16. Flowers
Flowers
Dain bounded forward with childish exuberance. He wasn’t afraid of being surrounded, despite the risks. In two strides he was almost upon the waiting squad, and with a roar of delight he leapt into the middle of them and flung a glamor of flying stone in every direction.
Two of the squad went flying with grunts of pain. The other three slashed through the glamor of stone with practiced force, dispelling the magic and giving Dain no chance to regroup as they went on the offensive.
Kiki’s sword hit Dain in the back of his right hind leg as Tiernan closed on his left.
Dain let out a high keening sound and collapsed, blood spraying from his sliced hamstring.
Tiernan’s sword sank deep into his left flank.
Dain’s instinctual snap towards the man saved his life: Irridyi’s steel blade bit into his face instead of his throat, laying his muzzle open to the bone.
I moved before I’d even processed what was happening, flinging myself for Dain.
I didn’t even bother fully engaging with the soldiers I passed.
My sword slashed across the back of the knees of one of the soldiers who’d been flung back by Dain’s opening attack—Duennain, I thought distantly—and I moved past him without any care for his blade.
Rage had me in its teeth. Rage and terror, and like a mother wolf defending her cub I threw myself between Dain and a woman I’d thought I’d known, and I took the sword meant for his heart in my chest.
Sparks flew as steel gouged a line across my breastplate. My back impacted Dain’s side. He barked in pain, jerking away.
For one harrowing moment, my eyes met Kiki’s. Her brows pulled together in confusion, her gaze clouding as if she couldn’t understand why I was there, and for that fraction of a second, she hesitated.
I didn’t.
With a raw cry of agony, I slashed my sword across her chest, laying open her brigandine and scoring the small metal plates beneath the padded cloth.
She staggered backwards, and in the space of time between catching my balance and the brutal thrust of my sword, I flung every dram of power I had into casting radiant allure.
My radiance wasn’t a geas. I couldn’t make them obey me. But I could make them look at me, and with every eye on me and my teeth bared with the rage of a feral animal, I tore into my own soldiers without mercy.
My world narrowed to battle: to the light gleaming off of steel and the shapes of my opponents.
My armored body was a weapon as much as my sword.
I hit with fist and heel and elbow, put my sword through the chink in a woman’s armor to sever her arm at the shoulder and drove the pommel into the throat of a soldier with such force it punched through.
A high wail and vicious crunch marked Dain’s first blood, my prince biting through the leg of an armored soldier to keep her sword from taking me in the thigh.
Soldiers died, and no one tried to intervene. I killed all five of them, driving my sword so hard through the gut of the last one that it went in almost to the hilt.
Tiernan met my eyes with disgust and hatred. His sword clattered to the ground. One of his hands twitched ineffectually.
“You… pathetic… traitor,” he coughed out, blood spattering my face.
“Go to hell,” I snarled back, and ripped my sword out of him.
He crumpled, dead before he hit the ground, guts falling out of his belly. Behind me, Dain whimpered like an injured puppy. My prince, bleeding, injured, his mouth burned and cut by steel and the savage wounds in his side and hamstringing his left hind leg gaping open.
My fault.
I stalked over to the cowering healer with gore spattering my armor and dripping off my sword. I didn’t bother dimming my allure. I grabbed her by the shirt and dragged her over to Dain, through bodies and severed limbs, and flung her at him.
“Fix it,” I shouted at her when she stared and wept. She fell to the task with another sob, hands on Dain to stop the bleeding.
I turned back to the assembled watchers with righteous fury still pounding through my veins. “He is nine years old,” I roared at them. “He is a child. He is your prince. If any of you dare hurt him, you answer to me. Do you understand me?!”
Behind me, Dain whimpered again, a sound of such animal pain that my vision went hazy.
My fault.
“Get out,” I gritted through my teeth. “Get out! All of you! And bring me the fucking healers!”
They got out. The healers came, and though I snarled at them like a vicious animal, I knew they were a necessary danger.
