14. Princeling #2
“How did you even get him here, Lu?” I asked wearily. “She keeps him in the walled garden when he’s not in his rooms, and they’re palace walls, so I know Dain didn’t walk you through with glamor.”
Alluin flushed. “I boosted him over the wall,” he muttered.
That was an insane thing to say. Dain had to weigh easily a thousand pounds. I gave Alluin what had to be a pathetic look of longsuffering, given how low his ears dropped. In my most plaintive voice, I asked, “What?”
He made a face, then shoved up his sleeve.
“I keep them glamored. I know they’re ugly,” he said, still at a mutter, sweeping his fingers over the underside of his forearm to bare dark scars in the shape of a complex sigil running from wrist to inner elbow.
“They’re talisman spells for strength and stability.
One on each arm, and two more on my calves.
It’s how I carried you down the mountain, too. ”
I stared at the scarring. Alluin looked away as I picked up his arm to examine the spellwork, letting me manhandle him. He looked ashamed, almost, like I might be disgusted to discover that he was wearing ancient, powerful talismans carved into his very skin.
“Wow,” I breathed, tracing the lines of the spell, unbinding my allure geas so that I could feel the power thrumming in the sigil.
Alluin didn’t have much in the way of magical ability; he had enough of a talent for glamor that he could cast his voice about ten feet and apparently smooth away scars, but he couldn’t power something like this.
They had to be power-banks, collecting strength for when he needed it, or maybe even channeling ambient energy to boost what he could feed the sigil.
It was a gorgeous piece of work, and all the more impressive for the fact that it had to be tens of thousands of years old.
If he’d gotten them while he’d been in the service of the Crown, there would have been records of it, and I would have read those records by now—
“Zhi, if you do that—” Alluin said, halfway to a moan. He let out a panting breath. “If you do that, you ought not hold me responsible for the consequences.”
I looked up, surprised, to see Alluin’s lips parted and pupils blown, an expression of such unfettered yearning on his face that my breath caught in my throat and desire bloomed in a heavy throb between my legs.
I didn’t know what to do—didn’t know what was happening.
Did he like having me touch his arm that much? But I touched him all the time—
“Zhiolas,” he growled, eyes gleaming gold in the late afternoon light and one hand landing on the cupboard next to me, caging me in. I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know what I was doing—
Wait.
My allure.
“Shit!” I yelped, yanking my hands off of him and slamming down my magical control. Fuck! I’d been so fucking stupid, hadn’t thought about the fact that the talisman spell was in him, had blithely loosed my magic on it as if I was examining a piece of artifice.
Without putting focused power behind it, my allure geas only fascinated people.
It made them love me, the sort of obsession that made them need to look at me and make me happy, but it wasn’t control, per se.
People under an allure geas acted in accordance with their own natures, but with all their desire pointed at the caster.
Whatever natural attraction or positive relationship existed between the two would be amplified a thousandfold, which was one reason why a handsome, charismatic allure mage like myself was such a danger to everyone around him.
But an allure geas could be influenced by the sort of affection the caster wanted from the person he was luring, too. And for me—lustful, wanton, needy me—to cast one on Alluin, the object of more than a century of my focused, secret, extremely filthy fantasies?
I would be lucky if he didn’t throw me out on my heels. If he didn’t meet my lilac eyes with his hazel gaze as hard as stone and tell me to get my lecherous ass out of his house and out of his garrison.
Alluin shuddered and let out a shaky breath, head dropping as he started to pant. He lowered the arm I’d been touching to his side, but didn’t move from his position penning me in against the pantry cupboards.
“It’s not ugly,” I said, my voice too high and my desperation obvious. “It’s a really gorgeous spell, and you have very nice forearms, and the two of them look extremely good as a couple—”
“Zhiolas, please shut up,” he groaned. “Give me at least a moment to recover. Please. You are very lovely and your allure geas is very alluring, and if you keep babbling about how much you like my scars I’m going to show you how useful it is to be able to hold a man off the ground while I fuck him, and I think we’ll both dearly regret me fucking you in the kitchen while our prince is eating our couch. ”
Pleading. Alluin, pleading, because if I didn’t shut up he was going to fuck me against the wall, whether or not I wanted him to.
