“Ula—” Urtzi grunted, dropping everything, then headed in after her.
Smoke billowed out for a few tense seconds before they both appeared again, coughing. Ula held a wad of fabric in her hands.
“Get dressed,” Ula ordered, shoving his tunic into Luca’s arms.
Of course. She was right. He shrugged it on, concealing the tattoo, and surveyed the scene.
Every structure was aflame—the house, the barn, the lean-to stable, the fence surrounding the whole damned thing. The stench of burning animal flesh and hair rose to the stars. Horses screaming, a cacophony of goats, chickens, the frantic barking of the farm dogs.
The pair of riders lighting the fence were thundering their way from opposite directions, on a course to meet right in front of the rear door, and their intended targets. The man lighting the cabin rounded the side of the building and met them.
This had been intricately planned.
They’d been smoked out and now stood trapped, hemmed in by fire on all sides, their only escape path blocked by the mounted marauders who crowded before them, torches still aflame. All three wore the sand-blasted canvas and muslin popular in the Torrent, hats pulled down over their eyes, bandanas shoved over their noses.
As Luca stared them down, dagger tight in his grip, he realized this would be his first true fight without Amarande either by his side or as his pure and only motivation. He’d told the truth those moments in the meadow before everything changed.
“Of course I practice—I fight you.”
No reason more, no reason less.
To the stars, Luca wanted nothing more to be on the other side of this moment. Closer to being with her again. He couldn’t lose. Couldn’t let her down. Couldn’t leave her like this.
“I have an idea,” Osana announced, eyes on the bandits as they began to advance with their torches and hard eyes. She shoved King Sendoa’s sword into Luca’s free hand and tagged Urtzi’s arm. “I need your help.”
“Wait—” Ula started, only to be cut off as Osana sprinted away, holding something she’d grabbed from their pile of saved belongings.
“Trust me!” she screamed, without so much as a backward glance.
Urtzi hesitated a moment, looking to Ula, who waved him off, and he chased after Osana, catching up in just a few long strides.
“We saw your face, girl!” the leader screamed toward Osana before she and Urtzi disappeared around the side of the cabin, toward the stable and animal pens. “You can’t hide from the Warlord!”
There was no denying it then. These were the Warlord’s men.
The three bandits did not change the pace of their advance or regroup—facing off against Luca with a sword and dagger, Ula and her trusty curved blade, and Mannah wielding her fire poker, fierce in defense of her hard-won home, now burning to the deadened grass.
“If that was meant to be a diversion it didn’t work,” Luca whispered, when not a one of them peeled off after the pair.
“It’s not a diversion because they know whoyouare,” Ula whispered. “Run, we’ll hold them off.”
“I will not.”
“You can and you will,” she grit out, nudging him with her shoulder.Back toward the side of the burning cabin, where he could dart out front, find a break in the fence, and disappear into the night. Maybe.
He stepped aside. “No. I will not hide. I didn’t come on this journey to hide.”
As they argued, Mannah broke away, all snarl and spit. She advanced on the riders, poker out and pointed straight at the middle one, who had a mean gleam in his eyes and a bandana of Warlord blue. “What is your business here?”
“Everything you fear and everything you expect, old woman,” he snarled. There was something familiar about him to Luca. Hard. Wiry. Pitiless. But perhaps all men scoured by the harsh Torrent winds and sand turned out this way—like the men whom Renard and Taillefer had hired to hunt down Amarande.
“I do not fear you!” Mannah shouted back, poker jutted forward like a spear. “Raiders! Scum! You’ve burned everything of value. What are you going to bring to the Warlord from this? A pile of ash?”
The leader began to laugh, as did his seconds—one scrawny, one stout, both as thorny and stubborn as shoots off a blackberry bramble. Like their leader, there was something familiar about them. “We all know what here is of value, old woman, and it is not you. That boy comes with us.”
Mannah shook her poker at him. “Over my dead body he does.”
The leader caught eyes with his seconds.
