After creating Atlas and watching it rise into one of the most talked-about books in the world—apparently even the Japanese and Chinese editions were drawing attention—the year continued in a way that felt almost suspicious.
It behaved.
Not perfectly, of course. This was still Oskar von Hohenzollern's life, and fate had always treated his sleep schedule as something to be hunted for sport. But compared with the previous years, 1908 moved forward with a strange, almost peaceful rhythm.
Weeks passed without anyone trying to assassinate him.
No fires. No explosions. No emergency meetings where ministers burst through doors smelling of maps, cigar smoke, and panic. No dawn telegrams declaring that history had collapsed somewhere and required His Highness to personally repair it before breakfast.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, there were stretches—whole weeks, sometimes even months—where nothing catastrophic demanded his hands.
That did not mean he stopped working.
Oskar never truly stopped.
He still signed papers that moved money, steel, engines, grain, coal, ships, medicine, and people across the Empire. He still approved sensible projects and killed stupid ones before they could become expensive disasters. He still received reports from shipyards, weapons factories, railway committees, sewage boards, housing offices, book publishers, gym managers, school inspectors, and men who believed trash collection was a matter of national destiny.
In Oskar's Germany, even garbage had begun to come with diagrams.
But he was no longer trying to hold every bolt in place with his own fingers. Managers managed. Engineers argued. Clerks sorted. Foremen shouted. Karl cursed at ledgers. The machine ran.
And Oskar, for once, allowed himself to live inside the world he had been building.
His mornings began early.
Always early.
The palace would still be half asleep when he opened his eyes, the first grey light of dawn creeping across the ceiling. For one blessed moment there would be warmth, soft breathing, tangled blankets, and the quiet presence of the women beside him.
Sometimes he greeted them gently.
Sometimes less gently.
Sometimes Tanya laughed into his shoulder and called him impossible. Sometimes Anna, warm and sleepy and smiling, let him pull her closer and kissed him with the patience of a woman who knew exactly how little time peace lasted in that room.
Then a baby cried.
Or two.
Or all six seemed to decide, by some secret infant parliament, that the monarchy must be overthrown before breakfast.
Romance ended instantly.
Oskar would sit up like a soldier hearing artillery, hair a mess, eyes narrowed.
"Which front?" he would mutter.
"Diapers," Anna would say, already laughing.
And so Prince Oskar of Prussia—Acting Crown Prince, industrial titan, naval reformer, author of Atlas, terror of old committees—would find himself wrestling a one-year-old who had no interest in wearing pants.
He was very strong.
The baby was very small.
The baby usually won.
His hands were simply too large for the delicate work. He could lift grown men, bend iron, swim through freezing water, and carry two women at once if necessary, but fastening a tiny diaper around a kicking, giggling child seemed to require a level of fine motor skill denied to giants by God.
"Hold still," he would plead.
The child would not.
Imperiel would attempt to escape. Juniel would steal the cloth. Lailael would clap as if this were a stage performance. Liorael and Azarael would scream in support of revolution. Mirael would watch with solemn violet eyes, judging her father's technique and finding it wanting.
Tanya and Anna would stand to the side, laughing until they took pity on him.
"Move, Oskar," Anna would say at last, nudging him aside with her hip. "You are too large for this."
"I can design battleships," he would protest.
"You cannot fasten baby clothes," Tanya replied.
That was how most mornings went. He fought the small battles and lost them with dignity. Then the women took over, and he was reassigned to work better suited to his size: carrying children, fetching warm water, lifting baskets, entertaining toddlers, and making ridiculous faces until someone stopped crying.
Breakfast was usually with the family.
Not the whole Hohenzollern clan. Most of his brothers had their own households now, their own routines, their own marriages or duties. The palace itself often felt emptier than its size suggested: endless halls, polished floors, guards, maids, footmen, secretaries, and echoes.
The core family remaining at table was smaller.
The Kaiser. The Empress. Luise, still young enough to belong to the palace more than the world. Joachim when he was present. And Oskar, who arrived with women, children, and enough domestic chaos to make even imperial etiquette hesitate.
Wilhelm II had grown used to it by now.
Mostly.
He would drink his coffee, glance over the rim, and watch Oskar attempt to eat while three children demanded pieces of bread, fruit, attention, or conquest.
"You look tired, my boy," the Kaiser would say.
