10. Treading New Ground
Treading New Ground
That summer, Alluin took me to Droesh. I put in a special request for an extended leave of six weeks, which was approved without remark.
I wasn’t sure if that was because I had built up enough goodwill with my commander or if Alluin had also made a special request for my time, and I decided not to ask.
The exact details didn’t matter in the end, only that I could meet Alluin in Lyraniorn on the appointed date and head south for Droesh.
We took a stagecoach down to the town of Whitvel, then hired a private driver to take us the rest of the way to the wild lands of Droesh by carriage. Alluin pointed out his manor as we passed it by—Nyland’s manor, now, I thought, my lip curling.
Alluin bumped his shoulder against mine. “Don’t be such a sourpuss,” he said with a smirk. “I hadn’t truly lived there for centuries, and I doubt Nyland’s having an enjoyable time of it.”
I raised a brow at him. “What makes you say that?”
“You don’t think that the battlefield is the only place I excel in tactics, do you?
” he asked in his most dangerously-pleasant voice, eyes taking on a ruthless glint as he watched the manor drifting past us in the hills below.
My heart started beating faster. “I’m quite capable at bargaining, let alone when it comes to striking a bargain with an angry, frightened man who thinks he’s getting his heart’s desire. ”
“Do tell,” I said, my mouth slanting into a slow smile at the flinty satisfaction in his gaze.
“You read the terms,” Alluin said, glancing sidelong at me.
“The manor and everything within it. The town of Gehain. All farmlands contiguous with the manor grounds and town, and with tenancy of greater than thirty feast cycles.” When I didn’t immediately figure out what he was talking about, he grinned at me like a wolf.
“Zhi. Do you think I kept my assets in the manor?”
I stared at him for a moment before the meaning of that hit me, my eyes widening. “Black night, Lu, was it all in your name?”
Alluin laughed, a warm rumble, and returned to looking out the coach window at the landscape.
“Nyland married into my family, not the other way around,” he said.
“Things have changed over the millennia, of course, but of the two of us, the incomes and tending of Droesh always fell to me. While we were married, I kept a generous amount of coin at the manor for him to spend as he chose, but Nyland never had open access to my resources. More recently he’s drawn upon my purse at my sufferance, but no longer.
” He shrugged one shoulder. “He has his own incomes from investments I made for him through the years, but it has surely been unpleasant for him to have to learn how to manage both an estate and his own extravagances on a slim purse.”
“Damn,” I said, a bit stunned. Financially, the original arrangement wasn’t unusual; fae marriages were expected to be temporary, and assets were typically kept separate or semi-separate as a result.
I’d never heard of a parting that ended up with one party ending up with the land assets and the other ending up with all the financial assets, though.
The benefit of being a landholder was generally the accumulated wealth of centuries, not the land itself, which cost money to protect and maintain, not to mention the required duties to the Crown.
After a moment, Alluin added, “He’ll still get the fall tithe from Gehain and the farmlands. If he’s wise with it, in a century or two he ought to be able to live in style again.”
“Do you think that’s likely?” I asked, resting my arm on his shoulder.
“Doubtful,” he said in a dark purr.
“Hmm. Remind me not to piss you off.”
He snaked an arm around my waist and tugged me up against his side on the bench seat of the coach, turning back towards me with a warm expression.
“You’re not like him,” Alluin said, smiling at me with his whole face, the corners of his eyes crinkling and his ears tilting forward.
“You’re coming to Droesh for me, rather than being for me because Droesh is mine.
Perhaps he once loved me. Perhaps he never did.
But in all our years together, he never once went feral for me, and I never gave him Droesh. ”
My ears dropped as I blushed. I had no idea what to say to that.
Alluin smiled again and rested his head against my shoulder, looking out the window once more as the farmland vanished behind a ridgeline thick with trees. His fingers found mine and laced our hands together. “Almost there,” he said dreamily.
I just sat there, heart pounding and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, completely at a loss for words or reaction.
