Chapter 7
Oliver threw off the covers and scrambled to his feet.
He was forced to close his eyes against a nauseating wave of dizziness.
His body flushed hot, sweat springing up under his arms and down his back and chest. He felt stricken with marsh fever again, and clutched wildly for something against which to catch his balance.
He felt cool porcelain—the washstand—and when he slapped at the wooden surface, he wound up shoving it instead.
It hit the dirt floor of the tent with a crash of broken crockery.
Oliver opened his eyes, the inside of the tent see-sawing madly around him, and saw the smashed bowl and pitcher lying amidst tufts of weeds.
Off to his right, a flurry of movement signaled Erik’s waking.
He let out a wordless bellow, threw the covers off himself, and drew his sword from the scabbard beside the pallet with a shink of steel on leather.
He leaped to his feet, bare-chested, loose-haired, chest already heaving for breath.
He settled into a ready stance, feet braced apart, sword held before him.
Oliver would have laughed at another time. As it was, his own panic thumping wildly in his chest, he rubbed at his eyes and said, “All is well. It was only me.”
Erik scanned the tent, and then his gaze landed and remained on Oliver, and his fearsome, battle-ready scowl became one of concern.
He charged across the tent and took Oliver’s chin in his free hand.
Bewildered, Oliver let his neck go lax and turned his head side-to-side at Erik’s urging while he peered down into his face.
His frown deepened. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
Oliver blinked, panic climbing. It was a physical presence in his throat, bound to choke him.
“What do you mean?” Half his thoughts were back in the Between, where Romanus was now alone with Amelia.
Amelia, who’d never met a man she couldn’t infuriate.
Amelia, who he was convinced had only lived this long because she’d had first a band of loyal men, and now a band of loyal drakes to guard her back.
“They’re glowing,” Erik said.
“I’m fine, I…what?”
Still holding his sword, Erik bent down and picked up a wedge of broken mirror. He held it up in front of Oliver’s face, and it didn’t matter that the light inside the tent was poor; he didn’t need light to see what Erik meant, because his eyes were generating a light of their own.
They were glowing, their blue backlit as though by an inner fire.
Oliver gasped and stepped back from the mirror. He blinked, long and slow, but when he looked again, his eyes still flared bright as the blue heart of the hottest flame.
Like the drakes’ eyes.
Oliver reached, and watched his reflection reach, to his right eye. Touched the skin just beneath; pulled down the lower lid, then lifted the upper.
“Does it hurt?” Erik asked, voice oddly hesitant.
“No.” And it didn’t. “I don’t feel any different.”
“Is this Percy’s doing?”
“No,” Oliver said, without thinking about it. But when he considered, he knew it was true. He could have reached out and sought Percy’s mind, but it wasn’t connected to his at the moment. “I have no idea why this was happening.”
Though he suspected it had something to do with Romanus. With being shoved forcefully out of the Between. He’d been trying to return to the solarium since he woke, but it was impossible; every attempt was met with an impregnable defense. His mind and his magic bounced off of it every time.
Erik lowered the mirror, and Oliver almost protested; never before had he been hypnotized by the sight of his own face. Thus distracted, it took Oliver a moment to classify the look that had come over Erik’s face.
Wariness.
Logically, it made sense: Oliver’s eyes were glowing. Who wouldn’t be wary of such a thing?
Still, it stung. “Are you frightened of me?”
Erik looked down at his hands, the jagged wedge of glass in one and the sword in the other.
He dropped the shard of mirror as though burned, but turned to walk the sword back to its scabbard, and sheathed it with the care he showed all his weapons.
With the sleeping pallet between them, he folded his arms over his bare chest and said, “No. I’m frightened for you. ”
Oliver was too muddled, too distracted, pulled too hard in two different directions, to properly appreciate what his folded arms did for the muscles in Erik’s arms and chest. To admire the way his hair lay in silver-shot black waves over his shoulders, awaiting the braids that Oliver would give him when it was time to properly rise for the morning.
“I can talk with dragons,” Oliver said. “Why should this,” he gestured to his face, “be the thing that frightens you?”
“It isn’t. At least not that alone. The closer we get to the capital, the more distant you grow. You are…pale, and waxen, and listless in your saddle.”
“Because I’m clothed in Northern garments too warm for a Southern spring. As for pale, I’m sorry, but I was born that way.” The last he snapped, scowling.
