Amarande rushed out a lie. “No, just thought I might have seen a quail egg. The light and my hunger playing tricks.”
The girl chewed on that. “If there was ever an egg to be found here, a Harea Asp has already claimed it and its mother.”
Amarande stilled. She’d been so distracted by the obvious threats—the people, the terrain, dehydration—that she’d completely discounted the animals lurking here.
Beware or be dead.
It was her father’s rule number one, and she hadn’t applied it. Even after her brush with the black wolf. Quemado Scorpion. Harea Asp. Osana had pointed out two immediate threats in less than a minute and both were as deadly as the men possibly following them. Or as deadly as they could be to each other.
“They like the rare vegetation as much as we do,” Osana added when Amarande didn’t respond.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Amarande grabbed Mira’s reins and realigned herself with her course—through the water, up the other bank, and cutting back into the sun. When the girl followed, sloshing through the meager water, Amarande mounted and then hesitated before kicking Mira into action.
It was dangerous enough that Osana knew her name and title. If she’d been bought and sold within the halls of her own castle, the same could and would be done here. She’d misjudged when she’d shared with the guards. And having a companion she barely knew was another danger.
She looked the girl in the eye, suggestion in her tone. “Are you sure you don’t have somewhere to go?”
Osana pushed her dark hair behind her shoulders. Like Amarande, she wore it loose, letting it blanket her neck from the sun. “We left Basilica in debt, moving our sheep over the mountains.” Into the Torrent. “That lasted a year.”
Amarande’s mouth dropped open, her heart clenching at what must come next. The girl’s words didn’t have the skew of a lie. “The Warlord’s men?”
The girl smiled tightly. “None other. My father sold me off as penance for squatting unapproved.”Penance. Again, that word.Osana continued, her eyes meeting Amarande’s in a heavy way. “But I wasn’t enough, so they murdered him anyway.”
The princess’s heart, already so low, dropped further. Their meager trust had grown in the daylight, to be sure, but it was still fledgling. Discomfort rose in Amarande as she processed this new information. Sharing like this was an invitation. And Amarande had already shared enough. Still, she asked more. “And what of your mother?”
“Somewhere in Basilica—new family, new life.”
Amarande nodded and let the girl follow.
CHAPTER
22
AFEWhours later, the sun high and Mira’s black coat burning to the touch and baking into the silk of the princess’s skirts as she rode bareback, a compound rose above them. A mirage. It must be.
A rambling building of blocked mountain stone, plunked down in a blanket of basin-flat desert terrain. Though she’d yet to see the fabled Hand in person, this house was possibly an even more stark anomaly against the flats of red earth. Almost as amazing, a barrier made of wood—wood!—stood tall in a large, circular wall around it.
“Is this place real?” Osana asked, her voice barely above a dry whisper beneath the cowl she’d made from a ripped scrap of her pant leg.
Amarande tugged away her own cowl, fashioned from her skirt hem. The one she’d made from the kerchief hadn’t been with her when she had awoken in the Warlord’s camp. “I believe so—you knew about the Cardenas Scar but not this?”
Osana pulled down the fabric, licking her lips and shrugging. “My captors took me to the watering hole and called it by name.”
In answer to Osana, Amarande simply tapped Mira forward in approach.
Ten horse lengths from the compound’s entrance was a sign meant to address anyone looking to enter, written in the chicken-scratch equivalent of the etched text found on steel historicalmarkers throughout the standing kingdoms of the Sand and Sky. Only this message was written in what appeared to be blood—human or otherwise, it was a commodity that had been used to paint over and over as the sun bleached the words away.
ONE AT A TIME AND YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE.
Amarande dismounted and tied Mira to the post. She tipped her chin at Osana. “Stay here.”
The girl didn’t protest, and Amarande felt confident she couldn’t steal away Mira without Amarande hearing and preventing her from getting far. Feeling the weight of the girl’s stare against her father’s crossed swords at her back, she tested their modicum of trust and walked away.
As the princess’s boot heel hit the single-plank step leading to the building’s shade portico, a voice came from within. “Remove your weapons before entering.”
Amarande hesitated, her father’s swords pressing into her back.
