Page 10 of The Traitor Queen (The Bridge Kingdom 2)

But instead of answering, Lara screamed.

Aren’s eyes snapped open and he tried to sit, but he was bound to the cot beneath him. The room was cast in total blackness, and Lara was screaming, her voice full of pain and terror.

“Lara!” he shouted, fighting against his restraints. “Lara!”

Then the screams cut off, his ears filled instead by the patter of fleeing footsteps. A door opened and shut, then a lamp flared, burning his eyes and revealing Serin’s hooded face. “Good morning, Aren.”

It hadn’t been Lara screaming. Just another of Serin’s mind games. Marshaling his composure, Aren said, “I’ve had better mornings.”

The Magpie smiled. “Two more of your people were caught last night in the sewers beneath the palace—apparently they were unaware of our recently installed security. Care to join me while I give them aproperMaridrinian welcome?”

8

Lara

Lara shieldedher eyes from the blinding glare of the mountain lake, carefully picking out the details of the town built among the trees on its western shore. Over the past week, she’d visited a dozen just like it, cautiously asking questions about a beautiful woman with black hair and ocean-blue eyes.

Sarhina. Her favorite sister. Her closest sister. The sister in whose pocket Lara had deposited her note of explanation moments before she’d poisoned her and the rest.

How certain she’d been in that moment that they’d understand her deception. That they’d wake from their near-dead stupor, find the note, and realize that she’d bought them a chance at life and freedom. That they might not thank her for it, precisely, but would at least realize that it had been the only way for them all to survive.

Marylyn’s fury had shaken that belief to the core.

She’d had the most cause to be angry. Marylyn was the chosen sister—the one intended to be the Queen of Ithicana—and Lara had robbed her of that honor.Or rather the rewards that their father had promised would come with it,she reminded herself, remembering the manic brightness in Marylyn’s eyes when she’d revealed her true motivations.

But perhaps her other sisters had equal cause to hate Lara for what she’d done. Their lives had been spent vying for one position—a position which Marylyn had earned and which Lara had stolen using subterfuge. She’d lied to them all. Poisoned them all. Left them to fight their way out of the Red Desert without camels or supplies. For all she knew, they would take one look at her and slit her throat as punishment.

Sarhina alone was the sister she was certain would forgive her actions.

The brightest of Lara’s sisters, Sarhina was a brutal fighter, grim strategist, and natural-born leader. Yet time and again, she’d score in the middle of the pack when by all rights she should’ve been on top. Average by design, Lara had come to believe, but if any of their masters had suspected her sister’s tactics, they’d never been able to prove it. Sarhina hadn’t been foolish enough to admit that she was sabotaging her own chances at becoming queen, but fears were revealing, as Lara had come to realize.

“They say Ithicana is shrouded in mists so thick one can’t see more than a dozen paces in either direction,” Sarhina had whispered to her in the dark nights in their shared bedroom. “That the jungles are so dense one must carve through them with a blade, and the unwary find themselves caught in branches like a fly in a spiderweb. That once you are on the islands, you never see the sky.”

“Sounds wonderful,” she mumbled. “I could use some respite from the sun.”

“Sounds like a tomb,” Sarhina replied.

Sarhina’s concerns had mattered little at the time, but as Serin had intensified the sisters’ training, making them complicit in one another’s torture, Lara had come to understand Sarhina’s fear. Had watched her sister break down in the pit while the others had rained shovel after shovel of sand on her head, burying her alive. Watched her plead and offer any information in order to extract herself from the situation.

Serin had only thrown his hands up in disgust, screaming at Sarhina that the Ithicanians would bury her alive in truth if she confessed, then ordered her tossed back in the pit to repeat the exercise. Time and again until Sarhina learned to master her terror. To hide it. To compensate for it.

But never to defeat it.

Which was why Lara stood at the highest point in Maridrina: the Kresteck Mountains. The range ran down the eastern coast, craggy and wild, filled with glittering lakes, rushing streams, and the crisp scent of pine. It was thinly populated, mostly hunters and trappers living in isolation in their rough cabins, the few hamlets tucked in valleys and on lakeshores rarely home to more than a hundred people. The range was dangerous to traverse, prone to rockslides, flooding, and in the winter, avalanches, all of which was made worse by the highwaymen who haunted the few established routes running north and south.

A dreadful place in Lara’s opinion, cold and unwelcoming. But the peaks reached up to the sky, the view wide and open for miles and miles around, and in her heart, Lara knew this was where Sarhina had gone.

Tracking her, however, would be quite another matter. In the days before that fateful dinner in the desert oasis, there’d been no opportunity to consider how she might reunite with her sisters in the future—not without revealing her plan. Which was why she was dependent on Sarhina findingher.The other girls knew their father wanted them dead. Quite possibly they knew that the cover Lara had given them had been compromised by Marylyn. Either way, they’d be prepared for pursuit. And would be equally prepared to deal with anyone who came looking for them. Like Lara, all the Veliant sisters were hunters; she needed only spring one of their traps.

And given she’d been tipped off in the last town that there might be a young woman of Sarhina’s description in this place, Lara was certain that she’d finally done just that.

Dismounting, Lara tethered her mountain pony far enough away from the path that he wouldn’t be seen, then started toward the hamlet. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses, and she spotted two men stretching hides over frames to dry, the fur destined to travel through the bridge and eventually be sold to line the cloaks and gloves of Harendellian or Amaridian nobles. Another man, fine of form and stripped to the waist, chopped wood to add to a formidable pile. An old woman crouched near a fire, basting the meat turning on a spit, and behind her, a gaggle of children raced through buildings, their laughter drifting through the trees to reach Lara’s ears.

She circled the town, marking each individual and the weapons they wore as well as the best routes for escape if the situation escalated. The mountainfolk were peaceful enough, but necessity made them both wary of strangers and capable fighters. No one had troubled her yet, but that could change in a heartbeat. And the last thing she needed was word of a woman of her description reaching Serin in Vencia, especially if it was paired with the information that she was searching for women fitting the description of a Veliant princess.

Satisfied she had the lay of the land, Lara took a step toward the town, the story of her search for a lost sister sitting on the tip of her tongue, when the door to one of the homes opened and Sarhina stepped out, a basket under one arm.

Lara froze mid-step as she watched her sister stroll across the common area to the man chopping wood. He paused in his task, wiping sweat from his brow before bending to whisper something in her ear. Sarhina’s laugh spilled through the air and she leaned back, her cloak parting to reveal two marriage knives belted above a swollen belly.

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