Encrypted (47 page)

Rias stopped a few feet from him. “Yes.”

Sweat dripped down the sides of Sicarius’s
dust-streaked face and dampened his pale hair. For the first time,
he seemed uncertain, frazzled. Young. “Why?”

“
I couldn’t let him have
those weapons. There’s no honor in destroying one’s enemies like
that. Nobody should have that kind of power.”

“
That wasn’t for you to
decide.”

“
Yes, it was. Sometimes
the only person capable of such a decision is someone who stands on
the outside, someone who has nothing left to lose, nothing to gain,
by the outcome.”

“
Nothing to gain?”
Sicarius asked. “You could have had your life back, your lands.”
The faintest hint of longing entered his voice. “You could have
been a hero again.”

Tikaya lowered the bow as it dawned on her
that Sicarius had yet to point the dagger at Rias. Not here and not
at any point since he had shown up.

“
That’s never been a goal
of mine,” Rias said. “The definition of a hero changes depending on
the needs of the person with the dictionary. And of late I’ve
become more aware how much being a hero to the empire means being a
war criminal to the rest of the world.” Rias smiled sadly at Tikaya
before turning back to Sicarius. “For twenty years, I served
Turgonia. I think it’s time now to see if I can serve the
world.”

“
I see,” Sicarius said,
and Tikaya had a hard time telling if he truly did or
not.

Rias unsheathed a dagger, flipped it in his
hand, and held it hilt-first toward Sicarius. It was utterly black,
one of the tools they had gathered for working on the cubes. The
keen edge would probably never dull.

Sicarius considered it for a long moment
before accepting it. Peace offering, Tikaya guessed.

“
Are you returning with
Bocrest and the others?” Rias asked.

“
Yes,” Sicarius
said.

“
Parkonis is no threat to
the empire. Will you see to it that he escapes when the ship docks
in Port Sakrent?”

Tikaya’s eyes widened, not in surprise that
Rias would care enough to make the request, but that he was asking
Sicarius for a favor. After they had defeated him.

“
If that is your wish,”
Sicarius said, stunning Tikaya even more.

The kid was going to be in trouble already
for not completing his mission, for letting Rias go. Earlier, she
had been thinking of shooting him, but now she found herself hoping
the emperor had invested too much in his education to dispose of
him over a failure.

“
Thank you,” Rias said.
“And one last request: will you relay a message to the emperor for
me?”

Sicarius tilted his head.

“
Though I may never see
them again, I have family and friends in Turgonia. It is not my
intention to make trouble for the empire. But I want him to know
that if he bothers them or—” Rias angled toward Tikaya, directing
Sicarius’s eyes to her, “—if he sends anyone after her or her
family, I
will
become trouble.”

Tikaya thought she detected bleakness in the
assassin’s usual mask. Yes, all Fleet Admiral Starcrest would have
to do to make the emperor’s life unpleasant would be to show up on
the Nurian Chief’s threshold, offering to help war against his
former nation.

“
I will tell him,”
Sicarius said.

“
Thank you,” Rias said
again, and he put a hand on Sicarius’s shoulder. “You would have
made a good officer.”

“
Not the road fate paved
for me,” Sicarius said, but something in the soft exhale that
followed his words made Tikaya wonder if he wished things were
different.

EPILOGUE

As the light faded from the mountains, Rias
placed the last block of snow on the top of the igloo. There was no
wood to make a fire, though a kerosene lantern provided a pool of
light.

He stepped back, brushed off his gloves, and
quirked an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

It had taken two days to find a “back door”
out of the tunnels, and it had brought them out above the tree line
with only a couple hours of daylight remaining. Icy wind gusted
along the ridge, and the first stars glittered in the clear sky.
The night would be long and cold, very cold. Though she had helped
build it, Tikaya eyed the igloo dubiously.

“
You’re sure we won’t
freeze to death?” she asked.

They had enough gear, Rias assured her, to
make it out of the mountains and to the nearest town. Still, the
lack of firewood and the plummeting temperature made her nervous
for this first night.

Rias flattened his hand on his chest. “Are
you questioning my engineering skills?”

“
No, I’m sure it’s
structurally stable. I’m questioning the wisdom of sleeping inside
a box of snow.”

He chuckled, ambled over, and kissed her on
the forehead. “Snow is insulating, my dear. Once our body heat
warms up the igloo, you’ll be able to sleep naked if you want.”

“
Sleep naked,
huh?”

His eyes twinkled. “The sleeping part is
optional.”

A distant boom echoed through the mountains.
The marines had apparently found a different way out and were
following their orders to seal the tunnels. She hoped they were
treating Parkonis well. Leaving him felt like a betrayal, but the
reality was he would probably make it home sooner and less
eventfully than she. And though Sicarius ranked at the top of her
list of People She Never Wanted to Meet Again, Rias trusted him to
keep his word, and she trusted Rias.

