Actually, yes, she knew this to be true from personal experience.
Amarande tossed up her hands. “That’s true. I’m so disgusted, I’m overcomplicating his next death.”
“It was a poetic idea, Ama—cuts right to the heart of the fact that Renard’s even more two-faced than I imagined.” Ferdinand was in full glower. “I can see exactly how he’s the type of man to want to marry you or kill you. Everything about him is wrong.”
“I appreciate that assessment becausehow in the starscould the rest of them just go on with that meeting like it’s completely normal to have a man presumed deadvoting? I should’ve just stabbed him right there a second time.”
“I’ll stab him now if you like,” Ferdinand deadpanned. “Then perhaps they’ll believe it to have happened.”
Luca threw his arms wide. “We cannot—you cannot, I cannot, Amarande cannot. Nobody is allowed to kill Renard a second time.”
“Why not?” Amarande and Ferdinand asked, their words piling on top of one another into one question.
“Because,” Luca addressed them both, frantic exasperation leeching past his usual calm, “he’s here, he’s alive, and killing him now will mean war. Not just with Pyrenee but with the others, who think we’re out of our minds.”
“Out ofourminds?” Amarande pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes until she could see the starsRenard should be within. “We’re not out of our minds—thatthingis not of this earth. He was dead. We saw him die.”
Luca drew himself in carefully, let the knot at his throat bob, and pinned Amarande directly.
“Did we?”
Was Luca truly asking this? Did the others get to him? Make him question what he saw?
“I did.”
Amarande hoped the certainty in her voice would expunge whatever doubt he had. She stopped pacing and dropped to the nearest cushion, too fidgety for a chair. “I thrust the knife. I saw the realization on his face. His lifeblood sprayed my dress. His body fell to the dais.”
“But did you see himdie?” Luca pushed, offering her something—a mug of water. He’d poured himself a drink and taken care to bring her some as well. He sat next to her. Ferdinand lowered himself to the wooden chair that had been their father’s and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Ama, did you see him take a final breath? Watch his body go rigid? Feel his soul sail to the stars?”
Amarande paged back to that horrible night.
“I told him on the dais ‘I would rather die,’ tossed my ring at the priest, and the bouquet at the guards to buy time, drew the knife I’d hidden in my bodice, and…”
Suddenly she was reading the recognition on Renard’s face—he saw her expression, the blade, and knew exactly what she was about to do.
“And then I stabbed him—upward thrust, as I’d been taught, catching the heart and the lungs in one.” She swallowed. “I withdrew the knife, his body fell, then Inés was yelling, and the guards rushed in. I leapt off the dais and onto Taillefer… and I didn’t see Renard after that.”
“I didn’t see him either.” Luca’s eyes met hers. “I was so focused on saving you.”
Even after everything, that little admission sent Amarande’s heart soaring into her throat. She squeezed his arm and dropped a kiss to his shoulder. Then, the queen stared at the remaining water in her cup as if it held the answers in its depths.
It did not.
“Even if he somehow survived…” A gust of wind tore at the tent, all sides fluttering against the stakes as Amarande’s words fell to the space between them. “How would Inés have convinced her council to move on her behalf if he wasn’t dead? And Taillefer—he believed it and regretted his role in Renard’s death with his whole rotten heart. Taillefer lied about much, but I believe that admission of pain was an honest one. I do.”
Luca sighed. “None of it makes sense.”
Ferdinand crashed his hands together, one fist to a cupped palm,and the chair protested his shift in weight with a pointed crack. “It doesn’t, but thatthingis unnatural, and it must die.”
Amarande concurred but Luca was right. They couldn’t outright kill Renard a second time, especially here and now, and with the union of kingdoms already so set against Amarande, and by extension, Luca. But this problem needed to be addressed before it festered more—stamp it out, burn it out, seal the wound.
“I must speak with Renard.” Amarande was already standing before finishing the sentence, angling toward the tent exit. “Alone—either of you coming with me will only fortify his belief that I need constant male support for any sort of diplomacy.”
Ferdinand’s protest was immediate. “But—”
She cut him off with a useful errand of his own to continue to divert his grief. “Brother, perhaps you can visit Osana, check upon her wounds, and inquire as to if she’s spied any caracaras to her father. We know Geneva and her brother keep in touch, but we don’t know exactly where his loyalties lie currently. I’d imagine it’s quite touch-and-go now that he has an entire kingdom under his control.”
Barely pausing, she turned to Luca—who also very much needed something to do. “Visit your people, deliver the news that Torrence is formally renewed as a standing kingdom of the Sand and Sky. They need to hear it from you, directly.”
