The Bridge Kingdom (The Bridge Kingdom, #1)(7)

Lara smiled.

“If they won’t allow you to communicate with the outside world, you’ll need to bide your time while you learn their secrets, then escape. Perhaps even fight your way free and return to us with what you’ve learned.”

She nodded, flipping the blades back and forth to get the feel of them. There was no chance of her willingly returning to hand-deliver her invasion strategy. To do so would be a death wish.

After learning her father’s intention to kill her and her sisters at the dinner, Lara had had time to consider why her father wanted the daughters not destined to be queen dead. It was more than a desire to keep his plot a secret until he’d succeeded in taking the bridge. Her father wanted this plot kept secret forever, for if anyone learned of it, his ability to use his other living children as negotiating tools would be negated. No one would ever trust him. Just like he’d never trust her. Which meant if Lara ever returned, successful or not, she too would be silenced.

Her father interrupted her thoughts. “I was there when you girls had your first kills,” he said. “Did you know?”

The blades stilled in her hands as Lara remembered. She and her sisters had been sixteen when the line of chained men had been brought to the compound under Serin’s watchful eye. They were raiders from Valcotta who’d been captured and brought to test the mettle of Maridrina’s warrior princesses. Kill or be killed, Master Erik had told them as they were pushed one by one into the fighting yard. Some of her sisters had hesitated and fallen beneath the raider’s desperate blows. Lara had not. She would never forget the meaty thunk her blade made as it sank into her opponent’s throat from across the yard. The way he stared at her in astonishment before slowly collapsing onto the sand, his lifeblood pooling around him.

“I didn’t know,” she said.

“Knives, as I recall, are your specialty.”

Killing was her specialty.

The carriage was rumbling over cobbled streets, the horses’ hooves making sharp little sounds against the stone. Outside, Lara heard intermittent cheers, and flicking aside the curtain, she tried to smile at the filthy men and women lining the streets, their faces pale from hunger and illness. Worse were the children among them, eyes dull and hopeless, flies buzzing near their eyes and mouths.

“Why don’t you do something for them?” she demanded of her father, whose face was expressionless as he stared out the window.

He turned his azure eyes on her. “Why else do you think I created you?” Then he reached into his pocket and gave her a handful of silver to toss from the window, which she did. She closed her eyes as her impoverished people fought each other for the gleaming metal. She would save them. She would wrest the bridge from Ithicana’s control, and no Maridrinian would go hungry again.

The horses slowed, making their way down the steep switchbacking streets to the harbor below. Where the ship waited to take her to Ithicana.

She tugged aside the curtain to get her first look at the sea, the scent of fish and brine on the air. There were whitecaps on the water, the rise and fall of the waves stealing her attention as her father plucked the knives from her hands to be returned when the time was right.

The carriage pulled through a market that appeared nearly devoid of life, the stalls empty. “Where is everyone?” she asked.

Her father’s face was dark and unreadable. “Waiting for you to open the gates to Ithicana.”

The carriage rolled into the harbor, then came to a stop. There was no ceremony as her father helped her out. The ship awaiting them flew a flag of azure and silver. Maridrina’s colors.

He led her swiftly down the dock and up a gangplank onto the ship. “The crossing to Southwatch takes less than an hour. There are servants waiting to prepare you below.”

Lara cast one backward glance at Vencia, at the sun burning hot and bright above it, then turned her sights on the clouds and mist and darkness that lay across the narrow strait before her. One kingdom to save. One kingdom to destroy.





4





Lara





Lara stood on the ship’s deck, which lurched and bucked like a wild horse, digging her fingernails into the railing, fighting to keep the contents of her stomach from spilling out into the sea. To make matters worse, raised in the desert, she had never learned to swim—a weakness that had already begun to haunt her. Every time the ship heeled over in the heavy wind, her breath caught with the certainty they’d capsize and drown. The only things that distracted her from visions of waves closing over her head were the more certain dangers facing her.

By tonight, she’d be married. She’d be alone in a foreign kingdom with a reputation for the worst sort of cruelty. The wife of a young man who was lord over it all. This was the life she’d been protecting her sisters from, at the sacrifice of her own, and all of it for the sake of her people. But now the consequences of that choice were terrifyingly imminent. Clouds hung low over the white-capped sea, shifting and moving like sentient beasts, but through them, ever so faintly, she could make out the shadow of an island. Ithicana.

Her father joined her at the railing. “Southwatch.”

His travel-stained clothing had been replaced with a pristine white shirt and black coat, his polished sword hanging from a belt decorated with silver and turquoise disks. “Aren keeps a full garrison of soldiers there at all times, and they have catapults and other war machines trained on the ocean, ready to sink any who’d attempt to take the island. There are spikes set into the seafloor to spear any ship that manages to approach any point other than the pier, which is itself rigged with explosives should they feel it has been compromised. The bridge cannot be taken at its mouth.” His jaw tightened. “It’s been tried and tried.”