“ What?”
His long exhale tickled the back of her ear. “The fact that the Nurians are trying to kill you makes me believe we really need you.”
“ We?”
“ The empire. Bocrest’s family has been personally loyal to the throne for a long time. That Emperor Raumesys picked him over brighter men suggests this is a very sensitive mission. My people may have unearthed something that’s put them in danger. If the Nurians have found out, well, they’d be the first to help us on our way to the black eternity.”
Tikaya pressed her hand against the cool wooden siding of the launch, dread curling through her gut for a new reason. If the Turgonian emperor had walked onto her plantation and asked for her help, she would have told him to shove sugar cane into his anal orifice. But Rias asking her to stay and help…
She shook her head. She hardly knew him. And he was one of them. Surely, she owed him nothing.
“ How can the empire’s fate even matter to you?” she asked. “After they condemned you and left you to die?”
“ Strange, isn’t it? By the emperor’s decree, I’m dead to my family, my friends, everyone I ever knew, but it was the emperor who cast me out, not them. I still care that they are well, and I’m not sure the orchards where I grew up will ever stop being the place my mind conjures when someone says home.”
Tikaya cleared her throat and tried to sound offhand when she asked, “Family?”
“ Parents, brothers.”
“ No children?” No wife?
“ My wife didn’t want them.”
So, there was a wife. The intensity of her disappointment surprised her.
“ Ex-wife,” Rias said, as if reading her thoughts. “I know you owe nothing to me, Tikaya-in fact, I owe you a couple favors. But if you would stay and decipher the language and help-I can’t believe I’m saying this-help Bocrest solve whatever problem my people have gotten themselves into, I’d…”
The request she had dreaded. She swallowed and waited.
“ I have nothing I can offer you.” He sighed. “Not even my protection since I’m even more a prisoner than you. All I can promise is that I’ll do everything possible to ensure you escape and can return to your island afterwards. I imagine you have family you miss, people who are worried about you.”
“ Yes.” If she died out here, would anyone even tell her parents what happened?
“ Children?” he asked in the same offhand tone she had used.
“ No.” Then, feeling the need to lay everything out, she added, “My fiance was killed on a science vessel that went down near the end of the war.”
“ Oh.” A long beat passed, probably because he did not want to know the answer to the next question, but he asked anyway: “How did it-who sank it?”
“ Your people.”
She felt his shoulders slump behind her.
“ I’m sorry,” he said.
A twinge of guilt wound through her; it was not as if he had done it. If he had been on that penal island for two years, he would have missed the last year of the war, the year when things unraveled for the Turgonians and their people stopped paying attention to Kantioch Treaty dictates. Yet she could not bring herself to say it was all right. It wasn’t. It never would be.
The attack had slowed, and Tikaya felt a stirring of hope, but then another set of lights appeared on the inky horizon. Another ship, bringing the total to four. The captains had probably just paused to confer-deciding on a final strategy-through communications practitioners. The attack would resume with all four ships joining in, and even the sturdy ironclad would sink under that assault.
“ How come none of your people know about this shindig going on in the middle of the ocean?” Tikaya asked.
“ I don’t know.”
A great swirling gust of wind tugged at her dress and whipped loose strands of hair into her mouth. She looked up at the stack. The smoke was not affected, meaning the disturbance was localized.
“ Nurian magic!” Rias wrapped his arm around her.
A flash of yellow burned Tikaya’s eyes, and vertigo washed over her. A final burst of wind railed at her, her stomach dropped, then silence engulfed her.
She blinked and tried to wipe away the yellow dots swimming before her eyes. Bile churned in her throat, and she forced a swallow. The world came back into focus.
She was belowdecks, not in the ironclad but in a wooden vessel. She stood in a storage space full of Nurians pointing short bows at her, arrows nocked and drawn back. Crates, barrels, and a number of confusing machines, or perhaps practitioners’ contraptions, fenced the large hold. Rias still had his arm around her, and he held the sword out before them, but it did not matter with so many weapons pointed their way. A smug woman in black robes smiled in triumph.
“ There, that’s easier,” she said in Nurian.
She lifted a finger toward the bowmen and opened her mouth.
Tikaya scrabbled for something to say, something to sway the woman from giving the kill order.
“ Don’t tell them,” Rias blurted in Turgonian.
Barely, just barely, Tikaya managed to keep the bewildered expression off her face. The practitioner halted, finger still lifted, and frowned at Rias.
“ I won’t,” Tikaya whispered back, also in Turgonian.
“ They’ll torture us if they know what we know,” he stage whispered.
Did the Nurian understand? None of the expressions on the bowmen’s faces had changed, but an assessing mien narrowed the woman’s eyes. Yes, she understood, and Rias must be counting on that, trying to pique her interest long enough to have a chance to do something.
Tikaya lifted one placating hand and stepped toward the woman. “I understand you have orders to kill me,” she said in Nurian as she slipped her other hand into her pocket, “but I’m sure I can be of more use to you alive.” She caught the other woman eyeing Rias and added, “As can he. We’ve just escaped our cells on the Turgonian ship; we’ve no allegiance to them-they kidnapped us against our will.”
The practitioner seemed to be only half-listening. She stepped closer, peering up at Rias, whose head brushed the ceiling of the hold.
“ You look familiar,” she said in heavily accented Turgonian. “Who-”
Tikaya hurled a handful of sand, and the woman gasped, swiping at her eyes. Rias lunged past Tikaya, pushing her to the deck. His body coiled, then he sprang, whipping the sword through the practitioner’s neck with a grunt.
He landed and charged, taking advantage of the startled silence gripping the hold.
For a stunned moment, Tikaya lay on her belly, staring at the decapitated head, the still-twitching body, and the blood. So much blood.
The Nurians recovered, and bows twanged. An arrow grazed Tikaya’s arm and pinned her sleeve to the deck.
“ Move,” Rias barked. “Find cover.” He was already attacking a third man.
Yes, cover, of course.
Tikaya tore her sleeve free and rolled toward the closest set of legs. An arrow thudded into the deck an inch from her ear. She kicked as hard as she could, and her heel smashed the inside of a man’s knee. He yelped and collapsed on her.
Her first instinct was to shove him away, but another arrow slammed into the deck near her head. She tried to stay under him, to use him as a human shield. He drew back to punch her. An arrow lodged in his shoulder.
“ Not me, idiot!” he screamed.
He thrashed, still on top of Tikaya as he clawed at the shaft. A wayward elbow nearly tore her spectacles from her face. His frustrated cries of pain reverberated in her ears. His face, eyes squeezed shut, mouth contorted with agony, loomed inches from her own. Fearful of more bows aimed at her, she wrapped her fingers into his shirt and kept him from pulling away.
Rias towered over the Nurians, head brushing the ceiling beams as he lunged about the space. He slashed bowstrings and pounded through the startled archers, who-after catching their own comrades in the crossfire-were dropping their bows in favor of short swords and cutlasses. Howls of pain and rage bounced from the wooden walls.