25. Soulmate
Soulmate
Dain wasn’t the same after Alluin brought him home.
I couldn’t imagine any way he could be. Even I woke up from nightmares of Phazikai—of the grim, awful task of taking those tens of thousands of mangled bodies and interring them in massive graves dug in every quarter of the city.
People called him ‘the Beast of Phazikai,’ and it wasn’t difficult to understand why that would be the first thing on their minds when they thought of the Stag Prince.
He was grimmer. Crueler. His temper, never particularly tamed, became murderous.
He’d been killing assassins and the occasional courtier since he was a teenager, but the ease with which he now drew his sword was troubling.
What was one more death, after all, for a man who had the blood of a city on his hands?
The high court hated and feared him for it, which only bolstered his willingness to answer their violence with certain death.
When assassination attempts were a near-monthly occurrence, it wasn’t as if he ever had the chance to be less than willing to kill to defend himself.
Dain stood alone in the Antlered Palace. His sword was his only shield.
At least the Armies were still a safe place for him.
We understood, viscerally, what it was that he’d been bound to and what he’d done to spare us from the horrors that indelibly stained him.
Our prince had put himself between his people and annihilation.
He’d committed atrocities to keep us safe, and we answered his devotion with unswerving loyalty.
Dain spent a great deal of time with the army.
He was still the high commander, but he also wanted to learn, and his willingness to put himself under the command of common soldiers endeared him to many.
Since he was so difficult to harm and recovered from injury so quickly, Dain was often the first to volunteer when particularly dangerous monsters were roving too near to settlements.
His kill count crept up, year over year. He even took down a manticore.
More than once, I wondered if Alluin and I had done Dain a great disservice by teaching him about loyalty and his duty to his Court.
If he’d only had his mother to learn from, he might have turned into a conniving snake, but I doubted he would have murdered a city and eaten a prince to save his Court from suffering centuries of slaughter.
He would have that on his conscience for the rest of his life.
We would have that on our consciences for the rest of our lives.
The gentle Dain we both loved—the boy who loved flowers and playing with soldiers—had been drowned in blood.
The whole topic of Droesh was sealed for Dain.
He hadn’t even wanted to see the flowers of his youthful retreat when he’d been traveling with Alluin.
I understood that, even if it cut Alluin to the core.
He was carrying the charnel-house of Phazikai inside his soul in the same way I’d carried my guilt over his near-assassination as a boy.
The idea of going to the place that had always meant safety and peace had to feel like sullying it, as if his very footsteps seeped blood.
Alluin and I still went to Droesh together each summer, but we started taking Dain to a new location every year for his birthday, trying to give him back any amount of those bucolic days.
I’d walked the length and breadth of Stag Court, after all, and there were many beautiful places, each with their own lovely things to discover.
We even started going to the mortal world on occasion, Alluin and I hunting down guides to wildflowers from the mortal world and then making Dain take us through one of the Ways through the Veil to go hunting.
For his hundred and nineteenth birthday, Alluin and I presented him with a modern mortal field guide to a region of the western North American continent known as ‘Yosemite.’ I was quite proud of the find, actually; I’d made a number of the Second Army procurers aware that there would be an excellent finder’s fee for a floral guide to somewhere in the mortal realm that was easily accessible from Stag Court, and it had paid off in spades.
Nothing would do, of course, but that we go immediately. We picked a remote area of the map, crossed the Veil, and set to hunting.
Many of the flowers in the mortal world were similar to faery flowers, even to the point of being identifiable as the same species, but certainly not all. Dain fell in love with western bistort and pine fritillary; I determinedly held out for a snow orchid.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dain said with a smirk, sauntering along behind me as I scanned the ground under the trees. “We’ve been out here for almost six hours already. Surely you’re aware that the more intensely you demand fate comply, the fickler she tends to be.”
“Orchids, though, my prince,” I said pleadingly, getting a laugh from Alluin. “Not even regular orchids! Parasitic orchids! Think of how delightful that would be.”
“Are you intending to cajole me into staying out here till sunset? It won’t be that difficult,” Dain replied in an amused rumble.
