“Well, that explains why you’re in love with her, then,” Marisol said softly. “You’ve always been enthralled by challenges.”
Lara snatched up one of the little glasses and downed the contents, her ears buzzing even as she looked anywhere but at Aren.
Jor coughed loudly, then waved his arms in the air. “We need a round of drinks over here.”
“Perhaps more than one.” Marisol sat at the table, giving the slightest of nods to the musicians. They set aside the stringed instruments, retrieving drums and tambourines, filling the room with rhythm. Young women dressed in bright-colored dresses danced through the tables, the bracelets of bells around their wrists and ankles jingling as their voices accompanied the music. Moments later, the patrons began to clap, the din making it hard for Lara to hear herself think.
Marisol clapped along. “There is no evidence the king is building up his fleet in an effort to fight the Valcottan blockade. Not even any sign that he intends to. I have informants up and down the coast, and not a single shipyard boasts a commission from the crown.”
Lara blinked. This woman was a spy?
“The prices of imports have skyrocketed. Food is limited to what Maridrina can produce itself, which is little given all our farmers have been turned to soldiers, and famine is on the rise in the cities. It’s only expected to worsen.”
Aren clapped along in time to the music. “Amarid isn’t picking up the slack? I would’ve thought they’d be clamoring for the opportunity.”
Marisol shook her head. “Amaridian sailors are crying in every port that the alliance between Ithicana and Maridrina has destroyed their incomes.” Her eyes flicked to Aren. “And now that the alliance isn’t working out as intended, they seem happy for Maridrina to pay the price.”
“Vindictive of them.”
Marisol took a sip from her drink, then nodded. “The support of the Maridrinian people for the conflict with Valcotta had been on the wane for years, because no one believed there was anything to be gained from it. But since the wedding and Valcotta’s subsequent retaliation, favor for all-out war with Valcotta has grown tenfold. Men and boys both are throwing themselves at army recruiters, fancying themselves the saviors of their people, and—” Marisol broke off, casting a quick glance at Lara.
“And?” Aren prompted.
“And there is a growing number of voices suggesting that the alliance of the Fifteen Year Treaty should be broken. That while Maridrina starves, Ithicana continues to profit off trade with Valcotta. That if the Bridge Kingdom were a true ally, they would deny our enemies port at Southwatch.”
Lifting one shoulder, Marisol let it fall. “The concessions Ithicana granted Maridrina haven’t benefited our people in the slightest. But rather than blaming King Silas, they blame Ithicana for the hardship. The people are itching for a fight.”
Maridrina will starve before they ever see the benefit of this treaty. Aren’s words echoed through Lara’s skull. How right he’d been.
The song ended, the dancers faded back to their other posts, and the musicians chose a more subdued song for their next piece. Marisol stood. “I need to get back to work. I’ll have food sent over and rooms made up for you and your crew.”
Her father, Serin . . . all her masters. They’d lied to Lara and her sisters. That in itself was no great revelation—she’d realized that Ithicana’s villainy had been exaggerated and expounded upon in order to turn the girls into fundamentalists with one clear goal: the destruction of Maridrina’s oppressor. But until this precise moment, she had believed that while her father’s methods had been vile, his motivation had been pure. To save Maridrina’s people. To feed them and protect them.
Except Ithicana wasn’t the oppressor. Her father was.
Lara and her sisters hadn’t been isolated in the desert compound for their safety. They hadn’t even been kept there to conceal her father’s plans from Ithicana, not really. It had been to keep Lara and her sisters from the truth. Because if they’d known that their mission was driven not by the need to right a wrong, but by their father’s endless greed, how willing would any of them have been to betray a husband? To tear apart a nation? To see a people slaughtered? Promises and threats and bribes were paltry motivators compared to the fanaticism that had been burned into her and her sisters’ souls.
But for Lara, that fanaticism burned no longer.
27
Aren
“Why are we here?” Jor motioned for one of the girls to bring another round of drinks. “What are we risking wild seas and enemy territory for?”
Pushing his food around on the plate in front of him, Aren didn’t answer. Lara had gone upstairs to their room an hour ago, silent, her face pale. He’d told her to remain there until he returned for her own safety. He had no expectations that she’d listen.
He’d known. Standing in the water with her next to Snake Island, he’d known. All the little peculiarities about his Maridrinian wife, the little things that had struck him as odd, had accumulated until there was no denying it.
Lara was a spy.
The woman he’d goddamned fallen in love with was a spy.
In the early days of their marriage, he’d believed Lara’s apparent disdain for him was driven by her discomfort of being forced into a marriage that she didn’t want. A life she hadn’t chosen. But the shock on her face when he told her that her father had been given the chance to feed his starving people and had bought weapons instead signaled she’d been lied to on top of everything else.
Aren employed enough spies of his own to know the best of them believed that the work they did was for a greater good. The Rat King would be hard-pressed to find a spy who believed Ithicana was the cause of Maridrina’s plight, so he’d created one: a daughter raised in total isolation to implant a false sense of righteousness.
Except now she knew the truth.
“Aren?” Jor’s voice was unconcerned, but Aren had never heard the captain of his guard slip on a pseudonym, particularly that of his king. The older man was worried. And rightly so. Ithicana was caught between a rock and a very hard place.
Before Aren had a chance to answer, one of his crew stepped inside the tavern and nodded once. Aren’s heart sank. “You’re about to find out.”
Outside, his guard reported, “She’s walking up the main boulevard. Gorrick is tailing her.” He handed Aren his bow and quiver.
Aren took the weapons without comment and started up the street, Jor on his heels. Vencia was crowded as always, and it took him a bit of time to find the tall Ithicanian tailing his wife. “Go back,” he muttered to Gorrick once he had Lara in his sights. “We’ll take it from here.”
The man opened his mouth to argue, then saw the expression on Aren’s face, and faded into the crowd.
Lara strode up the center of the street, still wearing her disguise, which meant the drunks and rabble-rousers left her alone. Yet as they tailed her, he wondered how the disguise fooled anyone at all. Every time she turned her head to regard something that had caught her interest, torchlight framed the delicate lines of her face, her full lips, the long column of her neck, the rounded curve of her ass. The slight sway to her step. No Harendellian ship boy he’d ever met walked like that.