A Queen of Gilded Horns (A River of Royal Blood #2) - Amanda Joy Page 0,27

village with an inn was a country away.

In the Roune Lands there were few such comforts. No taverns or inns, only armored strongholds and heavily guarded camps and roving bands of thieves and slavers and rocky, lifeless dirt.

Ysai now led one of those bands, though the Tribe did its thieving in the South, in Myre, the country where once they might’ve ruled. They were exiles, long forgotten by their homeland and plotting to seize something greater than any thief had the right to set their eyes upon.

A throne.

There was a tap at the tent flap. Ysai called for whoever it was to enter, teeth already set to grinding.

The opening of the tent offered only scant predawn light. Ysai, always a poor sleeper, usually woke shortly after dawn, but she’d already been up for an hour, poring over her mother’s notes.

Arsa, one of the Elderi, ducked into the tent, bent low, though her horns still scraped the top of the tent, and silently began to pour tea. It was the last of the Myrean mint and bloodberry taken in their most recent run south through the A’Nir.

Arsa sat and took one sip from a battered blue porcelain cup, candlelight flickering over the snowy feathers on her arms, and lifted her chin. The khimaer woman looked very much like a crane, crowned with white antlers, her eyes shaded the red of a sunrise. Her snowfall wings were tipped in black and tucked behind her. “A third missive came just moments ago.”

Ysai’s jaw tightened. Like every Elderi in the Tribe, Arsa did not speak Ysai’s title easily. “Tell me.”

“It is as Moriya reported.” Arsa left off her title again and Ysai’s smirk at the slight caused the woman to twitch. “The capital is truly in turmoil following the King’s death. Our eyes in the Temple confirm the Hunter returned to Ternain with the girl following the King’s murder and both left the city in the night following her nameday—separately. They say the crown is trying to keep news of her departure quiet, but the other”—Arsa’s mouth twisted—“Princess has disappeared.”

The porcelain cup in Ysai’s clawed hand shattered. Silently cursing her temper, she dropped the ruined pieces into a nearby rag and wiped the spilled tea from her hand before asking, “All of our eyes in the capital confirm this?”

Arsa nodded. “The crown is trying to keep it quiet, but apparently several thousand soldiers are searching the country for them.”

Gods damn it. The Hunter had always strained the bonds of his oath—her mother had told her the stories, of how he’d stayed far from the Tribe for the last century, hiding in the magickless country to the west—but this, aiding one of their Princesses, was beyond belief. They should have known he would be too weak to do what was necessary. He must have learned that the girl was half khimaer.

A fact Ysai had only stumbled upon late one night scouring her Mother’s notes on the royal family. That the King was a member of a family of khimaer hidden in Myre was a detail her mother had declined to share with the Elderi. Ysai couldn’t be sure if Moriya had withheld the information from Baccha and the Elderi so that he could discover it himself, or because she wanted nothing to do with the girl.

It did not matter—she had been raised as a human. She was still a Usurper.

Ysai might have considered accepting the girl or, at the very least, using her, but for the fact that she possessed the magick of Raina the First. Blood and marrow magick—violence incarnate.

The first words Ysai read as a child were accounts of the Great War. She knew of Raina’s betrayal, and the slaughter that followed, before she was five. She’d read of horns torn from dead bodies and worn as trophies by human soldiers, and of blood still alive with magick soaking the earth.

Ysai’s dreams had been drenched in that blood in the month since her mother’s death and she made that promise. The thought of another person who possessed blood and marrow magick sitting upon the throne sickened Ysai.

That the Hunter had aided her, just as he’d assisted Raina in her treachery, made her pulse thrum with rage.

Arsa handed Ysai a bone tube, the sort used on messenger birds. “There is more . . . Mother.”

Ysai pulled a rolled length of parchment from the bone, pleased to find the wax sealing it was unbroken. Lately Arsa and the rest of the Elderi had taken .