Amarande lay back down. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“You haven’t. Not yet. And I believe you won’t. Your love won’t let you.”
The princess closed her eyes.
My love is exactly why I’m giving in.
CHAPTER
40
GENERALKoldo woke with a start, blinking into the gray wisp of a candle gone cold.
Within the space of that blink, the setting came in.
Her camp desk. Her camp chair. Her camp tent. A home away from home for much of her life, common in its shadows.
She’d fallen asleep with her face to a map of the Sand and Sky. Thoughts of fissures, alliances, and greed still smoldering in the dark of her mind along with the wick before her.
Sleep hadn’t been long, but it had been enough that again she dreamed of him.
Sunset hair. Green eyes. Body of a bear though he was an Ardenian tiger, through and through.
Koldo drew in a breath and awakened to something else—the sense that danger hung in the air as sure as the coming day.
The general pulled herself to standing, legs stiff but determined, as she slipped to the entrance of her camp tent. Pulling back the fabric, she peered into the night. The dark was the deep, inky blue of dawn approaching.
The Ardenian camp was quiet, but Koldo had lived long enough—survived enough—to be sure.
Something was amiss.
Whatever it was had woken her when she hadn’t meant to fallasleep to begin with. Her instincts were always razor sharp and never stopped flickering. For that she was thankful.
Vision sharpening, her mind cleared of his face—compartmentalization was one key to her survival. Immediate focus.Beware or be dead.
In one smooth, soundless motion, the general released her sword from its scabbard. It didn’t have a reputation like Sendoa’s twin weapons, but it had served her well enough for some twenty years. It wasn’t sung about like Egia and Maite, but it too had a name—Seme—though no one knew it but Koldo. The smooth Basilican steel was an extension of who she was as much as it was a symbol of all she’d lost.
Who she’d lost.
Koldo stepped out of the tent, the sandy dirt silently falling away under her weight. In two blinks, her vision had adjusted to the light of a moon swathed in clouds, light too weak to ever reach so far as the Torrent. That thread of danger pulled against her skin, as gentle as a spiderweb.
She raised her sword in line with her nose—traditional ox guard stance, her favorite. Every sense was on alert now.
That eyesight of hers caught the corners of every movement and cataloged each.
The scent of embers in the wind was noted, as was the direction from whence it came.
On her tongue, taste working via scent, the cool freshness of the water bubbling through the stream near the camp and the coffee grounds prepared for sunrise.
Every breath counted—hers, her soldiers’, and probably the distant snore of the men from the opposing camps, along with the call and scratch of mountain life.
The air was dry and frigid to the touch, summer forgetting itself until daylight.
Intuition tugged her right, toward where Myrcell’s camp lay past the trees, on the other side of the shared brook. Not that Koldo thought these soldiers better than Basilica’s. Neither set was as prepared or as talented as hers. Neither stood the chance they thought they had. That Domingu and Akil thought they had. She’d told it true when she confirmed to the Royal Council and Amarande that Ardenia would be stretched thin by a multi-front war. But she still had every belief that her tigers would win a fight of any kind, no matter how prolonged or multipronged.
Bear, shark, mountain lion, or the sigil-free bandits of the Warlord, none stood a chance.
With Sendoa gone, she now commanded the greatest army in the Sand and Sky and indeed the world. And though Koldo’s ego was nearly nonexistent, she had no qualms in admitting she was a big reason for the army’s reputation. It was her life’s work, and for it she’d sacrificed much.