She wished she had been able to keep her
word to Agarik. Leaving him there to be incinerated by that
machine... Another betrayal. She wondered what the marines would
tell his family. If he even had family. It shamed her that a man
had given his life to save hers and she knew so little about
him.

Rias shoved their weapons and gear through
the igloo’s low entrance, then belly-crawled after. Tikaya grabbed
the lantern and managed to get snow down her pants following him.
She hissed in frustration as she dug it out in the tiny confines.
She could not wait to walk again on a tropical beach.

Inside, there was room enough to lie down if
one did not straighten too many limbs. Rias shoved a rucksack in
front of the tunnel, leaving them entombed with only a few air
holes. The snowy walls gleamed next to the lantern. The single
flame brightened the space surprisingly well.

Tikaya lay down, head propped against her
pack. “Not bad.”

“
Easy,” Rias said, “your
lavish praise will inflate my ego.”

Tikaya pulled him down beside her, hoping to
shake the gloomy mood that shrouded her. “I’d rather inflate other
things.”

“
I’m always amenable to
that.”

She slid her arms inside his parka. If body
heat was the way to warm up an igloo, then she was all for
hastening that process along.

Sometime later, and with fewer clothes on,
she asked, “How did you know Sicarius would let us go?”

“
That was always my plan,”
Rias murmured, his lips brushing her ear.

Tikaya chuckled. She lay snuggled in his
arms “And how did you know he would go along with your plan?
Especially after we betrayed him and destroyed the weapons before
his eyes.”

“
I read him.”

“
You
read
him? The kid emoted less than a
rock.”

For a moment, Rias did not answer, and she
wondered if she had offended him. But, as she formed an apology, he
spoke, his tone somewhere between amusement and bemusement.

“
What do you think a
military strategist does?”

An image filled her mind: Rias, leaning over
a map-filled table surrounded by his officers. They pushed
miniature battleships back and forth while debating numbers of
troops, cannons, practitioners, and the like. Then she realized
those battleships and troops were commanded by people. People he
had never met face-to-face but that he had to analyze and outthink.
She thought of the time Rias had spent working with Sicarius on the
trebuchet, talking to him when no one else did, treating him like a
promising young officer. As worldly and educated as the assassin
seemed, he was still a seventeen-year-old boy, one who had
doubtlessly grown up hearing of Rias’s exploits. Whether he showed
it or not, Sicarius must have felt a little hero worship for the
distinguished veteran. Tikaya smirked. All that time, she had
thought Rias was succumbing to his fate. He must have seen Sicarius
as the one person he could not escape or physically force his way
past, and the one person he needed to befriend.

“
I see now,” Tikaya said.
“I was being obtuse. Military strategist isn’t a career option
where I grew up.”

“
Sounds like a lovely
place.”

“
Yes...about that.” She
had told Rias she would follow him anywhere, and she would,
but—

“
You need to go home and
let your family know you’re safe,” he said.

“
Just for a week or two.
Do you want to come or...” When she had learned his name, she told
him he would never be welcome on her island, and she suspected that
true, at least not until people’s memories of the war faded, but if
he had saved the president from assassination, surely Rias could
finagle visitation rights. The president owed her too. He had said
as much after her decryption work proved so valuable. But maybe she
was being presumptuous. “Or do you need to visit your own family?
Let them know you’re alive?”

“
I’ll write them a letter
from some distant port. The emperor will be irked when he finds out
about this, and I don’t think it’d be auspicious for my life
expectancy to linger on imperial soil.”

Yes, the Turgonian emperor had never come
across as the magnanimous type in the orders she decrypted.

“
Besides...” Rias found
her hand and linked his fingers with hers. “I have little interest
in going home. I seem to have fallen in love with an exotic
foreigner, and I have the urge to follow her wherever she wants to
go.”

Flutters stirred in her belly. She had hoped
that would be his response. “Well, we’ll have the sphere to work
on, and as far as places to go, I know of all sorts of ruins around
the world with unsolved puzzles and mathematical oddities. Of
course, many of them are surrounded by dangerous aborigines,
crocodile-filled swamps, and pistol-toting relic raiders, all ready
to end your life if you let your guard down for an instant.”

“
My dear,” Rias breathed,
“if you’re trying to seduce me...it’s working.”

<<< >>>

Thank you for purchasing this ebook (or
wanting it badly enough to steal it from a friend). If you enjoyed
it, please leave a review somewhere (everywhere!). If you didn’t,
well, uhm, feel free to disregard that review thing.

If you’d like to read
another story set in this world (and get to know an older version
of Sicarius), try The Emperor’s Edge. Available at
Amazon
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Barnes & Noble
, and
Smashwords
.

Visit me at:
http://www.lindsayburoker.com

Lastly, many thanks to Kendra Highley,
Jeanne Marcella, Miquela Faure, Becca Andre, and Elissa Hunt for
reviewing early versions of this novel.