Stupefied by her weariness, Amaranthe could only stare at it for a puzzled moment. Another alligator, she thought, but wouldn’t an animal have dragged the man away to eat?
She shook away the cobwebs lacing her mind. She put her back to the tree and lifted her rifle as she scanned her surroundings. This might be a trap. Maybe the man wasn’t even dead; maybe he was a diversion while someone else crept up on her.
Nothing stirred the foliage around her, not even a breeze. Only mosquitoes buzzed about, flying through the humid air and giving Amaranthe another reason to wish she weren’t naked. She eyed the worn shirt and trousers on the still form at her feet. He didn’t seem to be breathing; if he was playing dead, he was doing a convincing job of it.
She propped her rifle against the tree, gripped the man’s arm and leg, and tugged him onto his back. Her breath caught. His throat had been slit.
Sicarius? No, she wanted to believe that, but he couldn’t have come so far in… She’d lost track of the days. Five? Seven? More? Even if he
could
have made it, how would he have found her in this place? Maybe she had some other ally out there. Whatever the case, she couldn’t stay in one area to contemplate it.
Knife in one hand, rifle in the other, Amaranthe stood up, ready to slip into the vegetation again. A dark figure stepped out of the brush ahead of her.
Pike. That was her first thought, but her visitor’s hair was blond, not white, its arrangement more tousled than usual, littered with cypress needles and moss tufts. The start of a scruffy beard covered his jaw, and his face seemed leaner than she remembered. Road grime coated black clothing plagued with holes and tears. Worn and dusty, his soft boots had little sole left to them. His garments hung more loosely than usual, and she imagined that he’d jogged all the way with little in the way of food and water. Looking for her.
A lump tightened Amaranthe’s throat, and tears welled in her eyes. She tamped down an urge to leap across the intervening meters and fling her arms about him. What if it was a trick, something else her enemies could do with that ancient technology, something designed to tease her from hiding?
Sicarius did not move except to look her up and down, his eyes full of concern and… pity. In that second, Amaranthe knew it wasn’t a trick. Pike and the Forge people never would have put emotion on his face. Indeed, she must look awful to have elicited it. For the first time, in the presence of someone who mattered, she felt self-conscious about roaming the wilderness stark naked except for a weapon in each hand.
“
Oh
,” Amaranthe said, “are you supposed to wear clothing for skirmishes in an alligator-filled swamp?”
She barely managed to get the words out. Emotion, something bordering on hysteria, threatened to bubble out of her. She was tired of holding herself together.
When Sicarius lifted an inviting arm and said, “They are optional,” she nearly tumbled into his embrace.
Despite his worn appearance, the arms he wrapped around her were strong, and his body offered the solid dependability of a boulder. Or a steel slab. She wanted to bury her head against his chest and let him worry about Pike and the others. But the memory of her failure arose in her thoughts, bringing forth the tears that had only threatened before. She’d have to tell him, and as soon as she did…
Maybe Sicarius already sensed that she’d failed him in some way, for his body grew rigid beneath her arms, and tension radiated from him. More than tension. Anger.
Amaranthe wiped her eyes and stepped back. She searched his face, trying to guess what he knew.
“Thank you for coming,” Amaranthe said carefully. It occurred to her that his being here instead of with the team might mean that Sespian hadn’t made it. Maybe rage, and a desire to avenge his son’s death, had driven Sicarius down here as much as a need to find her. “Is Sespian… Did he survive the crash?”
“Yes.”
Relief washed over Amaranthe. “Thank his ancestors.”
No similar relief expressed itself on Sicarius’s face. He looked her over again, more slowly this time, as if he were memorizing every detail. “Stay here. Hide. I will find Pike.”
His words were short and clipped. His anger, Amaranthe realized, wasn’t directed at her. He was furious with Pike on her behalf.
“Sicarius, I… have to tell you something.”
“Later.” Face hard and grim, Sicarius looked like a man with murder on his mind.
Amaranthe had no argument for sparing Pike, but the rest of his men might not deserve the wrath of a deadly assassin. “Without the head, the wolf will die,” she blurted after him.
Sicarius disappeared into the brush without a comment or backward glance.
“Hide,” Amaranthe mumbled to herself.