"I am surrounded by tiny enemies," Oskar would reply.
The Empress would pretend to disapprove.
Luise would laugh into her napkin.
And life would continue.
After breakfast, Oskar usually walked.
Sometimes through the palace gardens with Anna and Tanya, sometimes with Heddy and Karl, sometimes with the children bundled against the weather and carried in small groups by nurses, maids, and guards. Oskar liked those walks more than he admitted. The garden paths gave him time to think without staring at documents. The children chased pigeons. The women spoke among themselves. Karl complained about his leg, the weather, or life in general.
For a little while, Oskar could almost pretend he was simply a father.
Then the office waited.
His private office in the palace had become less a royal study and more the command room of a modern industrial empire that had arrived forty years too early. There were shelves of ledgers, maps of factory networks, railway diagrams, sanitation plans, shipbuilding reports, housing schedules, and letters from every corner of the Empire and beyond.
He answered invitations.
Some he accepted: a school opening, a Pump World inspection, a naval ceremony, a hospital visit, a book meeting, a factory anniversary, a Reichstag appearance, a theatre event where attendance mattered more than the play.
Some he declined: private dinners with women whose fathers wanted titles, clubs that wanted his name, aristocrats who wanted his money, and committees that wanted him to sit for four hours while old men discovered the concept of delay.
Then there were the stranger invitations.
After Atlas, men from philosophical societies, reading circles, reform clubs, scientific associations, and even Masonic lodges began reaching for him with careful hands. They no longer saw him as merely a conservative prince with factories and muscles. Some began to imagine him as something else: a free thinker, a builder, a modernizing prince, perhaps even a man who could be persuaded toward broader ideas of liberty, progress, and reason.
Oskar treated them politely.
He listened.
That was one of his more dangerous habits.
He would sit in quiet rooms with doctors, professors, writers, reformers, lodge brothers, aristocratic liberals, and men who spoke of freedom as if it were a machine that only needed the right pressure valve. He did not promise them democracy. He did not betray the monarchy. But he listened to their arguments, asked questions, and sometimes surprised them by agreeing with pieces of their thought.
His own mind did not fit easily into any European box.
In his previous life, Buddhism had not been a church to him so much as a discipline of thought, a way of living with change. It had taught him that clinging blindly to one idea because it was familiar was stupidity wearing tradition as a hat. If a better idea appeared—clearer, kinder, more logical, more useful—then a man should be strong enough to change.
That was how Oskar thought.
Not conservative. Not liberal. Not socialist. Not nationalist in the simple tavern-song sense.
He believed in what worked.
He believed in natural law as he understood it: that which followed from reality, from consequence, from proof, from the hard bones of the world beneath human wishes. A thing should be believed because it was true, not because it was comfortable. A policy should be kept because it helped life flourish, not because some dead man had once liked it. Customs deserved respect, but not worship. Faith deserved humility, but not blindness.
He still attended church.
That mattered too.
He stood beneath Lutheran hymns, bowed his head when expected, listened to sermons, and allowed Priest Arnold and others to keep trying to pull his impossible ideas into language the faithful could survive hearing. He did not see contradiction in that. Truth, to him, did not become false because men found it in different temples.
In the afternoons came duty.
Sometimes he inspected troops on parade grounds, watching boots, rifles, posture, and drill with the cold eye of a man who had seen what bad habits cost under fire. Sometimes he visited the Reichstag, where men watched him now with a strange mixture of respect, calculation, and fear. Sometimes he stood at the opening of a new shop, school, clinic, Pump Station, housing block, bathhouse, or Waterworld complex, smiling while cameras flashed and children waved flags.
He saw Germany changing around him.
More motorcars in the streets. More motorcycles roaring past carriages. More delivery trucks rumbling near railway depots. Cleaner courtyards. Better drains. More public baths. More factory workers in proper boots and gloves. More women in practical clothes that would have scandalized their grandmothers. More boys greeting each other with "my man" as if it had been German since Charlemagne.
Not all of it was beautiful.
Modernity never was.
There was smoke, noise, argument, greed, jealousy, corruption, and the constant danger that any machine built to improve life could be turned toward domination. Oskar knew that better than most. But still, when he saw a mother pushing a proper pram down a cleaner street, or a child drinking from a safe fountain, or a worker riding home on a motorcycle instead of limping through mud, he felt the quiet satisfaction of a man who had not wasted his second life entirely.
