When Oskar finally passed beneath the guarded archway of the Potsdam palace and entered the Royal District proper, the world outside seemed to fall away behind him. The noise of cheering crowds diminished beyond the walls, replaced by the familiar rhythm of Shadowmane's hooves upon the long palace drive and the quieter clatter of the Eternal Guard following behind.
His father had beaten him home.
Wilhelm's automobile stood near the entrance with its engine already silent, and the Kaiser himself waited in the courtyard beside Augusta Victoria. Karl and Heddy were there as well, surrounded by their own children, though it took Oskar several seconds to properly understand what he was looking at because there were children everywhere.
They seemed to occupy every available piece of ground.
Some stood upon the steps. Others crowded beneath the arches or ran between adults' legs. Babies rested against shoulders and chests while toddlers wandered with the dangerous confidence of people who had only recently discovered that legs could carry them wherever they pleased. Older children had already formed little clusters of their own, whispering excitedly and pointing toward the approaching riders.
And mixed among all of them stood Oskar's family.
Tanya. Anna. Gundelinde. Cecilie.
Then Oskar noticed the fifth woman.
Bertha Krupp.
She stood among the others without Gustav beside her, her children gathered nearby, and the sight was sufficiently unexpected that Oskar almost slowed Shadowmane without meaning to.
Of course.
He should have known.
Whatever awaited him tonight had clearly been organized before he returned, and the fact that Bertha had come all the way from Essen with her children told him that the women had no intention of allowing Sarajevo, mobilization or impending war to carry him away again without first having their say.
Then the children noticed him properly.
The courtyard erupted.
The older ones shouted first, and the younger ones followed largely because everyone else seemed excited. Within moments a ridiculous tide of small bodies was racing down the steps and across the courtyard toward him.
There were more than thirty children altogether once Karl and Heddy's six were added to the sprawling collection belonging to Tanya, Anna, Gundelinde, Cecilie and Bertha. Nobody could have counted them easily while they were moving. They simply came in waves—platinum hair flashing beside ordinary pale blond, violet eyes mixed among blue and brown, children ranging from infants barely old enough to crawl to teenagers old enough to stand back and laugh at the chaos.
Oskar had barely swung down from Shadowmane before they reached him.
Hands caught his coat and trousers. Someone wrapped both arms around one leg. Another child immediately began demanding to be lifted. A toddler stumbled into his boot and had to be caught before reaching the ground, while two of the older children attempted unsuccessfully to impose order upon younger siblings who had no interest whatsoever in being ordered.
Oskar laughed despite himself.
He lifted one child beneath an arm, caught another against his hip and reached down to ruffle a third head while several more pressed close simply to touch him.
That, more than anything, struck him.
They needed to touch him.
For nearly two weeks they had known him mostly through telegrams, newspapers and frightened conversations among adults who believed the children were not listening. They had heard that Father had crashed a locomotive. That he had ridden into Sarajevo. That he had been shot. That he had nearly died.
Now he was standing in front of them again.
Alive.
Bruised, bandaged beneath his uniform and moving more stiffly than usual, but alive.
Some of the youngest understood none of that. They simply wanted their father.
The older children understood considerably more.
Oskar could see it in the way they looked at him.
Beyond the swarm waited the women.
Whatever stern little formation they might once have arranged had already begun collapsing. Tanya stood slightly ahead of the others, golden hair bright beneath the lowering summer sun. Anna remained close beside her, dark-haired and soft-faced, with one hand pressed unconsciously against her own chest. Gundelinde looked almost painfully delicate beside them, honey-blond hair catching the light while her expression wavered between relief and tears. Cecilie remained taller and more composed, carrying herself with aristocratic control even though her eyes had already betrayed her.
Bertha stood among them as though she had always belonged there.
For perhaps one second Oskar considered making some remark about the conspiracy waiting for him.
Then Tanya started crying.
That ended any possibility of humour.
She crossed the remaining distance almost at once and threw herself against him, wrapping both arms around his body with enough force to make his healing wounds protest. Oskar grunted but said nothing. He only folded his arms around her and held her while she buried her face against his chest.
Anna followed before Tanya had even released him.
Then Gundelinde.
