Chapter 20
Oliver’s fever returned. He’d known that it would. “You’re my grandson,” the emperor told him, and then walked him to his room, and the fever roared up like a bonfire and claimed him once more.
He drifted within its grasp, unable to tell what was real and what was nightmare.
Voices murmured above and around him, and inside his head.
He couldn’t open his eyes, but could see pulsing red walls, squeezing his temples, his throat, his chest. He thought someone might have wiped his brow, a blessed press of cool on his burning forehead.
Erik was there. He reached for him, his face screwed up with desperation, hair swirling around his head as though he stood braced against a maelstrom. “Ollie! Take my hand!”
But he couldn’t move; he couldn’t even call back to him.
Then Erik was whisked away on a breeze, folding and crinkling and lifting off, as though made of parchment.
Strong hands gripped Oliver and spun him. Romanus took up every inch of his vision, face distorted, his smile so wide it seemed his face would split, eyes dancing in an unnatural way.
When he spoke, his voice boomed, stabbing at Oliver’s ears, ringing in his head. “Fuck him all you want, but he’ll never be your family. He’ll never be your blood, the way I am.”
Oliver woke with a start to find his teeth chattering.
He was back in the copper tub, packed with snow.
His bare toes stuck up at the end, the nailbeds tinged blue with the cold.
He shivered uncontrollably…but the fever had broken, and his head was clear, if heavy with leftover sickness and fatigue.
With effort, he rotated his neck. The edge of the tub dug into his temple in a painful way, but he could now view the chamber, and its host of slaves in the act of laying out clothes and preparing a shaving brush and foam.
Gods.
He allowed himself to be hauled from the bath and toweled dry, limp as a child’s dolly. When two slaves pressed him into a chair by the fire, wrapped up in a warm robe, he clutched it tighter under his throat and basked in the hearth’s heat.
Grandson. I’m his grandson. The thought cycled through his mind, an endless loop that left room for little else.
He sat pliant while his heels were massaged with oil, and his nails cleaned and buffed.
Closed his eyes and tipped his head back while a slave shaved his face.
Had they tried to cut his hair, he would have snarled at them, but it was only combed out and then swept back with a golden headband.
He wondered where his beads had gone, and felt a momentary pang that he’d never see them again.
Hopefully Erik would braid new ones into his hair, when they were reunited.
Grandson. I’m his grandson.
There would be no reunion. He was too tired and shaky to delude himself.
When he was dressed in a knee-length gold tunic slashed with white, matching breeches, and high-gloss boots, two guards came to escort him.
He wobbled in the hallway, and wondered if he would grab at one of his guards if he started to fall. No, he decided. He’d rather faceplant on the flagstones. He didn’t ask where they were going, because it didn’t matter.
Grandson. I’m his grandson.
They bypassed the king’s—the emperor’s—quarters, and continued to a spiral staircase. Down and around, down and around, walking single file. At least, Oliver reflected, if he fell now, he’d land on the guard in front of him rather than shatter his front teeth.
Grandson. I’m his grandson.
Maybe Romanus Tyrsbane would reject him and any imagined familial relationship if he was toothless.
Imagined…there was a thought. Perhaps all of this was a lie. Some terrible misunderstanding. Or an intentional lie meant to sway him to the enemy side.
That was it.
It must be it.
Otherwise…
Grandson. I’m his grandson.
Oliver spared a thought that, fever or no, he was still a little delirious, and then nearly collided with the guard in front of him when he pulled up short.
He threw his hands out, and slapped them against the guard’s golden-armored back to catch himself.
“Oh. Apologies.” If his voice dripped sarcasm, so be it.
No one was going to clout the emperor’s grandson upside the head for laying hands on a guard.
Gods, oh gods…
The guard stepped to the side, and Oliver rocked back on his heels. He wasn’t dizzy, per se, but unsteady. He forced his hands to his sides, took a deep breath, and edged his feet apart to regain his balance.
When the guards stepped up to flank him on either side, he looked ahead, and took in the room before him.
It glowed. A long room with a high, barreled ceiling, and intricate gilt-framed paintings adoring the walls. The table stretched all the way to the iron-framed bow windows, heaped with gold candlesticks of all shapes and sizes, the candle flames tall and still, filling the space with warm light.
Nearest him, at the head of the table, Romanus pushed back his chair and stood to face him.
