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“Odd? You don’t like being the young and dashing one?”

“I never said that.”

Erik chuckled, a rumbling vibration that Oliver felt against his own ribcage.

They stood a moment, enjoying a peaceful moment and the press of each other’s bodies. When Erik next spoke, his voice sounded faintly awed. “I saw you today, through the window. You and Tessa, and your drakes.”

“It was her very first flight.”

“She finally got up the nerve?”

“Well, I think Estrid prodded her to it.”

Erik snorted. “How’d she do?”

“Amazingly. She’s always been a good horsewoman, so I thought she would do splendid.”

“Is she as taken with it as you?”

“I’ve never seen her smile like that,” Oliver confessed, and realized, a beat later, that perhaps that wouldn’t be the sort of thing that Tessa’s soon-to-be-husband, and perhaps uncle-in-law by proxy, would want to hear.

But Erik rubbed up and down his spine in a soothing, unbothered way. A good sign.

You will burn before the end, Frodeson. The magics of this land will bend to the emperor’s will, and your whore will look on, laughing, as he burns you himself.

The words popped into his mind unbidden, as they’d been doing on and off, at least once a day, since the Sel general first spat them at Erik’s feet. Did Erik recall them still? he wondered. Were his dreams full of screams and fire as Oliver’s were? Percy was a cold-drake, and he breathed ice instead of fire…but ice burned as well, didn’t it?

“What is it?” Erik asked, quietly, hand stilling in the center of his back.

“What?”

“You went very still all of a sudden.”

He’d also, he realized, tightened his hands to fists on the back of Erik’s jerkin. He relaxed them forcibly, and took a measured breath, chasing the ugly thoughts away. There was nothing he could do about the heated lies of a condemned man, he reminded himself, just as he’d been doing for the whole of the past month.

“Funny,” he said, managing a light tone, “that’s what I was going to say to you when I first walked up.”

“That I was still?”

“No. ‘What is it?’” He rubbed Erik’s back in turn, hand skimming over smooth leather. “You looked very pensive just now. Troubled, even, some might say.”

“Revna says that’s just my face.”

Oliver chuckled. Erik was dodging the question, but he wasn’t going to call him out on it. He did ask, however, “Has Leif come up yet? He passed me on the way here.”

The muscles beneath Oliver’s hand shifted, tensed briefly. “Yes. He’s inside with the others.”

That explained it, then. Erik never stopped worrying about Leif, but worried in double time whenever they were in the same room together. The frosty, unapproachable king Oliver had met on his first day here was in fact a front, he’d well learned since, for a First-Class Fretter. Oliver had tried to take on some of that worry to spread across his own shoulders, and while he thought he had helped, he wasn’t sure if he could ever keep Erik from falling into his natural, dour state.

He would always try, though.

“Does that mean,” he said, “that everyone’s already in there waiting, wondering what we’re doing out here in the hallway?” He smoothed his hands down the small of Erik’s back, and took a grip on his backside.

Erik rumbled a low, appreciative sound, and pulled back so he could capture Oliver’s jaw in one big hand and tip his head back. Oliver had the privilege of watching his expression soften, while his gaze heated, low-lidded and predatory in a way that never failed to give him the shivers.

“Might as well be doing something, then, eh?”

Oliver said, “What an excellent idea,” and stood up on his toes, swaying forward to let Erik hold his weight as he leaned down and brought their lips together.