Cecilie maintained her composure somewhat longer, though once Oskar drew her close the distinction became largely academic.
Bertha hesitated last.
There were still boundaries around her that did not exist around the others. Public boundaries. Family boundaries. Gustav. Essen. The complicated fiction everyone had agreed to maintain.
Oskar simply opened one arm toward her.
Bertha looked at him for a moment, then stepped into the embrace.
For several strange seconds Oskar stood in the courtyard surrounded by five women, with children pressed around his legs and more watching from the steps, while his father, mother, Karl and Heddy looked on.
No speeches were required.
Everyone knew what Sarajevo had nearly taken from them.
Later, as the sun sank behind the palace trees and the summer light softened toward evening, the whole impossible gathering moved indoors.
Dinner became less a formal royal meal than an exercise in controlled overcrowding. Even the palace's great dining room seemed insufficient for so many children. Extra chairs appeared. Infants occupied laps and nearby cradles. Toddlers migrated between seats despite repeated attempts to keep them in one place, while older children passed plates, corrected younger siblings and occasionally surrendered whatever food someone smaller had decided looked more desirable.
For once there was little ceremony.
Wilhelm sat with his family rather than his court.
That mattered more to him than he said.
One by one his sons were being pulled toward the armies gathering across Europe. Eitel Friedrich would take the Fifth Army west. Others would follow their own commands and duties. And tomorrow his fifth son—the son who had become, despite everything, the one Wilhelm trusted and worried over most—would leave east with the Black Legion.
The Kaiser had spent much of his life dreaming about war in uniforms, maps and manoeuvres.
Tonight there were no maps.
There were simply his wife, his children, his grandchildren, old friends and the knowledge that by this time tomorrow many of the men around whom his life had been built would be travelling toward places from which they might not return.
So dinner remained quieter than such a gathering normally would have been.
There was laughter, certainly. With that many children silence was physically impossible. Yet underneath it sat something restrained and fragile. People lingered over conversations that ordinarily would have ended sooner. Hands remained upon shoulders slightly longer. Small jokes became more precious simply because everyone understood there might not be another evening like this for some time.
Karl understood it perhaps better than most.
He had known Oskar would get himself into trouble in Sarajevo. He had not expected the precise combination of locomotive wreck, gunfire, international crisis and impending continental war, but with Oskar involved the distinction almost felt academic.
Mostly Karl was simply relieved that his friend had come home alive.
He had spent eleven years watching Oskar prepare Germany for a war everyone knew might eventually arrive. If war was unavoidable, then Karl preferred that it come while Germany was strong, supplied and ready rather than years later under worse circumstances.
Still, preparedness did not make farewell easier.
When the meal finally ended, the goodbyes began quietly.
Karl and Heddy gathered Durin, Balin, Éowyn, Fíli, Kíli and Arwen and prepared to return home. Wilhelm and Augusta Victoria withdrew toward their rooms in the western wing of the palace after embracing their son one final time for the evening.
Oskar watched his father walk away and understood that tomorrow morning would be harder.
Then he turned toward the eastern wing.
Five women waited for him.
And around them came the children.
The procession toward the family apartments possessed something faintly ridiculous about it. Children spread along the corridors in a loose migrating column while nurses and older siblings tried to prevent the youngest from wandering into the wrong rooms. Some infants were already asleep against their mothers. Toddlers staggered onward with slowing steps. Older children whispered among themselves as they climbed toward the third floor.
Eventually they reached the broad family wing near Oskar's own rooms.
At its end stood the large shared bedtime room he had created years earlier, partly because he loved reading to the children and partly because attempting to visit every individual bedroom would have required most of the night.
The room was warm and comfortable, its shelves crowded with books, maps and illustrated stories. Wide windows overlooked the darkening grounds beyond the palace, while cushions, small chairs and blankets filled much of the floor.
Tonight nearly everyone came.
Even the older children who had long since outgrown bedtime stories found reasons to remain.
They understood.
The little ones mostly did not.
To them Father had returned, and therefore the world had become correct again. Some crawled across blankets. Others leaned against brothers and sisters or climbed into Oskar's lap until there was no room left. The seven newest babies required considerably less literature than sleep, several already unconscious in their mothers' arms before the story had properly begun.
