13. Houses
Houses
Alluin seemed so much lighter in the years that followed.
We rarely talked about our time in Droesh and never about the night he’d made me his heir, but I got the impression that it had changed something bone-deep for him, too.
His long history and the legacy of his family was no longer the millstone around his neck.
He laughed more. He flirted more, too, and not only with me.
Despite the fully unreasonable jealousy that lurked in my gut, I encouraged him to take advantage when handsome men flirted back, and sometimes he even did.
He never stayed the night with any of them.
He rarely even went home with them. When I dared to ask why, Alluin shrugged and told me that he’d learned quite well that physical satiation and physical comfort didn’t need to come from the same source, and that he much preferred affection that came from the heart instead of merely from post-orgasmic bliss.
I bit my tongue to keep from blurting out that he could have both if he liked his shaeulo’s white hair well enough to have it wrapped around his fist. It was true, but it would sound too pathetically eager if I said it out loud, and I was both too needy and too flighty to be a good paramour for him.
Alluin deserved someone capable and self-composed.
Just that morning, I’d cried because I’d encountered a newborn fawn curled up in a flowerbed, and it was too damn small and cute for me to keep my composure.
I wasn’t his type, anyway. Alluin hooked up with slim, pretty, delicate men, the kind who blinked big overwhelmed eyes up at him when he smirked and who he probably folded in half while fucking the daylights out of them.
Not that I was jealous. Bottoming required too much trust for me to feel at all comfortable with the concept.
I usually topped when I was with men, and my size and brute strength made me good at it.
Other, lesser men might have grumbled about how their height didn’t matter when they were on their knees or about how they were plenty flexible enough to get folded in half, but I didn’t lower myself to such petty jealousies.
I did, however, go through lovers like a fish through water after Alluin’s one-night stands. There was only so much restraint one could ask of a man.
Years became decades. I received a number of commendations for action in the field, mostly for monster-hunting adventures while my company was paired with the First Army, but also for coordinating a massive rescue campaign after a series of deadly mudslides in the east. The latter led to a face-to-face meeting with General Dykaestra, who controlled the Second Army, and eventually to my consideration for the role of commander.
My promotion to commander came with a number of distinct perks.
For one, the salary increase meant that I’d be able to pick up the tab on more than the rare occasion when I was with Alluin; even if he hadn’t been well-paid himself, his family history and his own brilliance with numbers meant that he was distinctly wealthy, and he had expensive tastes.
For another, two battalions were headquartered at the palace garrison, and one of them was mine.
I showed up to my introductory meeting with the First Army leadership without giving Alluin any warning.
Dressed in my formal whites, with my silvery hair pulled back into a braided knot and wearing a rack of platinum-and-purple-topaz earrings that Alluin had foisted upon me before I’d realized how ruinously expensive they were, I knew I cut a dashing figure.
The delicate floral shapes of the earrings and the teardrop stones that dangled from my lobes suited my coloration and fine-boned features, and I’d ensured my uniform was tailored perfectly to show off my powerful form.
Alluin looked up when I was shown in and stopped talking mid-sentence.
He stared at me like I was a ghost, his jaw working but no sound coming out.
He’d cut his hair recently. One perfect curl fell across his forehead, the only softness in his otherwise severe personage, sitting at a table surrounded by First Army commanders and scribes.
Gods and monsters, I was going to cherish that sight forever. I couldn’t remember another time when I’d seen the General of the First Army struck dumb.
“Zhi?” he finally choked out.
I put my hand over my heart and bowed in the correct style, keeping my self-satisfied smirk off my face. “Commander Zhiolas Ulahana of the Third Battalion of the Second Army, reporting for duty, sir. It’s a pleasure to join you at the table, General Xilsatra. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Someone in the room bit back a guffaw and started coughing instead.
The woman next to him hit him on the back as if she was helping him unlodge a piece of food that had gone the wrong direction.
“Perhaps a brief recess?” she asked, giving me a smirky little smile that said she knew exactly what relationship I had to Alluin.
Alluin wet his lips, not taking his eyes off of me.
