Prince's Fire

by Amy Raby

  Rayn peered over her shoulder at the letter. “How can you decode it without the key?”

  “I’m a mathematician. I can break most ciphers, given sufficient time and a long enough message.”

  “But they’re just random letters,” said Rayn.

  “In fact, they are not,” said Celeste. “They mean something, and the fact that they do should give me a foothold in deciphering them. I can’t say for certain whether I can break this particular message—it’s less than a page long. But it’s worth trying.”

  “Gods know we’ve nothing else at this point,” said Justien. Snarling at the dead assassin, he aimed a kick at the prison bench.

  Rayn turned to Celeste. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “About what?” She was wary of anything Rayn might have to say to her, now that she knew how he felt about her family. “Shouldn’t you see Kasellus and get that wound healed?”

  “It can wait,” said Rayn.

  “We’ll be called to assembly soon,” said Justien. “The Riorcans will want to hear about the attack. You should see Kasellus before they drag you off to the assembly room.”

  “We’ll talk after the assembly,” said Rayn.

  • • •

  Rayn spent an hour with Kasellus, a skilled Healer who managed to remove every last vestige of pain from his arrow wound. Then, knowing he smelled of sweat and blood, he visited the baths in the basement level of the Enclave building, and was summoned to the assembly just minutes after he’d returned. It was a smaller group than usual. They convened in a dining room and were served luncheon: a salad course followed by a chowder of seafood, root vegetables, and spinefruit. Celeste and Justien and Nalica were present, along with several members of the Riorcan leadership. One seat was empty; they were waiting for Governor Asmund, who’d been away from the building at the time of the attack and had to be fetched by a runner.

  Rayn tucked into his food, happy to be alive. While it was clear someone—Celeste?—had arranged discreet protection for him against his expressly stated wishes, he could hardly complain about it. He’d been wrong, and she’d been right. He might not need bodyguards at home in Inya, a civilized country, but he certainly needed them here.

  He turned to Celeste and spoke in a low voice. “Were you the one who arranged for me to be followed by Nalica and Kasellus?”

  She stiffened. “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  She met his eyes briefly, looking relieved, before returning to her food.

  He’d been a fool to push her away. The more he thought about it, the more embarrassed he felt. He knew so many families where the son or daughter was entirely unlike either parent. He’d spent time with Celeste. He’d talked to her, relied upon her in the Riorcan wilds, exchanged stories with her. He knew her. Why had he ignored the evidence before his eyes and blamed her for the crimes of an entirely different person?

  And after he’d pushed her away, she’d taken steps to save his life. Possibly she’d done it for political reasons; Kjall didn’t want a foreign prince assassinated on their territory. But he could not deny that she’d taken action to safeguard his life when it would have been easier for her to do nothing at all.

  Governor Asmund entered the room and took the remaining seat. “Sorry I’m late.”

  Greetings were exchanged, and Asmund asked Rayn to describe the events that had taken place on the street where he’d been attacked. With some help from Nalica, Rayn did so. Then the conversation turned to what had happened in the prison below.

  Asmund eyed Bayard and Ista. “What do you make of the fact that the captured assassin had a deathstone?”

  Ista shrugged. “It means the assassin was Riorcan. Someone from an old Circle enclave in the mountains, I imagine.”

  “The Obsidian Circle?” Rayn was confused. “The organization you’re a part of?”

  “Yes and no,” said Bayard. “Not all of our people approved of the Circle’s new role in governing Riorca as a Kjallan province. Some of the Circle members left the organization. This assassin could have been one of them.”

  “A mercenary, perhaps?” asked Justien. “Paid to carry out this assault?”

  Bayard shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  “Could be money is the motive,” said Ista. “Gods know the enclaves trained enough of us, and an assassin’s job skills don’t transfer well to other professions.”

  “Might be the breakaway enclave,” said Justien.

  “What’s that?” asked Rayn.

