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.”
