She wanted to cry.
Instead, she reminded herself that the servants in Drakewell had seen her naked, had helped her bathe, as was custom with young noble ladies, and so she stood, and lifted the hem of her gown, and climbed into a tub because the enemy emperor wanted her to.
15
“…rik. Erik.Erik.”
There had been a moment, when he was much younger, on the day his father fell on the battlefield, that Erik’s entire consciousness narrowed down to one tiny detail. As men carried Frode’s lifeless body across the drawbridge, Erik saw that one of his gloves was missing, his hand pale and limp where it dangled from the ox-hide stretcher. Erik doubled back.I have to find it, he thought.Father’s hand will be cold. It lay black and crumpled in scuffle of dirty snow, like a dead bird. When he picked it up, he saw the threads had come unraveled along the pointer finger, and that the palm was wet with blood.
Such a small thing, seen like that: a glove. A thin skin of leather to cover human skin. He’d stood staring at it for a long time. He didn’t know how long. Wondering if the stiches could be repaired—if Father could be repaired, though he knew that he couldn’t.
It had been a peaceful span of time, until someone started shaking him.
Someone was shaking him now.
“Erik. Son.”
That wasn’t right. He was no one’s son, not anymore. He was the king. He was the authority. Everyone waited on his pleasure, and his decision.
At the moment, his decision was to study each and every carved groove in the silver, diamond-studded hair bead he held in his palm, because it was the only bit of Oliver that remained once the portal closed.
It was such a small thing, this bead. It was incredible that the silversmith had managed to work so much detail intoits surface; that the jeweler had affixed such tiny diamonds at such precise intervals. It was truly a marvel of craftsmanship. A consort’s bead, one that marked the wearer as the lover and closest confidante of a king.
“Erik.” The shaking intensified; it moved from his shoulder to his arm. It jostled his hand, and the bead fell.Plink, down to the smooth stone floor of the tunnel.
A hand gripped the collar of his tunic and shook him so hard his teeth clacked together.
Erik lifted his head, and blinked, and found his men pressed in all around him, torches flickering, shadows dancing up the curved tunnel walls. They kept back a good two paces, though. Horses shifted and stamped, iron shoes ringing like bells on the stone.
It was Birger who stood in front of him; who’d been saying his name over and over; who’d shaken him, and still held fast to his collar. His weathered, gray-bearded face was lined with a frantic sort of worry, his forehead a maze of stacked creases where his brows were furrowed.
When Erik met his gaze, Birger tilted his head backward, as though shocked by whatever he saw on Erik’s face. “Erik,” he said, softer this time. “Lad. We can’t stay here.”
The sympathy on his face was too much to bear. Erik glanced away, across those gathered beyond them. He spotted Magnus and Lars. As he searched the crowd, Lord Askr shouldered his way through, leaning heavily on the axe haft he used as a cane. Everyone wore the same expression: sorrow…mixed with fear.
“How—” Erik started, and found that his mouth was very dry, as though he hadn’t swallowed for some time. He cleared his throat and began again. “How long have I been standing here?”
Birger hesitated a telling beat. “For a while, lad. For a while.”
A while that they didn’t have, if they were going to rendezvous with Tessa, and Rune, and Náli, and the drakes on the other side of the mountains. A while in which Oliver had not returned, because he would not return. He’d been taken, and Erik knew who’d done the taking.
His knees creaked and popped as he crouched down and retrieved the bead. It had felt warm in his palm, heated by his skin, but its brief time on the tunnel floor had turned it cold as an ice chip. He closed his hand around it as he stood, and when he spoke next, his voice sounded normal.
The sort of normal it had been before the Drakes came to Aeres. Before he’d braided lover’s beads into fire-red hair and learned to show softness. His old voice; a king’s voice.
“Has there been any sign of another portal opening?”
Birger let out a long, slow breath. Relieved.
“No,” Magnus said. “We’ve rubbed our hands over every inch of wall and floor here, and sent runners ahead and behind. There’s been nothing.”
Erik nodded. “Remount. We need to keep moving.”
~*~
When Oliver woke, his teeth were chattering. The sluggish, heavy press of the fever was gone, and in its place, a freezing cold that bit deep through skin and flesh and into his bones.
He opened his eyes and beheld a smooth plaster ceiling set with polished wooden beams. A gilded chandelier dripping crystal. He recognized the smooth, pale stone of the walls, because it was the same material that encircled the solarium where he’d so often met with Romanus in the Between.
