Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
“ Y ou look beautiful, Lady Hasannah,” Mathen said when Andrei and I approached the coach.
Constin stood to the side as well, relaxed but sharp eyed. He cast me a quick half smile then moved close to Andrei, murmuring something in his ear. The men laughed, low and deep—boys talking about girls laughter.
I rolled my eyes and turned to Mathen, rising on my tip toes to press a quick kiss on his cheek
“Thank you,” I said. “Shouldn't you be off duty? They do let you sleep, don't they?”
“Who is they?” The amusement on his face belied the droll tone.
“If you’re done seducing my bonded,” Andrei said, coming close to rest his hand on the small of my back.
Mathen smiled, opening the coach door. We entered, settling in our seats. Constin slid next to Andrei as Mathen closed the door and disappeared. I studied the men across from me, Andrei in his elegant High Lord at rest pose, Constin sprawled.
We’d come to an understanding that didn’t involve his manhandling or my passive aggressive insults. Most of the understanding revolved around his cooking, to be honest, which meant we were almost as friendly as Mathen and I now. To also be honest, when Constin was relaxed I liked him—when he was tired or irritated, I steered clear. He seemed to blow off steam by stalking and pouncing on people, sometimes with sharp implements. . .he called it training. When I couldn’t avoid him, I played roly-poly, making myself so pathetic that it would insult him to “train” me.
“There's something I don't understand about Fae men, or it might be Cassanian culture,” I said.
They looked at me with cautious eyes, summer lake and stormy gray.
“You're supposed to be outrageously possessive, correct? To the point where any sane human avoids the plague out of you all.”
The men exchanged a look. “And?” Constin prompted.
“Mathen flirts with me and neither of you blink.”
Amber glints warmed Andrei's eyes. “That's different. Mathen is mine.”
“You're aware English only has one word for mine? The English word mine has variations in your language—I’m probably losing something in the translation. What do you mean by he is yours? Not the same thing you mean when you say I'm radthven.”
The men exchanged another, longer, do we need a story and do we have it straight glance.
Oh, boy. I knew that look from years of keeping abreast of the romantic drama in my former company.
“Are you and Mathen lovers? Or were you? He’s your guard.”
Silence.
“You also have female guards. . . oooh. You’ve slept with all of them, haven’t you?” I leaned forward. “Spill.”
“Mathen and I are not currently lovers,” Andrei said as if he was cherry picking his words and found only seven that wouldn’t get him into immediate trouble.
“Well, that’s not a cagey response or anything.” Not currently didn’t mean had never been.
Constin muttered something in Cassanian and Andrei replied, rapid-fire.
I settled for a neutral expression while I entertained myself watching them decide how much to reveal about their culture’s sexual norms.
“Just tell her,” Constin said. “You know you have to.” In English, so he wanted me to know they were debating.
It was also a warning to brace.
“Guys?” I interjected, voice mild. They looked at me. “It’s all good. There’s very little you can say that will surprise me.”
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” was Andrei’s dark reply.
To be fair, their caution was based in reality—they had no way of knowing if I was one of the humans who’d censure and reject them for anything but a ‘traditional’ heterosexual, monogamous relationship status.
Andrei sighed. “He’s luudthen.”
It wasn’t a word in my limited Cassanian vocabulary and from the gravity with which he’d said it, shaded with reluctance as if he’d admitted something unbearably intimate, it wouldn’t have been anyway.
“I don’t know the word.”
“It means. . .” he paused, then cursed. “English is. . .it means I would die for him, kill for him, and he me. We’re closer than family, more intimate than lovers. There is no question of trust between us.” Andrei’s expression balanced between grave and vulnerable. “It’s the only word we use for love openly among enemies.”
“That’s because it’s also a threat,” Constin added, also quiet, but more resolute. “No one will attack someone called luudthen by a Lord with power greater than theirs unless they’re begging to die a slow, terrible death along with their loved ones.”
I studied them, understanding what had been eluding me about their relationship dynamic.
“Constin is luudthen also,” I said.
“Yes.” Andrei lowered his lashes. “Philea, Theland and Esseum as well.”
I pursed my lips. “I’m not. I can’t be. We don’t have lifetimes of shared experiences.”
And radthven kind of cancelled luudthen out. The latter included real love, the former just. . .possession.
I felt a pang of envy. What would it be like to be loved, trusted, needed like that? To have an unassailable place in someone’s heart to the point they’d die to preserve you?
Where they accepted all your damaged pieces because that was better than nothing—and pieces still reflected light.
I couldn’t imagine that level of closeness, and I hadn’t realized until now that I craved it, and ruthlessly suppressed the craving along with everything else I’d given up on.
Companionship, intimacy, sex of any kind. Simple comfort or conversation at the end of a long day.
The effortless sync of dancing with a partner familiar with every line of your body, the unshakable trust they’d hoist you on every lift, never let you fall. I wanted it.
