Not for the first time Amarande wondered how her mother had managed to vanish completely. Queen Geneva had left in the dead of night, too, or so the story went. Stealing away while King Sendoa was off on the front, leaving her baby in the care of night maids and the hands of the Itspi.
That tendril of anger at Amarande’s father flared again in her empty stomach. For not telling her his plan, just leaving her with a puzzle of laws and the council and the ambitions of many. She was angry at herself, too—for not asking enough questions.
About his succession plan. About her mother’s disappearance. About everything.
But then again, he was the Warrior King. Invincible. Though she worried for him as any daughter would, Sendoa always returned with a scar and a story. The lack of time was not something she’d ever truly feared.
Now it was what she feared the most.
The princess swallowed that fear and pressed on as the sun made its turn for the afternoon, her stomach growling and throat parched. With each passing moment, the trail became more clear, the hoofprints fresher, the winds having less time to disturb them.
She was closing in.
Mira gamely moved ahead on sure feet, trusting herself to navigate the deep wounds scraped across the landscape, brutal skies and wind leaving parts craggy and sunken. The filly climbed nimbly over rocks when it was the best path and pressed on, the unfiltered sunshine hot on her neck. Amarande had been riding for hours and had yet to come to water, but Mira hadn’t taken a misstep, finding a way through anything.
Until the obstacle wasn’t the terrain, but the people and horses upon it.
Not long after yet another view of the road more traveled, three riders came sprinting through a gap ahead, forming a tight V and heading straight for Amarande and Mira.
The princess saw them coming before they even truly appeared, her senses always at the ready, her training at the forefront. She knew when they turned that they were coming for her, not merely carving a path back to the mountains. But Mira didn’t have the training to know that, and she drifted to the side, as if to let them pass. To go around them, and keep working her way forward at her rider’s direction.
But as Mira swerved, the riders swerved, too. Amarande drew high and hard on her reins, and the horse slowed to a stop, albeit reluctantly. As a cloud of copper dust settled over the riders, the princess held tight on her reins, appraising them.
Three horses. Three riders. Luca nowhere in sight.
Either these weren’t the bandits she was looking for or they’d ditched Luca before accosting her. Whoever they were, they stood between her and her best friend and they had to go.
Each of them had kerchiefs pulled over their noses, mottled a strange mixture of pink, from the pounding sands, and white, bleached from the hard summer sun. Their clothes were a mishmash of canvas, camouflage against the landscape, their horses all shades of cider brown like newly poured sagardoa.
The princess knew they expected a girl dressed as she was to politely request that they state their purpose in stopping her. Or maybe to announce who she was in exchange for respect that surely would be given. Or maybe to offer them gold for no trouble, or even to flip it all around and use that gold to gain an escort.
But Amarande just wanted the bastards to move.
“You’re blocking the path.”
The man in the center made it a point to look around. “I see no path. I simply see a girl in a fancy dress out for a ride on a fancy horse in a decidedly un-fancy place.”
“You’re blockingmypath,” Amarande tried again, ripping down her own kerchief so that there was no mistaking exactly what she said. She didn’t yet reach for Egia and Maite, though she knew these men could not mistake the shapes of the pommels peeking out above her shoulders. The blades pressed into her back, and her blood sang to use them. She nearly whispered to them,Not yet.
Though Sendoa always told her to make the first mark, he balanced it with:Hang back and listen for the time to be right.
When one couldn’t strike first, it was best to wait for the perfect opening. Moreover, it was Koldo who was in the forefront of Amarande’s mind now. The king had never known what it was to travel as a woman, of course. He hadn’t experienced that the way a man appraised a woman—even one with steel at her back—was always somethingelse.A sizing up having much more to do with the specifics of the situation: setting, audience, perceived station, vulnerability.
Amarande was the Warrior King’s daughter, yes, but she was also a sixteen-year-old girl riding alone. And even someone as strong as Koldo knew how that felt and what it meant. If a man had a certain lack of respect for women and a certain amount of entitlement in his heart, then another danger would add to the fray.
The leader barked out a single laugh. “Yourpath? This is theTorrent, dearie. Nobody owns anything except the Warlord in this dump.”
This was true. From what she understood, shiny things bought much in the way of favor in the Warlord’s realm. If not from the Warlord himself, from other souls within it, trying to get ahead.
The man inched his horse forward. “But you, mylady,seem to own quite a bit for these parts. Pretty horse. Pretty dress. Saddlebags fat with more than sandy air.”
Beneath her, Mira stirred, looking for a way out, but Amarande would not run. The princess tipped her chin up, defiant.
“I shall give you nothing but my gratitude if you let me pass.”
“I wasn’t asking what you’dgiveme,” the leader said, before nodding to one of the men beside him. “How much do you think we could fetch for those yards of lace? Five years free of tax? A dozen moons in the nicest carriage available, no matter the caravan? Passage on a ship straight off this blasted rock of a continent?”
Amarande didn’t blink. Every educator she’d ever had—her father, Koldo, old Zuzen—told stories of the Torrent filled with men like these. Bandits with aims forged while living under a single law: Survive or die. Of starvation, dehydration, or at the hands of the Warlord as an example. The storied fire pits were not for show.
