20. Battlefields
Battlefields
I’d spent so long—my entire life, really—trying to live up to what was expected of me, that it was a breathtaking relief to simply stop.
I gambled with off-duty soldiers. I went to fancy parties and didn’t hesitate to take the last of my favorite foods off the charcuterie or to dance with beautiful ladies who were far beyond my station.
I got wildly drunk with old army buddies and nursed the horrific hangovers in my apartment overlooking the garrison.
I was in and out of so many people’s beds that I made a healer check part of my monthly routine.
Only once did I accidentally cry out Alluin’s name while orgasming inside someone else.
She (very kindly) promised not to tell anyone, but she couldn’t stop laughing at me, either.
We only lasted another fortnight before she found someone else with whom to spend her evenings—a man, she said with irrepressible humor, with someone less on his mind.
It wasn’t like I didn’t see Alluin. I did, all the time.
But I stopped trying to be the sort of person Alluin should be spending time with, and was simply myself.
It didn’t seem to dissuade him. If anything, Alluin seemed happier to spend time with me now that I was back to being the soldier he’d first known.
I’d once offered him the escape of my allure geas, but as time went on I thought that, maybe, the escape he actually wanted was an excuse to stop being General Xilsatra for a little while.
We got drinks together, went adventuring together, and even sometimes crashed out in bed together.
I had the very bad luck of waking up from a vivid dream of getting fucked by Alluin while literally in bed with Alluin, but when I tried to extract myself from the situation, he only growled at me and told me he knew precisely what came along with being male, and that he wasn’t about to have his time with me cut short just because my cock was hard.
Sometimes, Alluin was the one who woke hard, which inevitably meant that I went from muzzily asleep to ramrod stiff and desperately holding myself back from arching into the contact.
I loved sex and would have loved to have sex with him—and on more than one occasion, I got the distinct impression that the heat in his eyes when he watched me dancing was the possessive greed he’d warned me about, and that he might be amenable to the thought—but it was a worse idea now than it ever had been before.
Alluin wasn’t chaste, but he only seemed to have two kinds of sexual relationships: husbands and one-night stands.
As far as I knew, he’d only been married the once, and Nyland had been exactly the sort of person someone like Alluin would be married to.
For all that I hated the man, Nyland was elegant, well-bred, and well-connected.
He was the male equivalent of a lady raised as a marriage-token, and though Alluin had been hopelessly in love with him, from what I’d gathered the marriage had been a clan union, one much beloved by the families in question.
So as much as I loved the concept of belonging entirely to Alluin, ‘husband’ was right out.
We’d already established that trying to be a paragon was a failing proposition for me.
And as for the one-night stands, while I was certainly a light-of-love to many people, I knew it would gut me to be that to Alluin.
There was no way I could fuck him and then go back to normal.
I already couldn’t stop thinking about him.
If I ever crossed that line, there was no going back.
Oddly, none of my antics seemed to harm my standing in the Second Army.
I never shirked my duties, of course, and I could certainly dress the part, but I’d expected that my off-duty behavior would affect people’s trust in my ability to be a commander.
I supposed it did, but in the other direction: people seemed to trust my judgment more.
Maybe that was because I was spending more time with the soldiers, or because they could all tell that I was one of them even when I put on the formal whites and kissed the hands of noble ladies at palace events.
Whatever the reason, people liked and trusted me, and it was a rare day when I strolled into the garrison pub and didn’t have at least a couple people lifting their hands in greeting.
I became a fixture. I suspected, actually, that I became a bit infamous.
Dain joined us regularly. He’d long had affectionate defenders in the Armies, but it wasn’t long before he had friends, and it only had a little bit to do with me.
Now that he was an adult, Dain could step into the world of the soldiers in a way he’d never been able to as a boy, and he did it with relish.
We loved his strength, his loyalty, his ability to drink almost anyone under the table, and his willingness to treat the commonest footsoldier with the same respect and attention as the generals.
Alluin had always been somewhat aloof when Dain had been a child; they’d interacted formally, Alluin instructing him in simple tricks of glamor or being present at the arms lessons I taught, and Dain had looked up to him as a defender and protector.
