7. Letters
Letters
Iwas determined not to be the one who came crawling back.
I hadn’t done anything wrong, dammit, and the gut-punch of hearing that Alluin wanted me for my allure geas still throbbed like an open wound.
It had been decades since the fight with the foxen, and using my allure still made me sick with anxiety.
He knew how awful that had been for me. How could he ask for something like that?
He had to have known what he was asking for, right?
Not all of my letters were the fluffy minutia of my life.
Sometimes I talked about important things.
I must have mentioned hating how people would flirt with me when they found out I had an allure geas—how getting used as a drug made me feel like less than a person.
Even if I hadn’t said it outright, it wasn’t as if I never mentioned it, and he was Alluin.
He remembered everything, and he was so good at seeing what all the little pieces meant.
I’d tell him how much it had hurt in my next letter, I decided.
Really ream him out for it. It had been a shitty thing to ask of me, and as much as I liked the feeling of having a strong bargain tying us together, I’d only agreed to sleep with him, not to geas him.
If Alluin still wanted me to do it, I would, but I reserved the right to be hurt and angry about it.
Except his letter never came. Not after a week, not after a fortnight, not after a month.
I started to realize, with dawning horror, that maybe Alluin had been hurt, too.
I’d taken the worst possible interpretation of his words because I’d had that exact request be the secret reason why people were interested in getting into my bed, but he was explicitly not asking for that sort of thing.
It didn’t have to be about my allure at all. That was just a fact of my existence.
There were far easier ways to get someone to lay an allure geas on you than to spend decades and easily thousands of gold on befriending an allure mage, let alone giving them a literal piece of your soul.
Like, say, paying one. A lot less than thousands of gold, to boot.
We weren’t common, but there wasn’t a lot of need for our particular talents, save in prostitution, and even then, most people wanted the physical when it came to paid sex, not the emotional.
If all Alluin had wanted was a night of feeling loved, he wouldn’t be fucking Nyland or asking me to sleep with him.
He was always the one looking out for everyone around him.
Always the general; always responsible. All he really wanted was for someone who knew him, really knew him, to look at him and decide that he deserved even one night where all he had to do was be taken care of.
I was lower than a worm. An absolute, blithering idiot who didn’t deserve to be within three Courts of someone like Alluin. He’d been vulnerable, asking for help in a way he so rarely did, and I’d spit in his face because I’d decided he was like everyone else.
He was like no one else I’d ever met.
I made it all of six weeks before I folded like a piece of wet paper.
I was a lieutenant and I was on deployment, so I couldn’t simply abandon my post to go chasing after the First General like a lovelorn waif.
I also didn’t have access to any flicker-birds but the ones owned by the Second Army, and I wasn’t about to commandeer them to send personal messages to General Xilsatra. That would have been a disaster.
Luckily, I had an amount of money, and a salary to refresh that money. Unluckily, I was in the middle of nowhere, and it took more than a month for me to find myself in a place where I could hire a courier. Not even a flicker-bird. A courier.
Alluin probably thought I hated him by now. The three-to-eight-week delivery window I was quoted wouldn’t help.
Neither would the fact that, faced with actually sending a letter, I had no idea what to write.
I’d gone through my meager supply of writing materials trying to draft something remotely acceptable, and consigned all of them to the fire.
The problem was that what I wanted to write was ‘I’m sorry,’ but the idea of giving someone an apology, even in writing, made my guts twist.
I ended up writing a completely pathetic piece of drivel that took up both sides of the cheap paper I could afford.
The phrase ‘I miss you’ was used no less than three times.
My handwriting was even worse than usual, but Alluin always seemed to be able to parse it, so hopefully he’d be able to read most of it.
If I was lucky, he’d only be able to translate one of the paragraphs about how much I wanted to see him again, and the others could remain my shameful secret.
I sent one off the next day, too, and then another at the next town.
I kept waiting for his flicker-bird to appear—kept fucking dreaming about it, too.
