The conspicuous: a band of warriors; the Warlord’s caravan crushing down. The furtive: sleeping darts like the one that caught Amarande in the neck and landed her in the Warlord’s captivity; a sudden dagger piercing the most vulnerable target.
The dangers were real and directed at Luca. The ink above his heart all the proof anyone needed—severed heads in bags were for kings; flayed tattoos were for long-lost heirs.
Luca’s horse shifted its gait—Ula’s arm thrown up in a signal.Hold.
Ahead there was a gap in the long line of plateaus—marked on the map as the River of Stone—the sheer faces of the rock formations shifting into nothing but swirling, open wasteland, cinnamon red, and pulsing with waves of heat lifting from the ground up into the cloudless blue of the sky. Luca combed the vertical crags for a sign, fingers already at the lip of his boot, dagger a breath away.
Ula’s arm swung down and across her body, her index and middle fingers out and pointing about a third of the way up the far rock wall astride the gap.
Luca followed the slicing angle of her fingers.
There: A body strung up like a scarecrow, his limbs jammed into crevices in the rock face to keep him in place. A man—with the exact hat and bandana Erfu had donned just before leaving the outpost. They couldn’t see his face. Not from here. But it had to be him.
Luca’s heart lurched with the certainty that he’d sent this man to his death.
“Urtzi,” Luca called, “see if it’s Erfu.”
Urtzi slid from his horse and plucked a dagger from his belt, eyes scanning the rock formations for any movement. Luca drew the ancient Basilican sword at his back—a parting gift from Mannah—as Ula and Osana drew theirs.
Urtzi’s long strides shortened as he carefully stepped within the narrow rock cut—a hundred feet to the top of either plateau but only ten feet or so between one wall and the other. In recounting her journey to Luca, Amarande had called this chain of plateaus the dragon’s spine, and this proved it was more a spine than a stone river—Urtzi wedged himself between one vertebra and another, back pressed to the wall, carefully checking every inch of rock for hidden ambush points.
Luca did not exhale until Urtzi stepped away from the southern-most part of the wall and turned to face the body. Using the heel of his dagger, he tipped the man’s head up, revealing Erfu’s dark and bloated face to those watching below. “Dart in his neck and an assassin’s smile. Slowed him down and then sliced him open. His tunic is torn, too—they checked his tattoo. Carved anXthrough it.”
What had Ula said? There weren’t many of those with paw prints left—too easy to identify.
Osana, who’d been sold to the Warlord and held with Amarande, blinked and looked away. “That’s the Warlord for you. Stars only know how long he’s been like that.”
“He’s stiff as a board,” Urtzi answered. “Probably nabbed him half a day ago, no later.”
“Wait.” Ula squinted at him. “How do you know that?”
Urtzi’s jaw worked. “You may be surprised, but I do listen when you talk.”
“Anything else?” Luca asked. “Footprints? Horse tracks?”
Urtzi spun in a circle, testing the air. He shook his head. “The wind’s running north–south, it’s been roaring through the cut all morning at least. I don’t even see my own footprints anymore. Sand’s covered them.”
Silence descended as Urtzi picked his way back down to the trail.
“Was he left there as a message to us?” Luca asked, bile churning in the back of his windpipe. What would he tell Mannah? That his mere presence had destroyed not only her home but also the man she loved? How does one atone for that? Luca coughed, swallowing. “Or to the resistance in general?”
“Both. Hurts us, hurts them, hurtsanyonewho happens to see him,” Osana answered, her voice low and strained. “The Warlord is all about equal-opportunity fear—the cruelty of the symbolism is the point. ‘If you want to live, don’t be this bastard.’”
Osana wasn’t wrong. That was exactly the Warlord’s game. And exactly the hold they were trying to break on the people of the Torrent. Fear was the price paid for the supposed freedom the Warlord allowed them.
Urtzi swung himself back atop his horse. “Now what?”
Luca rattled his brain for the answer. No tracks, no clues, their guide dead—
“Now you come with us.”
Luca spun his horse around to face the new threat, sword at the ready. His companions took up position around him, weapons drawn. The voice had come from his dagger side—his open side. When his eyes found the speaker, crouched still as stone and watching from several feet away, Luca’s heart stuttered.
A ghost. The man was a ghost. One sent to the stars by Luca’s own hand and a knife, in the shadow of the Hand with Amarande fighting by his side.
Yet here he was, climbing awkwardly to his feet, one side of his body dragging as if partially paralyzed. The man took a halting step toward the mounted group.
At that, Luca found his voice, hoarse as it was. “You’re dead.”