  “One of the groups which broke away from the Circle.”

  “Why would an Obsidian Circle breakaway enclave want to murder Rayn?” asked Celeste. “He’s prince of a nation that has nothing to do with them.”

  “For the money,” said Ista. “Fund-raising’s not so easy when you can’t bully the local villages into coughing up tetrals. Or they may hope to provoke Kjall and Inya into war. If that’s the case, they’ll want Rayn killed here, on Kjallan soil or a Kjallan ship.” She turned to Rayn. “You might be safer if you returned home.”

  Rayn eyed Celeste. “Our treaty negotiations are not complete.”

  “I’m still trying to work out the political motives,” said Celeste. “If money was the cell’s motive, someone had to hire them. Rayn, if you’re assassinated, who takes your place as heir to the Inyan throne?”

  Rayn hesitated. “At the moment, it would be my illegitimate daughter, Aderyn. She’s an infant, so a regency council would be appointed to rule in her stead until she comes of age and marries.”

  “Who would be on the regency council?”

  “The Land Council appoints three people.”

  Ista spoke. “So the Land Council arranges to have you assassinated overseas where the blame is likely to fall on Kjall or Riorca rather than upon them. Then your daughter becomes queen and they name three of their own people for the regency council, thus seizing control of your country.”

  “That scenario is plausible,” said Rayn. “But it’s only speculation.”

  “Speculation is all we’ve got,” said Ista. “With the captured assassin dead, we’ve no one to interrogate.”

  Rayn’s eyes went to the Imperial Princess. They had no one to interrogate, but they did have an enciphered letter. Could Celeste break the code?

  • • •

  Celeste returned to her room with an inkpot, a quill, a stack of paper, and a mug of chocolate. She sat in the middle of the bed, spreading her writing tools around her, sipped her chocolate, and began analyzing the encoded letter. The preliminary work of decryption was rote and tedious, yet satisfying in its way. She began by making a list of every symbol that appeared in the ciphertext and marking down how many times it appeared. From the start, she observed something that gave her pause: there were many more distinct characters in the ciphertext than appeared in any language known to her. Frowning, she began calculating the percentages of how often each character appeared.

  A knock came at her door, and Rayn was announced. After a moment’s nervous hesitation, she called, “Enter. I’m in the bedroom.”

  She heard his heavy steps through the anteroom. He appeared in the archway, and as always, her heart dropped at the sight of him. It was unfair. Someone should pass a law against men this gorgeous.

  “Working on the cipher?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Any progress yet?”

  “No, I’m just beginning frequency analysis.”

  “May I see?”

  She beckoned him closer, wishing that having him near didn’t bring back those memories of the pool in the Riorcan wilds and how he’d worshipped her body—so it had seemed. Of course he hadn’t seen her body. She’d been underwater until the end, and by that point he’d been too preoccupied to notice her flaws.

  He looked through her lists of characters and frequency percentages.
“I don’t understand what any of this means. But it looks impressive.” The bed sank as he sat on the edge. “Who are Justien and Nalica? I mean, what are they? They don’t wear uniforms like the Legaciatti.”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  “Well, I owe you an apology,” he said.

  Her face flushed, and she turned away. “For what?”

  “For not trusting you. For holding you accountable for your father’s crimes, and for judging you based on Inyan ideas about bodyguards that don’t apply in Kjall. After all that, you still looked after me. I believe you saved my life.”

  “Well, you saved mine when you jumped out of that ship. Thank you for that.” She licked her lips and turned back to her percentages. “Anyway, you know I couldn’t allow an Inyan prince to be assassinated on Kjallan soil.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Is that the only reason you helped?”

  “I’m not certain what you’re asking.”

  He sighed. “Do you suppose we might start over? Let me court you the way I ought to have done the moment Lucien proposed the match.”

