The girl smiled. “Sleeping off his greed.”
“If that’s the case, he may never wake,” Amarande said. She looked to Osana. “Lead us.”
The girl did indeed know the way. A mountain stream had eroded the wall surrounding the Bellringe deep behind the stable. The sliver of missing stone was just large enough for a fit horse to scoot through, and hidden by a weeping boulder. Through the wall and onto the other side and they were in a ravine that had clearly been used as a road. Koldo loomed in Amarande’s mind as they crept out, telling her to catalog every inch under the waning light of the moon.
If Father’s maps didn’t hold this secret route out of the Bellringe and off King’s Crest, she would see to it that it was added. And, if it came to it, used later.
Amarande settled in, Luca’s arms about her waist. She wished for the warmth of his chest at her back, but he kept his distance; the press of any weight against his wound would be too much. Their return to the Itspi would be just as she’d pictured it before they’d been intercepted by Renard—Luca to Medikua Aritza’s workshop first to disinfect and redress his wound. Then to the Royal Council to prepare for what was to come.
The ravine bled out into a mountain pass, where, if it were daytime, they could easily see for miles. But in the pressing dark, all they saw was the flicker of torches on the main road below—winding down from the Bellringe. It was the one they’d taken up to the castle and the one they would need to follow to return to Ardenia.
“The castle has sent a party out looking for us,” Amarande said. The others nodded. “They will alert the camps at the border and no road we take will be safe.”
“Good thing we have a ship,” Urtzi answered.
True, not that it did them any good.
“I’m afraid it can’t help us much if it’s on the other side of the continent, Urtzi,” Luca said in his kind way.
“Luca, did you really believe everything we told you?” Ula asked, her eyes alight.
“Well, I didn’t really believe you had a ship at all, land pirates, but I’m giving Urtzi the benefit of the doubt at the moment.”
In response, Ula held up a small slip of paper. “We have a ship. We have the harbor receipt for the Port of Pyrenee. Which happens to be this way.” Ula pointed to a sliver of trail that went opposite the path that snaked through to the main road and the Pyrenee search party. Then she held out the slip so that Amarande and Luca could read the ink scratch in the moonlight.
It was truly a harbor receipt. Amarande smiled—yes, this was genius. “They can search every inch of these mountains, but they won’t find us if we’re on the water.”
Pyrenee would exhaust itself searching the mountains in vain before regrouping and declaring war—considering the political complications of what Renard was trying to achieve with the wedding, the stakes with the other players in the Sand and Sky in all-out war would be a delicate thing.
The princess pointed her horse for the Port of Pyrenee. “The ship. The water. The Itspi. And then revenge.”
CHAPTER
53
BUT it wasn’t that simple. Of course it wasn’t.
Obtaining the ship wasn’t the problem—Ula’s slip and one diamond from Amarande’s pouch did the trick.
No, it was after all that. By the time they’d loaded the horses, resupplied the food, water, and oats, and shoved out of the harbor, it was past midnight.
Under the stars, the ship, called Gatzal, angled toward the Divide—a waterway with sheer cliffs on either side. On one side, Pyrenee and the continent of the Sand and Sky. The other, Eritri and the mass of endless mountains beyond.
The waters here were so deep they seemed to well from the center of the earth itself, this gash drawn straight through a mountain range, doubly deep as it was tall. As if the stars in their wisdom had plucked up a dagger and carved straight through the face of the world, cleaving out an eye, blade dragging on bone.
Exhaustion hit Luca fast, the pain catching up as his adrenaline fled. The princess and Urtzi led him to the ship’s captain’s quarters. There, safely resting in an actual bed, Amarande undid his dressings and applied clove oil Ula had squirreled away, and he was out in five minutes, resting his head in the princess’s lap as he had done in Naiara’s carriage.
After a few minutes, Amarande gently propped him on a pillow and excused herself to the wash bucket, eager to finally remove Renard’s blood from her dress.
Even when the blood was gone, she knew she’d feel it, the weight of her first kill sinking below the stain to the silk and her skin. If she blinked too long, she could still see the look on Renard’s face when the knifepoint made contact—the shock, the recognition of what could not be undone.
Amarande had only made two passes with the rag, getting nowhere on the golden silk, when Ula appeared at her elbow. The girl’s face was drawn and serious in a way it hadn’t been even when she was fighting for her life. The joy of battle wasn’t there, but instead another thing entirely. Apprehension? Worry? Or perhaps … hope?
“I have something you need to hear.”
Amarande nodded and Ula didn’t hesitate, leaning in, her voice low and flaring with her eyes.
“Princess, believe me when I tell you I do not say this lightly … the ink on Luca’s chest? It’s the sign of the black wolf—the Otxoa.”
The princess stilled—movement, blood, breath.
The five points of ink bled into her vision. She’d always thought it a funny star, poorly drawn on a wiggly babe.
But now the face of the wolf she’d seen on the plateau pushed through, features lining up with the collapsed pentagram. Snout, jawline, ears.
Amarande’s lips parted, but no words escaped.
“I do not share this to raise your hopes, as mine are already to the stars.” Ula’s voice rushed with barely a breath drawn between words. “But there have been rumors for a long while now that the Otxoa had one final son before it all fell apart. No one ever saw the child or could confirm it, but … ink like that has had the same meaning for a thousand years. I believe Luca to be the Otsakumea.”
Something shot through Amarande at the word, her breath catching, as her mind scrabbled at Ula’s words. No. It couldn’t be. Her lips barely formed the words, her eyes shooting from the dark windows of the captain’s quarters back to Ula. This girl she now trusted with her life. “The wolf cub?”
“Yes. Torrence’s rightful king.”
From stillness, Amarande’s body jolted back into working order. Her heart quickened its pace, her head suddenly light. Maybe this was why her father had never healed the Torrent. It wasn’t that her mother was the Warlord—though the woman in the shadows of the Warlord’s camp still stuck in Amarande’s mind—it was that he’d been shielding the rightful ruler of Torrence all these years. Giving him lessons on reading, allowing him to learn to fight. Maybe this too was why he hadn’t worried over changing the laws of succession. Because he believed by the time Amarande was ready to rule, someone she loved like family would be a ruler himself.
The princess felt this like a truth, as tangible as her pounding heart. Her father was wise and never shortsighted.