“I have a plan, but the timing has to be perfect.”
“Ula—perfect… or what?”
Ula was used to Urtzi bantering about, but the number of questions in this conversation was somewhat staggering when compared to the total sum of queries compiled during their long history together. Urtzi liked following simply because it meant he didn’t have to make decisions.Questionswere a step away from making the choice himself. Apparently, he’d recently learned more than how to be quiet.
“Or,” she answered, “we are either caught or float away in the Divide.”
“I don’t like those odds.”
An opinion, too?A completely inconvenient development considering the timing, but an exciting one that proved that being away from Dunixi had done the big lug a world of good.
“We don’t make the odds—we just have to execute.”
Ula captured his hand in hers—and clearly that turn of events stunned Urtzi right back, because his dark eyes went wide with shock as he stared at their suddenly entwined fingers. “Which means we need to go.Now.”
Ula yanked him in the direction of their hidden horses, and, because he was Urtzi, he followed.
THEhorses went with the grooms easily enough, though the saddlebags—and the supplies within them—stayed with Ula and Urtzi, as they waited for their chance to tail the last person into the tunnel.
As the Warlord’s crew filed in, Ula’s eyes snagged on a man who set himself apart—waiting atop a large flat-top rock. He was grizzled and salt worn, looked to be of Pyrenee besides, and seemed to purposefully distance himself from the others.
“That’ll be the last of them,” she whispered, nodding to Urtzi. They were hovering near the closest stand of trees, horses already being tied up, waiting for this man to turn for the entrance to the tunnel, so they might rush forward and crowd him.
“He’s got a set of keys around his neck,” Urtzi answered, and, by stars, he was right.
Honestly, Ula didn’t have a plan for how to deal with this man if he challenged them in the tunnel, other than an assassin’s smile and a prayer that he wouldn’t be missed.
After the last in the line descended belowground, the man hauled himself up from his spot on the rock and began angling toward the entrance. Again, Ula clutched Urtzi’s hand, and they began to run—the pounding of their feet upon the flat rock outcroppings of the cliff got the man’s attention, and he netted them in his pinched gaze.
“Off in the woods, were you?” he asked as they rushed forth, his well-lined face crinkling from confused to all-too-knowing. Ula’s blood spiked at the man’s apparent glee as his eyes twinkled up to Urtzi’s.
A lover’s tryst. That’s what the old goat assumes.
Ula’s fingers tightened around Urtzi’s as her free hand formed a fist. If she punched this man right now, would it ruin everything?
Urtzi grunted at the man, giving him nothing, and yet the old codger simply laughed something dirty. “Come now, if I had a honey pot like that, I’d want her before the boat barracks gave me an audience, too. But it’s quite a choice to keep this captain waiting, she’s worse than the last one, mind me.”
Everything about Ula’s body was tense and tight. She forced herself to focus on the tunnel entrance, spying ancient stone steps just beyond, a wooden cover camouflaged with stone on one side, sitting beside it. Almost there—yet her legs were leaden and slow with the irresistible pull of drawing her sword, lunging at that stupid, knowing grin, and shutting him up with a perfect thrust or slice.
Ula was concentrating so hard on just moving forward that she didn’t hear the whisper of steel against leather until Urtzi droppedher hand. In a blink, Urtzi had the old man’s spine squeezed against his own chest, one forearm locking him in place while his other hand pointed a dagger straight at the silver beard climbing the old man’s throat. Urtzi’s broad back was to the grooms tending the horses—from their vantage, they couldn’t see anything more than a simple, tight-knit conversation. Urtzi had to bend his chin all the way to his chest to whisper in the smaller man’s ear.
“Apologize to the lady or I’ll slit your throat and stomp every bone in your body to chalk.”
The old man pawed at Urtzi’s arm, his slight form lifted off the ground, boot tips dragging against the stone. When he spoke it was thin and wanting for oxygen. “I. Am. Sorry.”
“Not to me. To her.”
The man’s brown eyes were bulging by the time he wrenched them away from the boy who was about to kill him to Ula. She stood there, watching back with both hands clenched tightly, teeth ground together, her whole body stiff and still as if she’d just been hit by lightning.
“I. Am. Sorry. My. Lady.”
Satisfied, Urtzi dropped the old codger, and he crumpled to his knees, hands immediately clawing at his scruffy neck. Urtzi sheathed his dagger. “Pirates have honor, too, you know.”
The man nodded, clearly afraid of any more infractions.
“Now, in. We’ll follow,” Urtzi ordered, motioning.
“I—I am the lock man.” He gestured to a hovel past the horses, something they had not noticed before, as obscured as it was. “I don’t go. I stay for when the ship docks.”
