17. Do Better
Do Better
Ikept it together all the way through delivering Dain back to the Antlered Palace.
Queen Ronelis greeted us, her mouth bracketing with distaste when she saw her son healed from his horrific injuries, but she didn’t say anything other than expressing her appreciation for us removing the prince from the palace during his convalescence.
Without Dain to keep up appearances for and without Droesh to soothe my soul, all the guilt and shame and dread came crawling back in, burrowing under my skin like worms into a carcass.
The crown prince had been entrusted to me.
I’d been given the twin tasks of training him for battle and keeping him safe, and I’d failed on both fronts.
I’d been too focused on trying to give Dain any semblance of a childhood to ensure that he knew how to protect himself, and I’d set five assassins on him like a casual afternoon’s training exercise.
Every ell of land between the Antlered Palace and the garrison felt stained, as if the very footsteps of the animals Kiki and her soldiers had ridden to come kill Dain had left oozing imprints in the soil.
They’d come from my home, from the place I worked and trained and ate, and they’d done so with the blithe confidence that I would stand by and let them do their grim work.
Kiki had thought she was doing me a favor. Her words slithered through my mind on a loop, wearing grooves in my soul:
When it come to swords, we’re efficient. We’ll get the job done.
You’ve left us something easy to exploit in battle.
Let’s get this over with.
I should have known. How could I not have? At the time, they’d seemed like innocent turns of phrases, but when was anything a fae ever said innocent? We were bound by our word. I’d been so blinded by comfort that I hadn’t been paying attention to anything but my casual routine.
Asking Alluin for soldiers over breakfast. Allowing personal relationships to influence my interactions.
Acting as if the antipathy the high court held for their prince wouldn’t spill over into others.
Alluin had even said it himself: Kiki had a cousin in the high court.
Of course she would have thought only the worst of Dain.
I’d been acting as if the world posed no true danger to the boy I’d been charged with protecting, and my prince wore scars because of it.
Alluin didn’t say anything to me about it when we got home, but I knew he was worried.
He kept glancing at me with that vulnerable anxiety he only ever showed when thinking about the few people he cared about.
I knew how much he loved Dain, even if he showed that in his fealty to his prince instead of the affectionate friendship I had with Dain.
I could hardly bear for him to look at me, certain that I’d wounded him as deeply as the prince.
I was supposed to be his shield-love—the one who protected him. What a fucking joke. I couldn’t even protect a child.
I had to do better. There was no other option.
I had to be better, to become the sort of person who would never treat his duty as something casual or put the people he loved in danger.
I was a commander, for fuck’s sake. People relied on me.
Expected me to be competent. I was an officer in the Second Army, and it was high time I acted like it.
“Zhi?” Alluin asked hesitantly, touching the backs of his fingers to my bicep.
I flinched away like he’d burned me. Alluin was so kind and so generous.
He would never punish me for this. He would comfort me for it, hold me and pet my hair and call me his shaeulo, his depths of loyalty far more than I deserved.
I couldn’t let him do it. If I accepted even a dram of that affection, I would crawl into his arms and sob for hours, and then there would be nothing to bind my hand to the sword I had to take up.
I would still be the same useless failure who had nearly let his prince get murdered by his own soldiers.
“What?” I asked, my voice coming out as harsh as the caw of a crow. My throat ached with unshed tears, all the pain of grief and guilt strangling me like garotte-wire.
He drew back, his expression shuttering. “It’s only… Shaeulo, you’ve been standing there in the entry room, staring at our couch, for nearly an hour.”
I had.
It was a nice couch, as those things went; overstuffed, with wide arms and a broad seat that let me sprawl flat on my back without my arm hanging off the edge.
So what if it was a bit worn? The green-and-gold brocade was done in a design like bracken ferns, and every brass tack had been stamped to look like a beetle, tiny legs and all.
It was like a piece of the woods. I’d fallen in love with it at an estate auction and brought it home with all the enthusiasm of a boy bringing home an extremely large bug to show his sister.
Alluin had observed the couch with mild horror for a few minutes when it had arrived, then looked up at me where I was beaming at him and laughed, shaking his head with his expression going easy.
“Might as well put it in the entry room to hide the claw marks our prince left behind,” he’d said with fond amusement.
“Maybe we can find a bookshelf to match.”
The bookshelf didn’t match. Nothing matched.