Erik shook his head. “No. This is different. You’re—you keep to yourself. Some disagreement has fractured your relationship with Náli, that I can tell even from a distance.”
Bollocks.
“And with me, you’d rather go to bed than talk of anything serious.”
With an effort, Oliver lifted his brows. “Congratulations on becoming the first man in recorded history to be concerned about getting his cock sucked.”
“Oliver.” It was a kingly voice, a command for silence.
Because the conversation wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. Because Oliver wasn’t behaving the way he wanted him to.
Meanwhile, Amelia was trapped with the emperor.
“Erik,” Oliver spit back. “If your aim in bringing me on this march was to be your mild-mannered, supportive bed warmer without opinions or feelings of my own—”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“I don’t know anything! Including what’s happening to me. But it is happening.” In more ways that Erik could imagine.
Erik looked ready to shout and bluster. Instead, he took a measured breath and said, “I love you.”
Oliver’s stomach sank. He wasn’t sure he’d ever enjoyed hearing that phrase less.
“Which,” he continued, “is how I know that something is badly wrong. You won’t tell me what it is. I want to demand that you do, but I know you well enough to know that will accomplish nothing.”
“Don’t you want to bludgeon me anyway? Isn’t that your style of leadership?”
Erik’s gaze narrowed, but he didn’t take the bait. “I don’t think you should fly over the mountains.”
“What?”
“Percy can follow orders, yes? He can manage without you. Send him through the air while you travel through the tunnels with me.”
“Are—are you mad?”
“I’m quite serious.”
Oliver scoffed, but knew the sound was halfhearted at best. His worry for Amelia was swelling by the moment, threatening to swallow him.
He lacked the energy for this argument. In fact, he wanted badly to admit to everything.
To tell Erik all about his visits with Romanus; wanted to pull the pendant from his pocket and reveal that the ambush on the camp had been a distraction so that Romanus could gift it to him.
Erik would be furious, might even snatch his ring from Oliver’s finger and boot him from the tent, but he was too tired, too anxious to care for the consequences at the moment.
Before he could form the words, Erik rounded the end of the sleeping pallet and moved to stand before him. “Ollie,” he said, tone pleading, and captured both of Oliver’s hands in his own. “Come with me. Let the drakes go alone.”
The way Erik’s voice trembled with true fear, the way he was begging, disarmed the last of Oliver’s fight. “But…but what if there’s an ambush waiting for us? What if we step out of the tunnels and straight into a trap?”
“Percy will tell you.” Erik pulled one hand from his, and reached as if to touch his face. Hesitated. When Oliver sighed, he reached again, and cupped Oliver’s cheek, firm and sure. “Won’t he tell you? Won’t he reach out through your bond if he sees any danger?”
“I—yes, of course—but I—what if he can’t? What if the tunnels are too deep? What if…?”
Erik’s thumb swept across his cheek, cool, and rough from sword work. “What if what?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know.” Oliver realized that he’d begun to shiver. If Romanus meant to kill or harm Amelia, surely he’d already done so. There was no way for Oliver to come to her rescue. “Erik, I’m afraid.”
“I know. Which is why I want you with me.” His smile was small, and more than a little heartbroken.
Oliver closed his eyes, nodded, and when he opened them again, Erik said, “Oh.”
“What?”
“Your eyes stopped glowing.”
But beneath his skin, he felt the first stirrings of a fever.
~*~
Amelia came awake flailing, an angry scream caught in her throat.
Something hard impacted all down her left side; knocked the breath from her lungs.
She opened her eyes and saw the hard ground, the rugs she’d laid over it inside her tent, the wooden feet of her sleeping cot—which she’d obviously just rolled out of.
“Gods,” a female voice said above her. “Is this a nightmare, or some sort of fit? Shall I fetch Callum and his box of potions?”
Amelia reached gingerly to touch the side of her head, relieved to see that her fingers didn’t come away bloody. “Leda?”
“The one and only.”
Amelia sat up, and clutched at the side of the cot when the tent tilted around her. “Oh. Bollocks.”
Leda sat on the end of the cot, dressed for the day in a brown riding habit trimmed in gold satin, hair neatly braided back from her face and jewels all in place.
Amelia wasn’t sure how she managed to keep from looking as bedraggled and dusty as the rest of their party, and was half-convinced it was some undiscovered form of magic.
Amelia blinked her vision clearer, hand pressed to her rolling stomach, and saw that the tent walls around them glowed with early yellow light. She’d overslept.