The doors plowed open, Koldo leading the way as her ragtag soldiers followed. They’d wormed their way through the hallways and down a flight—the only direct line from the north tower to the library the one they’d taken, apparently.
“Ama!”
Koldo’s call was not much different from that awful day. When she’d thundered toward the meadow, alone and crying. This time, Ferdinand and Osana were at her flanks. Then Luca appeared, sprinting from behind, Ula and Urtzi on his heels.
Amarande caught eyes with Luca.
That was all the opening her mother needed.
Geneva thrust a thumb straight into Amarande’s leg wound, and the princess’s body seized as she cried out, vision fading to white. Her mother shoved Amarande and her blade aside, and scrambled free.
The princess clawed blindly toward where her mother’s body had been. As the white in her vision began edging black, Geneva crashed against the revolving stone door, hitting it hard enough that the whole mechanism began to slide shut—Amarande’s body positioned between the concealed door and the jamb as they hurtled toward each other.
Amarande tried to pull herself away from the colliding walls of stone, but her limbs didn’t listen, all her adrenaline tapped, blood pooling under her body from her leg, arm, somewhere else.
Still, she scrabbled for her fallen dagger and aimed for her mother. First looking to the hidden passageway, but then tracking movementnot there but across the library—atop the gold-upholstered banquette. The five-sigil tapestry peeled aside, dumbwaiter shaft visible.
Then came movement but no clean edges.
And, just as all her senses died out, Amarande wasn’t sure if she’d won or lost. Only that the stars would choose.
EPILOGUE
AWISEpirate once said true love was the most powerful force on earth. Yet that power had been traded for fear at every turn—simpler to wield, to dole out in equal measure. To quantify in grand gestures of gross, undeniable terror.
But in the foothills of Ardenia, fear had no place. The stars had sorted things out.
And at sunset the day after the royal bloodshed in the Itspi, Amarande awoke to streaming mountain light, and the smile of a boy she’d loved since she could form the word.
“Luca?”
“Ama.” His fingers splayed across her cheeks and into her hair. An embrace. He pressed a kiss her to forehead, her nose, her lips. “Thank the stars you’re awake.”
Strong enough to kiss him back, she did so, moving her hands to his hair, keeping Luca where she wanted him until she realized they weren’t alone.
Knowing what Amarande was thinking, Luca pulled away, his weight shifting on the bed—her bed, her chambers, her western sun. She tried to sit up, of course.
“Whoa there, the medikua might have something to say about that.”
Ferdinand.Amarande blinked up at her brother, as he didn’t try to stop her and ended up helping her, moving pillows about for support before bumping into the nightstand while hovering near the headboard.
Beyond where Luca sat, the warmth of his frame crowding her body, were the others.
Koldo, coming to her other side, no uniform on today—simply dressed, her hand pressed to Amarande’s leg. Here, she wasn’t the general. She was the only mother Amarande had known, really.
At the foot of the bed, the others. Ula. Urtzi. Osana. Amarande’s misfits—pirates and orphans and spies turned to their side. Theywere cleaner than she’d ever seen them, rested, too, moved to standing from furniture pulled to her bedside from all corners of her chambers.
Amarande gathered herself for the answer she needed most. “Did we win?”
“We’re still alive.” Ula grinned and nodded. “That might be the definition at this point.”
The raw throb in Amarande’s thigh confirmed that. No pain without life. No life without pain. Such as it was. She read their faces, pausing on Ferdinand. “My mother?”
He swallowed and shook his head.
Gone, then. Again.
Amarande wet her cracking lips. “Taillefer—the ships? The soldiers?”