That I’d be walking, or eating a meal, or sitting grimly on my horse in the rain, and a tawny bird would appear and trill at me and show me its back so I could take out the letter.
I didn’t even care what the letter said.
It could be a formal notification of restraint, for all I cared.
As long as he would finally acknowledge my existence again.
But he didn’t.
For eight. Fucking. Years.
I didn’t stop writing him. After a while, it became a sort of ritual.
Something would happen in my life—every monster I killed, the several times I made and then missed an assignation because I was too busy obsessing over Alluin, my promotion from lieutenant to captain—and I would put it on paper, along with everything else in my head at the time.
I didn’t waste any space with greetings or farewells.
He damn well knew what my (horrible) handwriting looked like.
Nobody else would be sending him letters like this.
My personal obsession with the General of the First Army had long become old news, so when one of my soldiers casually commented that she’d heard that General Xilsatra was taking his leave in the town of Myrrista, only twenty miles away from our posting for the month, I knew it was a pointed statement.
At my sharp look, she merely shrugged and said that she thought it was a nice place to let the soldiers go on leave, if I’d be willing to allow the use of the riding stags to travel to town.
‘If I’d be willing to allow the use of the riding stags,’ my ass. Obviously I was going to authorize the use of the fucking riding stags. We were going to have to spend an extra month in the area to make up for having to do patrols entirely on foot, and I was still going to authorize it.
I left for Myrrista at dawn, along with four other soldiers in my company who were due some leave. There were some perks to command.
The town was mostly a spa location, with four inns and a picturesque view to go along with the local hot springs.
I asked the first guard I saw where I could find General Xilsatra, rewarded him for his attention to detail with a silver coin, and stalked to the White Horse Inn with murder in my eyes.
He was sitting at one of the tables with that stupid casual ease of his, expression calm and friendly and gaze picking up on everything. It took barely a heartbeat for him to notice me. Alluin froze in place, caught in my ambush with nowhere to go.
“You,” I snarled.
He looked back at me like a deer in a poacher’s light, eyes wide and ears dropped. He didn’t move.
I stalked over to him and grabbed him by the wrist before he could protest, hauling him bodily up. Alluin wasn’t a small man, but I was a heavy infantry soldier. If it came down to a physical brawl, I was winning. “Come with me, General Xilsatra,” I gritted out between my clenched teeth.
“Zhi,” he started, sounding like he had no idea how to respond. He came, though, which was a blessing. Throwing him over my shoulder would have spawned the sort of gossip even my parents might have disapproved of. I still would have done it, but there might have been consequences.
“Don’t ‘Zhi’ me,” I said, seething. I towed him up the stairs and into one of the unoccupied rooms of the inn, letting him go so I could slam and bar the door. I pointed at the bed. “Sit. And take your gods-damned shirt off.”
He stared at me. “Zhi, I don’t—”
I yanked my own shirt off and chucked it onto a chair. “Fucking sit, Alluin.”
He sat.
I glared at him. “Shirt off.”
He did that, too, moving like he thought I might snap and attack him.
I waited until he was shirtless to stalk over and climb onto the bed with him.
Alluin looked up at me pleadingly, his ears held low and lips parted.
That look killed me. He was going to plead?
The only thing he needed to plead for was whether he wanted to be chucked out the window or into the hottest of the hot springs.
Without giving him an explanation, I wrapped an arm around his chest from behind and dragged him down onto the bed.
Alluin didn’t fight as I manhandled him into position.
He moved like a mannequin, breathing too hard, letting me fit my body to his and bury my face in his too-long hair.
He looked stupid with it in a queue like this.
Tears stung my eyes. I was sweaty and angry and I hadn’t been able to sleep at all last night, but he smelled like sunlight and cedar, distinctly Alluin, and I couldn’t fight the sense of overwhelming relief at having him back.
“You arrogant, hateful ass,” I said through the thickness in my throat. “You couldn’t even be bothered to write back once?”
Alluin started trembling. “Write…back?” he asked, his voice cracking. “You wrote me?”