She laid a hand on Oliver’s shoulder, and he leaned into it. “I’m the last one to give anyone romantic advice.”
“That’s true.”
“Hey.” She pinched him through his tunic, and he finally cracked a grin, twisting away from her. “As I wassaying. I’ve only ever—well, you know about Mal.” Saying his name still put a lump in her throat. She swallowed and said, “And it’s not my place to tell you what to do. I’ve never met Erik,” she pressed on, hurriedly, when she saw him start to speak again.Since when?she imagined him saying. “I don’t know how dictatorial he is.”
Oliver’s brows lifted. “He’s aking, Lia.”
“That has no bearing on his relationship with you. On the way he treats you as his lover.”
He stared at her.
“Sometimes I’m amazed by my own brilliance.”
That earned her another grin, and a soft chuckle. He reached to cover her hand with his, and squeezed the back of it. “I know he won’t hurt me,” he said, growing somber again. “I trust him completely. But…I’m frightened to tell him all the same.” He turned a pleading gaze on her. “I’m frightened he’ll hate me.”
“He won’t.”
Oliver’s answering smile was grim, and Amelia didn’t know if she believed her own assertion. It didn’t matter, anyway, because Oliver wavered, and melted, along with the Between, and she woke on her lumpy bedroll, eyes adjusting slowly to the silvered dark of just before dawn.
She lay on her side a moment, blinking herself alert, remembering the look on Oliver’s face, the hopelessness of it.WouldErik do something drastic when he learned of Oliver’s dreamwalks with the emperor? Renounce him? Imprison him? Set him aside as consort and return him to Oliver Meacham?
She didn’t think so.
But she didn’tknow.
There was, however, a blood relative of Erik’s within easy reach.
She rose, and dressed, and because the nights were still cool, wrapped herself up in a cloak before she ducked out of the tent in search of the heir of Aeres.
The sky was brightening in colorless tones, the trees a black stamp along its belly. At ground level, fog hugged the road, and the verge on either side where they’d set up their tents last night. She’d argued with Connor at length about the location, wanting them to get deeper into the brush, out of sight; they’d posted scouts, he’d reasoned, and they had the drakes to keep watch. If they stayed on the road, he said, they could get a faster, earlier start; and with the war on, there was no traffic besides.She’d eventually relented, too exhausted to argue, and bolstered by the knowledge that the drakes would prevent any enemy from coming within a mile of their camp.
Even so, the dense fog turned her surroundings ghostly and uncertain. Anything or anyone might have been hiding in it.
She pulled her cloak tighter around herself, held her head up high, as a general and a duchess should, and strode toward the dim outline of the limp wolf banner atop a tent some fifty paces down the road.
The wolves never seemed to oversleep, all of them up and prowling the camp no matter how early Amelia rose. This morning seemed to be no exception. As she left the road, and cut across the dew-drenched grass, the sounds of sparring floated toward her. Low grunts of effort, and quiet swears. Instead of the bright ring of steel-on-steel, she heard the clacking of wooden staffs, less disruptive in the dawn quiet.
A wolf with loose, black hair sat at the open flap of the tent, sharpening a knife on a whetstone. He flicked a brief glance toward her, nodded in silent greeting, and bent back to his task without speaking.
Just as well. Amelia didn’t know his name.
She skirted around the tent, and halted at the edge of the makeshift sparring arena, which was nothing more than a wet, flattened patch of grass, trampled beneath the boots of the two combatants. It could have been any of the wolves, circling one another, wooden staffs held at the ready, sizing one another up and searching for an opening. But, no: it was Leif and Ragnar.
Amelia was not the sort of woman easily-enchanted by a handsome face. She’d grown up amidst all manner of fine-featured young noblemen, with perfect hair, and strong teeth, and all the latest fashions tailored to their trim physiques. None of them had turned her head. She’d wanted Mal because he wasn’t powdered and pampered; because he was real, and funny,and useful. And because he had strong shoulders and rough-but-gentle hands, and because he treated her like a flesh and blood woman, like his friend, and not a trophy to set upon a shelf.
When Mal died, Amelia assumed her ability to feel that way about someone died along with him. And she certainly didn’t feel that way now…
But she could no longer deny that she’d developed a certainadmirationfor the Prince of Aeres, and his bound thrall, cousin…lover. She had no proof of the last, but there seemed no other way to explain the sounds she’d overheard that night at the manor.
They were raw and real in a way that reminded her of Mal, unpretentious, unpolished in contrast to the Southern lords. Granted, given the march to war, none of the Southerners around her were all that polished anymore. But there was something vital and enchanting about Leif and Ragnar: the sheer size of them, the sharpness of their gazes, and their teeth. The feral, mannerless tilt of Ragnar’s grins, and the cool reserve of Leif’s attention at council meetings.
“They’re handsome and powerful,” Leda had said with a shrug. “Don’t overthink it, dear. Wanting to roll around on a campaign cot with one of them is more than enough reason for dreaming.”
Perhaps it was as simple as that.
This morning, both were stripped to the waist, bare chests and arms steaming in the chill. Ragnar’s hair was tied back in a messy knot, tendrils of deep gold hair clinging to his neck and shoulders. As she watched, he darted forward, staff lowering, aimed for Leif’s collarbone. He was the faster of the two, his movements less predictable.
But Leif was broader by an inch in every dimension, and there was a power behind his block that left Ragnar’s teeth clenched in discomfort. His hair was loose, save three tiny braidsover each year, fastened at the end with ivory chips of bone. Sight of them brought to mind Oliver’s worked silver beads studded with jewels, and her stomach twisted funnily when she realized Leif must have had beads such as those…but that he was wearing the simpler bone beads that Ragnar had threaded into his own hair.
