Always forward, never back.
Did he truly always look forward and never back? Even when her mother left them? Surely he had a pile of mistakes as large as his victories. Mistakes were the seeds of regrets. Weren’t they?
How could one truly live and not wish for some things to go differently?
Wasn’t that how you became a better leader? A better person? By learning from your mistakes and the residue they left on your soul in the form of regret?
But just as with her father’s plans for her future, for Luca’s future, for all her father had taught her, she was simply left with questions. Questions, piled so high now, they towered over her, closer to her father in the stars than her world on the continent.
The Warlord’s bell clanged across the camp.
The fire drums began.
The princess opened her eyes.
CHAPTER46
ATthe sound of the drums, Luca peered out into the falling night.
He wore the filthy, wide-brimmed hat he’d donned that morning. New tunic and pants, though—all the same sandblasted fabric. Ula’s kerchief was gone, and her usual braids were in place. She’d switched to a different tunic from the one she’d worn while picking up food and surveying the camp. Again, she wore his dagger and he carried her sword. This was necessary to avoid attention, but that didn’t mean Ula appreciated it much. “You are the only man I would let touch that sword without first feeling the power of its blade across your skin.”
“You forget that I’ve had it pointed straight at my heart.”
“Didn’t draw blood.”
“I will treat it kindly,” he assured her, stepping out of the carriage.
“You better,Miguel.”
The drumbeat fell in a relaxed rhythm, a heartbeat to the teeming masses traveling as one under the Warlord’s flag. A city had once stood here of stone and memories, but in only a few hours a fresh one had risen, thousands strong. The sheer vastness of it all was just as impressive as the surprise of a city’s worth of rebels living underground.
It might be that optimism that he wore with his heart on his sleeve, but not-so-deep down, Luca hoped these people would be spared. They’d already given so much to fear, fighting for the person who wielded it against them felt like the cruelest way to die.
No, more cruel still, they would die enveloped in a lie.
The Warlord was a symbol, no more than the one on his chest. But where his tattoo told a long-lost truth, this Warlord would stand in front of the crowd tonight, elevated by power she did not actually possess. This Warlord lied to her people as much as the one who sat beside Ardenia’s throne, pulling strings.
The drumbeat seemed to come faster with each step, the musicians signaling the time was close. Luca and Ula were careful to walkshoulder to shoulder, but as they passed the intersection of each row more bodies flooded into their path, bumping, jostling.
Ula lunged a full stride in front of Luca. Physically blocking his body, fingers hovering above the sheath that held Luca’s dagger. The flow bobbed along, the stench of the day heavy. The sword at his back made for natural space, but Luca hooked a thumb under the leather strap crisscrossing the front of his body, as the most casual measure of security he could offer.
Luca’s heart beat faster in time with the quickening drums. But the pace slowed as the fire pit and the Warlord’s tent beyond it neared—rows upon rows emptying into one of the throughways to the pit.
Within minutes, the crowd’s clip was an excruciating crawl.
Half step at a time, heart pumping as if he were running for his life.
Sweat crowding his temples, Luca searched his periphery for other members of the resistance. But instead he found nothing but a wall of bodies. Men, women, children. Some armed, some not. Most were of Torrent, with the same dark hair and burnished skin he carried, golden eyes common, varying shades of brown, too.
He saw himself in every one of them.
Even if in mere moments any one of them might try to kill him.
Luca’s height gave him little advantage here, so many of these men grown like the trees of the Oiartzun Forest, bone thin and always reaching toward the sky. Every bit of energy diverted toward the sun, rather than toward filling out. Yet he could see more than Ula, who plowed forward, eye level with the diaper end of a toddler, strapped carefully to his mother’s back. The golden spire of the Warlord’s tent was ahead and to the extreme right.
“Sera,” he said, tugging Ula’s tunic for her attention, the drums loud enough this close that it felt as if they’d originated within his person. “Head right at the next opportunity, would you?”
For several minutes, one staccato step at a time, they inched closer to the fire pit. When the path opened to a large ring around the pit, it felt as if they’d left behind a creek for a delta, plunging into the open ocean, room to breathe, yet the quarters still close.
