“My king, we arelate,” his mother prodded, not deigning to look back. “She won’t bleed out if she ties the knot herself.”
The king did not answer, instead he simply shook his head a minuscule amount, squeezed Osana’s fingers, and walked away.
CHAPTER29
AMARANDEawoke where the stars could not see.
She blinked into the humid darkness, startled at the realization that death was more temperate than she’d thought it would be. It was not an assortment of chills leading to rigid stiffness, but incandescent heat. On her skin, in her chest, her muscles. Her head throbbed with it, a heartbeat behind the new, searing reality of what it was like to open her eyes.
Perhaps the stars could not see her because she was one with them, wrapped in so much light it appeared onyx dark.
She blinked again and a single light appeared. It hovered in the distance, this ball of illumination. Perhaps a neighboring star. Someone else recently gone from this world.
“Father? Is that you?”
Her voice was dry, the metallic tang of blood at the back of her throat. She tried and failed to swallow it away.
The glow came closer. And closer. Until she could nearly reach out and touch it. Her eyes were drawn to the light, clinging to it like fireflies circling a torch. A spirit, perhaps, the blaze within, as all the starborn priests evangelized.
But then the light had a voice.
“You have the hardest head I’ve ever seen, Princess.”
Not her father.
Taillefer.
Amarande’s mind churned into motion—of coursehewould be the nearest star. He’d died within a breath of her own death. Even the afterlife of the Sand and Sky was brutal.
I should be with Luca. I should be next to Luca in the eternal sky.
But then Taillefer’s pale face, marred with grit and a smear of blood, loomed into her vision, along with the white light of flame. His blue eyes caught the firelight, as vivid as they were alive.
“No surprise given your stubbornness, but a blow like that would’ve killed most men. Yet here you are, blinking as if your brain is still intact. I have yet to see it slide out of your nose, but I still was not convinced you’d open your eyes again.”
Amarande ran a hand over the back of her head, where she’d smacked it on the floor in her cell at the Itspi only days ago. The knot there had subsided under the heaviness of her hair, but now there was a new, bigger bump right above it—the size of the goose eggs Maialen so celebrated upon their arrival to the Itspi kitchens.
A gloved hand appeared in the dead shadow between herself and Taillefer’s face. The light shifted. His already-tattered guard’s tunic was even more shredded than before. He had cut strips of it to bandage up the wounds he had suffered at the jaws of the black wolf.
Amarande accepted his hand and sat up. The blood in her head swept forward in a rush, her eyes automatically squeezed shut as an aching tide hit her temples. Her stomach lurched and she retched—whatever water was left in her system dribbled out of her mouth, narrowly missing her trousers and boots. She dropped Taillefer’s hand and rolled onto her hands and knees, clutching the soft earth until the nausea passed and nothing remained in her system.
Amarande wiped her face on her sleeve and sat back on her haunches. “How long was I out?”
“The first questionIwould’ve asked would’ve been ‘Where are we?’ And the answer is in an underground cavern as big as a dining hall and littered with bones. But to answeryourquestion—hours. Several. I’m not sure how many.” Taillefer shoved something into her palm. “Eat this. You need sustenance.”
She squinted at the oblong object. “Is that… a potato?”
“Yes. Peel it first—scrape to the inner flesh with your nails. Raw potatoes can make you ill enough to vomit again, but the toxin that causes the problem is mostly found in the skin.”
That natural arts knowledge of his, on display, giving her spinning head another rush of nausea. “I’m not going to eat it.”
She tossed it at his face. Taillefer caught it and pressed it back into her palm. “You haven’t eaten in at least a day and you’ve taken a blow to the head. You have to eat.”
Amarande handed it back. “Use your torch to roast it first. Or lendme the torch and I will do it. I would very much not like to chance another round of vomit.”
Taillefer blinked. Clearly he’d partaken of raw potato. “I have underestimated your shrewdness.”
As the prince did as she requested, the princess pushed herself slowly, painfully to her feet. The strength in her legs was missing, limbs wobbly beneath her. That pounding behind her eyes wasn’t dissipating. Her mouth was parched raw. Her injured hand throbbed. Yet all she could think was of the time they had lost.
