14. Princeling
Princeling
Crown Prince Dain Sundamar, the only child of Nephinae Ronelis, was born in the spring, on a clear-skied evening as the nighthawks first began to cry.
The Queen had been terrified that something would happen as the birth grew closer, though she wouldn’t say what.
Rumors had flown and grown—that she was carrying a litter of wolves, that she would birth bones and grave-dirt, that Faerqen Himself would descend upon the palace to devour the child—and the end result was that I was in the field with my battalion when the infant prince took his first breath.
No gods attacked. No strange omens filled the skies. It was boring, actually; the worst sort of ‘hurry up and wait’ activity that war had to offer, without any sort of enemy at all.
My battalion didn’t get recalled until more than a fortnight after the birth, at which point I was sorely missing both my bed and Alluin’s cooking.
I’d gotten soft in my cushy palace garrison posting.
Six months out from my last tour of duty and I’d already grown used to the featherbed in Alluin’s guest room and the perfect way he fried eggs.
He was waiting for me when I returned, sitting on a white horse on a hill in the drizzling rain like something out of a painting.
I rode up to meet him, dread rising as my horse trotted up the slope.
Alluin liked me, sure, but not enough to wait like a statue while he and his mount got soaked to the bone.
I reined up next to him. “General,” I said, giving him a nod.
His expression was remote. “He’s wild.”
Nothing more was forthcoming.
“Who’s wild, Lu?” I asked, my brow creasing in worry.
Alluin looked over at me, his eyes haunted. “The prince.”
There weren’t that many things Alluin could mean, and only one I thought could put that expression on his face.
Fae were all touched by wild magic to some degree or another; it was what gave us our immortality, our binding to truth, and our sense of indebtedness.
Some had other talents, like my allure geas or the small amount of glamor Alluin could wield.
Others had physical traits that deviated from the norm, like horns or tails, and yet others were shapeshifters tied to the pattern of the skies.
Wild fae—true wild fae, not the ones with a bit of wildness about them—were rare, and they were strange.
In form as much a monster as the things the wild magic birthed in the wilderness, but with the intellect and soul of a person, wild fae were so strikingly different in appearance and skills that they rarely fit into society, living in their own enclaves or joining the nomadic fae.
Queen Ronelis had been under some sort of geas, a punishment from Faerqen for her defiance of his worship. Gods-touched. His power must have overwhelmed her and altered the child inside her beyond recognition.
“I think she hates him,” Alluin said, his voice cracking. “He’s only a babe, Zhi. An innocent. And she—” He swallowed. “At the naming ceremony, she wouldn’t even look at him. She didn’t even give him her name.”
I nudged my mount closer. The cold rain dripped through the chinks in my armor and was seeping through my gambeson, but chills could be chased away. I wasn’t going to leave Alluin out here to brood and despair.
“What’s his name?” I asked gently.
“Dain,” he said softly. “Dain Sundamar.”
Sundamar—he who sunders. She’d given him a royal personal name but had inflicted her pain on him as a surname.
“And what are we going to do to help our prince, General?” I asked, putting myself on his side of the war without needing to be asked.
“‘We’?” Alluin asked, as if that had ever been in question.
“Of course ‘we,’” I said, flashing him a smile. “If it doesn’t involve catching a cold in the rain, though, can we go home so I can sit in the bathhouse for approximately three hours and soak out the past few weeks? You can wash my hair if you want to come with. I don’t mind.”
Alluin shuddered, blinking a few times, like he was breaking out of a fugue. “You don’t even know what I want to do,” he said, sounding dazed. “I don’t even know what I want to do.”
I wheeled my horse around, pointing his nose at the town beneath the palace garrison. “So? You’re the master strategist. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
Six years later, the master strategist kidnapped the crown prince.
I stood in the doorway with my bag of groceries in one hand, unsure if I should laugh or cry at the sight of the ungainly six-year-old in my entry room sharpening his claws on my settee like a kitten attacking a toy.
Dain had grown tremendously since his birth.
By two years of age, he’d gone from a floppy puppy roughly the size of a normal infant to the size of a direwolf; now, a few days past his sixth birthday, Dain was easily the size of a large pony, but with the bulk of a canine, massive scaled feet, and a pair of winglike arms that were currently engaged in gutting velveteen cushions.
“Seriously?” I asked in a world-weary voice. “The couch?”