But the older children watched him carefully.
They knew he was leaving tomorrow.
They knew soldiers were gathering.
They knew that adults had begun speaking in lowered voices whenever words such as Russia, Serbia, France or war appeared.
So Oskar chose something simple.
A story about the night.
About saying goodnight to familiar things. To a room. To the light. To the stars and, finally, to the moon.
When he finished, he left the book open upon his knee for a moment.
Outside the windows, night had settled properly over Potsdam. The moon hung pale above the palace grounds, unchanged by mobilization orders, assassinations, borders or armies.
Oskar looked toward it and then back toward the children.
He told them that tomorrow he would have to go far away.
Some of the younger faces immediately tightened.
He did not promise that it would only be for a few days. He did not know that.
Instead he gave them something simpler.
Wherever he travelled, the same moon would remain above him.
When they looked upward and saw it, they could remember that their father could see that same moon from wherever he happened to be. Perhaps not at precisely the same moment, perhaps sometimes hidden behind clouds or smoke, but it was still the same sky stretching above all of them.
Distance could separate people.
The sky did not care about distance.
So whenever they missed him, they could look upward and know that somewhere beneath that same moon he was thinking about them as well.
The younger children accepted the idea with the solemn literalism of childhood. One immediately wanted to know whether Father could wave at the moon and whether they would somehow see it. Another wondered whether the moon followed trains.
The older ones did not laugh.
Juniel and Lailael were already crying.
They tried not to, which only made it worse. When Oskar reached them afterward, both girls clung to him with the desperate strength of children old enough to understand that promises did not control bullets.
He held them and told them he intended to return.
It was not certainty.
But it was the promise he could give.
Imperiel waited longer.
As eldest among Oskar's sons, he had spent years teaching himself to stand properly, speak properly and behave as though childhood were something he had already largely conquered.
Tonight the performance lasted until Oskar knelt before him.
Then Imperiel wrapped his arms around his father.
Oskar held him tightly.
For all the strange responsibility the boy carried, for all his attempts to command younger brothers and behave like a miniature prince, he remained eight years old.
And he was frightened.
Eventually exhaustion settled the room. Babies slept in cradles, toddlers disappeared beneath blankets, and the older children gradually went quiet. Oskar lingered among them, drawing comfort from the simple sound of breathing after everything Sarajevo had brought.
The last awake were Anna's three teenage daughters—Greta, Lise and Klara. They were not his by blood, but Oskar had long treated them as his own girls. He asked them to help the women with the younger children while he was away and to remind the little ones that Father had promised to return.
He hugged all three goodbye. Klara clung to him easily, while Greta and Lise, old enough now to become embarrassed by such affection, both flushed when he pulled them close and kissed their foreheads.
Then Oskar paused at the doorway and looked back across the absurdly crowded room—babies, toddlers, children and three teenagers, some his by blood and some not.
The distinction hardly mattered.
They were his family.
He closed the door softly.
Outside, Tanya, Anna, Gundelinde, Cecilie and Bertha were waiting for him.
All five.
For several seconds Oskar simply looked at them.
He had expected this ever since seeing Bertha in the courtyard—anger, accusations, perhaps even violence. Instead, the five women said nothing. They simply took his hands and led him away.
Their silence was considerably more frightening.
As they walked, Oskar could not help glancing between them. Five beautiful women surrounded him, familiar after so many years and yet somehow particularly striking tonight. There was something deliberate in the way they moved, something almost conspiratorial, and Oskar increasingly suspected that whatever awaited him had been agreed upon long before he came home.
They led him to the old bathing room.
Once, years ago, it had been little more than Oskar's private bathroom—the place where Tanya had first discovered that the strange young prince genuinely did not understand how his own bath worked. She had taught him there, washed him there, and in the warmth and steam they had first crossed the uncertain distance between servant and prince and discovered one another as man and woman.
Time had changed considerably since then.
So had the room.
What had once accommodated two nervous young people had been rebuilt and expanded again and again until it resembled a private family bath, broad enough for the increasingly unreasonable number of people Oskar's household had accumulated over the years.
Warm water already waited beneath drifting steam.
The doors closed.
