12. Something Softer
Something Softer
We built an altar that night, up on top of the rocky escarpment dotted with dark recesses that served as the tombs for the Xilsatra dead. Drystone walls enclosed some of the entrances, but most of them stood empty, a shadowy necropolis that held the memories of millennia of inhabitants.
Surrounded by the ageless past and with only the stars as our witnesses, Alluin bound me to his land and his family. By oath and ritual, with the taste of blood and ochre on my tongue, I became the Xilsatra heir. His ancestors became mine and my scions became his. We were indelibly bound.
I couldn’t sleep afterwards, even when the wild magic had slipped away into the darkness and we’d made our way back to camp.
Alluin was…not unaffected, but he certainly seemed less affected than me, or at least differently so.
He seemed completely at peace, as if everything in his life that was off true had fallen into place. But I was…unsettled.
It wasn’t that I regretted becoming Alluin’s heir.
Even if I wasn’t already falling in love with Droesh on its own merits, having someone to call his heir was so obviously good for Alluin that I couldn’t be anything but grateful that I’d had the opportunity to lift that weight off his shoulders.
No, it wasn’t the title, or the land, or even embracing the primal magic that lay at the heart of every fae’s soul.
It was Alluin.
Or, rather, it was the vast divide between me and Alluin, the ocean of time I’d never before had reason to contemplate.
I’d never had cause to feel so young next to him before.
Yet on that windswept escarpment, with all of Droesh sprawled out beneath us and the great sweep of stars above us, I couldn’t escape how much more than me Alluin was.
The land knew him. The Army answered to him.
He remembered things from so long ago that no one else knew them—languages; rituals. Compared to him, who was I?
I must have fallen asleep, because between one blink and the next, the sky had gone from velvet black to the pale gray of dawn.
I looked over at Alluin where he slept. He didn’t look like someone strange and powerful.
He looked exactly like he always had, his handsome face and tousled curls as familiar to me as if I’d known him my entire life.
He’d given me so much—his soul, his land, his bloodline—and I didn’t have anything to offer in return.
I slunk out of camp, too squirrelly and anxious to lie there waiting for Alluin to wake up.
I didn’t go far—I didn’t want him to worry, even if his connection to Droesh would let him know that I was alive and uninjured—but I got out of sight of our camp, getting out of eyesight and then climbing a convenient pine so I could watch the sun rise.
Birds twittered around me, rising with the sun, their cheerful voices doing nothing to lift my spirits.
I was a bit bitter about their jaunty tunes, actually.
It didn’t seem fair that the wild animals of Droesh should be having such a carefree morning when I couldn’t seem to unstick my thoughts from the mire.
The sky bloomed with rose and lavender, then cooled to the lovely clear blue of a summer’s morning. I lost track of time, perched up in that tree like a lost dove. I didn’t even realize how long I’d been away from camp until Alluin walked up and looked up through the branches.
“Zhi?” he called. “Are you alright?”
A jolt of adrenaline left my skin buzzing.
My ears dropped in embarrassment. “I’m…uh…
I’m…” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I could say.
‘Fine’ was right out, as was any other reassuring adjective.
I struggled with my words for long enough to make it really, really obvious that I was not, in fact, alright, and finally got out, “...acceptable?”
Alluin voiced a low “hm,” one which sounded entirely unconvinced. “I made you breakfast,” he said, sounding hopeful. “Would you like me to…bring it up?”
For some reason, the idea of Alluin climbing up there with me filled me with panic. “Um, no! That’s— That’s alright,” I stammered out. My hand spasmed on the tree branch.
Another long pause.
“...Did I do something wrong, shaeulo?” Alluin asked, his words hesitant.
“What? No!” I said, finally leaning over to look down at him. “You’re fine— You’re— You’re more than fine.” I chewed on my lip, brows slanting. “You’re doing great.”
He made a face up at me. He had a plate in each hand, with something hot steaming on them.
“You do see why it might be difficult for me to believe that, yes?” Lu said dryly.
“Given, of course, that you were happy and relaxed right up until I made you my heir, and now you’ve treed yourself like a marten with a hound baying after it. ”
“That’s not— It’s not— I’m— I’m not—” I had to take a moment to compose myself, long enough that the next thing out of my mouth was unarguably a different sentence. “It would be awkward to eat breakfast up a tree, let alone carry it up here. I’m coming down.”
“Hm,” Alluin said again.
It took me almost a minute to force myself to move, with my statement itching at me until I did.
Climbing down to face Alluin didn’t quite fill me with dread, but I did feel a remarkable kinship to a dog with a tail between his legs, unable to meet Alluin’s eyes as I took the plate of breakfast from his hand.
“Come on,” he said with soft care, putting one arm gently around my waist. “Let’s go sit somewhere beautiful.”
Lu didn’t take me far. We’d camped within sight of a slender waterway, and Alluin led me a short ways upstream, to where the brook fell down from a notch at the top of a short cliff, splashing down along the water-worn stones to fall mistingly down into a deep pool.
Moss and ferns covered almost every surface around the pool, and river-lilies unfurled their leaves just beneath the surface of the water, their spiky white blooms drifting on the surface.
He kept pace with me while I ate my breakfast, his leg leaning against mine as we ate in silence.
I couldn’t help feeling small and sorry for myself.
Alluin had wanted me as his heir (and it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had time to reconsider before he’d actually done it), but I still felt like I’d overreached and that, at any moment, Alluin was going to realize what a horrible mistake he’d made.
I wasn’t anything like him. I wasn’t Xilsatra material.
I was a feckless, foolish ne’er-do-well compared to him. Droesh deserved better.
Alluin gently but firmly removed the plate and fork from my hands when I finished eating and set them to the side.
