Curiosity overrode the last dwindling embers of her fear. “Told who?”
“My father.” He threw up his hands. “Who else?” When his gaze swung to meet hers, it was wide and half-panicked.
“Your father is…frightening,” she said, again erring on the honest side.
Lucius dropped his hands to his thighs with a smack. “He is, yes.” He regarded the table a long moment, chewing at his wine-stained lower lip, and then returned his attention to her. “I did not ask for this. I don’t want it. But Father is the emperor.” His head tilted:there’s nothing anyone can do.
“When you saythis,” Tessa ventured, “what exactly do you mean by that?”
She thought she knew. Julianna had spoken excitedly to her while she helped her bathe, about what an honor it would be for her to meet Prince Lucius, and to be “given” to him by his father. Her heart had fallen into her stomach, and her teeth had chattered until Julianna got up to fetch more hot water to add to the bath.
She wanted Lucius to say it, though.
His throat bobbed again, a violent movement, before he said, “My father wants me to wed you, and to have children with you.”
She’d deduced as much, but to have it put so bluntly left her shaken. “Why?” she blurted, before she could think of a more careful question. “As punishment? As…” She trailed off, suppressing a wince.
But Lucius shook his head, unoffended. “No, nothing like that. My father is…powerful.”
An understatement.
He continued, gaze going glassy and withdrawn, “There are many mages in Seles, but none so powerful as my father. He has studied, and practiced, and no one can compete with him.” He glanced toward her, a slow and haunted slide. “You can imagine his disappointment, then, when my brother and I proved useless with magic.”
“You don’t have any?”
“None.”
Tessa dampened her dry lips, but her tongue was dry, too. She sipped her wine. “Why are you telling me this?”
“We are to be married.” His voice was detached, faint; a recitation of rehearsed lines. “I would like to be honest with you.”
Tessa swallowed with difficulty. “But I’m already married.”And not sleeping with you besides.
“You were married beneath the Northern gods of Aeretoll.” His voice grew even fainter. “My father does not view it as a legitimate marriage, and therefore null and void.”
Her pulse skipped. “He can’t do that.”
“He can.” His eyes locked with hers, and his were haunted. “He can do anything he likes.”
20
Oliver’s fever returned. He’d known that it would. “You’re my grandson,” the emperor told him, and then walked him to his room, and the fever roared up like a bonfire and claimed him once more.
He drifted within its grasp, unable to tell what was real and what was nightmare. Voices murmured above and around him, and inside his head. He couldn’t open his eyes, but could see pulsing red walls, squeezing his temples, his throat, his chest. He thought someone might have wiped his brow, a blessed press of cool on his burning forehead.
Erik was there. He reached for him, his face screwed up with desperation, hair swirling around his head as though he stood braced against a maelstrom. “Ollie! Take my hand!”
But he couldn’t move; he couldn’t even call back to him.
Then Erik was whisked away on a breeze, folding and crinkling and lifting off, as though made of parchment.
Strong hands gripped Oliver and spun him. Romanus took up every inch of his vision, face distorted, his smile so wide it seemed his face would split, eyes dancing in an unnatural way.
When he spoke, his voice boomed, stabbing at Oliver’s ears, ringing in his head. “Fuck him all you want, but he’ll never be your family. He’ll never be your blood, the way I am.”
Oliver woke with a start to find his teeth chattering. He was back in the copper tub, packed with snow. His bare toes stuck up at the end, the nailbeds tinged blue with the cold. He shivered uncontrollably…but the fever had broken, and his head was clear, if heavy with leftover sickness and fatigue.
With effort, he rotated his neck. The edge of the tub dug into his temple in a painful way, but he could now view thechamber, and its host of slaves in the act of laying out clothes and preparing a shaving brush and foam.
