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The headache grabbed and squeezed around his temples; the pressure built behind his eyes.
OLIVER!
“What…what are you…talking about?”
Romanus reached for him – Oliver braced for a strike – and a cold touch landed on his cheek, light as spring rain. “Choose who you wish to be,” he said, softly, “or the fortunes of war shall choose for you.”
A flash. A spin. Darkness.
And he opened his eyes to find that he lay sprawled across dry gray grass, as though he’d fallen there.
He blinked the white flares from his eyes, imaginary fireflies spinning and clouding the familiar environs of the Between.
Twin shadows fell over him.
“Ollie!” Tessa’s voice, audible now, ringing above him, shrill with worry. “There you are! We couldn’t find you.”
He recognized the silver and diamond ring on the middle finger of the hand that reached down to him: Náli.
Oliver took it, and let Náli’s deceptive, wiry strength haul him to his feet. Náli’s gaze, from which he quickly looked away, was accusatory, and too-knowing.
He looked instead into Tessa’s concerned face.
“Ollie, are you well? You look pale?” She patted his cheek, and then frowned when her hand came away damp with sweat. “Where have you been?”
Oliver marshalled his expression to something wry. “What would you say if I told you’d I’d been to the latrine? Would you still be desperate to find me then?”
Her face colored, and her eyes widened.
He chucked her under the chin, as he had when she was a girl, and then felt foolish for it. Felt foolish in general: awkward and out of sorts after having been snatched from Romanus’s solarium. “I’m teasing.”
“I know,” she murmured, and drew herself upright. Her face did something strange: composed itself in the mask of a woman grown. The mask of a princess, sure of herself. No longer the doubting, fearful girl he’d escorted up the eastern coast of Aquitainia.
How easily he forgot that, sometimes.
“I was practicing on my own,” he said, and stepped away from both of them. Walked a circle in the grass and blinked his vision fully clear; willed away the remnants of his headache. “I appreciate Náli’s guidance, but I can’t always rely on him or on Percy.” He turned back to them, several paces distant, now, and offered a smile.
Tessa’s brow was crimped, though she smiled back.
Náliknewsomething wasn’t right, and so Oliver let his gaze slide off of him without lingering.
“You’re right,” Tessa said. “I should learn not to rely on others’ strength as well.” She frowned. “Ollie, are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” His grin felt forced. “I suspect supper should be ready soon. Shall we go back?”
She stared at him a moment longer, then nodded. “Yes. And we must tell Erik what Amelia said, and present him with her idea.”
“Ah. She always does have good ideas.”
“Yes, doesn’t she? Let me tell you of this one…”
And she did, and Oliver committed it to memory. “Tell Amelia, the next time you see her, that’s she’s as brilliant as ever.”
“Or you can tell her yourself.” Tessa smiled, bowed her head, and shimmered out of existence.
Oliver gathered a breath–
“Wait,” Náli snapped, and strode across the grass, expression thunderous, suddenly. “You stay right there,your lordship.”
