As 1913 began, Oskar made himself the same promise he had made several times before.
He would do less.
It was not a promise with an impressive history, for whenever Oskar attempted to rest, he noticed something inefficient, dangerous or simply missing from the world. Before Karl could restrain him, another company, institution or branch of science had usually appeared.
This time, however, Oskar intended to make a genuine effort.
The writers now gathered beneath Imperial Image Works could manage their own stories. His scientists could refine radios, medicines and electrical equipment without Oskar rearranging their laboratories. The Black Legion's engineers understood their weapons and machines well enough to improve them independently.
Directors would direct. Managers would manage. Karl might finally accumulate money for longer than several weeks before Oskar poured it into another magnificent hole.
Existing projects would continue without him.
Libyan oil would flow. African roads, railways and settlements would expand according to plans already approved. At Southern Bauxi Town, engineers were dismantling an obsolete battleship to strengthen the harbour.
Its heavy guns would become coastal batteries overlooking the approaches. Armour plate would reinforce the emplacements, while engines, copper, steel and machinery would be reused throughout the settlement.
The project fascinated Oskar.
He wanted to travel there, inspect every bunker and personally decide where each gun should face.
Instead, he read the reports, approved the plans and allowed the engineers to continue without him.
It required extraordinary discipline.
For once, Oskar intended to let his empire breathe, his wealth gather and the systems he had created prove that they could function without his hand upon every lever.
He would preserve his money and strength for the greater work still waiting in Africa and elsewhere.
More importantly, he would try to become the People's Prince again.
The title of Iron Prince had its uses. It spoke of strength, endurance and the terrible certainty of a man who had survived bullets, blades and explosions. To Germany's enemies, it served as a warning.
But iron was cold.
Oskar wanted to become approachable again. He wished to walk among ordinary Germans, listen to them and be seen not merely as a commander of armies or master of industries, but as a man who belonged among his people.
The scars of the assassination attempt had almost vanished beneath his unnatural healing. It felt like permission to let the past recede.
Alongside all of this, Oskar wanted his children to understand the world beyond the palace walls.
In his former life, he had grown up ordinarily. He had attended an ordinary school, answered to teachers who did not bow and shared classrooms with children whose families possessed neither servants nor titles. Those experiences had shaped him more deeply than any princely education he had received in this life.
His eldest children deserved something similar.
Thus, at the beginning of the year, Oskar sent Imperiel, Juniel and Lailael to attend a public school alongside Karl's son, Durin.
They entered as transfer pupils beneath carefully prepared false names. Dark wigs concealed their pale hair, tinted spectacles disguised their unmistakable violet eyes, and plain Prussian-blue uniforms made them resemble the children of respectable middle-class families rather than princes and princesses of the Imperial household.
Oskar hoped the experience would teach them humility.
At school, no servant would carry their books. No courtier would praise every answer they gave. They would share desks, wait their turn and obey teachers whose authority came from the classroom rather than the Crown.
Their protection remained, naturally, but it was intended to be invisible.
Several newly appointed janitors belonged to the Eternal Guard and possessed shoulders far too broad for ordinary school caretakers. The nurse and the formidable woman presiding over the kitchens had both served with the Black Guard. Across the street, two muscular men in plain clothes spent every morning reading the same newspaper while observing every entrance to the building.
For the first few days, the experiment appeared to be working.
The children remained quiet, learned the rules and studied the strange little hierarchy of the classroom and playground.
But by the end of the second week, they ruled it.
Imperiel did not demand authority. He simply behaved as though responsibility belonged naturally to him. When arguments began, he settled them. When a smaller pupil was bullied, Imperiel appeared beside the offender with Durin standing silently at his shoulder.
Imperiel spoke. Durin folded his arms. Few disputes continued for long.
The older bullies who challenged them were defeated, lectured and then recruited into protecting younger pupils. Imperiel became the unofficial king of the playground, while Durin served as his short, broad and extremely loyal marshal.
Juniel and Lailael proved equally effective.
The sisters gathered the shy and excluded girls into their circles, settled rivalries and reduced the whispering campaigns of the playground with unnerving efficiency. Other pupils copied the way they tied their ribbons, carried their books and answered questions.
Within weeks, the two princesses had become queens of the classroom.
