Chapter 7 #2
“What time is it?” she asked, hauling herself back onto the cot before she was ready. She wobbled, and almost fell in her dizziness, but managed to get upright and keep from retching.
“Just past eight. Breakfast has been had and the fires doused. The men were growing worried when we didn’t see you, so I came to check that you’re well. It would appear that you are not.”
“No, no, I’m fine.” Amelia swallowed, and nearly gagged. “I’m tired, is all.”
“You screamed when I tried to wake you, and almost smashed me in the nose.”
Amelia winced. “Sorry.”
Leda studied her with familiar shrewdness. “It must have been a terrifying nightmare you were having.” Her tone suggested she suspected something more complicated than that.
“Yes. It was.”
Leda studied her a long moment, brows lifted, then stood and crossed to the sideboard. With her back to Amelia, she reached for a cup and a bottle. “That’s to be expected, given what we face.”
Amelia closed her eyes and massaged at the headache burning between her brows. She felt a presence there, like when her brother would hold his finger close at the bridge of her nose, not touching but almost, just to make her go cross-eyed. An ugly tingling feeling.
“Here,” Leda said, and she opened her eyes to find a cup of dark wine held before her.
“I need my wits about me,” Amelia protested.
“One cup won’t leave you staggering, and you can’t very well lead anyone anywhere if you’re swaying like a storm-tossed ship. Drink. It’ll settle your nerves.”
“Very well. Thank you.” When Amelia reached to take the cup, she saw a scabbed-over wound on her palm, and her heart leaped. The emperor hadn’t merely drawn her blood in the astral plane. He’d affected her physical body as well.
She tipped back the cup and drained it in a series of long swallows.
“You might have sipped it,” Leda said with a laugh as she dropped into a folding chair.
“I don’t have time for that.” Amelia attempted to stand, and was steadier, but not steady enough. She subsided back to the cot. “Can I tell you something and have you not repeat it to anyone?”
“Of course.” Leda’s gaze sparked with interest, and with mischief. “Does this something involve a certain Northern prince?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I met the emperor of Seles.”
“You did what?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I’ve told you how I can convene with my sister and cousin while I’m sleeping?”
“Yes. Though it beggars the imagination.” Leda smoothed her skirt, patted at her hair, and composed herself after a momentary goggle.
“I was with Oliver in the Between. That’s the place where…” She moved along when Leda waved for her to skip the magical details. “And he confessed to me that he’d been meeting with the emperor there.”
“Holy Gods.”
“It began with the emperor drawing him. Romanus Tyrsbane found him, and put him in some sort of magical mental construct of the Aquitaine palace solarium, and offered to teach him more about magic.”
“And that couldn’t possibly go wrong.”
“I cautioned him, but Oliver is stubborn.”
Leda sent her a speaking glance.
“More stubborn that me, even,” Amelia protested.
“He said that he was learning more about the enemy, gaining his trust.” It had sounded logical when Oliver put it to her, but saying it now to Leda’s disbelieving face she heard the weakness of the statement.
Oliver was ensnared, and trying to justify it.
“Oh, Gods.” She wiped at her face, and could smell the blood on her hand.
She shoved it out before her, glared down at the nick on her palm as though the offending limb was no longer part of her body.
“Oliver took you to meet the emperor?” Leda pressed.
“No. Oliver and I were talking in a field—that’s where we always meet, the Between is a great plains landscape—and suddenly the sky started to melt, and we were in the solarium.
The emperor brought us there. I have no idea how.
He’s much more powerful than any of us.” She’d suspected as much all along: he was said to have been emperor for more than a century, which she’d always taken as rumor and exaggeration to support his “Immortal” title, but to witness his power firsthand, so see what he could do seemingly without effort, she wondered now if he had been practicing magic for generations.
“He sent Oliver away – again, I don’t know how.
And then he…” She looked down at the scab on her palm and shuddered.
“What?”
“He cut my hand.” She turned it toward Leda to show her the mark. “And then he tasted my blood.”
Leda jerked as though she meant to stand, gripping the arms of her chair much the way Amelia had in the Between. “What?”
“He took a drop of blood from my palm and licked it.” She mimed doing so and felt ill. “Then I fainted and woke up here.”
Leda did stand, then, foot tapping, one hand reaching to toy with the pendant around her neck.
Her gaze settled on a travel trunk, distracted and withdrawn.
“All right. Very well. That’s…all right.
Good. We’ll just…” She snapped her fingers and met Amelia’s gaze.
“That Northern lordling. The necromancer.”
“Náli.”
“Him. He uses blood magic, does he not? You’ll go to that—that Between place and ask him what’s to be gained from tasting blood.” She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes widening. “Drat, I shouldn’t have said that aloud. What if the emperor is even now spying on us?”
“The emperor might well have been spying all along. Meeting with him proved I have no idea the degree to which he’s capable of learning about us. And if I go back into the Between to find Náli, who’s to say I won’t return straight to the solarium with Romanus?”
“Gods and bollocks,” Leda said with feeling, and thumped back into her chair. “I don’t like this, Amelia. I don’t like it at all.”
“Do you suppose I do?”
They regarded one another in helpless silence a moment.
It allowed them to hear the crunch of approaching footsteps.
A moment later, the tent flap lifted, and Reggie’s golden head thrust through the gap.
He was already dressed in drab, woodland colors, which only heightened the regal prettiness of his face and hair.
“Good, you’re up,” he said when he spied Amelia sitting on the edge of the cot. Then he really examined her, and frowned. “What is it? Are you ill?”
Amelia stood, and bent to pull her boots from under the cot. “No, I’m fine. Go and rouse the troops.”
He frowned. “The troops are well and roused. We’re waiting for you.”
She stood, boots in-hand, and swallowed down the last of her panic. The wine was taking effect, now, smoothing out the edges of her fright and fortifying her quaking spine. “Give me a moment, then, unless you’ve changed your tastes with regard to naked women.”
He blushed, scowled, said, “Be quick about it,” and departed.
“It’s a shame the two of you aren’t better-suited,” Leda mused, signaling an end to their discussion of the emperor, for which Amelia was grateful. “The children would be beautiful.”
Amelia sorted, and went to fetch her clothes.