  She frowned at the papers on her bed. Challenging as the cipher was, it was easier to lose herself in a complex problem than it was to open her heart to all these messy emotions. In mathematics and cryptanalysis, she either solved a problem or didn’t. There was no betrayal, no confusion, no heartbreak. Just a stepwise process. “We’ve got assassins to track down.”

  “That will not occupy your every waking minute.”

  “Actually, it will. This ciphertext is the only lead we have.”

  “What if I stay and help you with the cipher? After all, it’s my life at stake.”

  Celeste hesitated. She craved his company, but Rayn was a distraction. Not that he tried to be. It was just that with a body like his, he couldn’t help it. “You don’t know how to break ciphers.”

  “There’s rote work, isn’t there?” He picked up one of her frequency lists. “Counting up letters and whatnot?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Give me the rote jobs, then. Save the hard stuff for yourself.” He smiled. “And when you get tense, I can help you relax.”

  Don’t tempt me. The thought of his hands on her body again, his magical heat flowing through her . . .

  She was going to stay focused. But it made sense to let him help with the cipher. “All right. You can help.”

  15

  By evening, Celeste was ready to throw down her quill in frustration. Frequency analysis was getting her nowhere. She’d tried it using every language she knew: Riorcan, Kjallan, Inyan, even Mosari. But nothing had yielded results. Now the letters blurred before her eyes, and she couldn’t concentrate. She sank into the sheets, defeated. “There’s no getting around it,” she said. “This is a homophonic cipher.”

  Rayn eyed her. “What does that mean?”

  “A nonhomophonic substitution cipher is where you substitute one letter for another. Say you replace the Riorcan letter vert with the letter hinan everywhere it appears. Each letter in the alphabet is mapped to some other letter, and that letter replaces it in the cipher. That sort of cipher can be broken by frequency analysis. See here.” She sat up and grabbed one of her papers. The bed looked messy, but she knew exactly what each paper was and what purpose it served. “In the Riorcan language—or any other language—some letters appear more commonly than others. For example, olov, a common letter, represents eight percent of all letters in written Riorcan. In the ciphertext, if hinan appeared twenty times, that would be eight percent of the total letters. So I would guess that hinan is the mapping for olov.”

  “But it’s just a guess. Right?”

  “An educated guess. It may be wrong, certainly—as it turns out, in this case it is wrong—but if it failed, I could try the letter yertia, which represents seven percent of all Riorcan letters, or riach, which represents six percent. Essentially, I would make educated guesses and see what they yield.”

  “But the other two didn’t work.”

  “No, and in fact no character in this cipher appears twenty times.” Celeste sighed. “We’re dealing with a more sophisticated cipher.”

  “A homophonic cipher?”

  She nodded. “A cipher designed to defeat frequency analysis. I suspected it was homophonic when I saw how many symbols it used. See, instead of assigning just one symbol to a high-frequency letter like olov, the cipher creator assigns it several different symbols and uses them all in turn. That means no letter appears much more frequently than any other, and I can’t tell olov apart from a low-frequency letter.”

  “Are you saying it can’t be solved?”

  “No.” She bit her lip. “There are ways to break homophonic ciphers. But it’s harder, and I can’t guarantee success.”

  “How do you break a homophonic cipher?”

  “I look for patterns. Letter combinations. For example, in Kjallan you often see the letter combination kj, but you never see the reverse, jk.”

  “I see.” His brow wrinkled. “Looking for those patterns sounds like tedious work. Especially if you have to attempt it in multiple languages.”

  “Indeed.” She flopped backward on the bed, closing her eyes. “But it will be worth it if I can get this decoded.”

  “I think you need a break, karamasi.”

  That word again. “I need to get back to work. Those assassins are still out there.”

  “Not as many as there were before,” said Rayn. “And you’ve been working on this for hours. Your mind needs rest. Come here and let me relax you.”

  She hesitated, uncertain of his intentions and also still drawn to the cipher. She had to break it. She’d worked on it all afternoon and accomplished nothing except to determine that it was immune to frequency analysis. And yet Rayn was right. Her mind was blurry and unfocused, like her eyes upon awakening in the morning.