All four children, along with Durin learned faster than expected, remembered lessons after hearing them once and dominated nearly every game requiring speed, coordination or strength.
The headmaster considered their arrival an extraordinary success.
Oskar was less certain.
He had sent his children to school so they might learn how ordinary children lived.
Instead, while disguised and without revealing their names, they had conquered the institution in less than two weeks.
The disguises had made them anonymous. They had not made them ordinary.
Oskar nevertheless allowed the experiment to continue. They were still learning from the school.
The school, apparently, was also learning from them.
Meanwhile, his own return to ordinary life proved no simpler.
Tanya objected immediately. Captain Carter called it reckless. Karl, who had been shot during the assassination attempt and had watched men die around them, objected most bitterly.
"You were shot and nearly blown apart," Karl reminded him. "I was shot. Several men were killed."
"And yet here we are."
Karl stared at him.
A compromise was eventually reached.
A handful of Eternal Guards followed at a discreet distance in ordinary clothing. Karl usually remained beside Oskar with a revolver beneath his coat and the expression of a man expecting disaster at every street corner.
Karl was well suited to anonymity. He avoided journalists, rarely appeared in photographs and increasingly preferred directing Oskar's empire from behind the scenes, especially now that he possessed a family of his own.
To most Germans, he appeared to be nothing more than an unusually muscular, impeccably dressed dwarf accompanying an enormous blond stranger through the streets.
Together, they formed an unmistakably peculiar pair.
The sight became stranger whenever Heddy and the children joined them.
Durin followed Karl and Oskar whenever he suspected that something important—or merely entertaining—might occur. Balin and Éowyn came with equal curiosity and considerably less discipline.
Many of their excursions eventually carried them to Waterworld.
The enormous public swimming complexes had become familiar features of German life. Nearly every city possessed at least one, while smaller versions were appearing throughout the towns.
Families entered beneath high glass roofs and warm electric lights. Clear tiled pools replaced polluted canals and muddy ponds as the place where many German children first encountered deep water. Workers rested aching bodies in heated baths. Swimming instructors taught entire school groups beneath flags marking the safe depths.
The clothing appeared almost as modern as the buildings.
Men wore fitted swimming trunks rather than heavy bathing costumes. Women used practical one-piece suits, while younger and bolder visitors increasingly favoured simpler two-piece designs. Children possessed brightly coloured suits suited to movement rather than modest garments that became dangerous once soaked.
Oskar displayed no embarrassment at appearing among the public in little more than swimming trunks.
At two hundred and nine centimetres, with a body built like some exaggerated monument to human anatomy, concealment would have been pointless anyway.
People stared.
Men stared at the width of his shoulders and the impossible density of his muscles. Women stared for other reasons and occasionally forgot whatever conversation they had been having.
Karl attracted attention as well. Though short, he possessed the compact, brutal musculature of a man carved from a block of stone.
Heddy, beautiful and confident in her bathing suit, completed the family spectacle.
The children cared nothing for any of it. Yet Heddy had become determined that all three would learn to swim properly.
They resisted with remarkable unity.
Durin maintained that dwarves belonged upon stone, preferably several kilometres from the nearest body of water. He swam only under orders and did so with the rigid resentment of a soldier crossing a flooded trench.
Balin considered the shallow children's pool acceptable, provided he could sit upon the bottom and construct fortresses from floating blocks. Any suggestion that he attempt actual swimming produced the solemn declaration that dwarves were too dense to float and that Heddy was endangering an ancient mountain people.
Éowyn preferred the heated bathing pools. There she could sit comfortably and imagine herself resting after a long ride.
In her view, respectable people travelled upon horses. Horses travelled upon land. No sensible creature voluntarily moved through water by kicking its legs like a frightened duck.
Whenever Heddy attempted a formal lesson, the children escaped onto the tiles and began running around the pool.
This immediately summoned the lifeguards.
"Do not run!"
Durin slowed to a purposeful military march.
Balin continued at full speed while insisting that he was not running but retreating from the sea.
Éowyn attempted to hide behind Oskar, which worked extremely well until her mother walked around him.
Meanwhile, Karl stood waist-deep in the pool, watching his family scatter in three directions while Oskar laughed loudly enough to echo beneath the glass roof.