Still nobody spoke.
Then, almost together, the women began removing their clothes.
Oskar stared perhaps a little longer than politeness required. He had known all five for years, loved them in different ways and seen more of them than modesty would normally permit, yet the sight of five beauties standing together beneath the warm lamplight still managed to silence him.
Then they turned their attention to him.
The mood changed immediately.
Five pairs of hands began carefully removing his uniform with a tenderness that felt almost ceremonial. Buttons were opened, leather loosened, boots removed and heavy cloth eased from his shoulders. Where fabric caught against bandages or stitches, they slowed, working around the injuries with extraordinary care.
There was something almost worshipful about it—not desire so much as relief. They touched him as though reassuring themselves that he was truly there, warm and alive beneath their hands.
Oskar stopped joking.
Piece by piece, the uniform disappeared.
And beneath it lay the reason none of them had spoken. When the last bandages came away, all five women gasped.
It was not Oskar's nakedness that shocked them. They knew his body too well for that. They knew the enormous shoulders, the heavy chest and arms, the sharply divided muscles of his abdomen, even the old scars that had once crossed so much of him. Those scars had faded greatly over the years, reduced by his unnatural healing to pale reminders of dangers long survived.
Now there were new ones.
Fresh bullet wounds marked his shoulder and side. Stitches pulled across bruised flesh. Cuts, burns and abrasions from the locomotive wreck crossed his back and ribs, while lesser wounds covered his arms and legs. A body that had seemed almost indestructible only weeks before suddenly looked as though death had spent several days trying very hard to prove otherwise.
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then their hands found him.
They moved over his shoulders, arms, chest and back with trembling care, tracing bruises and stopping around fresh wounds. One palm rested against his heartbeat while another slipped across the hard ridges of his abdomen. They pressed close around him almost instinctively, five soft bodies surrounding something powerful that had nevertheless come frighteningly close to being taken from them.
Somewhere among them someone began crying.
Oskar made no joke.
He simply let them touch him and reassure themselves that beneath the wounds he was still warm, still breathing, still theirs.
Eventually they guided him into the bath. He lowered his enormous frame into the hot water and leaned back against the stone, submerged to the waist while his chest, shoulders and much of his battered back remained exposed above the surface.
The women gathered around him and went to work.
They washed away the sweat and grime of travel, cleaned the remaining blood from his skin and worked soap carefully through his hair. Their fingers searched him for injuries the doctors might have overlooked, lingering over every bruise and abrasion. Gundelinde, whose sewing hands had become surprisingly capable with medical needle and thread, inspected his sutures with particular seriousness and repaired those the day's riding had pulled loose.
Oskar barely reacted to the needle.
The women reacted considerably more.
Once the necessary work was finished, however, they did not move away.
Hands continued roaming slowly through his hair and across his shoulders. Fingers massaged the tension from his neck and back. Kisses began appearing upon uninjured skin, first almost absent-mindedly, then more frequently. They pressed close against him in the warm water, surrounding hard muscle and old scars with familiar softness and warmth.
There was desire in it, certainly, but tonight it came second to relief.
They had spent nearly two weeks imagining him dead. Now they could feel his breathing beneath their hands, hear the slow beat inside his chest and touch every place where bullets, steel and fire had failed to take him away.
Oskar gradually stopped thinking.
He leaned farther back, closed his eyes and allowed five pairs of hands to tend to him. He enjoyed fingers working through his hair, warm bodies pressed around his own, quiet kisses against his face and shoulders, and the simple comfort of being touched by people who loved him rather than examined by doctors or fitted into another uniform.
Tomorrow those touches would be gone.
There would be trains, soldiers, maps and orders. Perhaps weeks would pass before he felt any of this again. Perhaps longer.
So Oskar did something unusually sensible.
He remained exactly where he was.
He let the women wash him, fuss over him, kiss him and draw whatever reassurance they needed from his presence while the steam thickened around them and the palace beyond the bathing chamber slowly fell silent.
Whatever else they intended for him that night could wait.
For now, surrounded by five women who had nearly lost him and clearly had no intention of letting him forget it, Oskar closed his eyes and surrendered himself to their care.
And for a little while, the coming war remained outside the door.