The smallest of smiles touched Luca’s lips as he trod the path from the arena to the stable. With a little laugh he whispered to himself, “She’s going to kill him.”
It wasn’t funny. Not really. But if the Sand and Sky didn’t change that blasted law, Renard or any other poor bastard who tried to marry Amarande without her approval couldn’t say she didn’t warn him.
And if she did manage to change the law without blood on her hands and became free to rule and marry as she pleased… well, Luca kept the hope in that thought locked far away where it couldn’t annihilate every fiber of his being.
Luca stepped into his stable still dressed in his finest clothes—a hand-me-down cloak, tunic, and trousers from King Sendoa himself, about twenty years and fifty pounds of muscle between himself and the original owner. He strode through the workshop and into his quarters, built off the back of the barn.
Just hours after her father’s death, Amarande had begged, nagged, and ordered him to move into the castle. He’d wanted to say yes. Of course he had. But then who would tend to things here? The horses still needed water, food, shoes, care. And if he didn’t do those things, who would? Luca felt as loyal to the hours he spent here as he did to Amarande, much preferring to earn his keep with hard work rather than with favor.
And so, carefully, he removed the silken clothing and folded it away onto the open shelves and pulled on plain rough-spun work clothes. He had plenty to do before dinner, tending not only to the Itspi’s horses but also to the horses of the men who’d shown up to steal Amarande away.
Her great-grandfather (yes, truly)—King Domingu. The neighbor boy—Prince Renard. The newlywed—King Akil.
Bear. Mountain Lion. Shark.
Again, a smile touched Luca’s lips, because none of them had a chance.
Still, he wouldn’t let their horses suffer. It wasn’t their fault they’d been dragged hundreds of miles into this mess.
He’d start with the purple-and-gold-clad horses of Pyrenee. The soldiers kept theirs close, near the military quarters, but the royal family’s carriage horses made their beds here, in his stable’s guest wing. There were five in all, each of them the color of fresh snow—Pyrenee preferred white horses for official business, and they’d arrived with their undercarriages a ruddy brown from hard travel through the mountains dividing the two kingdoms. Luca had already spent much of the day returning the horses’ coats to their original state.
Usually, all of Luca’s horses received hay, but he’d learned quickly that the high horses of other kingdoms were accustomed to finer things. Horse bread, fresh-cut pasture grass, and, in the case of Pyrenee, oats.
As he finished, Luca realized the cord on the oat bag had gone bald and would need to be replaced—slick rope never knotted tightly. Oats weren’t the price of gold, but they weren’t as easy to find in Ardenia as hay, and he didn’t want to waste them. These horses could be his guests for days before their riders rushed away in failure.
He stepped out of the stable wing meant for guests, fingers still fiddling with the drawstring, the promise of his own dinner on his mind.
His mistake.
He’d only been trained to fight a girl who didn’t want to hurt him.
Luca heard the blow before he felt it, the thick side of his own practice sword cracking him in a wide smack across his back. Tall as he was, the shot sent him off-balance, stumbling forward, one boot dragging a divot in the packed sod. Luca’s hands flew forward, bag of oats and all, but only the bag grazed the dirt, his legs doing enough to keep him from sprawling, face first, on the floor. He immediately tried to rise but was cut down again, this time with a boot to his exposed gut. He fell to the side, rolling onto his back, free hand up in weak defense.
A crush of blood hit all Luca’s senses at once—the sound of it pumping through his hearing, the tang of it on his throat, clinging to any air his bruising lungs were able to capture. Garnet spots slinked across his sight as he opened his eyes to blurry vision.
It was then that Luca felt a sword to his throat—the swooped kind they preferred in the Torrent. Even without full sight he knew what sat across his windpipe, pressing in a curve as deep as the coming crescent moon.
Luca blinked again, and his vision cleared to faces staring down at him. A tall boy, a short boy, and a girl. The tall boy had the tawny brown skin of Myrcell, and sweat-slicked curlshugged the smooth angles of his face. The shorter one had to be from across the Divide: Eritri, most likely, given his features—blunt, broad, and blanched. His hair was so blond it was almost white, eyes a saltwater blue, forehead wide as the sky. The girl, though, she had the burnished skin and honeyed eyes of the Torrent. Like him.
It was the girl who held the blade to his throat, as fierce as anything he’d ever seen, and he couldn’t help but think Amarande would appreciate her if her blade were pointed elsewhere.
The tall boy rapped Luca’s ear with the thin edge of the practice sword. It stung almost more than the pulsing misery of his midsection, front and back. “This can’t be right; he’s of Torrent.”
“Watch your tongue,” the girl snapped, eyes cutting dangerously to the Myrcellian boy. After a nice, hard glance, she turned her attention back to Luca, her lips pulling up at one corner of her mouth. “I’d say general suspicion is correct—look at those cheekbones. What princess is going to turn them down?”
The short boy nodded. “He’s the one. Haul him up. Let’s go.”
The tall one wrapped a mammoth hand around the neck of Luca’s work tunic and used it as a handle to right him to his knees, ripping the fabric in the process. He then bound Luca’s wrists in a length of rope as the shorter boy yanked away the oats—spilling them everywhere as he slung the bag to the girl. She caught the drawstring with a single hand and no comment, stuffing it in a pack slung over her shoulder. Then the girl moved her sword tip to hover directly in line with Luca’s eyes as his equilibrium changed, rotated, reset.
It was then that Luca finally felt he could speak, blood spotting his words, though he couldn’t tell if its place of origin was his chest or his gut.
“Who are you? Where are you taking me?”
“We’re pirates for hire, and you, stableboy, are blackmail,” the short one said. From this perspective he wasn’t actually very short;he just looked that way next to his tall companion. It was clear he was in charge of whatever this was, though Luca was sure the girl could eat him for supper.
“Blackmail?”
The leader boy held up a piece of parchment. The outside was marked in a blunt scrawl:AMARANDE.“Here’s the mail. Now we disappear you away into the black night until your princess takes the hint and marries our guy.”