"You wished to spend more time together," Karl reminded Heddy.
"I imagined considerably less pursuit."
Oskar challenged him to a race before Karl could reply.
Karl rarely won.
He claimed this was because each of Oskar's arms possessed the length and propulsive force of a naval oar, not because dwarves were fundamentally unsuited to water—although the behaviour of his children was beginning to provide troubling evidence.
Waterworld allowed Oskar to play, exercise and be seen.
Its steam rooms allowed him to listen.
He visited them throughout Germany—Berlin, Essen, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and whichever other cities his journeys carried him through.
Late in the evening, he entered alone with a towel draped over his pale hair and much of his face. Then he settled into the darkest corner and allowed the steam to gather around him.
Within minutes, he resembled an ancient stone idol concealed inside a cloud.
Men entering the room noticed the enormous silhouette and carefully selected benches elsewhere.
Few imagined that the Crown Prince of Germany might be sitting naked in the corner of an ordinary public bathhouse, listening while they complained.
So they spoke freely.
They complained about work, wives, supervisors, schools, buses, rents, broken roads and every other inconvenience too small to survive the journey into a ministerial report.
Oskar listened.
In Essen, steelworkers complained that the final Number Twelve bus departed shortly before the late shift ended.
"Why?" the enormous stranger beneath the towel asked.
"Because the idiot who designed the timetable has never worked a late shift."
Two weeks later, the departure time changed.
In Hamburg, dockworkers complained that the changing rooms lacked enough hooks and that nowhere remained dry enough for heavy boots.
The next renovation included raised lockers and heated drying racks.
In Cologne, three elderly men argued for twenty minutes about broken paving outside a tram station.
Oskar inspected it the following morning.
The stones were replaced before the month ended.
One evening in Leipzig, a father spoke quietly about his son.
Older pupils had stolen the boy's cap, torn his books and eventually taken his shoes, forcing him to walk home through winter mud in his stockings. The father feared that complaining would only worsen the bullying.
The giant hidden inside the steam asked for the name of the school.
Several days later, an imperial automobile stopped outside it.
The offending boys suddenly found themselves standing before the Iron Prince.
Oskar did not threaten them.
He asked why they believed strength gave them the right to torment someone weaker. He reminded them that German Man used his power to protect people, not humiliate them.
None produced a satisfactory answer.
The stolen shoes were eventually recovered from a drainage ditch. Oskar supervised while the boys searched for them, ensuring that the lesson involved considerably more cold mud than they had expected.
Their victim received new shoes, fresh books and a signed copy of German Man. The bullies spent several afternoons assisting the caretaker and repairing the damage they had caused. They never troubled the boy again.
Stories of such incidents spread quickly. And he did enjoy those small victories.
Ministers spoke in systems. Ordinary people spoke in inconveniences.
A report might describe public transport as satisfactory while a mother knew precisely which bus step was too high for a pram. An official might declare a district healthy while its residents knew which drain overflowed whenever it rained.
Oskar possessed the power to correct such things. He considered it almost immoral not to listen.
He also visited Pump World gyms filled with chalk, iron and clean sweat. He trained beside factory workers who tried desperately not to stare when he lifted weights intended for several men.
He walked through Warenhöfe, the great shopping halls where families could eat, shop and escape the winter cold beneath one roof. He attended moving-picture theatres, rode amusement rides with Karl's family and sat in public parks while old men argued over newspapers.
He rode the new buses as well.
The Prussian-blue double-deckers had become moving symbols of Oskar's Germany. Citizens travelled without paying fares, boarding with factory bags, schoolbooks, prams and baskets of groceries.
Oskar often sat near the driver.
Drivers understood cities in ways ministers never could. They knew which streets flooded, where traffic became dangerous, which factories released workers at the same hour and which neighbourhoods required another route.
Oskar spoke to them as equals, which reminded him of his former life.
During the war in Eastern Europe, he had learned more from drivers, mechanics, wounded soldiers and frightened civilians than from official statements. Ordinary people rarely possessed the entire truth, but each carried one piece of it.
Collect enough pieces and the real world began to appear.
Unfortunately, his return to public life also attracted photographers.
