“You, my dear cousin, have never been naïve a day in your life.”
She sent him a look.
“Tessa, yes. I still can’t believe she’s married.” He shook his head, and Amelia joined him. “Your sister is a very sweet-hearted person who wants to see the best in others. Butyouareskeptical. If he isn’t actually trustworthy, then he’s a talented enough actor to fool the meanest woman I know.”
She scrunched up her nose, but looked pleased.
“Shouldn’t you be abed? Truly sleeping? You’ve a long day of preparations ahead of you.”
“And you don’t?”
Oliver’s dreamwalking form currently lay curled against Erik’s side, spent and snoring after a frantic coupling. It was becoming a habit: when his guilt and secret-keeping turned him prickly, and Erik started frowning and wondering, Oliver would throw himself at his lover. So far it worked, and worked well, but he knew Erik would reach a point when he shoved him away and demanded to know why he was behaving this way.
Amelia had a point: his day loomed busy and exhausting as well. After two weeks of riding across flat fields and abandoned farmland, tomorrow they would enter a scrubby and stunted stretch of forest that led up into the foothills. The road would wind upward for a spell, before they reached the man-carved canyon that was the entrance to the vast tunnel network that would lead the Phalanx beneath the mountains and straight to the rear of the palace at Aquitaine. They would wait to enter the tunnels until word from Amelia that her party was safely past the last checkpoint and en route overland past the Bridelands.
The drakes, of course, would not travel underground. Oliver, Tessa, and Náli would fly up and over the snow-capped mountains, cut off from the Phalanx. Far from their lovers and partners, the three of them alone against whatever might lie in wait atop the sharp peaks.
Talking with Amelia had been a pleasant distraction from his steadily-mounting anxiety, but now he broke out in a flashfire sweat, shivering inside his tunic and fur-lined boots.
Quietly, Amelia said, “We’ve been talking and planning an assault for so long that it seemed as though it would never happen. And now…” Her next breath whistled unsteadily.
“Yes. I know.” Oliver offered her a commiserating smile…and watched the sky behind her darken from its usual washed-out white to a deep, stormy gray.
He jerked upright, and so did Amelia, her hair whipping back and forth as she turned her head. “What’s happening?”
The sky had begun tobleed, like ink splashed with water. It turned gray in long drips that swept downward and flattened the grass. Erased it entirely. The ground beneath him turned hard, and cold. Lines appeared in the sky: the joins of stacked stone blocks.
Oliver bolted to his feet when he realized what was happening. The twitter of ghostly birds faded, and in its place was a ringing, indoor silence. The arches formed, and beyond it, the glow of a fire, the kiss of sunlight through a glass domed ceiling.
The palace solarium.
“Amelia, go! You have to leave now!”
She scrambled up. “What? Why? Where are we?”
He gripped her by the arms and shook her until her eyes popped wide. “Leave,” he ordered. “Get out of the Between. Right now. Go.”
She grabbed his forearms. “Why? Ollie, what’s—”
“There’s no need for the lady to go,” an accented voice called from over by the fire. “Have her join us.”
No. “Amelia,” he hissed. “Please leave.”
But Amelia’s head was turned, and she peered through the arches toward the imposing figure seated in one of the chairs by the hearth. “Is that…is he…”
“Lady Amelia Drake,” Romanus Tyrsbane called. “Come.”
“Don’t,” Oliver begged. His heart was beating fast enough to choke him, and his hands were sweating so much she must surely feel it through her sleeves. “Just go.”
Amelia slanted him a disapproving look. “It’s all right for you to meet with him but not me?”
Yes. That was his true answer. He was in complete control of his faculties when he was in the emperor’s company; he was using the emperor, in fact, gaining knowledge and magical skill that he would then use against the man when the time came. But Amelia, strong but young Amelia…
Gods. Listen to him.
Romanus didn’t call them again, he wouldn’t deign to, but Oliver heard the quiet sounds of wine pouring from a crystal decanter, and he let go of Amelia’s arms.
Her look saidthat’s what I thought. She smoothed her tunic, lifted her head, and strode through the archway into the solarium.