We hiked in on foot from our drop-off point.
I could tell the instant that we crossed the border onto Alluin’s land.
His whole demeanor shifted, like watching a hound step across a threshold and transform into a wolf, all the tameness and civility sliding off his shoulders.
His movement became more liquid; his ears turned towards sounds I couldn’t pick out of the splendor of birdsong and soughing wind.
I must have been staring, because Alluin paused and turned towards me, a question on his face. I gave him a helpless smile.
“You have land-sense?” I asked.
He didn’t wear a signet ring, so I knew he wasn’t a landed lord in the Courtly sense of the word. Queen Ronelis hadn’t granted him any portion of her own power. There hadn’t been so much as a blaze on a tree to mark where Droesh began, though, and Alluin had known.
Alluin breathed a laugh, looking so much easier than I’d ever seen him before.
Looking more real, somehow, as if Droesh was a part of his soul.
“Not as such. It’s not such a tame magic as that,” he said, a smile warming his face as he continued heading into the forest, following a deer-trail that headed to the southwest. “I’ve been here a long, long time.
The land knows me, and I know it. We…recognize each other, I suppose.
” Alluin cast another grin over his shoulder. “And now I’m introducing you to it.”
I was completely out of my depth, I realized.
I was familiar with bloodline bindings and other ritual adoptions; they were all more-or-less variations on a theme, with the adoptee receiving some of the blood of the adopting family and various oaths exchanged.
Some of them could get rather uncomfortably physical, especially when they involved a full ritual forsaking of the adoptee’s bloodline, but given that we were just making me a Xilsatra heir, I hadn’t anticipated anything particularly unusual.
We were all of twenty feet onto Droesh, and I’d already been proven wrong.
Most of the time, I didn’t have any cause to think about the enormous age difference between me and Alluin.
Fae were generally considered to have reached adulthood sometime between sixteen and twenty, with both the first century and first millennium considered significant markers of maturity.
Past those ages, all that generally mattered was ability and compatibility.
Age did matter when it came to magic, though.
Truly ancient fae—like Alluin—had a much more stable relationship with wild magic than younger fae.
If Alluin got teleported into the Shifting Lands, chances were that he’d come back the same as he’d gone in, if not perhaps more like himself.
An average fae of my age was far more likely to become a wildling or die of magic-poisoning than to come back normal.
As a mage, I was fairly safe from the worst of the vagaries of wild magic.
Being a mage also meant that I was familiar with what Alluin had called ‘tame’ magic, ranging from the land-sense of Court-bound fae to spellwork—and that I knew enough about the manifestations of wild magic to know that Alluin’s reaction to setting foot on Droesh wasn’t merely deep familiarity with the land.
Droesh was more than a place. It was a living thing in its own right, an awareness that answered to Stag Court but had its own existence, just like the deer and the fae that wandered across its surface.
Given the long relationship between Droesh and the Xilsatras, I suspected that if Droesh didn’t approve of me as an heir, things might go very badly for me.
“Spooky,” I muttered under my breath, following after Alluin, my ears pivoting at every unfamiliar sound, as if I might be able to forestall the very land under my feet wanting to shake me off.
There was only so long I could stay wary, though.
I’d grown up knowing that the land was alive, after all, and Droesh was far from the first living wildland I’d set foot on.
Borderlands in particular tended to be a bit vicious, especially in regions where there’d historically been hostilities between Courts.
I knew how to tell when the land around you wanted to get rid of you, and Droesh didn’t set me on edge the way angry borders did.
Honestly, walking into Droesh felt far more like coming home than walking into my parents’ house ever had.
The chestnuts and oaks were in full dark leaf and some of the wild cherries already had maroon berries hanging in inviting clusters.
In many places, the bedrock was close enough to the surface that only shrubs and herbs grew there, making wet meadows full of the croaking of frogs and the babbling of wrens.
Vivid jewel-skinks flitted between trees and the white puffs of dandelion motes floated under the leafy canopy.