Weapons remained part of the work too.
He tried not to hover. He tried, sincerely, to let Imperial Weapons Works, Krupp, Mauser negotiations, ammunition factories, artillery teams, and small-arms designers do their jobs. But weapons had a way of pulling him back.
And where weapons were concerned, Bertha was never far.
He tried to keep distance from her.
He failed regularly.
There were meetings in Essen, technical reviews, steel contracts, gun schedules, and production arguments where she appeared with papers in hand, Alfried nearby, calm eyes far too knowing. She had a way of standing close enough to remind him of every bad decision he had once called strategy. Oskar remained polite. Usually. Bertha remained respectable. Mostly.
The work continued.
So did the tension.
By evening, whenever possible, Oskar returned to iron.
Sometimes he trained privately in the palace gym. There he dragged in guards, servants, Joachim, Luise, and occasionally even his parents. The Kaiser preferred to call it "light physical cultivation" rather than exercise. The Empress complained, but allowed Oskar to teach her careful movements, balance drills, and gentle strength work that made her feel younger than she wanted to admit.
Luise took to training with fierce enthusiasm and terrible discipline. She wanted to do everything too quickly. Oskar spent half their sessions stopping her from trying to lift things twice her size.
"No," he would say.
"I can do it," she would insist.
"You can injure yourself."
"I am a princess."
"That does not protect your spine."
Other evenings, he went to Pump World in Potsdam.
Those nights mattered most.
He would arrive with Karl and Heddy, sometimes with guards, sometimes with family, always with enough presence to turn a normal training session into an event. People did not stop exercising when he entered. That was one of his rules. No kneeling in the gym. No saluting with weights overhead. No acting like he was a statue.
Train first.
Admire later.
Karl hated it at first. Then he hated it less. Then, slowly and against his own predictions, he began to change.
Oskar worked him mercilessly.
Posture. Breathing. Squats. Rows. Presses. Carries. Grip strength. Balance. Stretching. Less sugar. Fewer pastries. More sleep. Fewer "business snacks," which Karl insisted were necessary for thought and Oskar called "cookie-based self-destruction."
"Your Highness," Karl wheezed once, shaking beneath a bar, "I believe I am dying."
"No blood, no death," Oskar answered. "Lift, my little man."
"That is not medicine."
"It is motivation."
The crowd loved it.
Karl did not.
But month by month, the softness retreated. His back straightened. His shoulders broadened. His breath steadied. He stopped looking like a brilliant overfed clerk and began looking like something rarer: a small, dangerous man who had decided his body was also part of the ledger.
Oskar taught him to fight too.
Not fencing. Not dueling. Real fighting.
Grip breaks. Throws. Balance. How to hit without breaking your hand. How to fall. How to stand up again. How to protect Heddy. How to protect himself. How to refuse panic.
After months of training, Karl managed to defeat Gunther once in a spar.
It was not pretty.
It involved stubbornness, a low center of gravity, a very rude strike to a sensitive region, and Karl refusing to stay down.
For half a heartbeat the upper floor of Pump World went silent.
Then the room exploded into cheers.
Gunther lay on the mat, wheezing in betrayal.
Karl stood over him, red-faced, stunned, and glorious.
Oskar wiped a tear from his eye.
"My little man," he said, "today you became a legend."
Heddy noticed the change most.
She noticed Karl lifting things without strain, carrying Durin with one arm while reading documents with the other, walking with more confidence, sleeping deeper, eating better. One evening, as a joke, Karl tried to lift her.
He succeeded.
For a moment, both husband and wife stared at each other in total shock.
Then Heddy laughed and threw her arms around his neck.
Karl nearly dropped her from panic.
Oskar, watching from nearby, grinned like a demon.
"Good," he said. "Now you can carry your wife away when she tries to stop you from working."
Heddy smacked his chest because she could not comfortably reach his shoulder.
The gym laughed.
Oskar's public lessons became part of the rhythm of the city.
He spoke about strength, but not only strength. He spoke about rest. About food. About sleep. About not drinking away the body God had given you. About sweat as proof of effort, not shame. About soreness as a message, not a death sentence. About the difference between pain that built and pain that warned.
He taught simple things people remembered.
