Luca fiddled with his collar. His chest injury had a similar healing timeline and under far worse conditions than a sickbed or wherever Renard had been kept after the wedding, and yet she’d seen it just the other night, healing well, no blackness or even red irritation to speak of at this point.
“Was there anything else unusual?”
Amarande was nodding before even formulating what she meant to say—every bizarre note of her encounter with Renard spilling one on top of the other as she tried to deduce what might matter as much as the spreading black. “He’s fevered. Like he’d sat so close to a fire he’d singed his clothes, but there were only candles burning.”
“Strange.”
An understatement. Very few men could have survived a strike like that and live to tell. And only under the best care available… which gave Amarande an idea.
“The medikua—she was on the Pyrenee ship, was she not?”
Luca had been been privy to the initial search of Inés’s royal ship after Geneva’s escape and Taillefer’s death, while Amarande was still knocked out after losing far too much blood in one final fight with her mother. “Yes. Inés paid her to travel to Pyrenee with her party after the funeral, ostensibly to help improve, um, her moon cycle ahead of her marriage to Domingu.”
Of course. The original plan, per Renard himself: Geneva would marry Domingu and bear a joint heir before Renard came of age. Or, apparently, kill off Renard with poison like she did Louis-David, if the current king was to be believed. Amarande did not believe much but considering her new understanding of Taillefer before his death, this rang true.
“Perhaps the medikua attended to Renard’s injuries?” Even as the question slipped from her lips Amarande did not want to believe it.
From the tent entrance came the clearing of a throat, then her brother’s voice. “I will fetch the medikua.”
Yet again, her sixth sense was off. Flustered, Amarande threw up a hand. “Ferdinand? Yes, but wait—”
When he turned around, she saw that the anger he’d thrived upon earlier was all burned up—he looked absolutely exhausted. Amarande almost hesitated, but she recognized that need to feel anything other than what was left. It was why she so often sought steel and Luca when overfull with thought or emotion. She could barely sit alone with her own thoughts after Sendoa’s death, and Koldo’s was not more palatable. Ferdinand’s pain was a different shape and something she could not touch. She’d keep him as busy as possible if it would allow him peace. “Did you speak with Osana? Did you learn anything of where Basilica stands when it comes to Geneva?”
Ferdinand’s whole body seemed to slump, his shoulders pulling forward toward his ears as his passive face showed nothing. “Zavier wished me condolences about Koldo but claimed Osana was indisposed with a very complex treatment to her stab wound.”
Amarande muttered, “If she truly needed such a specialized regimen he shouldn’t have forced her to sit all day in the conclave.”
That earned her the slightest flicker of a smirk from her brother. There and gone, but still present in the dryness of his reply. “I will bring the medikua straightaway.”
The task underway, Amarande leaned back against her chair until it surrendered a satisfying crack, and she plunged the heels of her hands against her eyes. A brilliant band of colors swirled against her eyelids, but then as the pressure dissipated, there again was Renard’s stunned face as the knife went in—shock, draining blood, and anger. So much anger.
Amarande opened her eyes. Luca watched her patiently, giving her space to digest, to think, to be. No pressure, no expectation, no ego pressing her into accounting for her thoughts.
The words came and vanished from her tongue, her lips dropping open before pulling up short. Luca waited. Finally, she took one creaky breath and looked him in the eye.
“The medikua is talented, very talented but… I know what I did. Iknowit like it’s a very piece of me. I’ve lived with the weight of what I did for every moment since that blade slipped into his chest. I just cannot believe Renard survived whatIdid to him.”
Amarande’s voice was nearly a whisper when she finished.
The specter of regret still lived in the pit of her belly from the long days during which she’d worried she’d killed Renard in vain—Luca lived through Taillefer’s torture, to be sure—even though it was papered over by the surefire truth that Renard had indeed poisoned herfather. She believed those dying words of Taillefer’s as much as she believed that she’d killed Renard with her own strength and blade.
And now she wasn’t sure what was true.
Any of it?
Suddenly, Luca was beside Amarande, pulling her to her feet. His strong arms wrapped gently around her, careful of her newly mended sutures, hugging her solidly to his chest. Amarande buried her face into his clothes, woodsmoke mingling with the clove oil and honey protecting his healing skin. She felt tight, safe, whole. “Perhaps he’s a ghost.”
Amarande sighed. “I would almost feel better believing that.”
They stayed pressed together like that for so long, dawn could’ve come and Amarande would have believed it. Every bit of air away from Luca felt as if it were teeming with monsters of her own making, created simply because she would not accept the future designed for her by others.
No. That wasn’t fair.
Thishappened because Renard couldn’t wait for his kingdom. Because he decided to take his own fate into his hands by murdering her father with Taillefer’s poison.
It wasn’t her fault.
It was simply the undying patriarchy of the Sand and Sky that made herfeelthat way.
