The Kaiser's voice carried through his private office with enough authority that even Karl and the guards waiting beyond the closed doors could catch occasional fragments of it. He had already been speaking for several minutes, and judging by the steadily hardening edge beneath his words, Oskar's ever-growing collection of shameful behavior had apparently provided him with plenty of material. There was the birthday Oskar had deliberately avoided, the servants and guards who had been sent searching through the gardens for him as though he were some vagabond thief rather than a prince of Prussia, and, apparently, yesterday's incident involving one of his mother's carefully planted trees, whose branch he had once again broken while doing pull-ups in the middle of the night. Judging from the way Wilhelm's eyes had lingered on him when he first entered, Oskar's damp hair, scuffed boots, and generally disheveled appearance had not escaped notice either.
The accusations were numerous, and although the Kaiser had not yet begun shouting, the anger underneath them was obvious enough that it hardly needed volume. Wilhelm had the unpleasant ability to sound furious while still speaking in complete, perfectly measured sentences, which somehow made the entire thing worse. Oskar stood before his father's desk with his shoulders squared and his hands held stiffly at his sides like a recruit on parade, wearing the expression he had spent nearly a year perfecting: calm, attentive, perhaps even slightly cold. It was the sort of face that suggested he was listening carefully and considering every word when, in reality, he understood perhaps half of what was being said on a good day.
Tonight was very much not a good day.
Wilhelm's German came fast, formal, and cleanly structured, every sentence delivered with the absolute confidence of a man accustomed to being understood the first time. Oskar genuinely tried to follow him. Familiar words surfaced here and there, enough to give him vague landmarks before the rest rushed past too quickly for him to hold onto. It felt like trying to drink from a river with his hands; he could catch a little, but most of it escaped between his fingers before he had time to understand what he was holding. Still, he understood the tone, and at this point he was beginning to suspect that tone might be enough to survive the encounter. He hoped, anyway.
What he understood very clearly was that this was not a conversation between father and son. This was Oskar standing in front of the principal's desk after having been a very bad boy, while his older brother watched from the side for reasons Oskar could not entirely understand. The only thing missing was someone asking him whether he knew why he had been called in. Unfortunately, the longer Wilhelm continued, the less certain Oskar became that he actually did. He had entered the room believing this was about the Naval Academy. Now, after hearing references to gardens, servants, his mother, branches, birthdays, and at least three words he was fairly certain meant disgraceful, he was beginning to wonder whether the school issue had merely been one item on a much longer list.
His uncertainty did not help his concentration. Despite his best efforts, Oskar's attention kept wandering away from his father and drifting around the room as he searched for something—anything—that might give his brain a moment to recover.
As far as he could remember, this was the first time he had ever been inside the Kaiser's private office, and he had to admit that it was impressive. The room seemed designed to remind anyone entering it that important decisions were made there. Polished wood gleamed beneath the warm lamplight, every surface immaculate and every object arranged with something approaching military precision. Maps covered portions of the walls and lay spread across tables, Europe divided into neat borders and carefully chosen colors that looked almost offensively orderly to someone who knew what those same borders would resemble after millions of men had finished bleeding across them.
Miniature warships occupied shelves, display cases, and sections of the mantelpiece, each tiny vessel carefully detailed and arranged like a fleet awaiting orders. Some were recognizable enough that Oskar found himself studying them instead of listening, mentally comparing hull shapes, gun placements, armor schemes, and all the other features that would become obsolete far sooner than anyone in this room could imagine. Paintings of storm-darkened seas and steel warships filled much of the remaining wall space, dramatic enough that they felt less like decoration and more like declarations of intent.
Cigar smoke hung thickly in the air—one of his father's many habits Oskar had never understood—mixed with the smell of polished wood, leather, paper, and something expensive he could not identify. It made the office feel heavier somehow, as though even breathing in here required slightly more effort than breathing anywhere else in the palace.
Then Oskar's gaze drifted upward, and he found Queen Victoria staring down at him.
Her portrait hung prominently above the room, dressed in black, stern and immovable, her painted expression carrying the quiet severity of a woman who had spent a lifetime watching governments rise, children disappoint her, and half of Europe somehow become related to her. Oskar had seen that face countless times in textbooks, documentaries, old photographs, and history videos. Queen Victoria had always been one of those enormous historical figures who belonged safely to another age, preserved behind glass and printer ink where she could do no personal damage to him.
Except now she was family.
His great-grandmother.
That thought still felt profoundly wrong.
Oskar stared at the portrait for several seconds longer than he should have, struck once again by the ridiculous realization that the terrifying old woman from his history books was technically related to him now. Somewhere inside his head, Zhang-Ge wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. He resisted the urge. This did not seem like the room in which one laughed at Queen Victoria while Kaiser Wilhelm II was already angry with you.
