Ula rolled her eyes. “You know no more about women than he does.”
“I’ve been with plenty of women,” the tall boy—Urtzi—shot back.
“Lying in bed with a woman is completely different thanknowinga woman.” Ula waved her hands, done. “You both talk about them like they’re inanimate objects.”
“I wake every day to your smug face—are you not a woman?” Urtzi tested Luca’s binds for slippage around the wrists where the ropes got wet.
“I am, and if this princess is anything like me, she’ll castrate you before she kills you.”
Urtzi huffed out a non-answer while using every inch of his lanky arms to deposit Luca on the horse’s back. Like his rider, this horse wasn’t cut out for the sun—a pebbled white gelding whose pink skin shone through his coat.
“Ifshe arrives,” the leader said, mostly to Ula. As if he could get on her good side. Luca didn’t think it possible for him to talk his way out of this. He wondered why she put up with this crew at all. “I’m not questioning the girl’s strength—she’s the Warrior King’s daughter. I’m questioning how much she cares.”
“No, no you’re not,” Luca countered from atop the horse. He was aware that any one of them could knock him off in anger, his arms useless to break his fall, but it was worth it for what he had to say. “The first moment I said that she’d rescue me, you mocked me and insulted her over the basis of her ability, not because you believed she was too busy sipping tea and minding embroidery to come after me.”
The boy from Eritri simply laughed. It was loud and exaggerated, and a few fellow travelers took the time to peer over at their group. This included the Basilican girl, who Luca now saw was tied up just the same as he. Maybe the pirates were right—he wasn’t the only prisoner around. Still, that any of them had been moved by laughter but not by captivity confirmed for Luca all that he’d heard about what had become of his birthplace.
Ula pressed forward, even as Urtzi gamely tied a slip of fabric loosely around Luca’s throat. “Luca has a point. If he’s important enough to kidnap, he’s important enough to save.”
“Maybe I should gag you, too,” the short boy deadpanned.
“If you want to keep both hands, Dunixi, you won’t,” Ula saidwith a smile, but her tone was enough that no sane man would laugh.
Instead, the leader—Dunixi—changed the subject. “Let’s keep moving.”
“Where are we headed?”
Luca didn’t expect an answer. But all three pirates responded in near unison. “To our ship.”
That was not the response Luca had gotten when he’d asked them before. He wondered what had changed. Or maybe nothing had but their tune. “And what will we do when we get there?”
“Sail, of course,” Dunixi said, swinging up onto his horse and lashing Luca’s middle to his own. This close, his skin wasn’t just bright pink—it was burned badly enough that blisters had formed, stretching in looping rings across his skin, all up his neck, crawling beneath the linen he’d applied.
This boy was no sailor.
“I thought you’d been hired to keep me until my princess marries your man?” Luca asked. “If that’s true, why would we need to flee? Wouldn’t you return me home—in whatever state I’m to be in?”
“Ah.” Dunixi wrenched around in the saddle, grinning wide and gap-toothed at Luca. “You’re thinking she’s not coming then?”
“No, I’m asking because if you’re planning to take me on the water, you aren’t expecting for your man to get what he wants,” Luca said, “which means you actually think my princessiscoming and you need to keep me from her.”
Ula cocked a brow. “Luca has a point.”
“Or I think she’s not coming and she’s not marrying our man either.” Dunixi kicked his gelding into gear with more force than necessary. Luca bit back the urge to admonish him for treating the animal in such a way. “Which means you, my friend, are up a creek.”
They left the gag dangling loose around Luca’s neck as the three horses pushed back into the full sun.
CHAPTER
18
ROCKING.
Amarande blinked her eyes open to a violent swaying that was not Mira’s practiced steps. Her vision was nothing but white. The sun’s rays seemed to pry through her skin, burning her throat, lungs, heart.
Again, her eyes closed, the unrelenting heat wrapping around her like a shroud shorn from the stars above. And then the world shriveled to a pinpoint behind her eyes, the heat evaporating, the rocking, her sense of place.
Everything became black.