I was the one Dain came to when he had problems or questions and the one he’d always been most affectionate with.
But as a grown man, Dain was as ravenously interested in the intricacies of command and of the army as he was in swordplay and flowers, and Alluin was only too happy to oblige.
Perhaps, then, it should have come as no surprise that when Queen Nephinae managed to incite war along the border with Raven Court, she would hand the Armies to her son.
Dain was terribly young for that sort of responsibility, but he shouldered his duty without complaint.
He knew he didn’t have the experience to wage a war with our wealthy neighbor on his own, and he didn’t try.
He arrayed his generals and commanders, he brought in advisors to supplement our knowledge, and he listened to us.
We waged war for years, defending our land and protecting our people, and Dain never stopped listening and learning.
On the battlefield, Dain was peerless. He fought on two feet and on four, and Raven Court had no answer for him, even when they built and deployed the monstrous Furies to harry our lines.
Alluin used him the way a master swordsman used a blade, ruthless in his efficiency.
Alluin used everyone like that. His battlefield was the maps spread across his table, and it was a thing of beauty to watch him at work, every word of every report heard and collated, the gore and ruin of war reduced to numbers and tokens.
Without Alluin, we would have been squashed. Raven Court was enormously wealthy, they’d brought two allies to the field, and there was a great deal of bad blood between King Xirangyl and Queen Ronelis. But we had Alluin, and we held our own as the weeks turned into months and the months into years.
Of course, Alluin’s immense dedication and depths of loyalties came with their downsides.
Chief among them was that Alluin had a tendency to forgo sleep when there was a problem to solve, and war was a never-ending stream of problems, all of which had hundreds, if not thousands, of lives on the line.
It had been weeks since Alluin had slept through a night, and he was starting to look haggard.
I examined him from the entrance of the tent for a moment and decided to take a direct approach.
I walked over to his bedroll, hauled over the angled lounge-hammock he used to keep himself propped up when he only wanted to catnap instead of sleep, and plopped myself down.
“C’mere,” I said, patting my thigh. “Come lie down.”
Alluin fixed me with his cold-eyed general stare. “I have work to do.”
“You haven’t slept more than four hours a night for the past two weeks, and you’re running on so many stimulants that you’re going to start hitting toxicity,” I replied with a brilliant smile. “Come lie down.”
His ears pinned. “People will die if I don’t get this right, Zhiolas,” Alluin snapped, his expression going harder. “They’ll die. Maybe you don’t care if you have that on your conscience, but I do.”
I didn’t take the vicious words personally. Alluin turned into a ravening wolf when he was sleep-deprived, and the stimulants made it worse. It didn’t have anything to do with me.
“You’re tired enough that you’re surely going to make mistakes if you keep pushing, and I know you know that. I’m not trying to make your life harder. I’m trying to help you,” I said, putting some soothing into my voice. “Third time, Lu. Come lie down and let me hold you.”
He wavered—literally wavered, struggling to keep himself upright now that lying down was a possibility in his mind—and gave in with a soft sound of defeat, almost a whimper.
Alluin walked over and dropped to his knees next to me, all but falling onto me as he crawled onto my lap.
He clung to me, thigh across my legs and head on my shoulder, starting to tremble from exhaustion.
“There’s so much I should be doing,” he said in a thick voice. “I still don’t know how to counter the Furies—”
“No war talk when you’re in my bed,” I murmured back, burying my nose in his hair and settling his body more comfortably against mine.
“This’s my bed,” Alluin said, slurring the words, already falling asleep now that he was mostly horizontal.
A smile touched my mouth. “No war talk when I’m in your bed, then,” I said, tugging his shirt up so I could have my hand on his side the way he liked. “Let me take care of you, alright?”
He let out another little whimper, something so vulnerable and defenseless that I wanted to pick him up and carry him away from all of this. Alluin arched into the contact, his chin lifting and lashes fluttering. “Zhi,” he said, half-moaning my name.