The Rebel Prince (The Season Series #3)

Chapter 27

We spent nearly a week crossing plains, the days bleeding into one another in a haze of heat and hissing grasses. Saddlesore and sunburnt, my daily prayers for clouds went unanswered, the blazing sun cutting across the horizon each morning. There was no reprieve even after it had set, my evenings dedicated to testing whether Dulciana's poison still flooded my veins in an attempt to wean me from the antidote.

I was not alone in my suffering, Frederico seated across from me while Beatriz and Rafael poked and prodded us to test whether out fingers were going numb or not. The crown prince had returned to his silent, brooding self, his outburst at the inn seeming to have been brought on by the catastrophic news from Relizia. He remained cryptic and vague whenever I attempted to strike up a conversation about where we were headed or what his plans were.

Rafael did not approach me again, nor did either of his uncles, serving only to confirm my suspicions that my spying had gotten me ousted from the prince's inner circle. But I wasn't worried, not with the way things were going. Excluded though I was, it was easy enough to read the body language of Rafael's uncles, to notice the tense way Frederico held his shoulders whenever they approached, to overhear the other men grumbling about why we were headed away from the safety of the Carvalho lands.

Three days of weaning and I was free of the antidote, though it was no small annoyance that my fingers had always been the first to tingle, earning me a hasty dose of the foul antidote and a frustrated sigh from Beatriz. She'd kept dosing her brother as well, despite his protests that he felt fine. Had I been in her shoes, I would likely have forced it down his throat for at least another week, just to be sure he wouldn't fall asleep and never wake up.

For those three nights, while we sat huddled together around the fire, the rest of the camp quiet around us, Dulciana's name floated unsaid between us. From the poison she'd slipped into our veins to the fact we were still scouting ahead and behind, wary of royal soldiers, and the inconvenient way we'd avoided main roads for most of our journey, the eldest Ardalonian royal haunted us. Rafael mostly, it seemed, the way he tended to take his leave whenever Beatriz was forced to hand over more vials of antidote for us. I was haunted by the vision of his dying brother and his pregnant wife and I'd barely known them. I couldn't imagine what Rafael was going through, especially with his uncles breathing down his neck about Frederico's secretive form of leadership.

I finally identified the outlet for Rafael's emotions the first evening I was able to fall asleep without the antidote clouding my mind with fatigue. I slept fitfully, awakening with a start before the sun had so much as crested the horizon. Sounds of brawling, the thud of flesh connecting with flesh and the resulting grunts of effort and pain, were muffled in the pre-dawn air. I scoured the relative darkness, scrabbling free from my bedroll and searching for something to use as a weapon when my confused, sleep-deprived eyes settled upon the source of the disturbance.

Beyond the sparse trees of our camp, Rafael was pummelling Beatriz. Or, more accurately, he was attempting to. She blocked his blows with hands wrapped in broad swaths of cloth as padding, dodging and weaving around him while he muttered and grunted. I watched them spar, admiring the way she used her lithe speed against Rafael's brute strength.

Freed from the grip of the antidote, the sounds of their sparring woke me every morning after that. On my fourth antidote-free morning, when the combination of my sunburnt skin and a wild bird that had decided to crow the dawn hours before it was due kept me from my sleep, I dared to saunter over to them. Rafael glanced my way, which only earned him a shot to the ribs from Beatriz. After that, the pair of them thoroughly ignored me when I watched them spar each morning.

They alternated between fists and makeshift weapons, sticks they used as swords or staffs, longer ones they jabbed like spears. Some mornings, others from our group would join them, not at all hesitant to dole out blows to Beatriz, even though she was a woman. Few landed thanks to the fleetness of her feet and her dancelike evasive maneuvers, but not a single one of her sparring partners ever pulled their punches.