Grandson. I’m his grandson.
Oliver could hope and pretend, but it wasn’t a lie or a fantasy, was it?
The Drakes were dragon riders once upon a time, and the girls had strong magic of their own, to be sure…
but Oliver had felt that vibration with the emperor from the first. That spark, that pull.
There was a connection there, one he’d mistakenly attributed to lust on Romanus’s part.
He’d been the red whore, and he’d thought that meant Romanus wanted him.
But it was even worse than that.
Oliver stared up at him, at his harsh face, and his gleaming white hair, and the room tilted around him.
“Here,” Romanus said, and took his arm. “Come with me.”
Too dizzy to resist the help, too crushed by the enormity of a revelation that had happened hours ago, but which kept happening, he let Romanus tow him down the length of the table and deposit him in the chair at the foot of it.
Once he was seated, Romanus pushed the chair in closer to the table, as though Oliver’s weight were an afterthought.
He plucked the golden-embroidered napkin from the place setting, snapped it open, and draped it across Oliver’s lap.
Oliver lay his hands on the table edge to keep them from shaking.
As Romanus returned to his own seat, he gestured to the table, and the two young men sitting to the left and right of his abandoned chair. “Oliver, these are my sons. My heir, Crown Prince Marcellus, and his younger brother, Prince Lucius.”
They both resembled their father, but were slimmer and finer-featured. Marcellus was tall and cruel-faced. Lucius was slight, and wide-eyed.
They were his uncles, weren’t they?
Oliver didn’t care. His head was full of bees, and there was still snow lodged deep in his chest, beating back all feeling along with the fever.
But then the doors swung inward, and there stood his cousins, and he found that he could care, for the right thing.
He blinked, uncertain at first, that it was them, so elaborate and unusual were their dresses, their hair. They didn’t look like themselves. But when he looked at their faces, he found Amelia and Tessa, their blue eyes the same color as his own, full of fear, and of determination.
Tessa’s brows jumped when she saw him, and she swayed forward before she caught herself, and stood straight again. She wanted to come to him.
Amelia didn’t move save the hard leap of her throat as she swallowed.
Oliver gripped the table edge until his knuckles cracked, as the princes rose to escort them to their seats.
Lucius, he noted, pulled out Tessa’s chair and gestured her into it with a deferential lowering of his head.
Marcellus laid an ungentle hand on Amelia’s shoulder and shoved her down into hers.
I’ll kill him, Oliver thought, calmly, rationally. I’ll kill him for that. But then he thought that Amelia might like to do the killing herself.
“Lady Amelia,” Romanus said, as the doors parted again to admit footmen bearing large golden trays. “Lady Tessa. You look well-rested.”
Amelia closed her hand around her fork, gaze fixed on the candelabra in front of her.
When Oliver glanced toward Tessa, he saw that she was studying him, brow furrowed in concern. He must look sick, then. He attempted a smile for her benefit, but his face was stiff, the muscles there tired.
A footman reached over his shoulder to place a small, golden bowl of salad on his charger, and then poured wine into the waiting cut-crystal goblet to his right. Pale wine, the color of pears.
Oliver was already dizzy, but he reached for the goblet the moment the footman withdrew and drained it all down in one go. Without comment, the footman refilled it.
“I don’t see why this is necessary,” Marcellus said, and his voice matched the harsh angles of his face. “Playing at some sort of family dinner in front of these heathens.”
Oliver reached for his wine again.
Amelia’s hand tightened on the fork, knuckles white pearls under the skin.
Tessa slid her hand across the table, trying to capture her attention, to no avail.
In a low and pleasant voice, attention fixed on his salad, Romanus said, “If we are to host dinners here and in Seles, then it’s important to practice behaving as a family.”
Marcellus scoffed. “Just because I throw a leg over this whore, it doesn’t make us family.”
Don’t do it, Amelia, Oliver thought, and wished for the first time that his powers enabled him to communicate telepathically. Her thumb slid up and down, up and down on the fork handle, and it would spell disaster for her if she gave into her clear impulse to stab the prince beside her.
“How can I be sure,” Marcellus continued, “that she isn’t already ripening with some Aquitainian bastard? Do you think a woman marches with an army and doesn’t get passed from bedroll to bedroll?”
“It’s as I told you,” Romanus said. “The physicians and midwives will examine her. If she’s already with child, it will be dealt with.”