Dain barked, a happy sound, and rolled over, abandoning the couch to bound over and drop to a sitting position in front of me. He picked up his front paws with his jaw dropped in a canine smile and signed, “Hello! I’m here!”
“Yes, you’re very here,” I said drily, then leaned to the side and called in my best peeved-commander voice, enunciating every syllable, “Al-lu-in!”
My prince tilted his head back and loosed a puppy-howl in reply, one that set off the hounds three houses down and had a horse whinnying in the street.
I rolled my eyes and bumped him gently with my shoulder as I stepped past to drop my food off in the pantry.
“Keep it down, Your Highness,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to end your visit so soon, would you? ”
Dain padded behind me, but he was much too large to fit through the door to the kitchen, so he flopped onto his stomach and stuck his head through, whining.
I turned back to him, raising a brow. “Yes, my prince?”
His ears perked up and he moved back to sitting on his haunches, wing-arms tucked along his scaled back and front feet freed for signing. “Dinner?”
Oh, gods, of course he hadn’t eaten yet. Dain was a carnivore, and he went through an astonishing quantity of meat. I didn’t happen to have a flock of goats in the backyard. I supposed some could be procured.
“You’re hungry?” I asked.
He nodded with his brows pulled together in a pleading expression, an odd sight on a giant wolf-dragon.
But, then, Dain wasn’t a wolf or a dragon, or anything in-between.
He was a six-year-old fae child—one who hadn’t even been allowed to communicate like a person until I’d started teaching him Faery Sign as part of the arms lessons Alluin and I had arranged for him when he’d turned five.
Internally, I sighed. It wasn’t Dain’s fault he’d been put into my entry room without any plans for his supper or entertainment. That blame could surely be laid solidly at the First General’s feet.
“Once I find General Xilsatra, I’ll see what we can do,” I said.
He nodded again. “Behind you.”
“In the kitchen?”
Another nod.
“Much appreciated,” I said, smiling at him. “Go ahead and kill that couch. See if you can get your hind feet up high enough to do a gut-strike, alright?”
“Yes, sir!” Dain signed, then turned and pounced on the hapless settee again.
I shook my head and ducked back into the kitchen. “Al-lu—ai!” I yelped when Alluin stepped out from behind the door. “Fucking black night, Lu, don’t do that!”
He shot me a look and tilted his head towards the entry room, where Dain had returned to demolishing our furnishings. “Little ears,” he hissed, pushing the door shut.
“Very large ears, actually!” I stalked over to the pantry and started shoving food where it belonged.
“Gods and monsters, Alluin, what the fuck were you thinking? You can’t simply take the crown prince.
He’s a prince! And he’s also a very, very large, extremely carnivorous child who needs dinner—dinner, I will note, that is not currently bleating in our backyard! ”
His jaw clenched. “She hit him.”
“Oh! Great! So just because she—” I stopped mid-movement and mid-rant, a bag of semolina in one hand. I set it down slowly and turned to Alluin. “She hit him?”
He nodded.
“And so you…”
He nodded again.
I took a deep breath and let it out carefully, leaning against the cupboard. “Lu, we can’t keep him.”
Alluin’s throat worked. “I know.”
There really wasn’t anything to say to that.
Dain was the crown prince; even though Queen Ronelis hated him, he was her heir, and she’d clearly learned her lesson about defying the gods—or a lesson, at least. Dain was given everything his royal heritage demanded—expensive food, excellent tutors, palatial surroundings—but he was also despised.
The courtiers treated him like an animal, and his mother kept him locked away as much as possible.
He had us, at least, but that had taken time.
When I’d gone to the palace for Dain’s first arms lesson almost a year ago, I’d found a sullen, angry child, one who devoured his meals whole and raw and communicated primarily with growls and posturing.
Most of his tutors were terrified of him, and I knew he had to be able to smell it on them.
Hell, I’d been frightened of him. He was large, fast, and didn’t have very good command over his rapidly-growing body.
Which, of course, had been my job to improve. Luckily, my charisma apparently carried over to wild beast-princes, and after the first time that Alluin body-slammed a soldier into the wall for mocking Dain during practice, Dain practically hero-worshipped him.
Now we had a kidnapped prince in our house, killing our couch.
Wood cracked on the other side of the door. Dain yipped happily, and something splintered.
Correction: now we had a kidnapped prince in our house, dismembering our couch.