The door clanged shut behind him, the key wrenched in the lock, and then the last of the Otxoa was hauled to his feet by two of the men who had made him king. As they held him, Tala stepped forward.
Even in the dim light, Luca caught the old man’s dark grin. And when he spoke, his words held a different meaning than they had all the times before.
“My Otsakumea, we have been waiting for you.”
CHAPTER 49
RENARDheld his sword in a way Amarande had not seen before—strong and confident.
Like he knew how to use it.
“Ah yes, Amarande, I have killed with this blade, and I won’t hesitate to do it again.”
The queen set her stance, her own sword out and ready. Renard blocked the door, the through-way between the wall and Ferdinand’s cell too thin for her to make it past him without gambling a slice from his blade. Still, she grimaced and gave him exactly the look he clearly hoped for.
Mean. Eager. Deadly.
“You won’t kill me with it.”
Immediately, Renard was on Amarande, pushing her back, back, toward the wall. He had a height and positional advantage, as well as the will to show her that he knew exactly what he was doing. With the sword, with his strategy, with her.
Amarande aimed for his injury, for the skin she knew was black and festering beneath his doublet. And yet Renard’s blade blocked every jab, emeralds and gold and all its other gaudy pieces catching the torchglow in slanting, painful shocks of pure light deflected into her line of sight.
One perfectly timed flash had her blind for less than a second, but it gave him an opening to use swordsmanship he had never shown before.
With that speck of time and that ridiculous blade, Renard cut the thick straps that held her chest plate in. One, two. The whole thing yawned open from one side like a well-oiled door, useless. Worse, the movement and pressure of their blades crashing together had the armor sliding down the side still secured, all the weight of it pressing against the still-healing sutures of her carefully wrapped arm.
Amarande grimaced, and he quirked a brow. Renard could see the bandage still about her hand from Ferdinand’s strike days before, but he didn’t know about her other injuries—and she wasn’t about to tell him.
With one well-timed pivot, she released the chest plate from her body entirely, and it clanged to the stone floor. Now she had no protection other than the thick weave of her Ardenian uniform and her confidence in her own skills.
She’d faced much worse with much less.
Still, Renard seized the opportunity.
He rushed at Amarande, crossing his sword with hers as his weight pinned her against the cell bars with a muffled clang. She gritted her teeth and pushed against his annoyingly sturdy body, her feet scrabbling for purchase as he crowded every inch of her against the bars. Yet still, one boot slid between the vertical rails of metal.
“One foot in the cell is better than one foot in the grave, no, Amarande?” Renard bit out with all the imagined cleverness that he believed he shared with Taillefer.
He did not.
Up close, the new facial injury was less distracting and the rest of the reality of his presentation came through. His skin was sallow. Waxen. As if he hadn’t slept in days. Dark wells hung beneath his broken glacier eyes, but even the blue there waned. Less brilliant, bright, alive.
“You’re dying.”
Something black shifted Renard’s gaze before he chided her with a lie and an insult.
“I am most certainly not. If you want me to die, you’ll have to make sure to actually complete the job this time.”
Renard wanted a reaction from Amarande.
He wouldn’t get it. Instead, she went for a reaction from him.
“I know how you still breathe.”
“Good for you.”
Amarande grimaced a mean grin. “It should’ve been Taillefer who lived. Not you. He had many flaws but at least he had a heart.”
