Taillefer had the whole map unfurled now. He pointed at something on it and the wind caught the edge, the parchment crinkling in the breeze. Amarande snatched up the corner to silence it. In the process, she took her first real look at the map—and was met with surprise.
This was not just any map of the Sand and Sky. It was the old overlaid with the new—the particulars of the Kingdom of Torrence intercut with the scribbles of more modern landmarks such as the Hand, the single functioning port in the Torrent, dozens of settlements run through with thick, inkyXs. Former settlements—now delineated as fire pits by a small notation.
“That’s my father’s ink work. Everything drawn like the slash of a blade.”
Taillefer nodded and traced a gray line that snaked out from under an intricate depiction of a castle rendered between the gaping jaws of a howling black wolf. The water and cave entry.
Time stopped for Amarande as she pictured Luca slung to Lygia’s back as she ran from the castle in the moments before it was breached and set aflame. Sloshing through the water, against the flow of the tide, eyes frantic in the dark. All gasping breath, pounding heart, sprinting and stumbling, propelled forward by adrenaline and fear.
The image was horrifying—the last-ditch effort of a woman doing everything she could to save a child.
The rest of Luca’s family had been put to the sword, their heads mounted on pikes, surrounded by the gutted bodies of black wolves, the eradication of their house symbolically complete. A whole line and their sigil turned to ash.
“Yes, you’re right,” she whispered.
Amarande blinked hard, tears pricking at her eyes. She was exhausted, famished, and dehydrated, and yet her stomach sank with the intense assurance that she was failing Luca.
What if she’d sent him to his death in the name of power he didn’t want? Via this Warlord, her mother, poison, or even Osana and her loyalties… wherever they might lie?
What if this time death wasn’t a ruse but the truth?
Parchment rustled as Taillefer nudged Amarande, pointing at somelines of text. “If those drawings are your father’s, then perhaps this is his handwriting?”
Wetness blurred her vision, and she pressed the heels of her hands to each eye. It still took her a moment to focus on what he was referencing. He tapped the right edge of the map with a gloved thumb. There, in the margin, were sloping lines of text, written in pieces—a list.
Rebel chain needs forest link.
Warlord vulnerable at Hand—use river? Converge there?
Black gold sale to Indu? Fund horses?
Next to the line about the rebels was some sort of key—one filled-in dot and one empty circle. Amarande’s eyes skimmed the map—they were spread all across the Torrent, and some even in Ardenia and the rest of the standing Sand and Sky kingdoms. Filled-in ones made up the majority and were in several places, while three empty circles sat at the mouth of the forest—the Oiartzun, by the name on the map—where she’d rescued Luca from the pirates and Harea Asps.
The empty circles were clearly the missing link—the filled dots worked in almost an unbroken line in the same way the constellations promised images.
Amarande’s attention was drawn to the eastern quadrant, near the tail end of the Dragon’s Spine—also known as the River of Stone, apparently. It was the area they’d struck out for underground before the scorpions stopped them. In that spot there was a cluster of five filled dots, and several hand-drawn lines leading out from the spine, both north and south.
Her instincts had been right. They needed to find the man with the black wolf for their best chance of locating Luca and the rebels.
“He was planning to attack,” Taillefer whispered, color flooding back into his cheeks. “This map was on top of a stack. Flat, and recently used, not rolled up for storage.”
That hit Amarande like a lightning bolt. The figurines littering the library table—black wolves withWcarved on their sides. Her fingers scrambled for the map’s corners. “Did Father write anything else?”
As quietly as possible, Taillefer reversed the map, revealing the back of it. There, written more neatly with room to work, was another list, carved into the parchment in Sendoa’s knife-slash hand:
L—working with A and K
Tell A first? Or at same time?
K to T after solstice for preparation
Move before equinox
G—capture alive
Amarande read it again and again.
Her father was going to attack for Luca. With Luca.