Drink water. If your urine is dark yellow, your body is shouting for help. Eat real food. Meat, eggs, milk, vegetables, fruit when available, bread that does not taste like sawdust. Do not live on beer and sausage and then complain that stairs are enemies. Sleep, because muscles are repaired in rest, not in boasting. Train hard, then recover. Pride does not grow stronger when the body breaks.
He joked.
They listened.
He corrected form. He praised effort. He refused flattery when it got in the way of work.
And when he stood among common people, sweat on his skin, chalk on his hands, laughing as Karl cursed him from beneath a training bar, the people saw exactly what he wanted them to see.
Not a distant royal portrait.
A prince who worked.
A prince who taught.
A prince who could have hidden behind gold and ceremony, but instead came down into heat, noise, sweat, and ordinary struggle.
The People's Prince.
And most evenings, after all of it, he came home.
Sometimes to quiet.
More often to chaos.
Children crawled over carpets. Alfried visited with Bertha. Durin came with Heddy. Cecilie sometimes arrived with little Wilhelm and careful eyes. Luise invented games that turned nurseries into battlefields. Tanya and Anna coordinated everything with the competence of generals managing a siege.
Some nights they went to theatre. Some nights to concerts. Some nights Oskar attended book discussions, scientific lectures, private dinners, or philosophical circles where men tried to decide whether he was a monarchist, a mystic, a futurist, a liberal, a nationalist, or some impossible combination of all of them.
Other nights he went nowhere at all.
He lay in the palace gardens while the children crawled over him like determined invaders. He pretended to be slain by a wooden dinosaur. He allowed Imperiel to climb onto his chest and declare victory in a language only half made of words. The women laughed from nearby benches until one of the babies tried to eat grass, at which point civilization resumed.
Life, for once, felt good.
That was the dangerous part.
Peace made Oskar nervous.
By summer, the calm carried a new kind of tension. Not disaster, not yet. Something softer and more domestic, but no less powerful. Several women around him were again heavy with expectation, their steps slower, tempers sharper, hands resting more often over rounded bellies. The palace felt full of waiting—waiting for births, waiting for announcements, waiting for consequences that could not be postponed forever.
More than anything else, one date approached with the steady inevitability of a clock.
The twenty-seventh of July.
Oskar's twentieth birthday.
His coming-of-age.
He would have preferred to ignore it. A quiet dinner would have been enough. Family, friends, good food, perhaps a little music, then bed before anyone started speaking of destiny.
Unfortunately, princes were not permitted to prefer quiet.
Acting Crown Princes least of all.
By the evening of the twenty-sixth, the palace had already begun changing its skin. Corridors smelled of polish and fresh flowers. Servants moved faster. Footmen whispered over seating plans with the same intensity generals reserved for campaign maps. Somewhere in a distant wing, musicians rehearsed as if sound itself might hold the Empire together.
Oskar tried once to protest.
He was defeated by tradition, protocol, and an army of women carrying lists.
He was becoming official, and everyone could feel it.
That was when the Empress summoned him.
Not to church. Not to a sitting room where tailors and barbers waited to turn him into a properly arranged prince. Not to scold him about manners or court expectations.
For once, she asked him to walk with her in the gardens.
The evening was cool, but not cold. Lamps glowed along the paths, their light reflected in the dark stillness of the pond. Ducks drifted near the shore with the calm entitlement of creatures who had long ago learned that royalty meant bread.
Auguste Viktoria sat on a bench with a paper bag in her lap. She looked older than the portraits made her seem, but not weak. Oskar's training, careful food, and stubborn insistence on movement had done her good. She carried herself with more strength than she had a few years ago, and in the soft garden light there was still something graceful and beautiful in her face.
Oskar sat beside her carefully, lowering his large body onto the bench as if negotiating with furniture. For one absurd moment, he imagined bench-pressing the entire thing with his mother still seated on it, then wisely threw the thought into the deepest garbage pit of his mind.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
The Empress tore bread into pieces and tossed them to the ducks. They surged, splashed, quacked, fought, and trampled one another with all the dignity of ministers competing for budget allocations.
"Stop that," Auguste Viktoria snapped suddenly at the ducks.
Oskar blinked.
The ducks ignored her.
She seemed to realize what she had done, sat back down properly, and cleared her throat with imperial dignity.
"Oskar," she said at last, calm again, "tomorrow, in the eyes of the Empire, you will be a grown man."
Oskar resisted the urge to sigh.
