Chapter 2
Oliver stood facing away from Erik, his head bent over something cupped carefully in both hands.
In the midst of his (pointless) counsel with Askr, Erik had heard the distinct chime of buckles through the flimsy canvas screen, and known that Oliver was in the tent.
That he would doubtless hear Askr’s comments.
It had finally taken a direct order, including the phrase “your king” to shut Askr’s giant gob, and Erik had dismissed the others as soon as he was able, fearful that Oliver would have dumped his armor and retreated outside.
But here he stood. Erik knew a moment’s rush of relief, because no one needed to see him chasing Oliver through camp. He meant to walk up behind him, encircle his narrow waist with his arms, and offer his assurances.
He pulled up short, however, halfway to him. Stopped, without witnesses or pressing matters at hand, to take true stock of his lover for the first time today.
Oliver wore a burgundy velvet tunic, too warm for the Southern climate, purely Northern in design: belted low at his hips with a heavy, tooled leather belt.
His boots were knee-high, and cuffed with wolf fur, mud-spattered and dusty from travel.
His hair had grown long: past his shoulders, now, limp and matted from an afternoon inside his helmet, but the braids Erik had secured at the back of his head still intact, the beads at their ends catching the candlelight with winks of jet and sapphire.
He was still lithe, still narrow in all the ways that most excited Erik, compared to his own broad shape, but he’d filled out across the shoulders, tunic clinging to lines of new muscle.
He’d been arrestingly beautiful the moment Erik first saw him, from the blaze of defiance in his blue eyes, to the way he held himself stiff and ready for an attack.
But Erik loved him like this, draped in all the finery and practical garments of a Northern lord.
He looked like he belonged to Erik—which he did.
But something was wrong.
Erik had shoved the notion aside, because they’d been traveling, had been attacked, were trying to coordinate a complex maneuver via falcon message with a Southern faction Erik had never met and could only trust based on Oliver and Tessa’s word.
The farther south they marched, the more withdrawn, brittle, and tense Oliver grew.
There were a host of possible reasons for it, and yet, each time Erik met his gaze, and found Oliver blank-faced and detached, without his usual blush and wry smile at the ready, the more Erik worried.
Needlessly, Birger had told him. Oliver had gone from a soft-handed, indoors boy to an armored consort mounted on dragon back in relatively short order; he was bound to struggle beneath the weight of that change.
But this felt personal to Erik. It felt, in the moments when Oliver tensed beneath his touch, that Erik was the weight slung across his shoulders, rather than the stresses of war.
Ask him, a voice that sounded much like his sister’s whispered in the back of his mind. Ask him what’s the matter.
But what then? What solace could Erik offer? The war was happening; the march would continue; more blood would be spilled.
It was that final thought, more than any other, that pulled Erik forward again. He closed the gap between them, and didn’t hesitate in sliding his arms around Oliver’s waist. Leaned over his shoulder and pressed his chin to Oliver’s temple so he could see what he held in his hands.
It was blue. The egg-sized sapphire Oliver had pried from the icy wall of the cave where Alfie and Valgrind were held captive.
“It’s lovely,” Erik said, and Oliver hummed, a gentle vibration through his back and into Erik’s chest. “What does it feel like?”
Oliver’s pale, narrow fingers, newly callused, paused in the act of turning the stone over and over. With slow deliberation, he smoothed the pad of a thumb along the polished surface. When he spoke, Erik knew that he understood the true question: can you sense anything magical from it?
“It’s cold.” Oliver turned it over again, and though unfaceted, it caught the light in strange and lively ways; Erik swore the heart of it pulsed with its own blue glow. “Here. See for yourself.”
Erik turned up a hand from where it rested against Oliver’s stomach, and Oliver placed the sapphire in his palm.
Erik didn’t realize he’d tensed in anticipation of some shock until the stone was touching him, and he found it wholly unremarkable.
Cold, Oliver had said, but to Erik it felt body-warm from a day spent in Oliver’s pocket.
He’d handled enough gems in his life to have anticipated its weight, and was proven correct.