“No need, Commander Loyst,” he said levelly.
He pushed himself up to his feet with slow deliberation and walked around the table to me.
“Welcome, Commander Ulahana,” he said, holding out his hand to me.
“I hope our work together will be pleasurable for us both.”
I grasped his wrist in the formal style. “Likewise, sir,” I said, letting myself smile, the raw happiness of being able to stand at his side suffusing me like the warmth of a sunny day.
Alluin cornered me after the meeting. “You ass,” he growled into my ear, sending a zing of pleasure down my spine. “Did you have to catch me completely flat-footed? You didn’t even tell me you got promoted.”
I tilted my head back and grinned at him.
“If you’d been stalking me like you ought, you wouldn’t have been caught all unawares.
” I flicked my tongue out at him in an impish gesture.
“Or have you gotten so used to me nattering in my letters about even the most fleeting thoughts that pass betwixt my ears that you forgot I might omit important details?”
“Black night, you know I did.” He wrapped an arm around my waist and burrowed his face against my neck. “I didn’t even bother looking to see who the new Third Battalion commander was because I’ve been so fucking busy with the aftermath of the Feast of Wolves. Did you know the Queen’s pregnant?”
Touching Alluin left me feeling like I’d come home.
It had been almost eight months since we’d last seen each other; the disappearance of Queen Ronelis into the forest on the Feast of Wolves had been so disastrous that Alluin had needed to cancel his trip to see me, which had been when I’d concocted my evil plan.
I’d been saving the news of my promotion for his visit, but this had been so much more delicious.
“I did,” I said, putting one arm around him and running my fingers through his short hair. “Hopefully me being here is nice, not another thing to worry about. Not that I can be elsewhere, of course, since my battalion’s headquartered here, but I can make myself scarce if needed.”
“Don’t do that. It’s so far beyond nice that I can barely believe this is real.
” Alluin inhaled with his nose and mouth against my skin, relaxing against me.
“Did you already secure lodgings? There’s a few rooms in my house that were, well…
” I felt his face grow warmer. “They were supposed to be for Nyland,” he said in a rush, lifting his face to give me a self-conscious look.
“But then he didn’t want to visit, and you told me not to have sex with him, and then you threw him out a window and into a river for me, and I… ”
Alluin trailed off, possibly because I was giving him the most disbelievingly fond expression I’d ever worn in my life.
“Are you asking me to move in with you?” I asked with a wicked grin, tilting my ears forward at him so that the gems swung.
“Do you really think that’s an appropriate thing to offer to one of your commanders? ”
He made a face at me, something like a playful sneer, and started steering me towards the garrison exit.
“If you were one of my commanders, absolutely not,” Alluin said.
“But, thank the gods and every celestial light, I’m the General of the First Army and you’re a commander of the Second Army.
You collaborate with me. You don’t answer to me. ”
“But I am yours,” I said, the words slipping off my tongue before I could think to catch them. I’d never had a very good leash on my tongue. “Your closest friend. Your shield-love. Your Zhi, if you like. You’re the only one who calls me that.”
Alluin stopped walking, almost making me trip over my own feet. I blushed crimson at the reaction, dropping and pinning my ears. “What?” I asked in a defensive voice. “It’s not any more poetic than what you’ve been writing me for decades.”
He looked at me with an inscrutable expression. “Dangerous words, shaeulo,” Alluin said, his voice low and hazel eyes dark in the shadowed corridor. “You may see me as kind, but I’m greedy and possessive, and I keep what I take.”
The heat in his words made a number of places tingle in very interesting ways. I swallowed, too hard, my breathing going shallow.
Not for the first time, I remembered the absolute command in his voice when he’d stopped me from killing Nyland; remembered the grip of his hand and my certainty that I would do anything he told me to.
I remembered, too, the intensity in his eyes when I’d first set foot on the soil of his forebears, and the taste of the blood I’d licked from his skin when we’d bound ourselves as blood-kin and he’d made me his heir.
The utter rightness of it. The depth of certainty, something that went far past my attraction to him or the friendship we shared.