Chapter 6
“I have a confession of my own,” Amelia said, tall, gray grass waving around her shoulders.
A piece bowed to tickle her face, and she swatted it away with a gesture Oliver remembered well from their youth, slapping at flies and midges on the banks of their favorite creek, when the summer sun turned the whole world thick as soup.
Oliver plucked a strand of grass and wrapped it around and around his finger.
His ring, the one Erik had given him as a token of their union, didn’t glitter and gleam here in the Between the way it did in the waking world.
He saw that as an ill omen. “It can’t be as damning as my confession.
” He swept a hand through the air. “Confess away.”
She bit at her lip, and turned unusually hesitant. “Recall I told you that we’d captured a Sel when we retook the tower?”
“Yes. You chained him up in the wine cellar at Inglewood.”
“Yes, well…” She started playing with the grass, too, and Oliver forced his own hands still. “He’s not in the wine cellar anymore.”
He lifted his brows. “You executed him?” He still remembered well the whistle of Erik’s axe through the air.
The meaty thump of blade meeting neck, and the steaming spray of blood across the snow.
And then the dead Sel in the great hall.
The blood had needed to be scrubbed from the flags, but Oliver knew some must have slithered through the cracks, forever staining the soil beneath.
Amelia chewed harder at her lip. “Not exactly. The opposite, in fact.” She grimaced, and in that moment, she was a girl again, caught putting a live frog in her father’s boot. “I brought him along on the march.”
“Oh. You…oh. Well. Then.”
“Oh.” She scowled and was herself again, grown and jaded. “As if that’s more shocking than your clandestine emperor meetings.”
Oliver held out his hands in a bid for peace. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You said then in a very condemning way.”
“I’m not condemning you. I’m merely surprised.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Because only you are allowed to fraternize with the enemy?”
“I’m conducting reconnaissance.” He narrowed his eyes back. “Why, are you fraternizing?”
“I’m using him for information. He claims he’s defected from the Sel army for good; that he was a slave there and doesn’t wish to go back.”
“And you believe him?”
Her lip curled, and he braced himself for a hurled invective. She deflated, though, shoulders slumping. “I really do.”
Oliver nodded.
“He claims not to possess any magical abilities, and not only can I not detect any sort of power coming from him, the wolves can’t, either.”
“They would be the best judges. Them and the drakes.”
“He seems sincere.” She shook her head, and pulled her knees up to her chest, arms looped around them. “But am I na?ve?”
“You, my dear cousin, have never been na?ve a day in your life.”
She sent him a look.
“Tessa, yes. I still can’t believe she’s married.” He shook his head, and Amelia joined him. “Your sister is a very sweet-hearted person who wants to see the best in others. But you are skeptical. If he isn’t actually trustworthy, then he’s a talented enough actor to fool the meanest woman I know.”
She scrunched up her nose, but looked pleased.
“Shouldn’t you be abed? Truly sleeping? You’ve a long day of preparations ahead of you.”
“And you don’t?”
Oliver’s dreamwalking form currently lay curled against Erik’s side, spent and snoring after a frantic coupling.
It was becoming a habit: when his guilt and secret-keeping turned him prickly, and Erik started frowning and wondering, Oliver would throw himself at his lover.
So far it worked, and worked well, but he knew Erik would reach a point when he shoved him away and demanded to know why he was behaving this way.
Amelia had a point: his day loomed busy and exhausting as well.
After two weeks of riding across flat fields and abandoned farmland, tomorrow they would enter a scrubby and stunted stretch of forest that led up into the foothills.
The road would wind upward for a spell, before they reached the man-carved canyon that was the entrance to the vast tunnel network that would lead the Phalanx beneath the mountains and straight to the rear of the palace at Aquitaine.
They would wait to enter the tunnels until word from Amelia that her party was safely past the last checkpoint and en route overland past the Bridelands.
The drakes, of course, would not travel underground. Oliver, Tessa, and Náli would fly up and over the snow-capped mountains, cut off from the Phalanx. Far from their lovers and partners, the three of them alone against whatever might lie in wait atop the sharp peaks.
Talking with Amelia had been a pleasant distraction from his steadily-mounting anxiety, but now he broke out in a flashfire sweat, shivering inside his tunic and fur-lined boots.
Quietly, Amelia said, “We’ve been talking and planning an assault for so long that it seemed as though it would never happen. And now…” Her next breath whistled unsteadily.
