The Bridge Kingdom (The Bridge Kingdom, #1)(76)

The sun was too bright, everything a blur.

“I’ll continue, since it seems your education in the desert had some gaps.” Aren’s hazel eyes glinted with anger. They were the only thing she could seem to focus on. “War costs money, believe me, I know. But your father doesn’t have the bridge, so he pays for it with heavy taxes that have crippled Maridrina’s economy. So even when its merchants dock at Southwatch’s open market, they are unable to bid competitively. And so they set sail with what no one else will buy.”

Diseased meat. Rotten grain. Lara closed her eyes. If he was telling the truth, it meant that everything that had been fueling her desire to capture the bridge had been false. And all that would remain to justify the fall of Ithicana was the very thing she’d railed against her entire life: greed.

“I’m not the one who has been lying to you. Not that I expect you to believe me.”

Jor and the others chose that moment to circle back around, and the expression on Aren’s face was enough to wipe the amusement off the older man’s. The boat drew closer, and Aren grabbed the edge, hauling himself in. Once Lara did the same, Aren ordered, “Put up the other sail.”

Jor winced. “That eager to get home?”

“We aren’t going home.”

“Oh? Where to?”

Aren cast a glance at the darkening skies in the east, then turned back around. But it wasn’t Jor his eyes went to.

Lara’s stomach flipped as Aren stared her down. Challenged her. “We’re going to pay a visit to Maridrina.”





26





Lara





That he was willing to risk stepping into enemy territory, that he was willing to bring her—who knew so many of Ithicana’s secrets—into that territory, should’ve convinced Lara that Aren’s words were true. That her father, Serin, and all her masters at the compound were liars.

But it didn’t.

Stories of Ithicana’s villainy had been burned into Lara’s soul. Whispered in her ears all of her life. Chanted like a mantra through hours, days, years of grueling training that had nearly broken her. That had broken many of her half-sisters, sending them, one way or another, to their deaths.

Take the bridge and you will be the savior of Maridrina.

To believe Aren would mean changing that chant to something very different. Take the bridge and you will be the destroyer of a nation. Take the bridge and you will prove yourself your father’s pawn. For that reason, she, like a coward, immediately argued against going.

“We are in the middle of storm season.” Lara pointed at the darkness in the east. “What sort of madman takes to the seas to prove a point?”

“This sort of madman.” Aren pulled the line Lia passed him tight. “Besides, the skies are clear in the direction we’re going. And if the storm does catch us, we are rumored to be very adept sailors.”

“We are in a canoe!” Lara despised the shrillness in her voice. “I fail to see how your skill will come into play in the middle of a typhoon!”

Aren laughed, sitting down on one of the benches. “We’re hardly going to sail into the capital of Maridrina in an Ithicanian vessel.”

“How then?” she demanded. “The bridge?”

Jor snorted and gave Aren a meaningful look. “Better to bypass Southwatch, isn’t it, Your Majesty?”

Aren ignored him, putting his heels up and leaning back against a pack. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Soon enough she was clinging to the edge of the vessel as it skipped across the waves, heeled over so far she was certain a strong gust of wind would capsize them, drowning them in the open sea.

Lara reminded herself to pay attention to where they were going. This is how they infiltrate your homeland, how they spy. Yet as the bridge and its mist faded into the distance and more islands rose up ahead, all she cared to learn was the depths of Serin and her father’s deception.

The Ithicanians dropped one of the sails, the boat easing from its terrifying angle to settle on the sea, and Lara took stock of where Aren had taken her. Columns of rock crusted with green rose out of blue seas so clear that the bottom seemed only an arm’s reach away. Birds filled the air in enormous flocks, some diving into the water only to emerge with a fish clutched in their beaks, which they gulped down before one of their fellows could steal it away. Some of the larger islands had white beaches that beckoned invitingly, and nowhere, nowhere, was there any sign of the defenses that turned the waters around Ithicana’s bridge red with enemy blood.

Lara rose onto her knees to look up as they passed between two towers of limestone. “Do people live here?”

As if to answer her question, when they rounded another island, several fishing boats appeared, the men and women aboard them stopping what they were doing to lift their hands in greeting, many of them calling out to Aren by name.

“Some live here,” he responded slowly, as though the admission cost him something. “But it’s dangerous. If they are attacked, we can’t come to their aid until it’s too late to matter.”

“Are they attacked often?”

“Not since the treaty was signed, which is why more people have settled their families here.”

“Do they leave during War Tides?”