When he lifted it closer, hugging Oliver tighter in the process, he could no longer see that pulse of blue fire at its heart.
Nor did the candlelight sparkle on its surface.
Perhaps his eyes had only been playing tricks before.
“Does it do anything?”
“Does it need to?” Oliver’s voice was softer, and less prickly than it had been all day, and Erik found that encouraging.
He relinquished the sapphire when Oliver’s fingers ghost over his own; whether it served a purpose or not, it was Oliver’s, to do with what he would.
“I think it was helping hold Alfie and Valgrind in that cave. Somehow.”
He lifted the sapphire high, so the light glanced off it with a bright wink, and then tucked it back into his tunic pocket. His voice falsely cheerful, he added, “I don’t understand how, obviously. I’m an infant when it comes to magic after all.”
Erik sighed, and squeezed him tight, not surprised that Oliver remained stiff within his arms. “I was afraid you heard that. Askr is a fool.”
“He’s one of your most loyal lords.”
“That doesn’t mean he isn’t a fool.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him you said that.”
“Please do. What will he do about it? I’m his king.”
Oliver snorted, and the rigid line of his back finally softened a fraction. “How tyrannical of you.”
“You like me tyrannical,” Erik said, and pressed a smiling kiss to the side of his throat, where he smelled of dust and tasted of clean, dried sweat.
Oliver reached to wind a thick lock of Erik’s hair in his fist and tugged lightly. “You know me too well.”
He’d thought so. For a time. But lately…
As though realizing what he’d said, Oliver went still, and then released his hair. When he shifted forward, Erik let his arms drop, and let Oliver step away from him.
The air that slipped between them was cool after the warmth of Oliver’s body—too cool for comfort.
The day’s travel, its effects suppressed in the way that Erik had always suppressed hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, slammed into him with sudden force, and he stepped to the side and dropped down into a waiting camp chair.
When his head listed to the side, he let it; propped his temple on his knuckles and watched, tired and helpless, as Oliver began to slowly pace the width of the rug, fiddling with the ring that Erik had given him.
“I don’t blame Askr,” he said. “Nor any of them. I’m still new to this, and there are elements of it I can’t hope to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug mirrored by the humorless lift of half his mouth. “Most days I’m not sure I believe myself.”
“I believe you.”
“You’re biased.”
Erik felt a fast, but quickly-killed flare of temper. No one had ever questioned him as much as Oliver; it was his right as a consort… but this wasn’t questioning. Not really. “If you’ll remember,” he said, levering fondness into his tone, “I was the one who told you of the existence of drakes.”
Oliver kept pacing, but shot him a sideways glance, loaded with sass.
Erik sat back in his chair, relieved at the sight. “I was raised in the North, darling. I don’t doubt magic, nor do the others.”
Oliver’s lips pressed together, a wry, flat pretend smile. “So it’s me they doubt.”
“Ollie—”
He lifted a hand in a bid for silence, and turned to walk the length of the rug once more. “No, no. They’re right to.”
“What?”
Oliver stopped, and turned to face him, hands clasped together. His expression did something tense and unfamiliar that Erik didn’t like at all.
His pulse kicked up a step, and Erik repeated, “What?”
Oliver’s look of indecipherable concentration intensified. “They’re right to doubt me. Probably they shouldn’t listen to me at all. And neither should you.”
It was, without question, the strangest thing Oliver had ever said to him. It was alarming. Erik’s heart slammed inside his chest.
He sat up straight and said, “Oliver, what is this? Where is this coming from?”
Rather than answer, Oliver resumed pacing, hands at his sides this time, using his thumbs to crack each finger with a sequence of nervous flicks. “Is the war winnable?”
Erik was beginning to wish he’d poured himself a cup of wine before beginning this conversation.
He’d thought a little squeezing and petting would turn Oliver in his arms and that they’d be half-undressed and stretched out on the sleeping pallet by now.
Instead, his head was spinning. “Is the… every war is winnable.”
Oliver sent him a dark look. “Don’t play stupid. It doesn’t suit you.”
“What would you have me say? That I’ve led my entire nation to war, but I don’t think we can win?”
