“ Tikaya, you think too much,” she muttered, grabbing her clothes.
Outside, she found Rias and Sicarius building the frame of something that promised to be large. While the assassin dragged wood over, Rias knelt, his back to her, and hammered. Hard.
“ Rias?” she asked between whacks.
His shoulders tensed, and he hunched his neck. “Yes?”
She took a couple steps toward him. “May I speak with you?”
He fiddled with the hammer. “I should keep working, try to get this done so we can cross as soon as possible.”
Tikaya hesitated. Maybe she had guessed incorrectly. Yet he had never lost his temper with her, and it was hard to imagine a midday bath truly irking him.
“ Please?”
Rias’s head drooped. He stood, gave Sicarius instructions, and finally faced her. Tikaya led him out of the assassin’s earshot.
Rias stared at the ground, avoiding her eyes. She was about to speak, but he did so first.
“ I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. I wasn’t expecting you to be, ah…”
She resisted the urge to hug him-that would probably make him more uncomfortable-and gripped his forearm instead. Corded muscle lay beneath her hand. “I don’t mind. You can stare.” Though so many differences stood between them, she could not feel anything but delighted that he would want to.
Rias lifted his eyes. “Oh? I had the impression that your parents wouldn’t approve of Fleet Admiral Starcrest ogling their daughter.”
“ They’re not here.”
He arched his eyebrows. “I didn’t think you were particularly enamored at the notion either. Something about a nation’s war enemies not being easily inserted into dreams involving beach houses and blond children.”
She blushed. “Originally, I was rather distraught at the dishevelment of my dreams, but I must admit I can’t think of anyone else in the world I’d rather have ogling me.”
“ Really.” His eyes gleamed with humor but intensity too. He brushed his fingers down a lock of damp hair dangling by her cheek.
Tikaya considered the construction site and the assassin who, through tact or disinterest, was ignoring them. “Almost private around here at the moment.” She arched her eyebrows and stepped closer, placing a hand on his chest. “I haven’t figured out which piece of furniture up there is a bed, but I’m willing to conduct research.”
“ I wouldn’t think it’d be a problem. You found the tub after all.” Rias slid his arm around her, drawing her against him.
“ Actually, that’s an aquarium.”
She felt the soft rumble of laughter in his chest, but it ended with a sigh. She tilted her head back, searching his face.
“ Trust me, I’d very much like to research the furniture with you, but…” He smiled and brushed his thumb along her lips. “I suppose it’d be rather irresponsible of me.”
She barely managed to avoid blurting ‘huh?’ Instead, she guessed, “Because you’re supposed to be building a, er, whatever that is you’re building?”
Rias snorted. “Rust what I’m building-and it’s a counterweight trebuchet, by the way.” His inability to dismiss his project without at least a short explanation almost made her laugh, despite her confusion over the rejection.
“ I’m aware of what is, and what isn’t, included in a standard Turgonian field kit,” Rias went on, “and I wouldn’t want to put you in the awkward situation of explaining to your family how you came to be pregnant with an enemy admiral’s child.”
“ Oh.” She laughed with relief. He wasn’t rejecting her.
Rias frowned at her reaction. “Tikaya, I know what the world believes about Turgonians, and the Kyattese have every reason to think the worst of me. I fear that if you intimate that we’re even friends, your people will believe I’ve tortured and brainwashed you into giving that response.”
He looked exasperated that his words didn’t drive the grin from her face, and his concern touched her.
“ What you say may be true,” Tikaya said, “but that’s something to worry about after we both get out of here alive. As for the other, getting pregnant wouldn’t be possible until I returned home to see one of our doctors to have the…” She groped for words to explain it in Turgonian-as far as she knew, their women took their chances drinking egata tea for contraceptive purposes. “It’s a procedure, performed by a doctor-who is, in our culture, a practitioner specializing in the psychological and somatic aspects of the mental sciences. Anyway, it’s not irreversible. You just go see the doctor again when you want to have children.”
During her explanation, his expression changed from consternated to perplexed to enlightened. “There is no…danger?”
“ No. After certain incidents during the war, it was recommended by our government that any women at risk of being captured have it done.”
His face darkened. “Were there many? ‘Incidents?’”
“ I was sheltered by the fact that I never left the island, but from the folks who went out, I heard…there were some ships you really didn’t want to find yourself aboard.”
“ I see.” His jaw was tight, body rigid. “I’d ask for the names of those ships, but there’s nothing I could do now. It’s hard to know-I don’t mean to make excuses, but men present a vastly different face to their superiors than they do to their prisoners.”
“ I doubt you ever did.”
He grimaced, apparently not in the mood for praise, and she wished she had never brought up the subject. Except, she reminded herself, that bringing it up meant disavowing him of the notion that he could send her home a mother. Which actually was not a horrifying concept, though he was right in that it would be easier to deal with further down the line. Still, a smile curled her lips at the thought of a passel of precocious toddlers scurrying around the house, getting into mischief and cutting down heirloom fruit trees to build play forts.
“ What are you thinking of?” Rias’s muscles relaxed as he watched her.
“ Furniture research.” She rose on her tiptoes, marveling that her eyes still weren’t level with his, and kissed him.
Her explanations resulted in one pleasant outcome: he did not hesitate to return it.
The moment ended abruptly. Rias pulled away, annoyance flickering across his face. Before she could ask why, she heard the clomp of boots. One of the squads of marines had returned.
“ What, by the emperor’s eternal warts, is this mess?” Bocrest bellowed as soon as he entered the cavern and spotted the fledgling frame and the heaps of wood surrounding it.
Rias sighed and dropped his head on Tikaya’s shoulder.
“ Tonight?” she suggested.
He released her with a hand squeeze and a promise in his eyes. Please don’t let monsters, machines, or annoying marines ruin the night, she thought.
“ We need help, boys,” Rias called. “Grab a hammer.”
“ About this catapult…” Tikaya said, a question occurring to her as her gaze skimmed the chasm.
“ Counterweight trebuchet,” Rias said.
“ Yes, of course. How will one land without breaking every bone in her body?”
“ Parachutes, naturally.” Rias help up a finger. “That reminds me.” He turned to holler at the approaching men. “Anyone who isn’t able to find a hammer and work on this is on sewing duty.”
Without glancing at the captain, the marines hustled over, prepared to dive into the construction work to avoid a stitching task. Chuckling, Tikaya returned to the second-story retreat to examine the sphere that had piqued her interest earlier.
CHAPTER 18
The sphere proved amazing. With the journal’s help, she deciphered the runes on the outside, which were a proclamation of ownership and instructions for firing it up. Once she did that, a hole smaller than a grain of sand projected a display above the sphere. It appeared solid but she could wave her fingers through it as with an illusion. Plenty of practitioners who studied optics could make them, but she could not fathom how it was done with technology. She did not care either. It was the images and runes within the three-dimensional display that enraptured her. She found herself reading someone’s diary, and she could look up symbols and terms she did not understand, as if a dictionary and encyclopedia underlaid the journal. This was the type of artifact every philologist dreamed of finding, something that held the keys to unlocking an entire language. She marveled that the other team had left it. Maybe they had not been up here, or maybe they had not realized what they passed up.