbows trained along the top, hands gently clasped together. This man was the same age her father had been, but soft with comfort.