Mostly.
"Yes, Mother."
She tore another piece of bread and threw it. One especially fat duck seized it with a confidence that suggested it believed in divine right.
"The ceremony is not only for you," she continued. "It is for Germany. For the dynasty. For stability."
Her voice was gentle.
Her meaning was not.
"There will be many noble ladies present tomorrow," she said. "From old houses. German houses. Foreign houses. Many of them suitable. Many of them brought by families who would consider it the highest honor to tie themselves to you."
Oskar kept his gaze on the pond.
"I know."
Her fingers paused over the bread bag.
"And it is time," she said softly, "to think seriously about marriage."
There it was. Not shouted. Not forced. Not thrown like an accusation. Simply placed between them, like a crown on velvet.
Oskar said nothing.
Auguste Viktoria looked at him then, and he saw she was not only speaking as his mother. She was speaking as Empress, as wife to a Kaiser, as keeper of a household cracked by scandal, betrayal, and a ruined heir.
"You know I do not say this to wound Tanya or Anna," she said. "They are lovely in their own ways. They have given you beautiful children. I know you love them. I know they love you."
Her expression tightened with sadness.
"But love does not erase the world, Oskar."
He looked at her.
She held his gaze.
"Your children are precious," she said. "To me as well. Do not doubt that. But in the eyes of many noble families, and certainly in the eyes of foreign courts, they remain irregular. Recognized, yes. Beloved, perhaps. Miraculous, some would even say. But not born from a proper marriage. Not born from a union between houses."
Her voice lowered.
"And people are stubborn about blood. About rank. About legitimacy. They forgive much when a man is useful, but they remember everything when inheritance is mentioned."
Oskar's jaw tightened.
The Empress saw it and continued before he could answer too sharply.
"You are not only my son anymore. You are the hope many people now look toward. With Wilhelm…" She stopped, and for a heartbeat grief crossed her face. "With your elder brother where he is, the court watches you more closely than ever. The Empire watches you. Foreign courts watch you. Every family with a daughter of good blood is wondering whether you might be the future."
She gave him a small, tired smile.
"And many of them want a place in that future."
Oskar looked back toward the pond.
Auguste Viktoria's voice softened.
"A proper wife would give you more than a woman in your bed. She would give you alliance. Prestige. A bridge to the old houses. She would tell the nobles that, whatever else you are—industrialist, reformer, writer, inventor, impossible son—you still respect the forms that hold the dynasty together."
She tore another piece of bread.
"It would make them breathe easier."
"And what about me?" Oskar asked quietly.
She looked at him.
"What about what I want?"
The question hung there, sharp but not cruel.
The Empress exhaled slowly.
"That is why I brought you here," she said. "Not to command you."
Oskar almost smiled at that.
"You command very well when you wish to."
"I am your mother," she replied. "It is a sacred right."
Despite himself, his mouth twitched.
Then her expression turned serious again.
"Oskar, please think about it. Truly think about it. You are extraordinary. Perhaps the most extraordinary son I have." The words came quietly, but they struck him harder than a public speech. "And that is why I am afraid."
He said nothing.
She looked down at her hands.
"I have already watched one son twist himself around pride, resentment, and desire until I barely recognized him. I do not want to lose another to stubbornness. Not to scandal. Not to loneliness. Not to the belief that strength means never bending."
Oskar's throat tightened.
For all his reincarnated memories, for all the distance between Zhang-Ge and the dead boy whose body he wore, this woman had become his mother. Not by logic. Not by blood in the way he remembered blood. But by time, worry, scolding, awkward affection, and the strange miracle of being cared for in a life he had never expected.
"I'm not Wilhelm," he said.
"No," she answered at once. "You are not."
The certainty in her voice warmed him and hurt him at the same time.
"That is why I still have hope."
For a while, only the ducks made noise.
Then Oskar breathed out slowly.
"Mother," he said, "I understand what you are asking. I understand the politics. I understand the nobles. I understand the need for legitimacy."
He turned his head and met her eyes.
"But I will make no promises."
Her lips tightened, but she listened.
"I will not throw Tanya and Anna aside," he said. "Not for a princess. Not for a foreign court. Not for the comfort of old men who care more about bloodlines than love or loyalty."
"I did not ask you to cast them out."