He dragged his attention back down toward his father's desk, where neat stacks of paper sat beside writing implements, official stamps, and, somewhat bizarrely, a small plate of cookies with a glass of milk nearby. For half a second Oskar wondered whether the milk belonged to the Kaiser, whether there was some deeper German royal custom involved, and whether asking would get him in even more trouble. He decided against investigating.
His eyes returned to Wilhelm.
The Kaiser stood near the tall windows with his hands clasped behind his back, his broad, rigid figure silhouetted against the darkness beyond the glass. There was something almost theatrical about the pose, like a villain from an old film staring out over the world while explaining a plan that everyone else was expected to obey. Oskar had seen countless photographs and recordings of Wilhelm in his previous life, but none had quite captured the effect of seeing the man in person. The mustache was every bit as ridiculous as history remembered it, yet somehow it worked on him. Combined with the immaculate military uniform, the straight back, and the deliberate stillness, it created an image of authority so complete that the eye almost overlooked the physical imperfection beneath it.
One arm remained held at that familiar, unnatural angle, the result of the birth injury Oskar had known about long before he had ever met the man. Seeing it in person was different. Wilhelm projected strength so aggressively that the flaw somehow became more noticeable once you knew where to look, a tiny break in an image otherwise constructed around absolute control. There was something almost contradictory about him: majestic until one noticed the details, measured until suddenly he wasn't, ambitious in a way that seemed less like a personality trait and more like an atmosphere surrounding him.
Standing there listening to his father speak about his future with complete certainty, Oskar could not stop thinking that Wilhelm looked exactly like the kind of man who could march confidently down a road without ever asking whether anyone had checked what waited at the end.
At the side of the room stood another Wilhelm.
The Crown Prince leaned casually against one of the bookcases with his arms folded over his dark Guards uniform, watching the entire exchange with a faint, almost entertained smile. At twenty-two he was still far from the wartime commander history would later remember, but he already looked entirely at home inside the world Oskar struggled merely to imitate: tall, lean, immaculate, and composed, his fair hair neatly arranged and the beginnings of a light moustache giving him just enough resemblance to their father to make the family connection unmistakable. Where the Kaiser carried tension like a coiled spring, the Crown Prince seemed almost relaxed, content to observe while his younger brother was slowly roasted alive beneath paternal attention.
Oskar glanced at him only briefly. He still found it deeply confusing just how many Wilhelms this family seemed determined to produce. One Wilhelm was already difficult enough to deal with. Two in the same room felt excessive.
He returned his gaze to his father and tried very hard to look as though he had understood whatever had just been said. The truth was that he probably did not need every word. Whatever else his father was angry about, Oskar already knew the important part because Karl had managed to make that painfully clear before sending him through the doors: Kiel, the Naval Academy, school, and four years of it.
That was what mattered.
Now all Oskar had to do was figure out when he was supposed to answer and somehow construct a response in German that did not make him sound mentally damaged. That was proving considerably harder than expected. What is he saying now? Is he still explaining it? Am I supposed to answer yet? No, wait. Don't interrupt him. That would be bad. Just listen. Catch something useful. Anything useful.
Wilhelm finally turned away from the windows. "Oskar."
His name cut through the room so cleanly that Oskar's spine straightened another inch on instinct. The Kaiser regarded him for a moment, his expression controlled but expectant. "Have you understood your assignment, or must I repeat it again?"
Oskar understood enough of that. His brain immediately began scrambling through the German words he knew, desperately trying to assemble something useful before the silence became suspicious. For one dangerous moment, the easiest answer came to him.
Yes.
He nearly said it before realizing how disastrous that would be. He did understand the assignment. The problem was that he had absolutely no intention of accepting it.
Before Oskar could settle on another response, Wilhelm continued. "In one week, you will report to the Kiel Naval Academy."
Kiel.
That word he understood perfectly, and his stomach tightened the instant he heard it.
"It will shape your future," Wilhelm went on, "and perhaps teach you to conduct yourself as a proper son of this house."
Oskar missed parts of the sentence, but the meaning came through clearly enough. His father was not asking whether he wished to attend. He was not presenting an opportunity or inviting discussion. The decision had already been made, approved, and apparently delivered to everyone except the person expected to spend the next four years living with it.
Four years. Four years of study, examinations, drills, military discipline, etiquette, and God knew what else, all conducted in a language he still struggled to read properly. Four years spent trying not to expose himself as an idiot while the calendar marched relentlessly toward 1914. Worse, they were four years he desperately needed—four years to make money, build connections, find people capable of turning the contents of his ridiculous red notebook into something real, and understand Germany well enough to influence it before Europe began sliding toward the grave.
