The Bridge Kingdom (The Bridge Kingdom, #1)(81)

“And?” Aren prompted.

“And there is a growing number of voices suggesting that the alliance of the Fifteen Year Treaty should be broken. That while Maridrina starves, Ithicana continues to profit off trade with Valcotta. That if the Bridge Kingdom were a true ally, they would deny our enemies port at Southwatch.”

Lifting one shoulder, Marisol let it fall. “The concessions Ithicana granted Maridrina haven’t benefited our people in the slightest. But rather than blaming King Silas, they blame Ithicana for the hardship. The people are itching for a fight.”

Maridrina will starve before they ever see the benefit of this treaty. Aren’s words echoed through Lara’s skull. How right he’d been.

The song ended, the dancers faded back to their other posts, and the musicians chose a more subdued song for their next piece. Marisol stood. “I need to get back to work. I’ll have food sent over and rooms made up for you and your crew.”

Her father, Serin . . . all her masters. They’d lied to Lara and her sisters. That in itself was no great revelation—she’d realized that Ithicana’s villainy had been exaggerated and expounded upon in order to turn the girls into fundamentalists with one clear goal: the destruction of Maridrina’s oppressor. But until this precise moment, she had believed that while her father’s methods had been vile, his motivation had been pure. To save Maridrina’s people. To feed them and protect them.

Except Ithicana wasn’t the oppressor. Her father was.

Lara and her sisters hadn’t been isolated in the desert compound for their safety. They hadn’t even been kept there to conceal her father’s plans from Ithicana, not really. It had been to keep Lara and her sisters from the truth. Because if they’d known that their mission was driven not by the need to right a wrong, but by their father’s endless greed, how willing would any of them have been to betray a husband? To tear apart a nation? To see a people slaughtered? Promises and threats and bribes were paltry motivators compared to the fanaticism that had been burned into her and her sisters’ souls.

But for Lara, that fanaticism burned no longer.





27





Aren





“Why are we here?” Jor motioned for one of the girls to bring another round of drinks. “What are we risking wild seas and enemy territory for?”

Pushing his food around on the plate in front of him, Aren didn’t answer. Lara had gone upstairs to their room an hour ago, silent, her face pale. He’d told her to remain there until he returned for her own safety. He had no expectations that she’d listen.

He’d known. Standing in the water with her next to Snake Island, he’d known. All the little peculiarities about his Maridrinian wife, the little things that had struck him as odd, had accumulated until there was no denying it.

Lara was a spy.

The woman he’d goddamned fallen in love with was a spy.

In the early days of their marriage, he’d believed Lara’s apparent disdain for him was driven by her discomfort of being forced into a marriage that she didn’t want. A life she hadn’t chosen. But the shock on her face when he told her that her father had been given the chance to feed his starving people and had bought weapons instead signaled she’d been lied to on top of everything else.

Aren employed enough spies of his own to know the best of them believed that the work they did was for a greater good. The Rat King would be hard-pressed to find a spy who believed Ithicana was the cause of Maridrina’s plight, so he’d created one: a daughter raised in total isolation to implant a false sense of righteousness.

Except now she knew the truth.

“Aren?” Jor’s voice was unconcerned, but Aren had never heard the captain of his guard slip on a pseudonym, particularly that of his king. The older man was worried. And rightly so. Ithicana was caught between a rock and a very hard place.

Before Aren had a chance to answer, one of his crew stepped inside the tavern and nodded once. Aren’s heart sank. “You’re about to find out.”

Outside, his guard reported, “She’s walking up the main boulevard. Gorrick is tailing her.” He handed Aren his bow and quiver.

Aren took the weapons without comment and started up the street, Jor on his heels. Vencia was crowded as always, and it took him a bit of time to find the tall Ithicanian tailing his wife. “Go back,” he muttered to Gorrick once he had Lara in his sights. “We’ll take it from here.”

The man opened his mouth to argue, then saw the expression on Aren’s face, and faded into the crowd.

Lara strode up the center of the street, still wearing her disguise, which meant the drunks and rabble-rousers left her alone. Yet as they tailed her, he wondered how the disguise fooled anyone at all. Every time she turned her head to regard something that had caught her interest, torchlight framed the delicate lines of her face, her full lips, the long column of her neck, the rounded curve of her ass. The slight sway to her step. No Harendellian ship boy he’d ever met walked like that.

She was so painfully beautiful, and even knowing that she’d used it against him didn’t lessen how powerfully he was drawn to her.

He silently pleaded: Please let me be wrong about what you intend to do.

But there was no denying the route Lara was taking, up the switchback streets in the direction of her father’s palace, that blue and bronze testament to his hubris and greed.