"I know," Oskar said. "But others will. Quietly, politely, eventually. They will smile and suggest it would be cleaner if my household became more respectable. If the maids were moved somewhere comfortable. If the children were acknowledged but kept at a distance. If my future wife did not have to share space with the women who were there before her."
His voice hardened.
"That will not happen."
Auguste Viktoria said nothing.
Oskar continued, calmer now.
"If a noblewoman comes who is truly worth it—someone strong, intelligent, useful, beautiful in more than face, someone I can respect—then I will consider her. I am not closing the door. But if she joins me, she joins what already exists."
He gave a faint shrug.
"She would not be replacing anyone. She would be my third woman."
The Empress closed her eyes for a moment.
"Oskar…"
"I know," he said. "It sounds impossible."
"It sounds like a theological migraine."
"That too."
A duck quacked loudly, as if agreeing.
Oskar went on, "I still intend to marry Tanya and Anna if I can. Properly. Before God, if the Church can be made to understand. If I take another wife one day, then I would want all of them bound honestly, not hidden in shadows."
Auguste Viktoria looked pained.
"You ask the world to change very quickly."
"The world is already changing."
"Yes," she said. "Because you keep grabbing it by the collar and dragging it forward."
He looked away.
She studied him for a long moment. Then, to his surprise, her expression softened again.
"My son," she said quietly, "I do not understand everything in your heart. I do not understand all your ideas. Sometimes I suspect no one does, not even you."
"That is fair."
"But I do know this: you are trying to build something. Not only ships or factories. A life. A family. A Germany that does not collapse into hunger and grief."
Her hand moved, hesitant at first, then settled over his.
"And I am proud of you."
Oskar went very still.
She squeezed his hand.
"I am proud of you," she repeated. "But I am still your mother. So I must worry. I must think of what you refuse to think about. I must look at the daughters of Europe and ask whether one of them might give you peace, legitimacy, and allies instead of another battle."
Oskar's face softened.
"I don't need more battles."
"No," she said. "You collect them anyway."
That drew a quiet laugh from him.
Auguste Viktoria glanced back toward the palace, where windows blazed with preparation for the coming day.
"Tomorrow they will come with smiles," she said. "Fathers, mothers, daughters, ambassadors. They will praise you. They will flatter you. Some will want your money. Some your name. Some your influence. Some may even truly admire you."
She looked at him again.
"Be careful. But do not close your heart so tightly that no worthy person can enter."
Oskar nodded slowly.
"That much, I can promise."
She seemed to accept it, though not with complete satisfaction.
"And if no such woman appears?" she asked.
"Then nothing changes," Oskar said. "I continue as I am. I build Germany. I raise my children. I protect my family. I do my duty."
"And disappoint half the court."
"At least half."
For the first time that evening, the Empress smiled.
A small smile.
Tired, reluctant, but real.
"You are impossible," she said.
"Yes."
"And stubborn."
"Yes."
"And far too much like your father when you decide you are right."
Oskar grimaced. "That hurt."
"It was meant to."
They sat together in silence for a while after that, feeding the ducks as the palace lights trembled on the pond.
Oskar felt the pressure of the coming day settle over him again: the ceremony, the watching nobles, the eligible daughters, the whispers about legitimacy, succession, scandal, and destiny. Yet beside that pressure there was something gentler now.
His mother's hand still rested over his.
Whatever came tomorrow, whatever strange path he chose, she had not turned away from him.
At last Auguste Viktoria spoke again, softer than before.
"I only want you to be happy, Oskar."
He looked at her.
"And I want you to live a long life. A good one. Not merely useful. Not merely famous. Not only strong. Happy."
The words struck deeper than he expected.
Oskar gave her hand one careful squeeze.
"I'll try, Mother."
She nodded.
"That is all I ask."
A duck waddled closer, staring up at them with shameless demand.
Oskar tore off a large piece of bread and tossed it.
The duck seized it immediately and fled from the others like a victorious bandit.
Oskar watched it go and said, half to his mother, half to himself:
"Tomorrow, everyone will want something from me."
"Yes," the Empress said.
He leaned back, careful not to break the bench.
"Then I suppose I should disappoint them elegantly."
Auguste Viktoria's smile returned, warmer this time.
"For once," she said, "try to do it without causing a theological incident."
Oskar considered that.
"No promises."
And together, mother and son sat beneath the garden lamps, feeding ducks in the quiet before the Empire came to claim him.