It seemed like good advice, but she didn’t think she could bring herself to cower under a tree while Sicarius faced Pike. The emperor’s old master interrogator hadn’t moved with Sicarius’s sinewy grace, but who knew if he had more of that superior technology with him, ready to use in an emergency? At the least, he had a weapon capable of firing numerous shots without being reloaded, and he wouldn’t be alone.
Amaranthe eyed the rifle she’d taken from the dead soldier. It had five shots remaining. Maybe if she climbed a high tree, she could see out over the swamp and watch the confrontation. If Pike gave Sicarius a hard time, she could shoot the bastard.
“For once, I’ll have
your
back, Sicarius.”
Nodding to herself, Amaranthe headed for a cypress with the girth of a small house. A thorn gouged her thigh. Reminded of her vulnerability, she went back to the dead soldier to remove his clothes. She tucked the knife into a belt sheath, and, a couple of moments later, started up the tree, this time wearing green and gray clothes with the cuffs rolled up. The boots she left at the base of the trunk for later. A number of sizes too large, they would only hinder her on the climb.
Normally, scaling the tree wouldn’t have winded her. Now… her muscles quivered before she’d risen five feet. Amaranthe continued up doggedly, digging her fingers into the furrowed bark, and pulling herself from branch to branch with the rifle slung across her back on a strap. If Sicarius had traveled hundreds of miles to help her, she’d darn well figure out a way to climb a tree for him.
Amaranthe kept an eye out below as she pulled herself higher, aware that the foliage wasn’t as dense as that of the firs and cedars up north. The surrounding trees and leaves should make it hard for anyone to see her from below, but Sicarius would think her an idiot—rightfully so—if she’d survived all she had only to be shot by someone glancing upward.
The thought gnawed at her mind, and Amaranthe was on the verge of climbing down when something moved on the other side of a muddy inlet. A pair of people were hunting in a field of waist-high grass and cattails. One man gazed out at the water while the other bent to check the earth. The one looking at the water wore black; it wasn’t Sicarius this time.
Rage filled Amaranthe as she glowered at Pike. She could argue for sparing the men working for him, but, after what he’d done to her—and to Sicarius all those years ago—she wanted him dead. Not just for her sake, but for the good of the empire. Such a man shouldn’t be allowed into a position of power again, a position that would let him continue to torture people.
Amaranthe eased out onto a thick branch and lay belly-down along it. Once horizontal, she eased the rifle off her back, moving slowly so she wouldn’t stir the leaves. The two men were conversing and looking in the other direction now, but two more had walked into view on the far side of that field.
Amaranthe tucked the stock of the rifle into her shoulder and lined up her sights, targeting Pike’s back. Had she still been alone, she would have fired, but, knowing Sicarius was out there, she hesitated with her finger on the trigger. If she missed, Pike would be extra alert. And missing was a possibility, not necessarily because of the distance, but because her hands had started to sweat, and her heart seemed to be thundering with enough force to send tremors through the branch beneath her.
One of the men on the far side of the field disappeared from view. It happened so quickly that Amaranthe hadn’t the reason for it. One second he was there, the next gone. His partner, walking a couple of paces ahead and hacking at tall grass with a machete, hadn’t yet noticed.
Sicarius at work, Amaranthe presumed. She eased her finger away from the trigger. She’d let him handle the situation and only back him up if he needed it. Maybe it was small and weak of her to let someone else take out—no, not take out,
kill
—Pike for her, but Sicarius might relish the opportunity to get rid of a man who’d tormented him throughout his youth. He’d suffered more at Pike’s hands than she had.
The second man on the far side turned around and called out his partner’s name. Pike and his comrade heard.
“You see her?” Pike asked.
“No. I lost Bronc.”
Before Pike and his partner had taken more than a step in that direction, something grabbed the lone man’s leg and pulled him down. His head disappeared beneath the grass.
Pike and his comrade broke into a sprint. They reached the spot in seconds, but, from the way they turned in circles, it was clear they didn’t see Sicarius or their missing man. Pike frowned at the earth and knelt. Tracks in the mud?
When he stood again, his eyes were narrowed. Amaranthe had a feeling Pike knew now who he was dealing with. At the very least, he must suspect that hadn’t been her work.
