“And that couldn’t possibly go wrong.”
“I cautioned him, but Oliver is stubborn.”
Leda sent her a speaking glance.
“More stubborn that me, even,” Amelia protested. “He said that he was learning more about the enemy, gaining his trust.” It had sounded logical when Oliver put it to her, but saying it now to Leda’s disbelieving face she heard the weakness of the statement. Oliver was ensnared, and trying to justify it. “Oh, Gods.” She wiped at her face, and could smell the blood on her hand. She shoved it out before her, glared down at the nick on her palm as though the offending limb was no longer part of her body.
“Oliver took you to meet the emperor?” Leda pressed.
“No. Oliver and I were talking in a field—that’s where we always meet, the Between is a great plains landscape—and suddenly the sky started to melt, and we were in the solarium. The emperorbrought usthere. I have no idea how. He’s much more powerful than any of us.” She’d suspected as much all along: he was said to have been emperor for more than a century, which she’d always taken as rumor and exaggeration to support his “Immortal” title, but to witness his power firsthand, so see what he could do seemingly without effort, she wondered now if he had been practicing magic for generations. “He sent Oliver away – again, I don’t know how. And then he…” She looked down at the scab on her palm and shuddered.
“What?”
“He cut my hand.” She turned it toward Leda to show her the mark. “And then he tasted my blood.”
Leda jerked as though she meant to stand, gripping the arms of her chair much the way Amelia had in the Between. “What?”
“He took a drop of blood from my palm and licked it.” She mimed doing so and felt ill. “Then I fainted and woke up here.”
Leda did stand, then, foot tapping, one hand reaching to toy with the pendant around her neck. Her gaze settled on a travel trunk, distracted and withdrawn. “All right. Very well.That’s…all right. Good. We’ll just…” She snapped her fingers and met Amelia’s gaze. “That Northern lordling. The necromancer.”
“Náli.”
“Him. He uses blood magic, does he not? You’ll go to that—thatBetweenplace and ask him what’s to be gained from tasting blood.” She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes widening. “Drat, I shouldn’t have said that aloud. What if the emperor is even now spying on us?”
“The emperor might well have been spying all along. Meeting with him proved I have no idea the degree to which he’s capable of learning about us. And if I go back into the Between to find Náli, who’s to say I won’t return straight to the solarium with Romanus?”
“Gods and bollocks,” Leda said with feeling, and thumped back into her chair. “I don’t like this, Amelia. I don’t like it at all.”
“Do you suppose I do?”
They regarded one another in helpless silence a moment. It allowed them to hear the crunch of approaching footsteps. A moment later, the tent flap lifted, and Reggie’s golden head thrust through the gap. He was already dressed in drab, woodland colors, which only heightened the regal prettiness of his face and hair.
“Good, you’re up,” he said when he spied Amelia sitting on the edge of the cot. Then he really examined her, and frowned. “What is it? Are you ill?”
Amelia stood, and bent to pull her boots from under the cot. “No, I’m fine. Go and rouse the troops.”
He frowned. “The troops are well and roused. We’re waiting for you.”
She stood, boots in-hand, and swallowed down the last of her panic. The wine was taking effect, now, smoothing out the edges of her fright and fortifying her quaking spine. “Give me amoment, then, unless you’ve changed your tastes with regard to naked women.”
He blushed, scowled, said, “Be quick about it,” and departed.
“It’s a shame the two of you aren’t better-suited,” Leda mused, signaling an end to their discussion of the emperor, for which Amelia was grateful. “The children would be beautiful.”
Amelia sorted, and went to fetch her clothes.
8
As the land began its slow slope upward, the dry spring heat that had poured sweat down their backs yesterday gave way to a cool breeze, refreshing against clammy brows and through damp hair. It was a clear day, the sky a bright, washed-out blue bowl overhead, and so the drakes, at Amelia’s direction, led their party up into the foothills on foot.
Despite having four legs, they walked nothing like horses, and the whole affair was a lumbering, graceless effort that involved long tails whipping back and forth through the underbrush, snapping off twigs and branches with sharp, black-powder cracks. They tucked their wings in close, and occasionally one would stretch its neck up tall to peer at the surrounding landscape.
Amelia had grown so used to viewing their march from Alpha’s back that she felt blindfolded here amidst the grime and debris of the road. She shaded her eyes with her hand, but could see nothing but rock, scrubby pine trees, and the great, glittering black shapes of the dragons up ahead, wreathed in fine red dust.
A crackling of dry needles signaled a wolf’s arrival. Shadow still didn’t like them, but he’d grown accustomed to their presence, and his only response to Leif’s sudden appearance on the road beside them was the flickering of an ear and a disapproving snort.
What was truly startling was the way Amelia recognized that it was Leif, and not some other member of the pack. He was gray instead of blond as he was in human form, but it was a very pale gray tipped with gold, his mottled patches very light. He was also the largest of the wolves, and his eyes, when he tipped them up to her, tongue lolling, were the same, human brightblue that regarded her with shrewd assessment when he walked on two legs.