At first, Oskar tolerated them. He had chosen to walk among the people again. Newspapers naturally wanted photographs of the Crown Prince riding buses, lifting weights beside workers or speaking with ordinary families.
Most reporters behaved reasonably.
They asked permission, took several photographs, shouted their questions and withdrew when Oskar declared that he had given them enough.
But one young photographer refused to understand the boundary.
He followed Oskar on several occasions, appearing outside gyms, stations and Warenhöfe with the same eager grin and the same camera raised before permission could be asked.
Oskar warned him more than once.
The man always apologised.
Then he returned.
Eventually, Oskar attempted to lose him inside the toy department of a crowded Warenhof.
He moved between displays of dolls, wooden trains, teddy bears and painted dinosaurs, hoping the photographer would abandon the pursuit rather than force his way among families and children.
The man followed anyway.
In his haste to obtain another picture, he pushed around a display and nearly knocked a little girl to the floor. She had been holding a toy dinosaur in one hand and reaching toward a row of bears with the other.
Oskar caught her before she struck the ground.
Then he turned.
The photographer showed no shame. He merely smiled, raised the camera and aimed it toward Oskar and the frightened child.
"That will make a wonderful picture."
The flash never came.
Oskar reached forward and closed one hand around the camera. Metal groaned beneath his fingers. Then the machine collapsed with a violent crack of glass and steel.
The entire department fell silent.
The little girl dropped her dinosaur and stared upward with enormous eyes. Mothers pulled their children closer. Clerks froze behind their counters.
Oskar placed the crushed remains of the camera into the photographer's trembling hands.
The man opened his mouth to protest.
Oskar stepped forward and pressed one finger against the centre of his chest.
The movement appeared almost casual.
The photographer lost his balance as though struck, stumbled backward and fell hard upon the floor.
"Stop."
Oskar's voice remained quiet, which made it worse.
"No more photographs. No more following me. No more forcing your way through women and children because you believe your newspaper entitles you to everything you see."
The man nodded frantically.
For the first time, he understood that the smiling prince who answered questions upon buses was the same man Germany called the Iron Prince.
Then as Oskar looked around the silent shop, he quickly realised that there was fear upon several faces.
He had wanted to appear approachable. Instead, for one brief moment, everyone had remembered exactly what he could do.
Oskar returned the toy dinosaur to the little girl, gave her a gentler smile and walked away.
The story travelled throughout Germany within days. And soon afterward, the Imperial Household issued a simple rule.
Interviews, close photographs and approaches to the royal family required permission. Newspapers could submit requests, arrange times and attend approved public appearances, but no reporter would be permitted to pursue Oskar or his family through private outings.
The rule ended the worst of the harassment.
Photographers still captured distant images from balconies, street corners and carefully selected hiding places. Oskar noticed many of them and ignored most.
He could tolerate enthusiasm.
He would not tolerate intrusion.
As the months passed, Oskar brought his household into public more frequently.
The Eternal Guards accompanied them, though rarely in ceremonial formation. They waited near entrances and crossroads or mingled with the crowds dressed as clerks, attendants and ordinary fathers.
Oskar wanted Germany to see his family as it truly was.
His children cried, argued, dirtied their clothes and demanded sweets. They became exhausted during long outings and occasionally required carrying. His women enjoyed cafés, music, clothes and conversation like women throughout the Empire.
He hoped familiarity would make the Imperial household appear human.
A ruler seen only in portraits became an abstraction.
A ruler seen holding a screaming toddler while another child pulled upon his coat might become someone the public could understand.
Instead, the opposite occurred.
The more Germany saw Oskar's family, the less ordinary it appeared.
Oskar himself could not be disguised.
At two hundred and nine centimetres, he looked like the concept of a man enlarged beyond reasonable limits—broad, powerful and impossibly composed. His pale-blond hair, severe features and icy eyes only sharpened the impression.
His women were no easier to overlook.
Tanya possessed the dangerous beauty of temptation given human form—golden-haired, small and fiercely alive, a seductress who had somehow also become a devoted mother.
Anna appeared almost as fertility made flesh: dark-haired, warm, abundant and maternal, comforting and overwhelming at once.
Gundelinde lacked their intimidating sensuality, but possessed a gentler beauty—graceful, honey-blonde and increasingly luminous, like a princess remembered from a childhood story.
