Chapter 3
“I’m having dreams,” Amelia confessed one evening, a rare moment when she and Leda were alone in her general’s tent.
Leda finished pouring their wine and nodded sagely. “Nightmares? That’s to be expected.”
“No. Not exactly.” Amelia’s face heated, and when Leda glanced up, and then lifted her brows, she knew she was blushing visibly. “Just dreams. Vivid ones. Of a rather… intimate nature.”
Leda grinned, her eye teeth nearly as sharp as one of the wolves’. “Ah. Carnal dreams.”
Amelia didn’t consider herself priggish and easily-offended; didn’t count herself among the sorts of tutting matrons who’d side-eyed the young noble men at every horrendous ball she’d attended before the war.
But something about these dreams—about the men in them with her—had left her stammering and stupid, so much so that Leda had laughed and told her not to worry so much. Even to enjoy herself.
Amelia had no intention of doing any such thing.
But she couldn’t stop the dreams from occurring.
Like now, for instance.
The saving grace, she told herself, was that she knew it was a dream.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t an unpleasant one, nor a well-defined one, so she didn’t startle awake when she felt large hands ghost up the insides of her thighs and spread them.
She was naked, the air cool on her skin, goosebumps shivering across her chest and stomach.
When she glanced down, she saw a pale head bent over her lap.
Not gold, as it gleamed in the daylight, but pale silver.
We’re beneath the moon, she thought, nonsensically, and then she woke up with a gasp.
Her eyes opened, as her lungs filled with air, and she saw that, no, she had not awakened. Not bodily, at least.
Gray-toned grass lapped around her knees, stirred by the same scentless breeze that lifted her hair. She was dressed as she had been earlier that day, in breeches, boots, and cinched traveling tunic, her black breastplate and pauldrons fastened overtop.
She was in the Between.
She was better at arriving here than she had been to start.
Despite his hauteur and dramatics, Náli was a good teacher.
It took time and concentration, and it still left her feeling lightheaded, but Amelia could find her way to this plane on her own now.
Usually, however, she was pulled here by one of the others.
“Tessa?” she called, turning a slow circle. It was her sister who invited her to the Between most often; sometimes on official Northern business, but generally just to visit.
“No,” a male voice said behind her. “It’s me.”
She whirled and found Oliver standing several paces away, clothed in dusty, stripped-down Northern garments.
He bore the distinct air of one who’d spent all day traveling; but his eyes weren’t weary.
Rather, they sparked and brimmed with a kind of worry she’d never associated with her cousin. It was unnerving.
“Ollie. Are you well? Did you bring me here?”
“Yes, I brought you here.” When his mouth turned down at the corners, she noticed new frown lines grooved in each cheek. “And no. I’m afraid I’m not well at all.”
“You don’t look it.” And he didn’t, but she hadn’t expected him to be straightforward about it. “What’s the matter? Is it your marsh fever?”
“No.” He began a negative, cutting-off gesture with one hand, then paused.
“No it’s—no, not that.” He shook his head, and let his hand fall, only to pick it up once more so that he could worry at the ring he wore on his other hand.
He hadn’t spoken about it with her, but she knew, based on its thick, Northern design and heavy stone, that it had been a gift from Erik.
“This isn’t physical. It’s more of a… crisis of morality, if you will. ”
Amelia felt her brows go up. I’ve been having one of those myself, she thought, but didn’t say. “About what? There’s not another man, is there?”
He went horrified—“No”—and again, paused, and his face compressed into a portrait of inner turmoil that would have been comical if inner turmoil was the sort of thing Oliver had ever displayed before. “There’s not,” he said, but slowly, as though unsure. “Not in the way that you’re thinking.”
“Ollie—”
“Gods.” He scrubbed both hands over his face, and his posture collapsed inward, so that he slumped and wavered and Amelia stepped forward in anticipation of catching him.
He didn’t fall. Instead, he let his hands fall away, and gave her a pitiful, puppy-dog look of misery.
“I need to tell you something. I need to tell someone. Náli knows, but not because I confessed, and he hates me for it anyway, so he’s of no use. ”
“Now you’re worrying me.”
“You mustn’t tell Tessa. Promise me.”
Amelia closed the final gap between them and reached to grip his arms. He was trembling. “All right. I promise.”
“It isn’t that I don’t trust her,” he said, and a sheen of sweat gleamed on his brow and at his temples. “It’s only that—”
“Ollie. Tell me.”
