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“Exactly. The gate’s most likely overgrown. The Northern army could sweep straight under the mountain, through the old tunnel, and pop out behind the palace, well behind the Selesee defenses.”
“And then do what?” Náli asked. “Be surrounded on all sides by the enemy? The Great Northern Phalanx needs room to maneuver.”
“Do you think our enemy doesn’t know that?” Amelia countered. “They’ve studied us: there’s a bloody dossier.”
And then she told them the disturbing tale of Cassius the Sel captain taken captive, and all that he knew about them. He’d recognized Amelia and Leif and Ragnaron sight.
Náli gave an airless, humorless chuckle. “We’re all going to die,” he said, brightly.
“No. No, we are not.” Amelia’s face had become fearsome: the dauntless older sister who could instantly soothe all her worries and give her the courage to get up, and dust herself off. That had usually applied to falling off a pony, when they were younger; it worked here, too, though, as they marched to war. “We have magic, and we have manpower. We have to use them to our best advantage is all.”
“Oh, is that all?” Náli mocked.
Amelia’s gaze was blistering when it locked with his. “Yes.” She quieted, and looked down at the map. “I’d love to speak with the king myself – have a proper war council about this. But you two will have to go to him for me and report back.”
Tessa nodded, and gave the map one last glance, trying to memorize its lines and curves.
“Speaking of the king,” Amelia said, frowning. “Where’s Oliver? He’s the one who’ll be most convincing for Erik.”
Tessa frowned, too, and a glance at Náli proved he did the same.
“Oliver’s here,” Tessa said. “In camp, I mean.”
“But he’s gone walking on his own,” Náli said, scanning the vast, empty plain. All around them was only the waving grass, and the distant shadow of the mountains. “Bloody fool.” He sighed, refocused, and took a moment to study the map as well.
Amelia bid them goodbye – a fast, fierce hug for Tessa, and an encouraging murmur in her ear – and then it was just the two of them, red and pale hair streaming like banners in the wind.
Náli scraped his back with an impatient gesture and said, “Shall we go and find him?”
Tessa nodded. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
~*~
“This game is terribly dull.” Oliver affected a yawn from his position slumped sideways in his chair, leg kicked up over the arm of it. The first time he’d sat this way, he’d done it as a show of insolence, fully expecting to be reprimanded for it; but no reprimand had come, and he’d found sprawling far preferable to sitting upright after a day in the saddle, so it had become a habit to sit every which way but properly.
Across the table, and its board of purple and black tiles, the emperor sat pitched forward, elbows resting on his thighs, gaze fixed on the game as though it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. As if he was gleaning something of Oliver’s strategy by staring at the tiles he’d already moved.
The joke was on him, because Oliver had no strategy.
“It is a game of patience,” Romanus said. “Of which you seem to be in short supply.” Face smooth as still water, he stared, and, slowly, without aid of his finger, one of his purple tiles lifted and hovered over three spaces on the checkered board. It touched down with the faintest click. Only then did the emperor’s gaze lift to meet his, unreadable. “You were sickly as a boy, were you not? You must have played many such games, to ease the passage of time.”
There was no inflection in his voice, nor expression on his face, but Oliver still sensed a kind of censure. Not of him, necessarily. Oliver had the strange sense he was angry at someone else.
“I played chess,” Oliver said. “Which was more complex and interesting than this.”
A single white brow lifted a fraction. “And did you play chess without aid of your hands?” When Oliver didn’t answer, he nodded to the board. “Your move.”
Oliver sighed – and hoped it covered the strain of seizing a black tile with nothing but his mind.
When Romanus suggested it – well, told him that he would and could – during their last meeting, Oliver had laughed. But when Romanus had stared at him…and stared at him…and then demonstrated, Oliver’s belly had filled with a cold, childlike fear. Not of the emperor, but of himself. Of the things he might be capable of. If he could move an object with his mind, what else might he do? What power lay untapped in his veins? And, even more frightening: what if it sat dormant forever, and him unable to tap into it in a time of need?
He'd managed to move the tiles that day, but only a few millimeters. In the waking world, he could move nothing. Erik had caught him just today trying to move a low-hanging branch from their path with a flick of his fingers and a no-doubt constipated look, and Oliver hadn’t tried it since.
He didn’t want to try it now, but shoved all other thoughts aside and bent his mind to the tile. To its shape, and its weight, and the effort it would require of his fingers to lift.
The headache came on instantly, a sharp pain above his left eye which left the lid twitching. The pain spread outward in jagged darts: across his forehead, over his ears, and around to the back of his skull. Bright spots crowded the edges of his vision, and sweat bloomed across his chest and back.
But the tile moved. Twitched, quivered, and lifted, finally, teetering in the air before it landed with a clatter one square over.
