“Yes, I brought you here.” When his mouth turned down at the corners, she noticed new frown lines grooved in each cheek. “And no. I’m afraid I’m not well at all.”
“You don’t look it.” And he didn’t, but she hadn’t expected him to be straightforward about it. “What’s the matter? Is it your marsh fever?”
“No.” He began a negative, cutting-off gesture with one hand, then paused. “No it’s—no, not that.” He shook his head, and let his hand fall, only to pick it up once more so that he couldworry at the ring he wore on his other hand. He hadn’t spoken about it with her, but she knew, based on its thick, Northern design and heavy stone, that it had been a gift from Erik. “This isn’t physical. It’s more of a… crisis of morality, if you will.”
Amelia felt her brows go up.I’ve been having one of those myself, she thought, but didn’t say. “About what? There’s not another man, is there?”
He went horrified—“No”—and again, paused, and his face compressed into a portrait of inner turmoil that would have been comical if inner turmoil was the sort of thing Oliver had ever displayed before. “There’s not,” he said, but slowly, as though unsure. “Not in the way that you’re thinking.”
“Ollie—”
“Gods.” He scrubbed both hands over his face, and his posture collapsed inward, so that he slumped and wavered and Amelia stepped forward in anticipation of catching him. He didn’t fall. Instead, he let his hands fall away, and gave her a pitiful, puppy-dog look of misery. “I need to tell you something. I need to tell someone. Náli knows, but not because I confessed, and he hates me for it anyway, so he’s of no use.”
“Now you’re worrying me.”
“You mustn’t tell Tessa. Promise me.”
Amelia closed the final gap between them and reached to grip his arms. He was trembling. “All right. I promise.”
“It isn’t that I don’t trust her,” he said, and a sheen of sweat gleamed on his brow and at his temples. “It’s only that—”
“Ollie. Tell me.”
He did.
By the end of his unlikely, sordid, alarming tale, they were both seated cross-legged, the grass cupped around them and shielding them from view of anyone else who might be wandering this plane. Amelia found it a comfort, its shivering stalk walls at her back, and his. Though perhaps she would havefound anything comforting outside of Oliver’s admission. That’s what it was: his head bowed, his hands plucking at grass stems, his voice flat, and hurried as he confessed to meeting with the enemy.
When he was finished, sighing gustily and hunkering down with his forearms braced on his thighs, bent nearly double and awaiting the cut of her tongue, Amelia allowed herself a moment of horror. But only a moment, because her own record was far from spotless.
“Well, then,” she said. “All right.”
His head lifted. “All right?”
“What do you want me to say? Shall I condemn you?”
His nose wrinkled with displeasure. “I feel as though you should.”
“How terrible of you, consorting with the enemy.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re learning about him. That has value – that perhaps has greater value than anything any of the rest of us are doing at the moment. The emperor has been an enigma this whole time, this faceless overlord whose motives we can only imagine.”
“Only imagine? He wants to conquer this continent.”
“Yes, but knowing the why and the how of it can only help our efforts.”
Oliver made another face, but nodded; glanced back down at his hands, where he twirled a blade of dead grass around and around a finger. “That’s what I tell myself, when I’m feeling most guilty.”
“Why do you feel guilty?”
He sent her an accusatory look.
“All right, that was a stupid question. But it isn’t as if you’re sharing troop movements or Northern secrets with him.” When he didn’t answer right away, Amelia said, “Ollie,surely not.”
“No, of course not!” He threw the grass stalk away. It fluttered and blew back to land in his lap. He scowled. “But it wouldn’t matter if I discovered the secret of winning the whole war in that solarium: if Erik knew I was meeting with him willingly, that I was seeking him out on my own, he would never forgive me.”
Amelia had been in love with only one man.So far, an unhelpful, quickly banished voice chimed in at the back of her mind. Hers and Malcolm’s had been a partnership: they argued, they made up; they disagreed, but they always came back to center.
But Malcolm had been, in title, her subservient. Not a king, certainly, nor even a royal, nor a noble. He had not been her peer. Had they married, she would have had to give up her title as marchioness. Could not have become a duchess as she was now, not even with a host of drakes at her command.
She could relate to Oliver in no way… save the knowledge that love was seldom easy, and often wounded one or both parties.