He did.
By the end of his unlikely, sordid, alarming tale, they were both seated cross-legged, the grass cupped around them and shielding them from view of anyone else who might be wandering this plane.
Amelia found it a comfort, its shivering stalk walls at her back, and his.
Though perhaps she would have found anything comforting outside of Oliver’s admission.
That’s what it was: his head bowed, his hands plucking at grass stems, his voice flat, and hurried as he confessed to meeting with the enemy.
When he was finished, sighing gustily and hunkering down with his forearms braced on his thighs, bent nearly double and awaiting the cut of her tongue, Amelia allowed herself a moment of horror. But only a moment, because her own record was far from spotless.
“Well, then,” she said. “All right.”
His head lifted. “All right?”
“What do you want me to say? Shall I condemn you?”
His nose wrinkled with displeasure. “I feel as though you should.”
“How terrible of you, consorting with the enemy.” She rolled her eyes.
“You’re learning about him. That has value – that perhaps has greater value than anything any of the rest of us are doing at the moment.
The emperor has been an enigma this whole time, this faceless overlord whose motives we can only imagine. ”
“Only imagine? He wants to conquer this continent.”
“Yes, but knowing the why and the how of it can only help our efforts.”
Oliver made another face, but nodded; glanced back down at his hands, where he twirled a blade of dead grass around and around a finger. “That’s what I tell myself, when I’m feeling most guilty.”
“Why do you feel guilty?”
He sent her an accusatory look.
“All right, that was a stupid question. But it isn’t as if you’re sharing troop movements or Northern secrets with him.” When he didn’t answer right away, Amelia said, “Ollie, surely not.”
“No, of course not!” He threw the grass stalk away.
It fluttered and blew back to land in his lap.
He scowled. “But it wouldn’t matter if I discovered the secret of winning the whole war in that solarium: if Erik knew I was meeting with him willingly, that I was seeking him out on my own, he would never forgive me. ”
Amelia had been in love with only one man. So far, an unhelpful, quickly banished voice chimed in at the back of her mind. Hers and Malcolm’s had been a partnership: they argued, they made up; they disagreed, but they always came back to center.
But Malcolm had been, in title, her subservient. Not a king, certainly, nor even a royal, nor a noble. He had not been her peer. Had they married, she would have had to give up her title as marchioness. Could not have become a duchess as she was now, not even with a host of drakes at her command.
She could relate to Oliver in no way… save the knowledge that love was seldom easy, and often wounded one or both parties.
She laid a hand on Oliver’s shoulder, and he leaned into it. “I’m the last one to give anyone romantic advice.”
“That’s true.”
“Hey.” She pinched him through his tunic, and he finally cracked a grin, twisting away from her.
“As I was saying. I’ve only ever—well, you know about Mal.
” Saying his name still put a lump in her throat.
She swallowed and said, “And it’s not my place to tell you what to do.
I’ve never met Erik,” she pressed on, hurriedly, when she saw him start to speak again.
Since when? she imagined him saying. “I don’t know how dictatorial he is. ”
Oliver’s brows lifted. “He’s a king, Lia.”
“That has no bearing on his relationship with you. On the way he treats you as his lover.”
He stared at her.
“Sometimes I’m amazed by my own brilliance.”
That earned her another grin, and a soft chuckle.
He reached to cover her hand with his, and squeezed the back of it.
“I know he won’t hurt me,” he said, growing somber again.
“I trust him completely. But…I’m frightened to tell him all the same.
” He turned a pleading gaze on her. “I’m frightened he’ll hate me. ”
“He won’t.”
Oliver’s answering smile was grim, and Amelia didn’t know if she believed her own assertion. It didn’t matter, anyway, because Oliver wavered, and melted, along with the Between, and she woke on her lumpy bedroll, eyes adjusting slowly to the silvered dark of just before dawn.
She lay on her side a moment, blinking herself alert, remembering the look on Oliver’s face, the hopelessness of it. Would Erik do something drastic when he learned of Oliver’s dreamwalks with the emperor? Renounce him? Imprison him? Set him aside as consort and return him to Oliver Meacham?
She didn’t think so.
But she didn’t know.
There was, however, a blood relative of Erik’s within easy reach.
She rose, and dressed, and because the nights were still cool, wrapped herself up in a cloak before she ducked out of the tent in search of the heir of Aeres.