  The bed sank beside her, and she felt the warmth of Rayn’s huge body. “Here,” he said. “I insist.” He pulled her onto his lap.

  She tried to straighten herself out, untangle her rag-doll limbs, but he placed her where he wanted her, in the crook of his thighs, and massaged her shoulders. His magic began to flow, a gentle breath of heat, warming and unknotting tense muscles. She groaned and leaned into his hands. Bliss.

  “You need this,” he said.

  “I can’t imagine why I’m so sore. I’ve been sitting on the bed all afternoon.”

  “You need to take breaks,” said Rayn. “Maybe take a walk with me every few hours.”

  She sighed. A walk sounded nice, but the sun had surely gone down by now, and she needed to stay focused on the cipher. Anyway, they couldn’t walk freely around Denmor with assassins at large.

  “Tell me something,” said Rayn. “When you were in Cassian’s power, was he cruel to you?”

  She shivered. “I told you. He beat me.”

  “Was there more?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you shudder when I mention his name.” Rayn shifted to the tender muscles of her neck, working out the knots with warmth and gentle pressure.

  Ugly girl. “Cassian hated me. Hated my brother, really, but he couldn’t get to Lucien because Vitala had stolen him away. He took his frustrations out on me.”

  “How did he take out these frustrations?”

  If you weren’t a princess, you’d be nobody, girl. Do you think a man would want you, with a body like that? She swallowed. “Sometimes he locked me in a cold room overnight.”

  Rayn’s hands stiffened. “A cold room? You mean a larder?”

  “It was a prison cell,” said Celeste. “He had one set aside for me. In the Imperial Palace, the prison cells aren’t served by the hypocaust, and if no heat-glows are provided, they get cold, especially at night. Our interrogators use the cold cell as a means of softening prisoners up. Cassian wo
uld throw me in there with only my shift to wear, and I’d shiver all night long.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Is it true you killed Cassian?”

  “Not really,” said Celeste. “Vitala and Ista killed him. I helped.”

  “Ista? The assembly representative?”

  Celeste nodded. “That’s her.”

  “I wish I could kill him again for you. He likes to freeze his political enemies? I’d watch him burn.” Rayn’s magic intensified, and she felt a surge of warmth. “You’ll never be cold with me.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to be my personal heat-glow,” said Celeste.

  “Karamasi, I’m better than a heat-glow.” He turned her, lifted her chin, and tilted her mouth toward his.

  She could not help herself. She parted her lips in silent invitation, and he kissed them. It astonished her that a man as big as Rayn, with so much muscle and power, could be this gentle. She’d experienced his roughness too, at the pool in the forest, and liked it. But now he held her, stroked her, and kissed her as softly and lovingly as if she were made of glass.

  This was not the primal passion they’d experienced in the Riorcan wilds. It was something quieter, something deeper. And Rayn was right—no heat-glow could compare.

  • • •

  Two days into the decoding work, Rayn was getting the hang of things. Deciphering a coded message was a puzzle, essentially—an extraordinarily difficult puzzle requiring a great deal of tedious work. It was one-third mathematics, one-third linguistics, and one-third intuition. Also three-thirds patience. Whenever Celeste became fatigued or frustrated, he took her in his arms, warmed her, rubbed the knots out of her shoulders, and kissed her senseless.

  He loved warming her with his magic. He’d warmed other people before—friends, family members. Usually there were no sexual overtones. But Celeste enjoyed it so much more than anyone else he’d plied his magic upon, perhaps because of what she’d been through with Cassian. For her, heat was comfort. While she worked on the cipher, he settled himself behind her, pulling her against his chest. “Pay no attention to me,” he murmured. “You concentrate.” He laid hands on her, warming her from the core first and working his way to her extremities, avoiding the erogenous zones. Her neck and shoulders began to unclench.