He could not simply surrender that time. Not if there was even the slightest chance that he could prevent what was coming.
Oskar swallowed and forced himself to breathe slowly. He had to refuse, which meant he had to speak, and that was unfortunate. Simple, he told himself. Keep it simple. You know the words. Just put them together. Father, I cannot go. Yes. That should have been easy enough to say.
He opened his mouth. "My man, I mean—"
Oskar stopped so abruptly that his teeth nearly clicked together. Heat rushed into his face, and from the corner of his eye he saw the Crown Prince's faint smile become noticeably less faint.
"Father," Oskar corrected quickly.
Better. Good start. Now came the important part.
His brain reached desperately for the proper German construction, found three different words, forgot the order they belonged in, briefly remembered something Karl had said earlier, lost it again, and finally began to panic. "I…" Oskar started, but the rest refused to come. Wilhelm waited. The Crown Prince waited. Even Queen Victoria seemed to wait from the wall above them while Oskar's entire knowledge of the German language chose that exact moment to abandon him.
He swallowed once more, gave up on dignity, and forced out the only words he could still remember. "I… not go."
The room went still, not with theatrical silence, but with the particular stillness of a royal court—the kind that meant everyone had heard him perfectly and was now deciding exactly what he had just done.
Wilhelm II turned his head by only a fraction. It was hardly a movement at all, yet somehow it felt as though the full weight of the German Empire had just shifted and aimed itself directly at one oversized young prince who had no idea how badly he had violated the rules.
"What," the Kaiser said very slowly, "did you say?"
Oskar's ears burned. He understood what and say. The rest might as well have been the growl of something deep inside a cave. Even so, he straightened, boots planted firmly on the floor and broad shoulders pulled back, forcing himself into the posture of a prince while his mind panicked like a cornered animal.
He had prepared a line. A hard line. A simple line. Something masculine and final.
His mouth betrayed him.
"I… will not… sail."
For half a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then Crown Prince Wilhelm made a sound somewhere between a choke and a laugh and smothered it behind one hand with the practiced dignity of a man attempting to hide a sin. Across the room, the Kaiser's expression darkened slowly, like bad weather gathering over the North Sea.
"Oskar!" the Crown Prince snapped, stepping forward with sudden theatrical outrage, as though personally offended on behalf of every dead Hohenzollern staring down from every portrait in the palace. "This is Father's will—the will of the Emperor! You refuse your duty? You would shame the House of Hohenzollern?"
He spoke loudly, cleanly, and in flawless German, with just enough elegance to make Oskar's mangled sentence sound even worse by comparison.
Oskar stared at him with the same blank expression he used whenever he understood perhaps one word in three and hoped no one noticed. He had caught only fragments, but he understood the shape of what was happening well enough.
This was utter humiliation.
And suddenly he understood why the Crown Prince had been smiling.
Wilhelm II lifted one hand, and his eldest son stopped immediately. The Kaiser crossed to the desk in two measured strides and planted both hands against the polished wood. The sound was not particularly loud, but somehow it did not need to be.
"Oskar," Wilhelm said, each syllable precise, his voice low with a restraint that felt far more dangerous than shouting, "explain yourself."
Oskar realized immediately that things had become bad. No, worse than bad.
He needed a reason, preferably one that was not the truth. I know the future and all of you are doomed would probably not help. Neither would I need money to build ships and machines that do not exist yet, or please do not let Germany collapse like melted ice cream. His mind sprinted through the German vocabulary available to him and found little more than potholes. Anything remotely complicated had already fallen through the gaps.
So Oskar did the one thing one should probably never do when facing an angry Kaiser.
He attempted honesty.
"Father…" he began, and even that word still felt strange in his mouth, like wearing someone else's underwear. Nevertheless, he pushed forward because there was nowhere left to retreat. "You see, I have big dreams. Like… Alexander the Big."
He tapped himself once on the chest, as if perhaps his ribcage could translate the rest for him.
"My destiny is too big, and school is too small."
He swallowed and attempted to construct another sentence before what remained of his courage deserted him. "Yes, you see. I want to make big things. For small men. Make monkeys, so debt go flying away for nation. Then we make… boom-boom. You will like. Happy days ahead."
Oskar heard the words as they left his mouth. It sounded like a caveman attempting to explain political philosophy.
For several seconds, both the Kaiser and the Crown Prince simply stared at him, as if someone had handed them an official memorandum written in mud. Then Wilhelm II's face began to change, first red, then darker still, until he reached a shade Oskar associated more with warning flags and battlefield maps than human skin.
"Enough!" Wilhelm thundered, his voice trembling not with confusion but with barely contained rage. "Oskar, you are a prince of the German Empire. Your future is service. Duty. Honor. Your brothers accepted theirs without question, and so will you!"
