1
On the Road
Aquitainia
“Oh, her eyes were blue, and her smile was red,
“She always baked the softest bread…
Oliver gritted his teeth, and belatedly realized that he’d tightened his hands on the reins when his horse tossed his head. “Sorry, boy,” he murmured, loosening his fingers and stroking the gelding’s neck.
Some half-hour ago – though it felt like more – they’d emerged from the cover of forest into a sea of wavering grassland: pastures gone unthreshed after the loss of life during the war, its farmers and their sons having marched to the capital, and been killed or captured. Out in the open, with the drakes circling lazily overhead of the Phalanx, Magnus had started singing, a few others had picked it up, and no one had told them to hush or risk drawing the attention of enemies hiding in the brush.
Ordinarily, Oliver found the Northern songs – which always started rather benign, and grew bawdier and bawdier as they went – charming, and, at worst, amusing. Today, though, it was an effort to unclench his jaw. He turned toward Erik, riding beside him, and whispered just loud enough to be heard over the plodding of horse hooves and jangling of bit chains, “Do youreallythink it’s wise for them to be alerting the whole countryside to our whereabouts like that?”
Erik smiled, though absently, his gaze fixed on the road between his mount’s ears. “There’s little chance of being ambushed here now, and it keeps their spirits up.”
Oliver failed to withhold a sigh. “Yes, but it makes me want to stab my eardrums out with my cloak pin.” He realized halfway through the sentence that it was a terribly fussy, overdramatic thing to say, and though that was the brand of humor he wielded most often, in these instances, he sounded waspish and overtired, rather than slyly humorous.
Erik’s half-turned head and cocked eyebrow echoed said realization.
“Er,” Oliver said, clumsily, and thought the smile he offered must be pathetic. “Perhaps with some voice lessons…” He trailed off, face warm with embarrassment.
And from the weather, as well. As he faced forward between his horse’s ears once more, he realized there was sweat trickling down his back, plastering his undershirt to his chest. They’d all left off their heavier furs, stowing them in the trunks onboard the sleds they’d converted to wagons one night, but their clothes were still Northern clothes, and they were most definitely in the midst of a Southern spring at the moment.
A shadow passed over them, blotting out the sun, spanning the road twice over. Oliver tipped his head back to watch Percy pass overhead, hair stirring in the breeze of his wings as he flapped them and began to climb again. It would be cooler up there, on his back. Tessa and Náli were both currently aboard their drakes. Tessa had looked at him curiously when he’d said he would ride in the caravan on horseback, alongside Erik.
Náli hadn’t looked at him at all, narrow shoulders rigid.
The simple truth was: Oliver felt guilty. So guilty, in fact, that when he woke this morning, and the coin-set amethyst in his pocket that the Emperor Unchallenged, Romanus Tyrsbane, had gifted him on the night of the campsite attack shifted in his pocket, he’d nearly blurted out the whole sordid truth toErik. The dreamwalking, the secret meetings in the dreamscape Aquitainian solarium, Romanus, all of it.
But at this point, the secret had become so tremendous, and so thorned, that Oliver didn’t know how to reveal it in a way that wouldn’t get everyone in its radius seriously hurt, Erik most of all.
Leaving aside the fact that Romanus was currently occupying his nation’s capital, had killed half the men of Aquitainia, and had launched an assault that had razed half the palace of Aeretoll—and, gods, weren’t those reasons enough for a kingly explosion of temper?—Erik was a loyal man. A loyal man who prized loyalty in all of his people, and in his family. In his lover – in the lover who he’d draped in jewels, and furs, and acknowledged as his official consort in front of his lords, his heirs, and his gods. Oliver was consorting with the enemy. There was no other word for it. And, perhaps worse, he felt almost certain, now, that Romanus had carnal designs on him. Oliver of course didn’t feel the same, and would never allow things to go so far…but he’d learned, in the past weeks, that he wasn’t above exploiting the emperor’s interest. As a means of gathering intelligence, of course. Nothing else. Nothingpersonal.
But Erik would never understand. He was a man who met threats head-on, sword in-hand, and he would view Oliver’s actions as a betrayal: royal, political, and romantically personal.
Oliver wasfucked.
“…ler?”
Oh. Erik was speaking to him.
Oliver blinked, found that he’d receded so deep into his worry that he hadn’t blinked in some time, and that his eyes had gone dry and gritty with road dust.
“Sorry.” He turned to Erik, and found him frowning, concern writ heavy in the lines on his brow. “What were you saying?”
Erik had been dour the moment Oliver met him…and then he’d melted, slowly, the harsh lines of worry shifting instead toward grooves of laughter and affection. Then the war had come to Aeres. Oliver didn’t know if travel and battle had carved fresh marks between Erik’s brows, and twined fresh white streaks at his temples, or if Oliver himself was to blame. Erik gazed upon him now with the kind of concern that could do permanent damage to one’s face.
“I wondered,” Erik began, and then a horn sounded.
Percy tugged at Oliver’s mind, a sharp pricking of blue.
It jolted him upright in the saddle, and he stood in his stirrups with a gasp, Percy’s surge of adrenaline pulsing through him.
Wings clapped hard together overhead, loud as bursts of thunder, as the three drakes raced ahead and then fell into a tripart circle, low over the grass. Percy offered Oliver a glimpse, even as the outriders streamed down the line toward them, words snatched back by the wind.
“A Selesee encampment,” Oliver said, vision split dizzyingly between his own view and Percy’s, an overlap of ghostly images. “Abandoned, apparently.”