“I’d much rather miss tonight’s miserable formal dinner to look at flowers than sit next to Mother and glower at all the nobles.
It’s sure to be—” He stopped, brows snapping together as his ears cocked forward.
A moment later, I heard it, too: a mortal voice, weak, begging in a language I didn’t recognize. The landscape of debt slanted towards me. She was asking for help—offering a debt for her rescue.
“Oh, that’s a fucking problem,” Alluin said. He was off like a shot, clambering up the slight rise towards the sound.
“Godsdammit, Alluin!” Dain snapped. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Guess we’re rescuing a mortal,” I said, flashing him a grimace before following Lu up the slope. I wasn’t letting him go alone.
“Hey! Idiots! At least let me fucking glamor you before you throw yourself at some mortal—”
We came up the ridge to a small alpine lake gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. A woman lay sprawled on the stone next to the lake, filthy and obviously fevered, holding herself up with one arm. She was young, bloodied, injured. The wind shifted and I caught the familiar scent of rotting flesh.
“Fucking black night,” Alluin said at the same time Dain snarled, “Don’t you fucking dare—”
Alluin and I were already moving. Dain was our high commander and prince, but we were off-duty and off Stag Court soil on unofficial business. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, in charge of us—not that Alluin would have paid attention even if Dain was.
He caught the woman just as she collapsed, holding her with the same gentleness he held any other injured creature.
She was beautiful—or would have been, if she hadn’t been dying of a blood infection.
Her dark hair was lank and greasy; her clothing was torn and ragged.
The lines of her elegant face were smeared with dirt and blood. Flies walked across her reddened flesh.
“Get down here and assist, Your Highness,” Alluin said over his shoulder as Dain thudded angrily down the rocky slope.
“Assist with what?” Dain said in a snarl. “She’s obviously dying. What do you want me to do? Eat her?”
“Don’t be such an asshole,” I snapped back. “We need a Way back. Where’s the nearest one?”
We weren’t authorized for that sort of thing; bringing back mortal bondservants was highly regulated, and bringing back a mortal without binding her was thoroughly illegal. Dain was a prince, though, and he could flaunt those laws if he wanted to.
Dain scoffed, though he still knelt to take a look at the mortal.
“She’s going to die if we leave her out here,” Alluin said, clearly upset at the idea of leaving someone here to die of an infection that could be easily fixed, even though we had no ties to her. “It’s easy to bring her back with us, and you can make the healers care for her.”
“I’ve killed plenty of people already,” Dain growled, though his glamored expression went shamefaced. “I don’t want to deal with the backlash of bringing a random human back home. Let her die.”
“You don’t have to keep her,” Alluin snarled back.
Dain bared his teeth and went to stand.
The mortal woman grabbed him. “Dain,” she panted out. “Dain, what’s wrong with your eyes?”
She said it in Faery.
She knew his fucking name.
“Gods and monsters,” I whispered, unable to keep the shock behind my teeth, scrambling away from her like she was made of hornets. She was his soulmate. His fucking soulmate. Dain had a soulmate and she was a dying mortal woman lying there in the summer sun—
Dain snarled like the wolf he was and hauled her off the ground as if she was as light as a feather, manhandling her into a bridal carry and striding into the forest with her. I stared after him, sitting on my ass on the cold stone, too stunned to do anything.
Soulmate. He had a soulmate.
Alluin’s hand wrapped around my wrist and tugged. I looked up at him with fear on my face, wanting to pin my ears but still glamored to look human. “Lu, I… She’s…”
“I know very well what she is,” he said grimly. “Are you going to get up, or do I need to carry you? I doubt Dain’s going to wait for us when he crosses the Veil.”
Shit, right. We were in Mortality. We needed to not be in Mortality for much longer.
“Getting up,” I said, sounding like I’d seen a ghost. I scrambled to my feet, staggering a few steps.
Alluin gave my wrist another tug and started jogging after Dain’s rapidly-retreating back, not letting go of me—a wise decision, since I might very well have returned to staring.