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Oliver gasped. The headache had spread down his neck and across his shoulders. He was shaking.

“Better,” Romanus said, and moved his next tile seemingly without effort. “Don’t strain so much.”

“Oh,” Oliver panted. “I never thought of that.”

His sarcasm was either lost on the man, or ignored.

Ignored, Oliver thought, because he sat back and folded his hands over his stomach, gaze going to the fire, no longer interested in the game. “You’re strong.” It wasn’t a compliment, but a statement of fact. “Not as strong as I’d hoped, but stronger than you know, certainly. You lack practice, and a proper upbringing, but you’ve shown improvement since our meetings began.”

Oliver frowned. As his headache faded, and clearness of thought returned, he reflected on the fact that Romanus was saying such things more and more. He spoke of him with a certain…familiarity. A proprietary air, almost.Not as strong as I’d hoped.As if Oliver was someone for whom he harbored hopes and expectations. Someone he’d thought about before their first meeting.

Oliver pulled his leg down, so he sat with his feet flat on the rug, and said, “How long did you study me? Before we met, I mean. How long were you planning these lessons?”

The fair brow crinkled, and Romanus’s pale lilac gaze shifted toward him, edged with something like hurt, which Oliver couldn’t understand. “How long have Istudiedyou?”

Inwardly, Oliver squirmed. He was too bold by half, coming here, learning from the man, speaking plainly. Not giving away secrets, no, but allowing the real him to shine through: arguing, and disagreeing, and pushing just a little too hard, as he was wont to do. It was easy, at moments, to forget that he wasn’t speaking with a ruler like Erik; that terrible power and threat lay behind the occasional indulgent, amused glance, and that there was no love there, no attraction, not even affection to save him, should he place a conversational foot too far wrong.

He swallowed. “Hope implies expectation. Expectation implies familiarity, and we’ve only just met. I have to assume that you’ve observed me from afar.” Spied on him, he meant, but heknewthat to be too bold a statement.

Romanus watched him a moment. “No, I have not studied,” he said, finally. “I could not find you, for the longest time. But I have searched.” His gaze bored straight through Oliver, fixed and intense, and he couldn’t understand why. If the man was as immortal as he claimed, and the Drakes had always been dragon riders, why had he searched for Oliver in particular? What could possibly be so special about him that he would draw the gaze of an emperor from across an ocean, and a kingdom, and across the waking plane of existence?

“Why?” he couldn’t help but ask.

Another moment passed, and then Romanus turned back to the fire. “I think that is a conversation for another time. When you’re ready.”

“But I–”

Oliver. Ollie!

A shout in the back of his mind. Tessa’s voice. A pluck of all his nerves, as though someone had chopped the flat of their hand against the back of his neck.

“Your friends are calling you.”

He could hear it as well?

If he could move game tiles with his thoughts, he could doubtless do anything.

Oliver sat up straighter, heart thudding. “Is this place shielded from them? From all others?”

Romanus propped his temple on his knuckles, at his leisure. “Are you worried they’ll find you here? With me?”

“Are you?” Oliver countered.

He flicked the fingers of his free hand dismissively. “A girl and a child necromancer do not trouble me.”

Ollie? Ollllliverrrr.

The headache returned, duller, but more all-encompassing.

“Do they suspect that you are keeping something from them? Hiding something?”

“No. I–”

Ollie, where are you? Are you here?

He winced.

“This is but a small taste,” Romanus said, rising. Seated, it was easy to forget how tall he was; he towered over Oliver, and the pounding of Oliver’s head, in rhythm with the pounding of his heart, left him unable to rise and take a step back from the man. “Of what it will be like later. You cannot exist as two people. No one can. You can be Oliver Drake…or who you really are. Until that choice is made, you cannot know peace.”