The palomino snorted.
Luca removed his boots from the stirrups, giving Amarande room. She swung up without a hitch. The horse didn’t grumble or kick. Luca looped his arms around the princess’s waist, and they were off yet again.
CHAPTER
36
ANhour later, they were making good time along the dragon’s spine. The shadows now were in their favor, and they shared them with other travelers without consequence. Amarande was again thankful for the extra clothes in the girl’s saddlebag—without the ball gown, wandering eyes didn’t linger so long on her form.
It was a relief, all of it.
Still, Amarande didn’t trust the peace or their luck in happening across the pirates’ horse. She kept searching over her shoulder. Jumping at every irregular shadow. She was tense and anxious, hungry for it to be over. The next leg of the story would be within the vipers’ nest of the Itspi’s towers.
“No one’s following us, Ama,” Luca said, after yet another sweep of her head. “If anything, there’s someone ahead of us—Koldo, Serville,someone,sent looking for you.”
Amarande frowned. She’d filled him in on the posturing at the southern border and how the general had left almost immediately after the funeral. But Koldo was also regent, and that had its own set of expectations, especially after the princess disappeared. The general would likely have had to return to the castle, perhaps personally mount the investigation into the princess’s disappearance. But would she have? In Amarande’s experience, Koldo saw the bigger picture better than anyone in history save for her father.
“What’s more important, locating your runaway princess or managing impending war?”
Luca answered immediately, “You’re the most important, always, Ama.”
A blush crept across her cheeks and she turned enough to drop a kiss on his shoulder. “To you. But to them… peace has to be more important than a princess who can’t even rule unless she’s wed—”
Ferri slowed as the terrain changed. Because here, north of the dragon’s spine, lay a wide pit, scorched black. Embers cold but blowing, the whole bowl was a whirl and puff of ashes, kicked up and reset and kicked up again, over and over, like the sands in an hourglass.
A Torrent fire pit.
Ferri halted altogether.
“Is that…?” Luca started. Amarande nodded so quickly it wasn’t worth it for him to finish the question.
How many times had Amarande feared her father would be tossed into one of these, with only his charred remains returning to the Itspi? She hadn’t actually seen the one that threatened her that first night, only its flames in the too-near distance. But here, in broad daylight, the carnage was a more impressive reminder of power than a head on a pike.
The base of this pit was at least twenty horses across in any direction. This was the aftermath of what Amarande had seen. The princess had yet to share her capture with Luca, but he, as always, met her where she was, the Warlord also on his mind.
“If King Sendoa relished being the protector of the realm… why…” Luca trailed off, words implying criticism of his lifelong benefactor dying on his tongue.
Loving her father as she did, Amarande had no qualms about completing the thought. “Why didn’t he defeat the Warlord and reinstate the Otxoa?”
“Yes. That.”
“I have a theory, but it really is just a theory.”
She felt Luca nod into her back, suggesting she continue.
“I think the Warlord is a woman. And not just any woman—my mother.”
Luca coughed with surprise and then silently ran it all through his mind. Amarande knew he was paging through the same sort of moonless dark that held her memories about this.
Of what Sendoa had said when rehashing the tale of the scar across his face.
Of what Maialen and Abene had shared with him about their own escape from the Torrent and the Warlord’s rule.
Of what those same women told him of his mother and her death the very same night the queen ran away.
Finally, he spoke in his measured, calm way. “Ama, it’s a good theory, it is, but the timing—”
The thunder of many horse hooves thumped through the air, cutting Luca off mid-sentence. The clamor shook the ground around them, going from a tremble to a quake in the space of a breath.
