Chapter 15
“…rik. Erik. Erik.”
There had been a moment, when he was much younger, on the day his father fell on the battlefield, that Erik’s entire consciousness narrowed down to one tiny detail.
As men carried Frode’s lifeless body across the drawbridge, Erik saw that one of his gloves was missing, his hand pale and limp where it dangled from the ox-hide stretcher.
Erik doubled back. I have to find it, he thought.
Father’s hand will be cold. It lay black and crumpled in scuffle of dirty snow, like a dead bird.
When he picked it up, he saw the threads had come unraveled along the pointer finger, and that the palm was wet with blood.
Such a small thing, seen like that: a glove. A thin skin of leather to cover human skin. He’d stood staring at it for a long time. He didn’t know how long. Wondering if the stiches could be repaired—if Father could be repaired, though he knew that he couldn’t.
It had been a peaceful span of time, until someone started shaking him.
Someone was shaking him now.
“Erik. Son.”
That wasn’t right. He was no one’s son, not anymore. He was the king. He was the authority. Everyone waited on his pleasure, and his decision.
At the moment, his decision was to study each and every carved groove in the silver, diamond-studded hair bead he held in his palm, because it was the only bit of Oliver that remained once the portal closed.
It was such a small thing, this bead. It was incredible that the silversmith had managed to work so much detail into its surface; that the jeweler had affixed such tiny diamonds at such precise intervals.
It was truly a marvel of craftsmanship. A consort’s bead, one that marked the wearer as the lover and closest confidante of a king.
“Erik.” The shaking intensified; it moved from his shoulder to his arm. It jostled his hand, and the bead fell. Plink, down to the smooth stone floor of the tunnel.
A hand gripped the collar of his tunic and shook him so hard his teeth clacked together.
Erik lifted his head, and blinked, and found his men pressed in all around him, torches flickering, shadows dancing up the curved tunnel walls. They kept back a good two paces, though. Horses shifted and stamped, iron shoes ringing like bells on the stone.
It was Birger who stood in front of him; who’d been saying his name over and over; who’d shaken him, and still held fast to his collar. His weathered, gray-bearded face was lined with a frantic sort of worry, his forehead a maze of stacked creases where his brows were furrowed.
When Erik met his gaze, Birger tilted his head backward, as though shocked by whatever he saw on Erik’s face. “Erik,” he said, softer this time. “Lad. We can’t stay here.”
The sympathy on his face was too much to bear.
Erik glanced away, across those gathered beyond them.
He spotted Magnus and Lars. As he searched the crowd, Lord Askr shouldered his way through, leaning heavily on the axe haft he used as a cane.
Everyone wore the same expression: sorrow… mixed with fear.
“How—” Erik started, and found that his mouth was very dry, as though he hadn’t swallowed for some time. He cleared his throat and began again. “How long have I been standing here?”
Birger hesitated a telling beat. “For a while, lad. For a while.”
A while that they didn’t have, if they were going to rendezvous with Tessa, and Rune, and Náli, and the drakes on the other side of the mountains. A while in which Oliver had not returned, because he would not return. He’d been taken, and Erik knew who’d done the taking.
His knees creaked and popped as he crouched down and retrieved the bead. It had felt warm in his palm, heated by his skin, but its brief time on the tunnel floor had turned it cold as an ice chip. He closed his hand around it as he stood, and when he spoke next, his voice sounded normal.
The sort of normal it had been before the Drakes came to Aeres. Before he’d braided lover’s beads into fire-red hair and learned to show softness. His old voice; a king’s voice.
“Has there been any sign of another portal opening?”
Birger let out a long, slow breath. Relieved.
“No,” Magnus said. “We’ve rubbed our hands over every inch of wall and floor here, and sent runners ahead and behind. There’s been nothing.”
Erik nodded. “Remount. We need to keep moving.”
~*~
When Oliver woke, his teeth were chattering. The sluggish, heavy press of the fever was gone, and in its place, a freezing cold that bit deep through skin and flesh and into his bones.
He opened his eyes and beheld a smooth plaster ceiling set with polished wooden beams. A gilded chandelier dripping crystal. He recognized the smooth, pale stone of the walls, because it was the same material that encircled the solarium where he’d so often met with Romanus in the Between.
This was Aquitaine. The palace.