Men stared. Women stared as well. Children often fell silent when they passed.
Then there were Oskar's sons and daughters.
Their pale hair shone almost white beneath sunlight. Their violet eyes appeared too bright and clear for ordinary children. Their faces possessed an unsettling harmony, as though each had been shaped from the same impossible design.
They were cleverer than their ages suggested. Stronger, faster and more coordinated than their classmates. Even their voices carried unusually well.
Oskar had brought his family among the people to prove that they were, beneath the titles and ceremony, a household like any other.
Instead, the sight resembled a company of angels entering a bakery and attempting to behave casually.
They smiled, argued, tugged at one another's sleeves and demanded cakes like ordinary children. Yet no one who saw them believed they were ordinary.
That reaction drew upon something older than Oskar himself.
Europe had never entirely abandoned the belief that monarchy possessed divine sanction. Kings still claimed authority through God. Churches prayed for ruling dynasties, and ordinary people spoke of royal blood as though it carried qualities denied to everyone else.
In most countries, such ideas survived as ceremony, habit and inherited superstition.
Around Oskar and his family, they began to look like observable fact.
The Church of the New Dawn already presented his household as sacred. Its priests preached that Oskar's strength, survival and children demonstrated divine favour. Every public appearance supplied fresh material.
A photograph of Oskar carrying several laughing children became evidence of paternal divinity. A picture of Tanya beside him became an icon of sacred motherhood. Stories of Imperiel defending smaller classmates became proof of the young heir's natural justice.
Oskar had wished to become less distant. Instead, his closeness strengthened the mythology.
The people did not conclude: They are like us.
Many concluded: They walk among us.
That distinction troubled Oskar more than he admitted. He enjoyed affection. He valued loyalty and understood the stability created by public trust.
But worship could be dangerous.
A man praised often enough might eventually mistake worship for truth. And a nation convinced that its rulers were incapable of error might follow them—willingly and unquestioningly—into catastrophe.
Still, the trust surrounding his household existed beside genuine improvement.
Germany had become safer.
Higher wages, shorter working hours, public relief and Church assistance reduced the desperation that had once fed theft and violence. Police were better trained, better paid and more mobile. Street lighting, clean housing and reliable transport left fewer places where crime could flourish unnoticed.
Some villages had begun leaving their doors unlocked.
In certain neighbourhoods, a wallet dropped upon the pavement might remain where it fell until its owner returned. More often, someone carried it to the nearest police station with every mark still inside.
When illness struck a household, neighbours appeared with food, coal and childcare before officials even learned assistance was required.
Crime had not vanished.
There were still thieves, violent husbands, drunks, fraudsters, extremists and men who treated fists as arguments.
But petty desperation had declined sharply.
It was easier to remain honest when food existed, rent could be paid and asking for help did not automatically bring humiliation.
Medicine advanced with equal speed.
The work of Paul Ehrlich and the Oskar Industrial Group had placed Germany at the edge of a new medical age. Antibiotic research, vaccines, germ theory, sterile surgery, public hygiene and battlefield medicine transformed diseases and injuries once accepted as death sentences.
Hospitals became cleaner. Childbirth became safer. Wounds that once blackened and killed could increasingly be treated.
Not every experiment succeeded. Not every medicine was safe. More than one promising compound poisoned laboratory rats before coming anywhere near a human patient.
But progress accumulated.
As Oskar travelled through the changing country, he occasionally allowed himself to believe that he had achieved something close to paradise.
Germany reminded him of the idealised golden ages people in his former world remembered long after they had ended—periods when wages rose, families grew, industries expanded and the future appeared naturally brighter than the past.
Factories produced more each year. Cities became cleaner. Children survived.
Ordinary people travelled, exercised, watched films and imagined lives their grandparents would have considered impossible.
It was not a perfect society.
Guests of the Empire remained beneath citizens. Minorities had been pressured into silence, assimilation or departure. The police possessed frightening powers, while national unity rested partly upon institutions designed to leave little room for dissent.
Oskar knew what existed beneath the bright surface, but even so, the life for regular Germans was undeniably better now than ever before. And that mattered.
Back at home, his household had settled into an equally satisfying rhythm.