Oliver spun toward him, brows drawn. “Did you?”
“No.” He was more than a little stung. “I’m not Náli. I’m not some—some cocksure child who thinks he’s invincible.”
“Náli is actually quite frightened and morbid all the time.”
“You know what I mean, Oliver,” Erik growled, half expecting Oliver to recoil.
He didn’t.
“This isn’t my first war,” Erik continued. “I’ve seen battle. I lost my father the last time I faced the Sels, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Oliver’s eyes flashed, a bright spark of anger that Erik was glad to see, because it was him. The bowed-up, easily-infuriated man Erik had thought he knew so well, but who’d been replaced by a withdrawn, brooding facsimile of late.
Then he realized his mistake.
Through gritted teeth, Oliver bit out, “Seeing as how the Sels killed every man in my family, no, I haven’t forgotten.”
In the silence that followed, Erik could hear both their breathing; competing rhythms.
He slumped back; the chair creaked in an ominous way, but held. He softened his voice, with an effort. “Come here.”
Oliver glared at him, biting at the inside of his cheek.
“Ollie. Come here.”
“Is that an order, Your Majesty?”
“Yes.” Erik beckoned with two fingers.
Oliver’s first step toward him was reluctant, his head kicked back, his jaw set at a mulish angle. But each step he took across the rug melted him a little more, so that when he reached Erik, he slumped down to straddle his lap and pressed his face into Erik’s throat with a deep, shuddering breath.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, lips tickling Erik’s skin.
“I am, too.”
Oliver wriggled around, so he was lying against Erik’s chest more comfortably, and though he did so without any lascivious intent, the movement stirred Erik’s blood nonetheless.
Erik stroked his back, marveling at the sinews there… and relishing the way he could physically feel the tension bleed out of him.
“I’m sorry,” Oliver repeated in a small, uncharacteristic voice.
Erik stroked his hair, fingers careful over the braids. “So you’ve said.”
“I never thought…” Oliver started, and then pressed his face deeper into the collar of Erik’s tunic.
Erik held him tighter. “Never thought what, love?”
Oliver hesitated so long that Erik thought he meant not to answer. But then he said, “That I would go to war.”
Gods, Erik wanted to bundle him up and send him straight home.
Wanted him piled with furs beside a warm fire, keeping Revna company while she painted or embroidered.
An insult to Oliver and Revna both, neither of whom deserved to be sidelined; Revna’s condition demanded it…
just as Oliver’s status and magical abilities demanded he be here, now.
Erik just wanted him safe. To spare him stress and harm.
And all he could do was hold him now, one arm snug around his waist, a hand cupped protectively at the back of his head. He realized, with surprise, that he was rocking them slowly, back and forth, back and forth.
Oliver tolerated it—no, reveled in it, if his low humming was anything to go by—for a time. When he braced his hands on Erik’s chest and pushed upright, Erik let him go with reluctance.
He didn’t go far. Sat with his hands loosely clenched in the front of Erik’s tunic, his face soft, and open, and hopelessly sad in a way it hadn’t been before.
Without conscious thought, Erik reached to cup his cheeks; to trace the edges of his sunburned freckles with his thumbs. “I would spare you this, if I could.”
Oliver’s mouth quirked, a fast flicker of a smile that quickly fell. “I know.” When he leaned down, Erik steered the angle of his head so the kiss was immediately deep, and sweet.
Erik couldn’t remember the last time they’d shared more than a passing squeeze, or a glancing press of lips before falling asleep. It was easy, in the crush of travel, and worry, and responsibility, to rely on one another for practical reasons; also easy to forget how much they enjoyed one another.
Erik pressed a thumb to the hinge of Oliver’s jaw and urged him to open wider. When Oliver’s lips parted, he slipped his tongue between them, and Oliver made a wordless, pleading sound in the back of his throat.
Then Oliver pulled back, and it was Erik’s turn to murmur a wordless noise, a protest that was half a growl.
Oliver’s gaze was feverish. Desperate. “Shh,” he said, and slid gracefully down between Erik’s spread thighs and reached for the fastening of his trousers. “Let me.”
And Erik did.