I was so intensely obsessed with that knowledge that I didn’t know what to do with myself.
As soon as I was alone I was going to have one hand on my cock and the other over my mouth to muffle myself, because the concept of Alluin wanting to fuck me was so all-consuming that I wasn’t going to be able to think about anything else until I’d orgasmed from it.
“Shutting up,” I breathed, my cock as hard as granite and my heartbeat ticking in my throat.
A THUD against the door made us both freeze. It was followed by another, Dain clearly tired of being excluded from the conversation.
“I’ll get it,” I said, ducking past Alluin with my eyes too wide and breathing too shallow. I quickly adjusted myself, tucking my cock out of the way so that I wouldn’t be so obviously aroused, and managed to yank the door open before Dain blew it off the hinges.
He blinked his enormous golden eyes at me. “You smell strange,” Dain signed, tilting his head to the side like a curious dog. “Why?”
I wet my lips and peered over his shoulder at the wreckage of the couch, not wanting to answer but committed to not hiding things from my prince. The rest of the world was making his life hard enough.
“Do you remember how some parts of the body are considered personal?” I asked.
Dain nodded, with all the seriousness that only small children can seem to muster.
I gave him a smile. “And do you remember how people sometimes interact closely with each other when they’re in public, and how you’re not supposed to look or listen, because it’s also personal?”
He nodded again. “Good sharing,” he signed.
“That’s right, Your Highness. That’s how we share public spaces.” I took a deep breath. “Sometimes, adult people like to interact with each other’s bodies in a way that’s personal. And when they do that, presumably it smells like this. I don’t have your sense of smell, so I’m not sure.”
Dain tilted his head to the other side, his ears flopping over. “What name?”
“‘What name?’ Oh, you mean ‘what’s the smell called?’” I asked.
Dain gave me another nod, his jaw parting in his canine smile.
Alluin appeared in the doorway next to me. “It’s called ‘desire,’” he said, his voice still rough. “Would you like to go hunting for supper, my prince? The wreckage of that couch suggests you could take down a deer.”
The prince’s ears perked straight up, and he dropped down into a play-bow and gave us a friendly growl—a blood-curdling sound that rumbled through the floor.
“Go ahead and glamor an exit for yourself, then, Your Highness,” Alluin said with a smile. “Remember to create structural support before veiling matter. We don’t want the house falling down.”
Dain gave another sharp nod and bounded over to the door, where he sat and stared fiercely at the wall, working on his glamor-spell.
Alluin looked over at me and raised a brow.
I couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said, shame slicking my skin. “I know what it does to people, and I was careless and stupid and you—”
Alluin put his hand over my mouth, which shut me up very effectively, both because I couldn’t get sound past his palm and because my rapt attention was now devoted to having Alluin physically controlling me.
“I’m not hurt, and you’re not a monster for having allure, Zhi,” he said, tipping my head so that our gazes intersected.
“If you’re willing to consider my pleading a response in kind to you luring me without permission, we can consider the matter settled. ”
I did not want to consider the matter settled. I wanted to find out precisely what Alluin had been considering while caught in my allure geas, and I wanted to discover that in as experiential a way as possible.
He was offering me a way out, though, one that meant I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life knowing that I’d only gotten what I wanted because of the geas-magic I still sometimes struggled to control. Taking it was the right decision, so I nodded, even though I didn’t want to.
Alluin took his hand off my mouth and gave me a rueful smile.
“That’s gracious of you. I accept,” I said softly, trying to fight back my disappointment. “Shall we take our prince hunting?”
A sudden increase in light and draft of wind marked the disappearance of a large square of wall, through which Dain bounded with a cheerful bark. Several people outside yelped. Someone—a soldier, by the cadence—called, “oh! Good evening, Your Highness!” moments before my wall reappeared.
Alluin let out a soft sigh. “We might as well have an excuse for having him.”
I searched his face. This was hard on him—awful for him.
He was so honorable and kind, and watching the young prince to whom he’d given his loyalty be hurt by the mother to whom he owed it had to be tearing him apart.
“And then we have to take him home, Lu. Not our home,” I added, knowing that’s what he would have heard. “To the Antlered Palace.”
He closed his eyes, pain flickering on his face. “I know.”