The boy stammered a moment. “Well, I—Your Majesty—I think that—that is, His Lordship is quite skilled with the drakes, Your Majesty, and I think—”
Oliver didn’t want to hear anymore. He tossed the cloth down and stalked toward the tent flap… Only to pull up short when he realized that if he ducked back outside, he’d have to contend with more of Tessa’s concern, and Náli’s derision, or the unwanted attention of any number of lords or soldiers.
He stood in the center of the rug, hands balled into fists, and felt a tightness in his lungs he hadn’t known since his last relapse of marsh fever.
In truth, he’d known it was too good to be true: the trust and faith of the Northern people. Of course some of them still had doubts. Of course they’d question his magic. No one alive in the North now had ever seen a drake, much less relied upon them for valuable tactical information. Askr’s questions were neither unwarranted, nor unexpected; he had a big mouth and he flapped it often, along with a complete lack of tact. Askr’s—everyone’s—doubt was understandable. Gods knew Oliver had learned to handle the doubts of others as a child.
And yet here he stood, breathless and trembling with anger.
It would have been easier to remain a bastard, unthought of and discounted, than to have spiraled up to the peak of authoritative consort, and then plunge back down to bitter reality. Wasn’t there a saying about how loving and losing was better than nothing? The same didn’t apply to power.
He closed his eyes and could see the solarium. Swore he could smell the sweetness of the wine, and hear Romanus’s contemplative hum. The fog and vertigo of the Between beckoned, and he wanted to fall into it. Its pull had never been so tempting… and that frightened him.
He opened his eyes, and fished the amulet from his pocket. It was warm, and smooth, save the jagged chunk of amethyst set in its center. He only looked at it in stolen moments, when he could be sure that no one would see him. There were words stamped around the perimeter of the coin, Selesee, he supposed. The amethyst had been pressed into what he thought was a face; a tip of a nose and the silhouette of hair remained, around the edges of the stone.
Romaus had staged a drake-filled campsite raid to give him this. Andwhy? Given Erik was the only other person to ever gift him jewels, Oliver thought the answer was obvious.
Absorbed in the candlelight refractions off the purple gem, he didn’t realize conversation had ceased in the neighboring room until the canvas flap lifted with a rustle and footsteps crossed the rug toward him.
2
Oliver stood facing away from Erik, his head bent over something cupped carefully in both hands.
In the midst of his (pointless) counsel with Askr, Erik had heard the distinct chime of buckles through the flimsy canvas screen, and known that Oliver was in the tent. That he would doubtless hear Askr’s comments. It had finally taken a direct order, including the phrase “your king” to shut Askr’s giant gob, and Erik had dismissed the others as soon as he was able, fearful that Oliver would have dumped his armor and retreated outside.
But here he stood. Erik knew a moment’s rush of relief, because no one needed to see him chasing Oliver through camp. He meant to walk up behind him, encircle his narrow waist with his arms, and offer his assurances.
He pulled up short, however, halfway to him. Stopped, without witnesses or pressing matters at hand, to take true stock of his lover for the first time today.
Oliver wore a burgundy velvet tunic, too warm for the Southern climate, purely Northern in design: belted low at his hips with a heavy, tooled leather belt. His boots were knee-high, and cuffed with wolf fur, mud-spattered and dusty from travel. His hair had grownlong: past his shoulders, now, limp and matted from an afternoon inside his helmet, but the braids Erik had secured at the back of his head still intact, the beads at their ends catching the candlelight with winks of jet and sapphire. He was still lithe, still narrow in all the ways that most excited Erik, compared to his own broad shape, but he’d filled out across the shoulders, tunic clinging to lines of new muscle. He’d been arrestingly beautiful the moment Erik first saw him, from the blaze of defiance in his blue eyes, to the way he held himselfstiff and ready for an attack. But Erik loved him like this, draped in all the finery and practical garments of a Northern lord. He looked like he belonged to Erik—which he did.
But something was wrong.
Erik had shoved the notion aside, because they’d been traveling, had been attacked, were trying to coordinate a complex maneuver via falcon message with a Southern faction Erik had never met and could only trust based on Oliver and Tessa’s word. The farther south they marched, the more withdrawn, brittle, and tense Oliver grew. There were a host of possible reasons for it, and yet, each time Erik met his gaze, and found Oliver blank-faced and detached, without his usual blush and wry smile at the ready, the more Erik worried.
Needlessly, Birger had told him. Oliver had gone from a soft-handed, indoors boy to an armored consort mounted on dragon back in relatively short order; he was bound to struggle beneath the weight of that change.
But this felt personal to Erik. It felt, in the moments when Oliver tensed beneath his touch, thatErikwas the weight slung across his shoulders, rather than the stresses of war.
Ask him, a voice that sounded much like his sister’s whispered in the back of his mind.Ask him what’s the matter.
But what then? What solace could Erik offer? The war was happening; the march would continue; more blood would be spilled.
It was that final thought, more than any other, that pulled Erik forward again. He closed the gap between them, and didn’t hesitate in sliding his arms around Oliver’s waist. Leaned over his shoulder and pressed his chin to Oliver’s temple so he could see what he held in his hands.
It was blue. The egg-sized sapphire Oliver had pried from the icy wall of the cave where Alfie and Valgrind were held captive.
“It’s lovely,” Erik said, and Oliver hummed, a gentle vibration through his back and into Erik’s chest. “What does it feel like?”
Oliver’s pale, narrow fingers, newly callused, paused in the act of turning the stone over and over. With slow deliberation, he smoothed the pad of a thumb along the polished surface. When he spoke, Erik knew that he understood the true question:can you sense anything magical from it?
“It’s cold.” Oliver turned it over again, and though unfaceted, it caught the light in strange and lively ways; Erik swore the heart of it pulsed with its own blue glow. “Here. See for yourself.”
Erik turned up a hand from where it rested against Oliver’s stomach, and Oliver placed the sapphire in his palm.
Erik didn’t realize he’d tensed in anticipation of some shock until the stone was touching him, and he found it wholly unremarkable.
Cold, Oliver had said, but to Erik it felt body-warm from a day spent in Oliver’s pocket. He’d handled enough gems in his life to have anticipated its weight, and was proven correct. When he lifted it closer, hugging Oliver tighter in the process, he could no longer see that pulse of blue fire at its heart. Nor did the candlelight sparkle on its surface.
