Dunixi relieved Urtzi of his reins, mounted his horse, and made another announcement as he led the way to the compound’s eastgate. “I’m off watch tonight, folks—I’m spent. Ula, you’re set until midnight. Urtzi, until sunup. Then we push on.”
THEYsettled in a camp on the northeast edge of the property. The key went to a gate to the fence that surrounded them, and then again to their lodging. Somehow, Dunixi had secured them a spot surrounded by a privacy fence tall enough that the horses couldn’t peek over. They lit a fire, feasting on pistachios, dates, and dried meat—taken from Urtzi’s saddlebag, interestingly. Ula fed Luca a handful from her stash before Dunixi caught her.
“No more, Ula. He doesn’t need to be plump, just alive.”
Then the leader draped a wet scrap of linen over his burnt skin and turned over for the night. Urtzi did the same minus the cloth. Within the space of just a few minutes, both boys were snoring. Ula stayed seated upright and awake—on watch.
Luca lay back and attempted to join them in sleep, but his mind was racing. Trying to make sense of these land pirates, where they were headed, and who exactly had come up with the plan to use him to coerce Amarande’s hand to begin with. Moreover, there was the fact that for the first time in his life since his mother left this place with him lashed to her back, he was in the Torrent. He’d thought many times of what it would be like here, fed on stories from the childhoods of Maialen, Abene, and Zuzen, not to mention the more recently wrought tales of King Sendoa and General Koldo.
He lay on his back, watching the stars. The pirates had left the fire going. Luca had thought this strange at first, but after the meal, with the sun fully devoured by the horizon, it was clear why. Because though it was summer, warmth here fled fast when the sun set, the heat evaporating from the parched ground, leaving it nothing but scorched embers, cold and dusty.
The winds picked up in the night, too, howling through the open spaces, between the boney plateaus, winding loose soil into flowing rivers of earth. The fence provided some insulation, but not much. Though he’d grown up in the mountains, Luca never knew summer could be so cool.
“Luca, shut your eyes and dream of your princess.”
Luca could feel his cheeks grow hot with Ula’s quiet suggestion, though in truth he didn’t need to shut his eyes to dream of Amarande. He sat up.
The pirate was sharpening that curved sword of hers, the gentleswish-swishof steel on the blade a complement to Dunixi’s pig-squeal snores. A bound journal and pencil sat half-pulled from her saddlebag, and Luca assumed that she was waiting for him to sleep before writing in it, preferring privacy for whatever she wanted to record. He spied the bald rope of the oat bag, a few fat flakes escaped and clinging loosely to the canvas.Good.
“May I ask you something?” Luca whispered after a few moments of watching her work.
She didn’t say yes. Didn’t say no. Didn’t tell him to shut up. So he continued, mindful of his volume with Dunixi and Urtzi snoring in the shadows.
“Did you grow up there—here,I mean?” He still couldn’t believe he was actually in the Torrent.
Instead of answering, she asked, “Did you?”
“No, I came to Ardenia with my mother as a baby. This is the first I’ve seen of it.”
Ula’s attention shifted to her blade. She held it up close to her face, inspecting its new sharpness. Once satisfied, she spoke. “It’s beautiful. This part. The coast. All of it.”
“I believe you.”
Ula accepted that with a chin tip, eyes so much like his own glued on the firelight. When she spoke again, her voice was barelyabove the exhale of a breath—as if the Warlord himself could hear the shape of her words. “I’m going to get it back.”
“The Torrent?”
“Torrence. That’s its name, you know. The Kingdom of Torrence. Ruled by the Otxoa family for a thousand years.”
Luca nodded. The Otxoa—the Wolf.It was actually a whole clan of them, a royal family ruling just as long as Amarande’s.
“What happened to them? The Otxoa?” Luca knew what the people in Ardenia had told him—that the Warlord rose to power in such an insidious way that by the time the coup physically happened, everything outside the wolf den had already turned. The disease of dissent against the Otxoa was so thick within every city, town, settlement, that by the time warning bells were rung, the people ringing them were the last loyalists to pick off. The Eradication of the Wolf, the Warlord’s people called it. They even destroyed the castle—Otxazulo, rendered to ash and rubble.
He knew all that, and yet he expected Ula to have a different point of view. She did.
“Your kingleft them to rot, that’s what happened.”
This wasn’t the King Sendoa that Luca knew, but he held his tongue and let her continue.
Ula kept her words low and swift, the rumble of pain a tremor beneath it all.
“Your king, exalted protector of the Sand and Sky, found it too difficult to restore order here.” When Luca didn’t balk or go on to defend King Sendoa, she continued. “Oh, he made a show of it in the beginning, when you and I were babes, running for our lives on our parents’ backs, as our towns crumbled and our homes burned. But then he lost his queen and he gave up. Didn’t do anything more than run interference. Kept raiders at bay from the kingdoms ringing the lands the Warlord took but never struck at the root of the problem.”
Luca frowned. King Sendoa had met with the Warlord. That was how he had gotten the scar on his face.
The wind kicked up beyond the fence and Dunixi rolled over in his sleep. When all had settled again, Ula sheathed her sword.
“You know what I think? I thinkyour kingdidn’t think it was worth it, to save the Kingdom of Torrence. So he let a royal family like his disappear into dust. Let the people fall to ash.” Ula’s eyes flashed to Luca’s. The undercurrent of anger in her whisper was matched now with sadness. She didn’t answer when Luca asked about her family and what she’d been through, but clearly none of it was good. His life hadn’t been roses, but his situation at the Itspi had never let him feel lost, displaced, unloved—all the things that Ula didn’t say. “No Ardenian diamonds here. No Pyrenee gold. No Basilican iron or steel, or pearl-rich Myrcellian beaches. Just people cowering beneath the shadow of a tyrant in a place without anything but the forever sun.”
