The bottle went again to the pedestal table. “That said, I would like to get right to work—discovery waits for no man, least of all one who must prepare for a wedding in mere hours.” The prince collected the plant and raised the green-and-purple stem, so that Luca could easily see where a cut had been made. The stem was hollow, oozing the poisonous sap. “We’ll start with just the sap and work our way up from there, shall we?” Luca didn’t respond. “Let’s see. Because this is a matter of the heart, how about we just open you up right about here.…”
Squeezing the stem as he went, Taillefer dragged oozing sap in a line down Luca’s sternum the same length as a grown man’s hand. He pressed in, scratching his way across the flesh like he was heavy-handed with a quill on parchment.
Luca tensed against his binds, veins popping from his skin, tendons firing. The reaction was so swift, so intense, that the taxidermic snake flicked off his shin and plunked to the floor. His teeth ground shut, his eyes, too, the pain bald and bold, coursing through him as his skin melted and blistered. As promised, he was opened up. A gaping, raised line cleaving the skin of his chest in two.
Prince Taillefer watched it with reserved reaction.
“Interesting. That was much quicker than I expected.”
Breathless yet heaving, Luca couldn’t wedge his mouth open for a response. The prince turned again to his worktable and came back with a leather-bound journal and a pencil. Ready to document the next phase. “Let’s see if your blood reacts the same as your skin, shall we?”
Luca tensed again, as much as he could, knowing it would not be enough. It couldn’t be. Not if Taillefer decided to make ashes of him from the inside out.
The prince uncorked the vial and, with careful fingers, lowered it until the lip of glass hovered tight against the wound festering along Luca’s sternum.
“Let’s start with one drop, shall we?”
The sticky liquid took its time leaving the vial, long enough in fact that Luca’s eyes sprang open, something about the pause giving him the courage to look. His vision cleared just in time for him to see a pale green drop roll across the lip and fall a hairsbreadth into his open flesh.
His jaw unclenched and he screamed then, so loud he thought it might shatter the whole of him. So loud he thought Amarande might hear. Or his mother in the heavens. Maybe the stars themselves if they weren’t blind.
Prince Taillefer, though, wasn’t moved, slowly and carefully resealing the bottle, placing it on the table behind, his eyes never leaving Luca’s reaction. His hand began running in looping script across one page and then another.
In the space of a second that felt like a year, Luca knew without visual confirmation that the single drop had eroded the initial wound into something deep and gaping that pulsed with the full power of the Torrent’s sun. “Pain” wasn’t enough of a word for the way it felt, and in the twilight of his clouded thoughts Luca realized his whole body’s suffering at that very moment matched his heart’s ache for Amarande.
After a time, that feeling shifted, everything about Luca shaking as bile lurched toward his lips—it took all he had not to choke on his own stomach acid.
Taillefer paused his writing and waited to speak until Luca was strong enough to meet his eyes.
“On a scale of one to your princess marrying my brother, how does that feel?”
Luca began to cry.
CHAPTER
45
THE pirates delivered their horses to the stable as they were told and lingered in the building’s shadows as the guards and hired hands from the Torrent retired for refreshment and a good cleaning.
“If we don’t hurry, there will be no food left for us. You know how mess halls go,” Urtzi grumbled, his large shoulders tense with irritation and hunger.
“You’re a big boy; just take what you want from filled plates and dare those spiders in purple not to scurry,” Dunixi answered with a wave of his bejeweled hand. “Five minutes to regroup, that’s all we need. Think of the bigger picture—we pull this off and you’ll be eating the roast duck of your Myrcellian childhood in a sauce of passion fruit from Indu, accompanied by a dressing of chestnuts of Basilica, grapes of Pyrenee, and juniper berries plucked from the trees of Ardenia.”
“I’d be fine with just the duck.”
“Your tastes will improve with acquired riches,” Dunixi spat. “Now shut up and listen.”
Urtzi lowered himself to the ground at the base of a tree, grumbling. Ula leaned against the same tree, eyes reading the distance. From atop the stable’s hill, they could see much, but nothing that was of help. Just giant swaths of castle stone hiding exactly what they wanted.
“They’ve separated our marks, but we can use that to our advantage. We shall steal the princess first—this will throw them into chaos, because the wedding cannot go on without her. The first place they will check is wherever they’ve kept Luca, and when they find him there and then fall further into chaos, we snatch him up, put them both safely away, and then blackmail Renard for his crown.”
Ula’s head was already shaking. “No. That won’t work. We can’t get the princess first. She won’t go anywhere without Luca. She would just as soon battle us again as go with us on the promise of her boy. We must capture him first. He’s the carrot for all that she does.”
“Did you have to say ‘carrot’?” Urtzi whined. “I’d kill for some carrots right now. In fresh cream butter? Amazing.”
Dunixi turned this over in his mind. The brains of the operation did not much like it when someone had a better idea.
“Okay. We’ll get him first. But where will they have put him?”
“The dungeon,” Ula answered immediately.
“Or the stable. He’s a stableboy, after all.”
She gestured, sour-faced and annoyed. “Do you see him here?”
“We’re no longer inside. Let’s go in and give them a look.”
Ula rolled her eyes. “Dunixi, go ahead and inspect the stable, but did you learn nothing from our ride with the princes of Pyrenee? Taillefer was told to guard Luca, and that boy’s wit is cruel. I saw him dropping beetles into the fire last night just to hear them pop. He’s not going to release Luca into the stable to work and head to supper.”
Urtzi’s mouth dropped open and she rapped his chin with a quick tap from her knuckles. “We all know you want to eat, Urtzi; you’ve made that abundantly clear without admonishing my choice of descriptive suggestion.”
Dunixi regrouped. “Okay, so we look around the stable, just to check, and then we find guard uniforms, slip into the castle, and head for the dungeon.”
“We have supper in the middle of all that, yes?” Urtzi pressed. “Between the uniforms and the dungeon?”
Neither Dunixi nor Ula responded.
“Yes, good. Let’s do it,” Ula said to the leader, and started moving toward the stable entrance.
Prince Taillefer and Luca were not there, of course. Nobody but Pyrenee’s approximation of Luca was there, spreading oats out for the hungry horses.
Urtzi took a fistful and ate them raw out of spite as Dunixi made one more pass, searching for the mark, and Ula located extra guard uniforms in prepacked saddlebags. She found some dried cherries and almonds in there, too, and slipped them in her pockets before pulling out one pouch and handing it to Urtzi as she gave him a guard vestment.