“Yes. I know.” Oliver offered her a commiserating smile…and watched the sky behind her darken from its usual washed-out white to a deep, stormy gray.
He jerked upright, and so did Amelia, her hair whipping back and forth as she turned her head. “What’s happening?”
The sky had begun to bleed, like ink splashed with water. It turned gray in long drips that swept downward and flattened the grass. Erased it entirely. The ground beneath him turned hard, and cold. Lines appeared in the sky: the joins of stacked stone blocks.
Oliver bolted to his feet when he realized what was happening. The twitter of ghostly birds faded, and in its place was a ringing, indoor silence. The arches formed, and beyond it, the glow of a fire, the kiss of sunlight through a glass domed ceiling.
The palace solarium.
“Amelia, go! You have to leave now!”
She scrambled up. “What? Why? Where are we?”
He gripped her by the arms and shook her until her eyes popped wide. “Leave,” he ordered. “Get out of the Between. Right now. Go.”
She grabbed his forearms. “Why? Ollie, what’s—”
“There’s no need for the lady to go,” an accented voice called from over by the fire. “Have her join us.”
No. “Amelia,” he hissed. “Please leave.”
But Amelia’s head was turned, and she peered through the arches toward the imposing figure seated in one of the chairs by the hearth. “Is that…is he…”
“Lady Amelia Drake,” Romanus Tyrsbane called. “Come.”
“Don’t,” Oliver begged. His heart was beating fast enough to choke him, and his hands were sweating so much she must surely feel it through her sleeves. “Just go.”
Amelia slanted him a disapproving look. “It’s all right for you to meet with him but not me?”
Yes. That was his true answer. He was in complete control of his faculties when he was in the emperor’s company; he was using the emperor, in fact, gaining knowledge and magical skill that he would then use against the man when the time came. But Amelia, strong but young Amelia…
Gods. Listen to him.
Romanus didn’t call them again, he wouldn’t deign to, but Oliver heard the quiet sounds of wine pouring from a crystal decanter, and he let go of Amelia’s arms.
Her look said that’s what I thought. She smoothed her tunic, lifted her head, and strode through the archway into the solarium.
So panicked he thought he might faint, Oliver followed.
Romanus stood beside one of the small, round-topped tables, pouring ruby-colored wine into ornate crystal goblets. Three of them. He was dressed richly, layers of purple trimmed with white fur, statelier and more court-ready than he usually was in Oliver’s presence. He’d dressed up for the lady.
Amelia made it halfway across the mosaic at the center of the floor before grinding to a halt. Her hands fluttered at her sides, and Oliver thought she was fighting the urge to fold her arms. She didn’t want to look frightened, though she clearly was.
Oliver stepped up beside her, and then a half-step farther, angling his shoulder across hers. He was no Erik, or Leif, or Rune, but he wasn’t going to stand idly by should Romanus decide on violence.
Romanus poured the last goblet of wine, and flicked a glance up through pale lashes as he put the stopper back in the decanter, and his flat mouth stretched in a way that Oliver now recognized: amusement. He found it amusing that Oliver should think to shield his cousin from him.
Oliver stretched up as tall as he could, chin lifted in silent challenge.
The decanter landed on the table with a soft thump, and Romanus lifted a goblet with an elegant, underhanded gesture. He extended it toward Amelia. “Lady Drake.”
Her gaze flicked from the goblet to his pale face, and back again.
Oliver couldn’t recall the last time she’d been so blank-faced.
Her ready displays of disgust and annoyance had always caused strife with her mother.
Oliver didn’t know if the way she schooled her features now was a newly-learned skill, or the result of abject terror.
“I assure you,” Romanus said, “it isn’t poisoned.”
Amelia darted a look to Oliver, who nodded. If Romanus was going to poison him with mystical wine in the Between, it would have happened long ago, he reasoned.
After another beat, Amelia accepted the goblet.
Romanus’s nod was regal, perfectly polite, and condescending all at once. As though Amelia was a willful child who’d made the correct decision in the end.
Romanus picked up the other two goblets, and offered one to Oliver with far less formality.
Oliver took it, and, for lack of anything better to do, said, “I believe you already know my cousin, Lady Amelia Drake, Duchess of Drakewell, but allow me to make the formal introduction. Lia, this is Romanus Tyrsbane, Immortal Emperor Unchallenged of Seles.”
It was perhaps the most ludicrous thing he’d ever said, but it seemed the only appropriate thing to say in the moment.