I wanted it with him —only he didn’t need me. I was here because some spiritual/biological force had snapped us together, not because he’d wanted me. And even if he did, the disparities between us. . .he tried to gloss over them but the time approached where that protective caul would be ripped off.
“You’re not less to me,” Andrei said, bringing me out of my silence. “You’re my bonded. One day. . .one day we’ll call each other luudthen, and it will be the truth.”
“You don’t need me when you have them, Andrei. They give you everything.”
“Do you want us to give him up?” Constin asked.
I met the reason for that resoluteness in his eyes. They’d been steeling themselves. They expected me to ask them to walk away from each other.
“Of course not,” I said softly. “I would never do that, certainly not to someone I cared about.”
I held out a hand. After a moment, Constin took it, with a slight tremble that wasn’t mine.
I squeezed gently, then released him. “Please believe me. The last thing I want is to break up your family.”
Constin nodded, jaw tense, then let out a breath. “We’re not his bonded,” he said. “Luudthen is a chosen bond, but yours—there’s no choice. It is.”
“Eventually our minds will be one. They know me through time and experience.” Andrei’s gaze held mine. “When our bond fully locks, you’ll know me as if we inhabited the same body.”
The note in Andrei’s voice told me he meant those words literally. But. . .I wrapped my arms around myself.
“No choice.” That wasn’t romantic, at all.
“I had a choice. I could have fought in the moment the bond first emerged. I didn’t. Hasannah—don’t think of it as if I was forced.” He gentled his tone. “As if I wouldn’t have chosen you otherwise. That doesn’t matter. I want this. I want you. ”
The weight of those fiercely spoken words kept me silent. Constin squeezed Andrei’s shoulder.
“We all want you,” Andrei’s luudthen said. “The older he gets, the more powerful he becomes, he’ll need you. Need the balance you provide.” The men exchanged a glance, this one dark with the bits of shared experiences I wanted no part of. “Too many of our High ones go mad with time and power. A bonded is an anchor. It’s a boon Andrei found you while he’s so young.”
“Under five hundred is a spring chicken,” I said. “I’d forgotten.”
Constin smirked. “I’m two centuries the elder.” He held up his fingers. “Two.”
“I bet you even changed his diapers.”
“Why, yes. I did.”
“I hope I pissed in your face,” Andrei murmured.
“Why do you think I’m still so hard on you?” was the purred reply.
The sly heat in those words, in the veiled glance Constin shot Andrei. . .well, my imagination sparked. More than my imagination.
“So you have slept with all your guards.”
Andrei smiled sweetly and examined his nails—matte black. “It's safer to choose pleasure from among your guard, even if they aren’t luudthen. Most of the High Lords choose to do this, or take lovers so far below them in?—”
I held up a hand, making a face. “Understood. Not exactly a healthy dynamic, but I can’t judge. I will never be a High Lord of anything but maybe your nail polish collection—which is excessive, by the way. Who needs. . .never mind.” I gave them a mock glare. “You could have told me all this, I wouldn’t have run naked into the woods howling.”
Andrei lifted a finger. “That sounds interesting, my darling. Why don’t we arrange it?”
Constin laughed. “Humans are finicky about these things. There’s supposedly only two genders, and you must be sexually attracted to only one, or maybe two.” He grimaced. “Boring. But then you have such short lives in which to be bored.”
“Not everyone is that restrictive.” It had taken me time and exposure to grow out of it though, so I didn’t argue too hard.
“Really? Many of you are. It's hard to decide when to tell the truth, and when to tell the creative truth.”
“You mean when to lie.”
“Fae can't lie.” He spoke with a straight face.
I waved my hand. “Uh huh. So the luudthen thing is why your Lord won’t go all High Fae on me if I’m affectionate with Mathen.”
Constin eyed me, absently massaging the back of his neck. “Confine your flirtations to us, and you'll be fine. And if you’d like us to demonstrate any particular technique?—”
“Hold,” Andrei said, giving Constin a narrow eyed glance. “I feel the need to clarify. Flirtations, Hasannah. Nothing more. I'm not sharing you fully even with them.”
“I can teach her how you like?—”
“I will feed you whole and living to my mother’s swans.”
I frowned. “This is the second time you’ve said that. Are they murder swans or something?”
“Or something,” Constin muttered.
I laughed, though Andrei didn’t appear to be joking, especially since he repeated himself in Cassanian—with a few extra imprecations it sounded like.
“I wasn't thinking about it,” I said, happy that they were revealing another layer of themselves to me. The softening in the air made plain the former, subtle tension I hadn’t noticed before. “I wanted to understand the dynamics, is all.”
“One hopes she'll learn to share after a few years,” Constin said. “You should know better, Drei. No one likes a hoarder.”
I almost choked. I wasn't going to think about those implications right now.
The coach pulled up to the private home where the party was being held.