The Bridge Kingdom (The Bridge Kingdom #1)(22)
Besides her rooms and Aren’s there were four other bedrooms, the dining room, kitchen, and servants’ quarters. The entire rear side of the home was filled with overstuffed chairs, a variety of games set on the tables, and walls lined with books. She longed to pick them up, but only trailed a finger along the spines before moving on. Every room was filled with windows, but the view was the same from them all: jungle. Beautiful, but utterly devoid of civilization. Maybe this is what Ithicana is like, Lara thought. The bridge, the jungle, and little else.
Or maybe that’s just want they wanted her to think.
Retreating to her rooms, she examined the selection of Ithicanian clothes in the closet, selecting a pair of trousers and a tunic that left her arms bare, as well as a pair of stiff leather boots, and then walked down the hall and out the front door of the house.
Test your limits in a way that won’t make them suspect your capabilities, Serin silently instructed. They expect you to be ignorant, helpless, and indulged. Capitalize upon their mistakes.
Anticipating that she might be followed, Lara started walking. There was a path that lead upward, but instead she chose to follow the spring, knowing that it would eventually deliver her to the sea.
It was only a matter of minutes until she heard the faint tread of someone walking behind her. The crack of a branch. A soft splash of water. Whoever it was had a hunter’s stealth, but she’d learned to tell the difference between sand shifting on the wind and that moving beneath a man’s weight, so catching the errant sounds of pursuit in this jungle was nothing to her.
Noting the signs of several booby traps in the jungle, Lara continued to follow the stream, soon finding herself drenched with rain and sweat, the humidity of the air making her feel like she was breathing water, but still, she had caught sight of neither bridge nor beach. Nor had her follower made any move to interfere.
She rested a hand against a tree trunk and feigned weariness as she stared up, trying and failing to penetrate the canopy and the mist.
Serin had explained in detail what they knew about the bridge. That the majority of the piers were natural towers of rock jutting out of the sea, holding the spans often a hundred or two hundred feet above the water. There were only a few islands onto which the bridge landed, and those were defended by all manner of hazards designed to sink ships. The most central of her goals was to find out how the Ithicanians accessed the bridge along its length, but she needed to find the thing first.
The stream was flowing down an increasingly steep slope, the now cool water pouring over ledges in tiny waterfalls, filling the air with a gentle roar. Holding onto vines and bracing herself on rocks, Lara picked her way down, already dreading the pain of the climb back up.
Then her boot slipped.
The world turned sideways, a blur of green as she tumbled, her elbow knocking painfully against a rock. Then she was falling.
Lara shrieked once, flailing her arms as she struggled to catch hold of a vine. She slammed into a pool of water, the force driving the wind out of her. Water closed over her head, bubbles streaming from her mouth as she kicked and thrashed her arms. Her boots knocked against the bottom, and she bent her knees to kick off . . .
To find herself only waist deep.
“Bloody hell,” Lara snarled, wading to the water’s edge. But before she reached shore, a hiss caught her attention.
Freezing where she stood, Lara scanned her surroundings, eyes landing on the brown and black snake shifting angrily in the underbrush. The creature was longer than she was tall, and it was caught between her and the cliff wall. She took a tentative step back into the water, but her motion only seemed to agitate the creature. This is what she got for not heeding Eli’s warning.
It took a great deal of self-control not to reach for one of the knives belted to her waist, her ears picking up the scuff of boots and a faintly muttered oath. Throwing knives were her specialty, but her follower was at the top of the cliff and the last thing she needed was to be seen using one of her weapons.
The snake reared up, its head eye level with her. Hissing. Angry. Ready to strike. Lara breathed steadily. In and out. Come on, whoever you are, she silently grumbled. Deal with this creature already.
The snake swayed from side to side, and Lara’s nerve began to fray. Her hand closed over her knife, her finger clicking open the case around the hilt.
The snake lunged.
A bow twanged, a black-fletched arrow spiking the creature’s head to the ground. Its body thrashed about violently, then went still. Lara turned.
Aren knelt on the edge of the waterfall she’d so gracelessly toppled off, bow in hand, a quiver full of arrows peeking over his broad shoulders. He straightened. “We have something of a snake problem in Ithicana. Not so bad on this island in particular, but”—he leapt off the edge, landing almost silently next to her—“if she’d sunk her teeth into you, you wouldn’t have been long for this world.”
Lara glanced at the dead snake and its body twitched. Despite herself, she flinched, and she attempted to conceal the motion with a question. “How can you tell it’s female?”
“Size. The males don’t get this big.” Crouching, he jerked the arrow out of the animal’s skull. Wiping blood and bits of scale from the arrowhead, which was three-edged, unlike the barbed broadheads Maridrinians favored, he turned his dark gaze on Lara. “You were supposed to stay in the house.”
She opened her mouth, about to tell him that she’d been given no such instruction, when he added, “Don’t play the fool. You knew what Clara meant.”