Here, he knew with a sick lurch, he would meet Romanus in the flesh. For the second time.
He craned his neck and found that he was naked, and lying in a copper bathtub packed with melting snow.
Just as it had at Aeres, the cold had broken his fever, and driven his body’s killing heat back to something manageable.
Despite the shivering and the numbness, his head felt clearer, his vision sharper.
He was hungry for the first time in days.
He also needed to get out of this bloody place as quickly as possible.
It was a laborious effort to sit upright, and then grip the sides of the tub and haul himself up out of the slushy snow.
He couldn’t feel his feet, nor much of his legs, and he floundered when he tried to step out of the tub, and flopped down hard onto a rug that did little to cushion the stone floor beneath.
“Shit,” he hissed, and pushed up onto his hands and knees, dripping and shaking.
“You’re awake,” a low, familiar voice said from across the room, and Oliver yelped.
He sat back on his haunches and clapped a hand over his mouth to quash the tail end of the embarrassing sound he’d made.
His damp hair lay in cold snarls across his shoulders and down his back, dripping icy pearls of water that made him shudder.
He wanted a towel, or a robe, or one of the purple drapes from the nearby window, even, with which to cover himself, but he didn’t trust his strength just yet.
He knelt, pale, naked, trembling, and lifted his head to find Romanus seated in a chair across from him, a handful of paces away.
Oliver tried to rub some feeling back into his arms and wracked his brain for the question most likely to be answered.
His memory was addled from the fever, but he recalled the tunnel, and its nightmare shadows leaping along the walls; the steady clop of horse hooves ringing out against stone.
He recalled Erik’s strong arms around him—and then the world tilting, and Erik shouting for him.
There had been a portal: that much was evident by his current circumstances. The night the camp was raided, men and drakes had poured through, but he’d not stopped to consider falling into a portal. It had opened directly beneath Erik’s horse. How had Romanus…
Oh.
Oh, of course.
Oliver rubbed a hand over his trembling lips, and his voice came out stuttery from the cold. “The pendant. The amethyst. That was how you knew where I’d be.”
Romanus tucked his regal chin in the barest of nods. “Very good.”
Kneeling as he was, Oliver felt like a dog being patted on the head. Good boy.
Oliver folded his hands in his lap, trying to cover himself.
A spill of purple off to his right looked like a plush robe draped over a chair, but he didn’t like the idea of standing up, wobbly as a new colt and naked as the day he was born, to fetch it.
“Why bother with the pendant at all? Why not take me the night you gave it to me?”
“It wasn’t time,” Romanus said, his tone suggesting that was obvious.
“I wasn’t sick yet, you mean.” Though he swayed on his knees, in danger of blacking out again, Oliver managed a scowl.
A thought occurred, one he wanted to kick himself for not having sooner.
“It was the necklace, wasn’t it? I haven’t had a fever since I bonded with Percy, and then you gave me that bloody amethyst, and I started feeling unwell. ”
Romanus tipped his head, the slightest angle of concession. “It didn’t cause your illness, if that’s what you’re thinking. Your illness lived inside you, still, sleeping. That sapphire you carry, the cold-drake essence trapped inside it, kept your fever at bay. The amethyst overrides it.”
Anger swelled in his belly, hotter, brighter, and more painful than the fever had been.
Oliver had never wanted to strike a person so badly before.
He clenched his hands into fists in his lap, and took a series of slow, deep breaths.
But there was pride building, too, tightening his chest; the bittersweet silver lining to his current storm cloud situation.
“I was too strong,” he said, and though Romanus’s expression didn’t change, he knew that he was correct. “You couldn’t pull me through the portal until I was sick.”
Romanus let out a slow, bored-sounding breath, and examined his spotless, trimmed-short nails. “I grew tired of waiting for you to come of your own volition.”
“Why would I come to you?” Oliver scoffed. “Why would think that would ever happen?”
Pale brows lifted a fraction. “Why wouldn’t I?
” he countered, in that infuriating way that had become familiar after weeks and weeks of meetings in the Between.
It was twice as infuriating, now, because Oliver was cold, and naked, and shivering, and all too aware that at any moment, Romanus could grow tired of bantering and reach out to touch him.
“You don’t belong with the Aeretolleans. That much is plain to both of us.”
“It’s not plain to me. I don’t care what titles you hold: it’s not for you to say where I do or don’t belong.”