The eldest children attended school. The younger ones crowded nurseries, gardens and family rooms. Mornings were noisy, afternoons structured and evenings filled with music, arguments, games and exhausted children being carried to bed.
At night, Oskar rarely slept alone unless travel gave the women no alternative.
Tanya remained fire—possessive, shameless and convinced that any room could become a bedroom if she tried hard enough. She stalked him through the palace like an overexcited cat, wore entirely unsuitable clothing to the gym and treated exercise as an elaborate excuse to distract him.
Anna was warmth and patience. She preferred slower affection, kept the household steady and regularly prevented Tanya from turning minor flirtation into structural damage.
Gundelinde loved openly and without restraint, forever offering kisses, massages and enough tenderness to leave no part of Oskar neglected.
Cecilie had once remained carefully outside their private arrangement.
That had not lasted.
Familiarity became affection, affection became desire, and eventually everyone stopped pretending she was merely visiting. Before long, she joined the others during baths and late evenings with such ease that Oskar wondered why they had bothered resisting at all.
The four women also became remarkably inventive whenever he was away. Tanya acquired a small whip. Anna claimed to disapprove. Gundelinde blushed whenever the subject arose. Cecilie refused to discuss what had happened to several missing pieces of fruit.
By spring, all four women were pregnant again.
The palace physicians confirmed that each pregnancy was progressing normally, and the household accepted the news without alarm.
Children were expected in Oskar's family. Rooms were reassigned, nurses selected and sleeping arrangements reorganised with the efficiency of a government ministry.
For once, life inside the palace seemed almost peaceful. Yet outside it, scandal pursued Oskar with the persistence of a tax collector.
His latest secret—and extraordinarily reckless—project that he was planning required Krupp's cooperation, which inevitably meant Bertha. She remained one of the few people he trusted with almost anything, though their private meetings rarely remained professional for long.
They began beneath the palace with maps, weapons reports and discussions of possible catastrophe. They usually ended with Bertha testing what Oskar had once jokingly named the Banana Blaster 9000.
"Not this time," he occasionally protested.
Bertha treated that as the beginning of negotiations.
Consequently, meetings scheduled for an hour often continued deep into the night, with considerably less attention paid to artillery than either later admitted.
During one family visit to an amusement park, Bertha informed Oskar that something inside the haunted house required his immediate attention.
He entered expecting a damaged mechanism.
Instead, Bertha pinned him against a false stone wall and explained that the true defect was his recent neglect of her.
The ghosts were not responsible for the noises that followed.
Several families emerged from the attraction visibly shaken and congratulated its owners for making the experience far too realistic.
That incident should have satisfied the year's appetite for scandal.
It did not.
One quiet morning in May, Oskar entered the steam room of a nearly deserted Waterworld in southern Germany. He settled upon the warm stone bench, draped a towel over his pale hair and waited for workers to arrive with useful complaints—or at least entertaining scandal.
No one came.
Only the steady hiss of steam disturbed the silence.
Then movement stirred beneath the frosted partition separating the men's and women's sections.
Two women slipped beneath it in quick succession.
Oskar stared as they rose through the vapour, water gleaming across pale skin and generous curves. One was tall and voluptuous; the other exceptionally petite, though no less shapely. Steam concealed their faces, but neither showed the slightest hesitation as they approached him.
"What the—"
The taller woman climbed onto his lap and silenced him with a fierce kiss. Oskar reached to seize her, only for his hands to close around the warm fullness of her breasts.
The smaller woman immediately knelt between his parted legs. She took him in both hands, kissed the thick head and gave a delighted little sound when he began hardening beneath her touch.
Then her tongue followed.
The woman upon his lap broke the kiss, breathless and smiling.
"We found you, our big boy."
She pressed her breasts against his face.
"Go on. Have a taste."
Oskar caught her firmly by the hips.
"Who are you?"
Neither answered.
Instead, she squeezed herself closer. Warm milk touched his tongue as one nipple slipped between his lips, and the question died beneath a low growl.
The petite woman below closed her mouth around him.
Oskar's entire body tightened.
The taller woman laughed against his ear.
"You like that, don't you?"
His palm struck her backside with a sharp crack. She jolted against him, her flesh trembling beneath his hand, and gasped when his fingers slipped between her thighs.
