“Mira!” the princess screamed over the churning equine mass. It wasn’t a given that she’d be here. But Amarande had to try. They’d been seen—she was most definitely going to call for her girl now.
After a pause that seemed as long as a moon phase, a rustling came from the back corner. Amarande bit her lip and ran in that direction.
And, there, rising from a stiff sleep, was the midnight filly.
Amarande mounted Mira bareback, picked her way through the crowd of horses angling toward the exit, swooped up someone’s reins from a fence post, and took off into the night.
CHAPTER
21
AMARANDEwas in a silent battle to stay awake longer than Osana.
The girls rode side by side through the night, into the dawn, and though they both drooped against their animals, neither dared to stop. The risk of betrayal was too high.
Amarande was certain she herself was leading them, going in the general direction she had been before she’d been captured—to the north and west, though she had no idea where within the great Torrent she’d been taken when she’d been dumped in the Warlord’s camp. Osana didn’t question Amarande about the particulars of where they were headed. Nor did she seem eager to make a turn elsewhere.
The threat presented by company outweighed the positives, even with the small trust they’d built in their escape. The princess was losing time and wasting energy on the girl. This worry only added to the mountain of frustrations that’d grown in the void created when the adrenaline of freedom had bled away.
The frustration that her tracking skills were useless at the moment—no oats, no hoofprints, no pinpricks on the horizon to lend guidance.
The frustration of possible failure. Of losing Luca—to the wilds or to the promise of the blackmail note still pressed to her skin beneath her bodice.
The frustration that she’d come all this way, fought so hard, and that she’d have nothing to show for it but heartache and an empty-handed return to the Itspi, where she’d have to accept Renard’s offer to get Luca back.
Even if it were successful, that in itself felt like defeat.
And who knew if he’d make good on returning Luca in one piece? Who knew if that was ever the intention at all?
All those frustrations wound onto themselves until they were a hard lump at the base of Amarande’s throat. The weight of it all pressed tight on her ribs, already constricted under the stupid stays of the bodice, and tears sparked against her eyes.
The princess tried and failed to clear the lump from her throat but then spoke anyway to Osana, her voice strange to her ears. “The sun is up now—go your own way. Surely you have somewhere to be.”
“There’s water up ahead.”
Amarande didn’t respond other than to scan the horizon again. In the cool blue of the new morning, the red dirt looked the same as it had the day before. Shifting, tugging, blowing. She’d fixed her position against the fuzzy gray of the mountain in the distance—home—and noted the tail end of the rock formation she’d dubbed the dragon’s spine well behind them. She didn’t see the Warlord’s camp. No one trailed them—a small miracle forged by the chaos of their mass escape.
Mostly, this patch of earth was the same as any other, rusted and red and dry as a bone, over and over.
Another mile, and a dark smudge appeared on the horizon. Trees.
The girl was right.
An hour later and they were there, a small creek tinkling up from the ground through an improbable stub of trees.
“The Cardenas Scar,” was all Osana said in explanation as they watered the horses and themselves.
No one else was at the watering hole in this early hour, though signs of a camp hung with fire smoke in the air. Amarande used one of her swords to finally remove the chains from where they cuffed their ankles. After that chore was finished, Osana disappeared to relieve herself behind a tree. Amarande pretended to do the same, though she was so dehydrated it was an impossibility—the water she’d just ingested only replenished what was missing. Still, she needed a moment away from the girl’s eyes to plan for what was to come.
Mira and a tree blocking her movements, Amarande wrenched her necklace out from its position underneath her lace collar and tugged the clasp apart. It had occurred to her somewhere in the endless inky night that if she were truly going to use the necklace to her advantage, she’d need to do so with it in pieces. She couldn’t just haul the thing out and present it, asking someone to choose a diamond the way they would their preferred lemon cake from a platter.
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 stuffedover 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.”