I didn’t let anyone else near him. I couldn’t let anyone else near him, too activated by seeing Dain nearly murdered by my own soldiers to do anything other than stand between him and all comers while he hid behind me in the courtyard, stitched and bandaged and crying from the pain.
My fault. My fault. My fault.
I didn’t take off my armor. I didn’t clean my blade. I stood there with my sword in hand, covered in drying blood, until Alluin came.
“Commander Ulahana’s still half-feral. He’ll probably attack you if you go in there,” one of the guards at the entrance of the courtyard said conversationally.
“He won’t,” Alluin said, with utter certainty. He walked up to me without fear and held out his hand. “Give me the sword, Zhi.”
My hand tightened on the hilt. “They hurt him,” I said in a low growl, unwilling to leave Dain unguarded even though my muscles trembled from the hours of adrenaline.
He contemplated me for a moment before settling back into a grounded stance. I watched him put on his General Xilsatra face; saw the command in his posture before he met my eyes with an iron will and said with careful clarity, “Zhiolas. Give me the sword.”
My lashes fluttered and my shoulders sagged. With my will and heart broken, I handed my bloody sword to the General of the First Army.
His bare hand wrapped around the hilt. He took it and handed it back to one of the guards without looking, holding my exhausted gaze as the sorrow and pain came to the fore.
“You did so well, shaeulo,” Alluin said softly, taking a step closer.
“You kept our prince safe. You kept him alive.” He reached up and set one hand on my blood-spattered face, his expression going lax for a moment and his eyes dropping to my mouth as my allure geas sank into him.
“Now let’s take him away from this, Zhi. ”
Alluin took us to Droesh. We weren’t alone, of course; we had two healers and a full squad of soldiers with us.
Each one of those soldiers, in the presence of me, Alluin, and Dain, had sworn to seek no harm to the prince and to defend him with their lives, and that was (thankfully) enough for me to let any of them come near Dain.
The force of my ferality left me brooding, the shame of it sliding through me like an eel through mud.
I’d been a soldier for centuries. I’d been trained and drilled in keeping my sanity when faced with deadly danger.
I’d faced death and the death of my friends with my body in the cold grip of my will.
Yet now it was like some savage part of me had come to the surface and would no longer be denied, as if I was the wild fae, not Dain.
We made camp in a rock shelter, one in which Alluin’s family had once lived, so very long ago.
The soldiers and the healers made their own camp in the woods, within earshot of a whistle but far enough that we could pretend to be alone, save for the daily delivery of Dain’s meal and the care of the healers.
Alluin sang us story-songs that hadn’t been heard for millennia, casting shadows on the walls in the firelight and giving Dain his history as much as he’d given it to me.
In the day, we took turns keeping Dain company, and at night, we slept with our bedrolls in front of Dain so that he could feel safe.
Dain healed at an astonishing rate. Maybe that was because Dain was also growing at an astonishing rate, but whatever the reason, he was back on his feet after four days, and by the end of the first week he was tromping through the woods with us, scarred but otherwise unhurt.
To keep myself from completely falling apart about there being sword-scars on my prince—scars that were my fault—I threw myself into being the best possible companion for the young prince.
Droesh belonged to Alluin’s family; he loved it because of its history.
I loved it simply because it was a wild place, and I loved the wilderness.
I used that to try to give Dain a gift—something to repay the awful harm I’d allowed to come to him.
I took Dain rambling through the woods, showing him every beautiful thing: the way the foxes set their burrows in the slopes to stay dry, the drooping basket-nests of the weaver-birds, the many lovely flowers of the spring.
I told him everything I could about them.
I just wanted to give him something good.
Something lovely he could carry inside him, back into that cesspit of a palace.
Dain’s favorite sign became ‘name,’ to the point where he would even sign with his wing-hand if there wasn’t anyone else in sight.
I didn’t know the name of every flowering plant, but I knew a lot, and together we came up with silly names for the ones I’d never memorized.
He never laughed, but when I saw him resting in a clearing in the woods, his whole body relaxed as he examined a blooming iris, I thought that maybe he would be alright.