He brushed my hair back from my face and tucked it behind my ear, fingertips trailing down my throat in a way that felt wistful.
“Will you tell me what’s wrong, now?” he asked, keeping his voice low enough that the sound didn’t carry past the shield of the waterfall’s endless thrum.
“If it’s not something I did, then…what? ”
I picked at a rock in the soil to keep from having to look at him.
“It’s just… I don’t feel like I’m worthy of all…
this,” I said, gesturing out at all of Droesh with a sweep of my hand.
“I’m just a soldier. You’re ancient, and famous, and…
” I looked at him with pleading in my eyes, willing him to understand.
“Lu, you’re so magical. You have this deep connection with the land, and you know all these things, and… you…”
I trailed off, because Alluin was looking at me as if I’d suddenly sprouted horns and started reciting poetry in a foreign language. “What?” I asked defensively, hunching my shoulders.
“I’m magical?” Alluin asked. He sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “Zhi. Seriously. I’m magical?”
My ears pinned back. “What?” I asked again. “You are. You’re all…spooky and stuff. I’m just normal.”
He really did laugh at that, a disbelieving bark of sound.
“Black night, Zhi, you’re the most powerful allure mage I’ve ever met, and believe me, I have met a lot of allure mages in my years.
” Alluin shook his head, starting to smile.
“Do you have any idea how extraordinary it is for anyone to survive an encounter with an eight-tailed foxen? You were alone, taken by surprise, and you fucking killed the thing. That takes incredible strength of will, an intuitive understanding of your magic, and a gods-damn astonishing amount of power.” Lu breathed another laugh. “I’m magical. Gods.”
“But… I…” I blinked at him, my cheeks warming and ears dropping. “That’s… I don’t know. It’s tame magic. Normal stuff. It’s not the same.”
Lu turned and sprawled down onto my lap like he owned the place, grinning up at me, his eyes sparkling with amusement.
“I’ll admit, not a lot of city folk in Stag Court possess relationships with wildlands, but it’s hardly unusual amongst even the nomads of the Courts, shaeulo.
” He snaked one arm around my hips to embrace me, his warm hand settling onto my side and giving me a squeeze.
“If you spend enough time with Droesh, you’ll surely have the same connection I do.
No more than a century or two, if I had to take a guess. That’s why I fed you a rock, remember?”
“But—” I started again.
“No ‘but’s,” he said, a smile still playing on his lips.
“When it comes to magic, you have me outclassed on every front. A friendship with a magical entity does not a mage make. The only thing ‘spooky’ about my relationship with Droesh is that it happens to be thousands of acres of land, instead of, say, a lovely, brilliant allure mage with eyes the color of varama blossoms who seems to keep forgetting what an amazing, talented person he is.”
I stared at him, lips parted and ears ringing, unable to say anything at all.
After all these years, the things Alluin had said to me when he’d dragged me back from the brink of dissolution had slipped into the depths of my memory, silted over by every experience I’d had since then.
They came back to me now, one after another: remarkable, brave, clever, strong. Impressive. Amazing.
You’re extraordinary, Zhiolas.
The whole world seemed to still around us.
When Alluin looked at me, he saw someone no one else did.
He saw who I could be on my best days—the person, maybe, that I could become, if only he kept looking at me.
Sitting there on Droesh’s stone, with the soft breeze ruffling my hair and the green grass teasing answering color from the depths of Alluin’s eyes, I thought that maybe I could be that person for him.
If only he would keep looking at me like that, all soft affection and warmth. If only he wanted to—if he could keep seeing the value in me, like I was a flower only beginning to peek through its sepals—
Alluin’s lashes fluttered. His chin tilted up and breath started coming faster, and he bent one knee, pushing himself more firmly against my body.
“Oh,” he breathed, sounding like he was falling in love. “A lovely, brilliant mage who can cast radiant allure, after all.”
His words took a moment to sink in. Then my eyes widened and my spine stiffened, but before I could freak out about accidentally casting on Alluin, his grip on my side tightened and he shook his head in a slight motion.
“It’s alright. Don’t stop,” Lu said with an easy smile.
“It’s not like your full geas. More like…
” He sighed with pleasure, relaxing back down onto my lap as I tried to slide back into that mindset.
“Like I can’t focus on anything but you.
Like when you walk into a room and everyone looks and stays looking, because you’re stunningly beautiful and they all want to caress you with their gaze. ”
I let out a shaky breath. I could feel the shape of the magic now that I knew to look for it—the newness of it.
My power had long since grown familiar, and I knew the shapes it took.
I’d never cast radiant allure before. I’d never been able to, and I’d never had an interest in putting the work into figuring out how to do it, or if I even could.
I’d never wanted anyone to look at me before.
Not truly. The person I felt like on the inside wasn’t anyone I wanted to be seen, a confused fuck-up who tried his best and failed anyway.
But Alluin didn’t see that person. He saw me as worthwhile—as if I were extraordinary—and for the first time, I wanted someone to keep looking.
“You’re sure this is alright?” I asked tentatively. Of their own accord, my fingers found his hair, smoothing across the dark curls.
“Mmm. Yes,” he murmured, eyes drifting closed. “You should…practice. So you can remember how.”
“Reflex caster,” I murmured back. “Once I do it once, I kind of do it all the time, unless I stop myself.”
“Keep doing it anyway,” Alluin said, cracking one eyelid enough to smirk up at me. “You owe me for making me wake up alone this morning. Making me nervous that you were freaked out.”
My lips twitched at that. “I was freaked out.”
“Mm. Should’ve been freaked out next to me.” He rubbed his cheek against my thigh like a needy cat. “Make it up to me.”
“Alright,” I said with a smile, scrubbing my fingers through his hair. “If you insist.”