Page 238 of Golden Eagle

Alexei took the bottle, and another sip. His automatic reaction was to push back, more petulantoh, so you think you know me. At this point, he had to admit that Dantedidknow him. Understood him, at least.

“What Val said.”

Dante’s brows quirked. “The three emperors thing.”

“What do you make of it?”

Another up-down of his black brows, clearly surprised to have been consulted. “Numerical symbolism has always been powerful. The superstition about Friday the thirteenth, for instance–”

“I don’t need a history lesson, professor,” he said without any heat. “I asked for your opinion.”

Dante thought a moment, lips pursed; took the bottle back for a moment. “Did you know,” he said, after he’d swallowed, “that Moscow is a city of seven hills?”

“What did Ijustsay?”

“No, this is important. Moscow is a city of seven hills – just as Byzantium. Just as Rome. It’s one of the reason the Muscovites bought so readily and enthusiastically into the idea of the Third Rome.”

Alexei suppressed a shiver, all the hair on his body prickling. “You’re kidding.”

“Very much not. There’s power in numbers, three and seven especially. Seven hills, three Romes, three seats of immense power, wealth, and mystique. Three histories rife with unbelievable stories, and leaders too strange and terrible to be believed.

“I’d not heard a theory like Price’s before, but it makes an awful kind of sense.”

“None of those empires exists today,” Alexei argued, but weakly. His skin was crawling.

“And neither does Romulus, king of Rome, according to humans.” Dante looked at him seriously. “Does the idea frighten you?”

“Well…yes! Look at me.”

Dante’s gaze moved across him, hungry suddenly.

“Not like that.” He took a hard pull off the bottle; there was only a little left, now. “I can call myself tsar all I want.” He shivered, hating, for a moment, that he was showing doubt, that he was letting Dante bring out his vulnerabilities – but shoved that worry away. For good or for bad, he didcare, after all, and even if he’d lied before, Dante was a comfort, now. Had been from the first. “But I’ve only ever been a tsarevich – and a sickly one at that. I wasn’t even out of the schoolroom when it all came crashing down, and I – I can’t be an emperor. Not one fated to lead Rome against its founder. That’s ridiculous.” And terrifying, he didn’t say.

Dante studied him a moment, then plucked the bottle from his hand and twisted to set it on the nightstand. When he rolled back over, he settled his hand on top of Alexei’s on the sheets. “Can I show you something?”

A joke formed and died on his tongue. He swallowed. “Show me what?”

“Observations. Your lineage.”

“I know my lineage. I don’t need to look through anymore of your albums.” Though a part of him wanted that, desperately. To see the faces of his parents and his sisters again, even if they were grainy and colorless. To lay their true features over the indistinct memories that lived in his head.

“No, not like that.” Dante lifted his hand, and very gently brushed a few stray pieces of hair off Alexei’s brow, tracing delicate fingertips across his forehead, after. “Showyou. Like before, with my own past.”

Alexei stilled. “What you’ve studied?”

“I have studied it. But – it comes and goes. There are glitches. But once I start down the path, I can usually follow it for a time. I can see whatwas, not just what’s been taken down in books. Not all dream-walkers tread the same paths on the astral plane: the past is my path.” He smiled, faintly. “How else do you think I made such a good historian?”

Alexei held still a long moment, every muscle tensed, debating. “How – how much would you show me?”

“Sometimes I can control it. Sometimes I can hand-pick. But sometimes it runs away from me.”

“What are – are you trying to convince me of something?” His lungs worked, tight and painful, pulse hummingbird fast in his throat, making him faint. The lightest cut would have bled him into a coma right now.

“No.” Dante’s fingers slid down his cheek and jaw, until he pressed a thumb to the quick throb of his pulse. “You’re trying to decide something. I want to help, if I can.”

A lie, he wondered?

But Dante had never looked so sincere. So – well, there was an emotion there, something affectionate that Alexei refused to name.

---