Pike whispered something to his comrade, and the man’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He rotated in place, his rifle clenched in his hands, his gaze darting in every direction. Meanwhile, Pike’s head bent for a moment. Amaranthe tensed. She couldn’t see his hands but thought he might have pulled something out of his pocket. If Sicarius was keeping his head below the weeds, he wouldn’t be able to see that.
Pike pulled out something black and dropped it. He clasped his hands behind his back and strolled—yes, it was definitely a stroll—a few paces.
“What is he doing?” Amaranthe wondered. She also wondered if she ought to simply shoot him. At this point, Pike knew someone was out there, killing his men, so even if she missed, it wouldn’t matter. It might even distract him for a moment so Sicarius could swoop in and take him down. “Not that he needs my help for that,” she muttered.
But she wasn’t that sure. Pike dropped something else several feet away from the first thing. Yes, he was definitely up to something devious. The other man kept spinning about, jerking his weapon in one direction and then another. Pike seemed as calm as a panther sunning itself on a rock.
Amaranthe rested her cheek against the stock of the rifle and lined up the pair of sights, centering the crosshairs on Pike’s chest. Her finger found the sleek, cool metal of the trigger. And she hesitated. She wiped a bead of sweat out of her eye. For all the evils he’d done to her, and countless others, Sicarius included, she had to wrestle with her instincts to nurture instead of kill. In her heart, she knew the man was beyond reform, and yet…
“Stop it,” she whispered to herself.
Pike wasn’t worth the self-doubt. If she and Sicarius failed to kill him, and he went on to become Ravido’s Commander of the Armies, with power over thousands, his ancestors only knew what harm he might do.
Amaranthe took a deep breath and found the trigger again.
An instant before she flexed her finger, something cold brushed her bare foot. She almost fell out of the tree in surprise. A startled squawk arose in her throat, but she clamped her mouth shut before her vocal cords could betray her.
Barely managing to keep the rife—and her perch on the branch—Amaranthe craned her neck about. A black-and-tan snake with a body as thick as her thigh was slithering across her foot on its way to…
She swallowed. It was coming out on the branch with her.
Its yellow irises stared into her soul, and she knew without a doubt that it wanted her for lunch. With a head that large and a maw that fang-filled, the snake could swallow her whole. She tried to pull her leg away, but it had already coiled halfway around her calf, pinning it to the branch. Its weight surprised her.
Amaranthe thought to maneuver the rifle about and shoot the beast between the eyes. But that would give away her position more surely than a scream. She glanced toward the clearing. Pike’s partner had disappeared. In the second she watched, Pike dropped a final item and then stepped to the left. The air shimmered, defining the walls of a cylinder with him inside, then winked out, the view returning to normal. Not good. While Sicarius had been picking off his men, Pike had been creating some sort of protective cage around himself. One Sicarius wouldn’t be able to see unless he’d happened to poke his head above the weeds during that second when the “walls” had been visible.
The snake moved up to Amaranthe’s thigh. She shifted about as best she could—she needed to leave one hand gripping the branch, lest she plummet thirty feet—and lifted the rifle above her head. She angled the butt, intending to smash the snake between the eyes. It wouldn’t harm such a massive creature, but maybe it’d deter it.
The snake saw the blow coming. Its head whipped to the side, evading the attack easily. An angry hiss pierced the air. Its mouth opened and saliva—or was that poison?—glistened on its fangs.
Amaranthe swung the rifle, using it like a club. She connected this time, but the snake didn’t budge under the blow. It hissed again, the sound dripping with ire. Its head reared several feet in the air, then it darted for Amaranthe’s throat, quicker than lightning.
She swung the rifle back again, abandoning her grip on the branch to throw all her weight into the blow. It deflected the attack—barely. The snake’s fangs bit into the branch, inches from Amaranthe’s ear. Already off balance from the defensive move, she shifted too far to get away from those fangs, and she slipped from her perch.
Amaranthe would have fallen all the way to the ground, but the snake still had its body coiled around her calf. A jolt of pain lanced through her knee as all her weight came to hang from that leg. Her face smacked into a lower branch, and she lost her grip on the rifle. It fell several feet, landing in the crook of another branch. That left only the knife. Great.