Satordi couldn’t allow that statement to stand. “Princess, you must marry. This is not up for discussion.”
“My mother married for position andleft.Left my father andmeand never returned.” All three faces behind the table closed up—the Runaway Queen was never spoken of. The king hadn’t allowed it. Amarande speaking of her in front of them trotted a piece of King Sendoa into the room that his advisors never saw. To her surprise, Koldo tensed, too, though she knew all of this and more.
“Though he’d learned to love her, she’d never learned to love him. And it broke his soul to know that she couldn’t bear life with him. He was not enough.Iwas not enough.” Amarande’s voice had become too loud in her own ears. She swallowed and reset, her tone quieter yet still fierce. Sharp. Splitting. “Never mind what her absence did to my childhood, because she taught me something. I will not give anyone my hand without love on both sides of the contract. I refuse to be broken for status or prodded by duty.Ideserve that—Ardeniadeserves that.”
She took a step forward and wiped the contract off the polished table, letting it flutter to the marble tile. “If my father’sfinechoice of a regent is seen as weak, then change the law and let me lead. Marriage can wait.”
Joseba scuttled around the table and lunged for the fallen contract, as if it would lose its validity if it sat discarded too long. Satordi spoke again as soon as the parchment was safe in the councilor’s soft palms. “Your Highness, to amend the law, we must have the approval of the entire union of the Sand and Sky. It can’t simply be changed on a whim.”
“Stars,Satordi! You’ve hadfifteen yearsof a ruler without a wife.Fifteen yearsof knowing a male heir wasn’t in Ardenia’s future.Fifteen yearsto get the union votes and rewrite the laws. Yet you didn’t.”
Yet my father didn’t.
A new tendril of anger snaked up from the pit of Amarande’s stomach, cold water on her flame. She took a deep breath.
“My father’s blood flows in my veins—that’s what is so precious to this kingdom. To this line. To these contracts. I have that blood—what does it matter if I’m a girl? What’s more important? The blood or the law?”
Satordi stuttered, standard answer not getting the strongest start. “The laws of the paternal line were written centuries ago to fortify—”
“‘Fortify’ means to strengthen, does it not? How does this law strengthen the Ardenian position by handing our throne to someone who may have had a hand in murdering our king, rather than delivering it to a ruler of his own blood?”
Amarande let that sit for a moment, watching the council fumble for an answer that didn’t come. “My father commanded the largest army in the Sand and Sky, and you’re saying that, though I am his child, I can’t do so because of my sex? Never mind the fact that my father installeda womanas my regent.”
“Well—”
“Men do not have a monopoly on strength. My father believed that—Koldo was his second-in-command for a reason. And he made sure I knew that—or have you forgotten that my father trained me from the time I could walk to hold a sword, throw a knife, track prey?”
Satordi stiffened. “No one has forgotten that, Princess.”
“Good. Then you know what you’re up against if you want me to agree to this contract or any of the others you’re awaiting. I willalways fight for the future of Ardenia. And I expect this council and its regent to fight, too.”
And with that, Princess Amarande turned on her boot heel—meeting adjourned. She nodded at Koldo, who tipped her chin back, and took for the now-closed doors while leaving the regent and the council with the only words she truly wanted them to remember.
“Change the law.”
CHAPTER
3
THEYdid not change the law.
The contract did not disappear. It gained company. One from each kingdom, as Amarande expected.
Worse, within days the leaders of the other kingdoms of the Sand and Sky arrived, one by one.
Bear, Shark, Mountain Lion—Basilica, Myrcell, Pyrenee.
Each of them owed their crowns to King Sendoa, their sworn protector of the realm. The man who lent his army to quell the Warlord’s raids from deep within the Torrent, to hunt down the pirates who haunted trade routes through the Divide that separated Pyrenee from Eritri, to clear mountain passes clogged with boulders after a hard snow.
All these people who got far more out of their alliance than Sendoa himself, coming to take more—his crown, his land, his legacy.
At least, that was Amarande’s opinion.
She didn’t want to see these people. These brutal, horrible, hungry people.
Not a one was good.
Domingu—the blue-eyed, craggy-faced king of iron-veined Basilica who’d lodged a blade in the back of his own brother fifty years ago for his crown. Amarande had no doubt that he’d kill the mother of his most recent children for a marriage that might buyhim half of the Sand and Sky. His contract promised as much without saying so—that woman was his fifth wife, after all.
