bride.”
There was more to it than that. Karel surveyed the items on the table—baskets, silk, thread, scissors, gilt-edged cards. This had something to do with the secret purpose that was driving the princess. There’s something here I’m missing.
“Yasma, please tell me what’s going on.”
She bit her lip and glanced up at him. “I’m sorry, Karel.”
He stared at the little maid. I could bully it from you. Force it from you. And then he sighed and went back to pacing the salon.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
AHEAD, THE FIR trees pulled back from the road. There was a sunny patch of grass, a brook.
Jaumé nudged the old gray gelding towards the brook. Others had halted here before him—the grass was flattened and muddy.
He and the horse drank, then Jaumé sat in the sun and ate two of the pears he’d scavenged yesterday. Juice dribbled down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
The sunshine made everything seem brighter. He had a knife, a waterskin, a blanket, and a horse, and one pear and three apples left to eat. The curse was falling further behind him. If he just followed the other people on the road, he’d find somewhere safe.
The sunshine and the sound of running water, the sound of the gelding cropping grass, almost lulled him to sleep. Jaumé pushed to his feet and filled the waterskin at the brook. It was too early to stop. They could travel a few more miles before night fell.
When he turned back to the horse, someone else was standing in the glade. A man with a shaggy red beard and mud-stained clothes.
“This your horse, boy?”
Jaumé nodded, hugging the waterskin to his chest.
“I’m taking it.”
Jaumé dropped the waterskin. He fumbled in his pocket for the knife, pulling it out. “No.”
The man grinned. “What you going to do with that thing, boy?”
Jaumé gripped the knife more tightly. His heart thudded in his chest. “Go away.”
The man took a fistful of the gelding’s mane. “Come on, horse.”
Jaumé gulped a deep breath and ran at the man, holding the knife out in front of him. Sunlight glinted off the blade.
The man watched him coming, still grinning. He released the horse’s mane and swung his fist. It struck Jaumé in the face.
Everything went black—and then Jaumé was blinking up at sunlight. The taste of blood filled his mouth. He pushed up on one elbow.
The man glanced back at him from astride the old gray gelding. “Thanks for the horse.”
JAUMÉ TRUDGED ALONG the road, clutching the waterskin, the blanket, the knife. His nose still bled sluggishly. Tears leaked from his eyes.
The rumble of wagon wheels came from behind him. He stepped to one side and hunched his shoulders.
The family in the wagon stared at him as they drove past—a man, his wife, two young boys.
The wagon halted. The man looked back. He had a bald head and a long, curling black beard. “Had some trouble, did you, son?”
Jaumé nodded and wiped his nose, smearing blood on his sleeve.
“How old are you?”
“Eight.”
“Alone?”
Jaumé nodded again.
The man looked at him a moment longer, and then jerked his head. “Get in. We’ll give you a ride to the top of the pass.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THEY SLEPT WRAPPED in blankets and woke to a chilly dawn. Innis huddled in her cloak, eating breakfast as the sky shaded from palest gray to a delicate eggshell blue. They rode following the river, hugging the base of the cliffs, with the desert on their left. As the sun rose higher and the blue of the sky deepened, a northerly wind picked up. Innis no longer needed the hood of Justen’s cloak pulled over her head for warmth, but for protection from wind-blown sand.
“What are those things?” Prince Harkeld asked when they halted for a lunch of hardbread, cheese, and peppery smoked sausages. He pointed at the cliff.
Innis blinked, not seeing anything but sandstone and a few scraggly thorn bushes.
Tomas glanced at the cliff. “A granary.”
“A granary? Here?”
Innis chewed, squinting at the sandstone. The cliffs were pock-marked with holes and caves, but nothing resembling a granary—
And then, as if a veil had suddenly been drawn back from her eyes, she saw them: cavities that had been bricked up. Both the bricks and the crumbling mortar were the same color as the sandstone.
“This used to be fields,” Tomas said, with a sweeping gesture at the desert. “When the grain was harvested, they stored it in caves and bricked them up.”
Innis shook her head. It was impossible to imagine the sand dunes covered