Hours. Several.
Time she couldn’t get back on her way to find Luca. All the information she needed to get to him and the resistance piling in her mind.
Her mother was in communication with the current Warlord, knew Luca’s name, expected the rebels to strike.
Then there was the poisoned water at the Cardenas Scar. How many other places were affected? Would Luca and the entire resistance be poisoned as they prepared to fight the Warlord?
And now there was the accusation of the man at the Warlord’s Inn—that she had last arrived there with a Warlord spy. Could he have meant Osana? If so, the implications of her traveling with Luca could be disastrous. Amarande’s gut didn’t want to believe it, but if blood didn’t matter on the continent of the Sand and Sky, then clearly a few moments on the same side didn’t matter either.
Amarande’s eyes snagged on the prince’s back.
As much as the thought of all the time they’d lost made fear and dread collect in the pit of her recently vacated stomach, there was something else disturbing here. She’d spent hours unconscious with Taillefer nearby, conscious, and in full possession of his faculties. Not a good thing under any circumstance.
Taking inventory, Amarande discovered, as she’d feared, that her boot knife and her sword were missing. “Taillefer, did you—”
“Relax, Princess. Iborrowedyour steel to make my bandages. And to spark the fire—there’s barely any wood down here and most of it is too wet to use anyway.” He turned, revealing that he held her dagger in his hand, two potatoes skewered on the blade, half-roasted over his torch, which he’d staked into the loamy earth. He cocked his head near a pile of rotten sticks he’d collected. “Your sword is over there.”
Moving more quickly than was wise, Amarande limped over to her sword. The Basilican steel felt twice its normal weight in her injured hand, but Amarande gritted her teeth and stowed it away in the scabbard still slung across her back. “I will require my dagger.”
“You are welcome to do the roasting, then.” He gestured at the pile of small, shriveled potatoes beside him. “My blades did not make the journey into this pit of despair with me.”
It was on the tip of her tongue, that this was a waste of time, but as she took a step toward him, another wave of nausea crashed over her, enough that she swooned on her feet—her knees softening, boots shuffling heavily across the soft loam beneath her soles as she steadied herself. Her empty stomach lurched and rolled, her vision blurred, and suddenly her heart was beating far too fast.
Taillefer was correct—she needed sustenance.
After a few careful steps, the princess sank down next to him, recovering her boot knife and starting the job of roasting the potatoes. He plucked the two he’d done first off the blade with what appeared to be sharp shards of pottery, and loaded the knife with two more before handing it back.
Amarande sank her teeth into her potato like it was an apple, the steam rising from its skin to her dirty cheeks. It was old and bland, but possibly the most amazing thing she’d ever tasted. The starch hit quickly, and with every bite, she felt renewed.
After her third tuber, she plucked two more from the pile, put them on the fire, and glanced at the prince. “Where did you find the potatoes?”
“In a stash of terra-cotta pots, over that way.” Taillefer nodded over his shoulder. “By a pair of tunnels. One is caved in; the other appears passable, but I didn’t have time to see where it led after I found the stores. I was worried about you.”
A cache of food and supplies meant people. And, she hoped, the resistance—who else would leave supplies stored underground but people with something to hide? “Then I suppose that’s where we start in looking for a way out.”
“Not until you’ve eaten every potato in that pile. Don’t think for a second I didn’t see you nearly fall over just trying to stand. Eat. Regain your strength. Then we’ll go.”
CHAPTER30
“ITstinks, doesn’t it?” Taillefer asked Amarande once their bellies were full, their legs more sure, and they’d found another stick both dry enough and long enough that the princess could also carry a torch. “Sulfur. Feeds the spring that created the slurry that sucked us down here.”
Amarande held her flame aloft and squinted through the distance, though the light was too weak to see much. This cave was at least three stories high, and the sharp spines of aragonite cave flowers bloomed across what she could see of the ceiling. “The Innkeeper told me that his ‘compost’ would lead to certain death. Good thing he was wrong.”
“Compost? I believe ‘quicksand’ is the technical term,” Taillefer replied, gesturing to their right. “And there are plenty of examples of certain death in that pile—dead meat but not the kind you’d like to eat.”
“Are you sure the tunnels are this way? You aren’t turned around?”
“They are. Just have to move beyond the sulfuric graveyard, first.”
The stench increased until it made her eyes water. Bones littered the sulfuric mire, and farther on appeared to be a solid wall but was, upon further inspection, silt and slurry, stacked on top of itself all the way to the surface. A handful of skulls in various configurations peered out from the layered mass, which shook with each grinding gulp from the earth.
“We survived simply by being lucky. We came down on the very edge of that mass and were heavy enough to fall through and bounce to where we landed. I moved you to more solid ground when I realized you weren’t going to wake.” Taillefer paused, pointedly. “You’re welcome.Anyhow, if we’d been dropped into the sand ten to fifteen feet in the other direction, our skin would be broiled off in that slurry.”
Amarande worked the sequence through in her mind’s eye. Taillefer’s analysis was sound. “The people at the inn knew of the sand but not that it was not equally deadly across its entire surface.”
“Yes. Quite the favor they did us.”
“I suppose so.” She turned away. “If only they had listened to reason.”