The couch was an enormous monstrosity, entirely out of place, and even the brass wall-sconces in the shape of branches that Alluin had gotten installed to match or the lovely oil landscape painting hung above it couldn’t hide the fact that the room had been designed for an entirely different sort of couch.
A settee, in fact, exactly of the sort that Alluin had purchased and Dain had dismembered. Not…this.
“We should get rid of it,” I said. The words sounded hollow, even to my own ears.
In the periphery of my vision, I saw Alluin’s brows draw together. “But you love that couch,” he said, sounding lost. “Almost every week I find you sprawled out there, reading your reports. You always look so happy. It’s comfortable and reminds you of the outdoors, and—”
“And it doesn’t fit the room,” I said harshly, cutting him off before I could start crying. “It never fit the room. Bringing it home was stupid.”
Gods. Bringing it home. Gallivanting off and buying an ugly couch to install in the gods-damn entry room, as if Alluin’s house and everything in it belonged to me—as if I had every right to make the first thing anyone who came to visit the First General see was the comfortable spot I liked to sprawl when I got bored of sitting at a desk.
Lu had only ever seemed to appreciate my foibles, but how long would that last?
I’d fucked up, tremendously, and my mistakes had left brutal scars on the prince he’d given his loyalty.
I could only imagine that whatever goodwill I’d built up with Alluin had been scorched down to a thin veneer of char, and I couldn’t bear for that last dram of tolerance to fall away into ash.
I’d been taking advantage of Alluin’s loyalty and good-heartedness for too long.
“Alright. If that’s what you want,” he said softly, sounding defeated. Alluin retreated, stepping back from me, his figure going indistinct as tears blurred my eyes. “I’m going out to buy us some supper.”
I didn’t answer. If I answered, I was going to start weeping, and then it would all be over. I gave him a curt nod, staring at my couch, seeing Droesh and remembering how little I deserved it, and almost broke when I heard the door shut behind him.
The next morning, I filed a formal request with the First Army for a temporary troop dispatchment to assist with the training of the crown prince.
Each soldier assigned to the part-time duty would be required to testify in front of three witnesses, to include both myself and the First General, that they intended no permanent harm or injury to His Highness Dain Sundamar, the crown prince of Stag Court, either in his person, spirit, soul, or status.
They would furthermore be expected to renew these vows each time they were called upon to spar with the prince.
I asked for twenty-four, each to be a soldier with a minimum of five years of active field duty and with a long-term posting at either the Antlered Palace or the palace garrison.
That would give me options, both in building squads for Dain to spar against and in dealing with the vagaries of illness and leave time.
Alluin, following my suit, called me to his office that afternoon to discuss the request. His expression, at once hopeful and worried, dimmed when I stepped into the room with my face as blank as I could make it.
My chest clenched and throat ached, but what else could I do?
Without the mask of formality, I was going to fall apart. I was already falling apart.
“I’ve granted your request, Commander Ulahana,” he said gravely. “Did you desire to make the selections personally, or are you yet willing to entrust such decisions to me?”
I had to take a minute before I could answer, shoving my heartbreak deep, deep down.
“They’re First Army soldiers, sir. You surely know them far better than I do,” I said, making myself hold his gaze even as his expression fully shuttered, his political mask taking over, stern and remote.
“I intend to do my own due diligence, but I would prefer that you exercise your discretion first.”
“As you like,” Alluin said, his level voice giving nothing away. He swallowed, throat bobbing, and for a moment his brows slanted in pleading. “Zhi—”
“Not here,” I said, too sharply, desperately trying to hold only the last fragile strands of my control.
I panted through my teeth. “Gods, Alluin, can’t you just let me do this the right way?
We knew them. They were First Army soldiers.
Being careless put those monsters within sword’s reach of the crown prince, and he paid the price for it. I don’t intend to let it happen again.”
He flinched back, a tiny motion, his political mask snapping back into place. “I didn’t intend to hamper your duty, Commander Ulahana,” he said, his voice going quiet and sad. “I will attempt to have a list of soldiers for you by the morrow.”
“You have my appreciation,” I said. My hands were trembling.
I stood there for one long moment, both desperately wanting to apologize and terrified of becoming just one more weight that Alluin had to carry on his shoulders, then finally bowed and walked out the door.
When I came home that night, the couch was gone. Good, I thought, even as some fragile piece inside of me I hadn’t even realized I possessed shattered into broken shards. It didn’t belong there. It never belonged there.
I closed my eyes, forcing the tears away. I’m going to do better.