"What the fuck is going on?" he demanded.
The woman kneeling before him answered by taking him deeper, struggling briefly against his size before retreating and working him with her lips and tongue instead.
The taller woman pulled the towel from Oskar's face, though the steam still concealed her identity. She pressed herself against him until he took one breast into his mouth, her teasing confidence dissolving into helpless moans.
Then she straddled him and lowered herself carefully. His size quickly forced her to abandon pride for caution, and Oskar held her still until she adjusted before guiding her through short, controlled movements. As her body relaxed, she grew bolder, while the petite woman remained between his legs, eagerly attending to whatever her companion left within reach.
By the time footsteps approached the steam-room door, Oskar had spent himself in both women—and finally recognised them.
Any lingering satisfaction vanished beneath a surge of anger.
The latch moved.
Oskar reacted at once. He pulled both women behind him, wrapped them in the nearest towels and spread his enormous body across the bench, shielding them almost completely from view.
When several men entered, the heavy steam revealed only Oskar's massive silhouette and two smaller shapes crouched behind his shoulders. Damp hair and the occasional movement were visible through the mist, but nothing more. No one could have said with certainty whether the hidden figures were small men or women.
Oskar stared rigidly ahead, one arm holding each intruder firmly in place.
Behind him, Patricia and Elise trembled with barely restrained laughter.
Only after the confused visitors had departed and the door closed again did Oskar turn upon them.
He had believed that two million marks in gold—and the children produced by their first encounter—had been enough to remove these women from his life.
Apparently, he had been optimistic.
After Patricia's disinheritance, she and Elise had vanished from British royal society. They combined their fortunes, abandoned the names imposed upon them by their former lives and established a discreet household of their own.
They now called themselves sisters, with the names Patricia and Elise Horn.
The family name of Horn, like a unicorn horn was deliberate.
For the unicorn they had chosen for their crest represented purity, power and untamed freedom. Patricia valued the power. Elise preferred the freedom. Both found the purity hilariously inappropriate.
Their family banner showed a crowned white unicorn rearing upon deep blue, with a golden mane and horn framed by gold ornamentation. It was elegant, unmistakably aristocratic and entirely their own—an emblem of two women who had rejected the lives selected for them and created a new family under a name they had chosen themselves.
The horn itself also amused them for reasons neither attempted to conceal.
Their earlier involvement with Oskar had produced children, now being raised safely beneath other names within the private household the two women had built together.
The Ladies Horn wanted secrecy, occasional contact and, judging from their conduct in the steam room, considerably more than conversation.
They also possessed enough information to scandalise both the British and German royal families.
Oskar disliked being cornered.
Unfortunately, he remained catastrophically vulnerable to beautiful women who knew exactly how to overwhelm his better judgement.
Thus Patricia and Elise Horn returned to the concealed edges of his life. They appeared rarely, travelled beneath false names and vanished again before anyone could begin asking inconvenient questions.
Oskar decided that Tanya, Anna, Gundelinde and Cecilie did not require a detailed report. Some secrets were best preserved in the interests of European peace.
Yet despite Bertha, the haunted house, the Ladies Horn and his own extraordinary talent for attracting scandal, Oskar was happy.
And during quiet moments, the same quiet thought returned to him again and again.
If Germany remained at peace, if his children grew strong and safe, and if he awakened each morning loved and needed, he would ask the world for nothing more.
It was a comforting thought, but unfortunately, Oskar already knew it would not last.
While he travelled openly among his people, another part of his life continued beneath locked doors. Meetings were held without records. Karl moved money through accounts that attracted no attention. Bertha's Krupp factories along with Imperial Weapon Works produced material that never appeared in official Army contracts.
Trains travelled south and east beneath false manifests.
New Dawn relief missions carried medicine, food and personnel toward the Balkans. Some wagons carried other cargo beneath their floors. Men departed Potsdam in small groups for supposed exercises, industrial assignments and humanitarian work. The Eternal Guard were redeployed in secret, while selected Black Guards assumed their uniforms and duties to conceal their absence.
No announcement was made and officially Oskar was doing nothing in the Balkans.
That fiction became increasingly difficult to maintain as the First Balkan War reached its conclusion at the end of May 1913, and the situation only worsened.