Gods.
“You, though,” he continued, “will be stubborn. I know this. I told them this. But.” He spread his hands, as if to sayhere we are.
It was bad enough that she’d been captured, but if the Sels had Tessa and Oliver, too…
Palms sweating against the cold cup, Amelia fought to keep her mounting panic from her face. Affecting bored, she said, “Stubborn about what?”
He sighed, long-suffering, and clapped his hands, three quick smacks that echoed off the walls around them.
The door clicked open, and this time she heard many pairs of feet enter, the soft scuff of many slippers.
A half-dozen Selesee women in robes similar to the newcomer’s trooped in, arms laden with towels, with vials and bottles. Two of them carried a large cooper tub between them, and one went straight to the fireplace to stoke the coals and swing a heavy iron kettle over the flames.
Amelia knew what it looked like when a bath was being prepared, but she still asked, “What’s happening? What are they doing?”
The man sighed again, and headed for the door. “Be sure to clean her hair down to the roots. It stinks of dragon,” he addressed the women, who nodded in silent understanding.
Amelia stood, wobbled, and caught herself with a hand braced on the high back of the chaise. “Wait!” she called after him, surprised when he stopped, and then turned. “Whatever this is for”—she gestured to the bath preparations, water spilling over the edge of her cup, heart pounding— “I won’t go along with it. You can’t make me do anything.” It sounded childish the moment it left her mouth, and his small, tight smile said he thought so, too.
“Miss Drake,” he said, falsely patient, “you are no longer the lone dragon rider amidst an army of Southern misfits. You are here, in our possession. You will do as you are told.”
Theor elsewent unspoken, but she shuddered all the same.
~*~
The nearest Cassius had ever been to the Immortal Emperor Unchallenged was during troop inspection before leaving the shores of Seles. The emperor had passed within touching distance; had Cassius extended an arm, he could have brushed the man’s embroidered sleeve with his fingertips. But the emperor’s gaze had passed over him, over all of them, seeing none of them, searching only for blemished armor, or sloppily fastened buckles. Cassius had not been nervous, then, because slaves didn’t have nerves; they weren’t people at all, and so never risked being addressed directly by their leader.
Now, though, the emperor wanted to see him.Him, Cassius, the man who’d brought him Amelia Drake, and he wouldseeCassius for the first time, not as a slave, but as a useful citizen of Seles.
As he walked down the long, torchlit hallways of the palace toward the king’s rooms that Romanus had taken for his own, flanked by armored guards, empty-handed and sweating, Cassius thought he might be dying. His chest tightened, and his belly cramped, and his face felt oily with sweat when he wiped a hand along his jaw.
He was anxious, he realized, far later than he should have. For the first time in his life, he was anxious.
Was this what it was like to be a man instead of a slave? To feel such ugly, roiling uncertainty inside himself? As if his heart might carve its way through his ribs and leap out onto the floor?
Humanity was hard-won, fragile, and a struggle to maintain, he decided.
Not only had he never actually met the emperor, he’d never been inside chambers fit for the emperor either. He wasn’t expecting, but felt afterward that he should have, so very many doors.
A heavy, iron-studded oak door loomed at the end of the hall, flanked by another pair of guards. One of them openedthe heavy panel just before they reached it, and Cassius and his guard stepped through into an antechamber. It was a large room, with a high, domed ceiling, clearly meant to offer rest and weapons storage for a coterie of guards. Tasteful cots lined the walls, alongside empty racks for spears. Double doors lay beyond, the wood painted white, set with decorative gold filigree. More guards opened the way for them, into a sitting room with a wide, unlit fireplace, sofas, chairs, and side tables loaded with crystal decanters of pale wine.
Cassius heard the low rumble of masculine voices, before a final door was opened by yet another guard. His stomach twisted, and for an awful moment, he thought he might be sick. But he swallowed hard, and smoothed his face, and crossed the threshold with the stiff-backed posture of the soldier he was bred to be.
The chamber in which they were holding Lady Amelia was lavish, but it paled in comparison to the rooms which had once belonged to the king of Aquitainia. It was three times the size of the other chamber, with three times the number of arched windows. The balcony beyond gleamed in the coppery glow of the sunset, white marble veined with gray. Not only was the fountain larger, but one of a pair.
Inside, the fireplace mantel was tall enough that a man could have walked beneath it without ducking, and the tub was built into the floor nearby, with a drain in its base, so that servants wouldn’t have to lug the spent bathwater away in pails.
All traces of Aquitainian finery had been packed away or burned; in its place, servants had laid out the emperor’s purple things: his rugs, his bedding, his drapes. His gold: cups on the sideboard, mirrors and brush on the built-in wardrobe; his full suit of armor assembled on a stand in the corner, seeming to move and stretch as firelight licked over its polished surface.
Servants moved about the room, one dusting, another pouring wine at a sideboard, another lighting candles with a taper as the sunset rapidly gave way to nightfall. At the very center of the chamber, a table with goldwork legs supported a spread of parchment; it was so fine and bright that it took Cassius a moment to realize it was a map table, though a far cry from the crude, foldable wood ones with which he was familiar.
Then he forgot the table when he took stock of the three men standing around it, talking in low voices.
The emperor he knew at once. If anything, Romanus lookedlargerout of his armor, the muscles of his chest and arms stretching the velvet of his tunic to its farthest limits. He was taller than Cassius remembered, a half-head taller than the other two men, who were younger, and who, based upon resemblance, were clearly his sons.
His heirs, of whom Cassius had heard many unflattering stories. Marcellus and Lucius.
The slightly taller of the two, who had inherited his father’s strong brow and cruel mouth, was dressed in lightweight leather armor, with gold pauldrons, gauntlets, and greaves in need of polishing. A helmet sat on the edge of the table; his, presumably, gold with a dyed-purple horsetail on top.