His fist came down hard against the desk. Ink jumped in its bottle and a nearby glass trembled against the wood.
"Or do you intend to dishonor our name?" the Kaiser demanded. "Do you even understand what you are doing? I warn you, Oskar, if you refuse to attend the Academy and learn once again to behave like a proper prince, then I will have no choice but to confine you to this palace until you cease humiliating this family!"
Oskar's stomach attempted to climb out through his throat.
Abort, abort, abort.
His expression, however, remained perfectly still. Too still. It was the same princely mask he wore whenever he understood only half the room and desperately hoped nobody could tell. Beside him, Crown Prince Wilhelm looked dangerously close to dying from restrained laughter.
"This," the Crown Prince murmured almost kindly, "is the part where you apologize, little brother."
Oskar knew he should surrender. He knew the sensible thing was to lower his head, say yes, apologize, and pretend that the entire disaster had never happened. But when he looked at the two men before him—both so utterly certain of themselves, so comfortable within a world he knew would someday burn—something stubborn inside him refused to bend.
So he doubled down.
And his mouth, traitorous and apparently suicidal, reached for the strongest line it could find.
"I will not kneel," Oskar said slowly and firmly. "Real men build their own bridges."
The sentence landed in the room like a dropped dinner plate.
The Crown Prince's shoulders began to shake, forcing him to cover his mouth again. The Kaiser, meanwhile, went completely still.
When Wilhelm II spoke again, his voice was quieter, and somehow that made it worse.
"Oskar," he said, "you have disappointed me. Deeply."
He stepped closer, his gaze hard enough that Oskar instinctively straightened beneath it. "I had hoped you were practicing to become a proper prince again. Instead, it appears you have spent your time accumulating muscle rather than intellect."
There it was. Not merely an imperial judgment, but something heavier: the cold weight of a father's disappointment wrapped neatly inside the language of duty.
Oskar felt it strike harder than he expected.
He had known this confrontation was coming. What he had not expected was to detonate it using what amounted to a badly translated action-movie speech.
The Kaiser straightened, every inch the man Oskar remembered from portraits and history books. "Prince Oskar of Prussia, you will report to the Kiel Naval Academy in one week. You will remain there for four years, and you will return only with my permission."
His eyes fixed on Oskar with the unpleasant precision of a nail being driven into wood. "And until the day you leave, you will remain confined to this palace. Do you understand?"
Oskar lowered his head slightly.
He wanted to shout that he was trying to save the Empire. He wanted to explain that every year mattered, that the world was racing toward a disaster none of them could yet imagine, and that four years spent buried beneath examinations and naval etiquette could cost him opportunities he might never get back.
Unfortunately, he did not trust his German not to transform I am trying to save the Empire into I am going to explode Germany with monkeys.
So he said nothing, for silence seemed considerably safer.
Wilhelm dismissed him with a sharp wave of the hand, as though swatting away a particularly irritating fly that had somehow learned to speak.
"Oskar, OUT."
Oskar turned stiffly and started toward the door.
He had taken only two steps when, because apparently the universe had not yet finished humiliating him, one final sentence slipped out on instinct in the same casual tone he used with servants, soldiers, and anyone else he wanted to reassure.
"…I'll be back."
The Crown Prince made a strangled noise behind him.
The Kaiser's eye twitched.
Oskar did not wait to discover whether the room had decided to laugh at him or execute him. He marched through the doorway and, in one final act of divine punishment, struck his forehead against the top of the doorframe hard enough for the impact to echo down the corridor.
Perfect.
Outside the study, the palace corridor was silent. The guards stood at their posts with their faces arranged into careful neutrality, pretending with professional determination that they had not just heard several centuries of Hohenzollern dignity collapsing on the other side of the door.
Karl waited against the wall with his arms folded, wearing the expression of a man who had spent the last several minutes watching a carriage roll steadily toward a cliff and had just heard the crash.
One look at Oskar's face told him everything.
"So," Karl said dryly, "how many centuries of Hohenzollern heritage did you insult this time?"
Oskar exhaled long and hollow. "All of them."
Karl reached up and patted his arm with the solemnity of a priest administering the last rites. "Well, good news: you have a week before they ship you off to sailor school. Bad news: you'll apparently be locked inside the palace until then."
Oskar groaned.
Karl nodded as though confirming a particularly unfortunate diagnosis. "Don't worry. I'll smuggle you snacks from the world beyond these walls. Perhaps I can also find you a book titled How Not to Speak Like a Cursed Statue."
Oskar stared into the middle distance, his expression empty and his voice grave. "Failure… is not an option."
Karl blinked once. "Oh, excellent. Another one-liner."
He sighed.
"We're all doomed."