18. Terrible Conversations
Terrible Conversations
Things weren’t the same after the assassination attempt.
Dain applied himself to his lessons with a grim, steely sort of resolve, as if the bright, cheerful boy he’d been had died in the courtyard where I’d allowed five people to attempt to kill him.
To my shock, he didn’t seem to carry any ill will towards me.
He treated me as if I was his stalwart shield, his trust unshaken, as if my actions in defending him had entirely blotted out my sins.
I couldn’t bring myself to disillusion him of that boyish belief. I made sure to remind him that even the most devoted of guardians made mistakes, redetermined to never let any assassins pass my inspection, and treated each new lesson as if all involved were unknown threats.
Though I had to treat his training with the grim reality of his world in the forefront of my mind—something I should have done from the very start—I didn’t want his entire life to revolve around blood and the ever-looming threat of attempted assassination.
I incorporated hunting and land’s-craft into lessons under the guise of utility in the field, accompanied several First Army missions against local monsters with him so that he could observe typical First Army maneuvers in real life, and required that all soldiers participating in training learn Faery Sign so that he could communicate with them directly.
Alluin stepped back and let me handle Dain’s training as I chose.
I wondered, occasionally, if that was because he trusted that I wouldn’t fuck it up this time, but even when I tried to tell myself that, I knew it was a lie.
Alluin had stepped back because I’d wanted him to step back.
He trusted me because he always trusted me.
He’d given me his faith as my shield-love, and for him, that was an unbreakable bond.
I didn’t deserve that faith, and it was a constant torment knowing that I could have his absolution at any time—an absolution I could never deserve and would be helpless to resist. I had to maintain careful walls between my thoughts and that knowledge, but I couldn’t bring myself to entirely wall Alluin off.
I wasn’t strong enough to walk away. I invited Alluin to come hunting with us and to teach Dain land’s-craft, and he joined us with a smile and a willing heart.
In return, he invited us to treat his home and his land as ours, and though I knew I should have felt like an imposter every time I set foot in Droesh, it never failed to feel like coming home.
Going to Droesh for Dain’s birthday became a tradition.
Our prince didn’t particularly enjoy the celebrations put on in his honor—not a surprise, really, given that nobody in the high court was actually celebrating his existence—so we had our own celebration, with people who actually cared about him.
So what if they were common soldiers? He had somewhere he could be safe, a place where no one flinched when he moved. Hell, people started howling back when he lifted his nose to the sky. Maybe he was the Beast Prince, but he was our Beast. If anyone wanted to hurt him, they came through us.
Droesh was where Dain shapeshifted for the first time, an extremely unsettling event that left me a bit hollow-eyed as I tried to teach a naked preteen boy with dragon feet how to walk.
It was also where he said his first words, and where he admitted to me his first inklings of attraction to women—a conversation I’d been utterly unprepared for, but had hopefully managed with grace.
As the years rolled by, it grew hard to believe that Dain was a natural creature.
He was physically so strange and magically so powerful.
Even once he was able to maintain a bipedal form, he was still moon-called, and when he was on all fours, sometimes the ground beneath his feet crackled with frost.
His origins didn’t matter to me. He was still Dain.
He was shaping up into an incredible heavy infantry fighter, he could stalk an elk through the woods by scent and eye, and he knew every flower in Droesh by sight, even when they weren’t in bloom.
He sparred with soldiers and invented new and horrifying ways to inflict damage with his beast-form.
Once he found his voice, he loved to tell stories, and he cracked extremely dry jokes that had me coughing water out of my nose.
Occasionally, and much to my distress, he attempted to fix my relationship with Alluin.
It wasn’t that Alluin and I weren’t still friends.
We still lived in the same house, spent time together, and talked about everything under the sun.
That was to say, we talked about daylit topics—events, Army business, gossip, Dain—and never once spoke about anything dwelling in the turbid darkness beneath the surface of the earth.
We didn’t share a bed. We didn’t ever cuddle. I didn’t deserve any of that.
Though outwardly I was as feckless and blithe as always, I felt like I was poisoned by some monstrous shadow pupating inside of me, so that wherever I slunk I left a fetid spoor behind, something lethal and horrible. There was no escape. The horror was coming from inside me.
I should have stepped away from Alluin. I knew that.
He was sunlight and clear water, and I was the rabid wolf poisoning his streams. I could even see it happening—watched through the years as Alluin’s sunniness faded; as the man I had once treasured every glimpse of grew steadily more reserved and grim, like a carapace was growing on his soul.
How was I any better than Nyland? How could I stay and keep hurting him, dragging him into hell with me?
But I couldn’t bear to go. So we were friends. We were companions. And Dain, who knew me better than anyone but Alluin, wouldn’t leave well enough alone.
“He’s attracted to you,” Dain said one day, keeping his eyes on the cluster of lady’s-slipper orchids we were examining, but with one ear turned towards me.
“A lot of people are,” I replied. “Look, there’s a little one. This must be a good spot for them. I don’t remember there being any young ones in the last patch we found.”
Dain flicked his tails. “You’re avoiding the topic.”
I sighed and got to my feet, brushing imaginary dirt off my pants. “Dain, you’re nineteen. I’m more than fifteen hundred, and Alluin just cleared forty-nine thousand. This is not a conversation I want to be having with you.”
He flashed me a fang. “So you knew I was talking about Alluin.”
“Of course I knew you were talking about Alluin,” I said, crossing my arms and frowning down at him. “You’re like a dog with a bone about him.”
Dain rose to his full height with casual ease and bared his teeth in a smug grin, gold eyes glinting as he looked down at me.
He only had an inch on me thus far, but he was going to be damned powerful once he filled out.
My physical superiority in the bipedal realm was rapidly reaching its end point.
“What?” I asked, unamused.
“You should fuck him,” Dain said, cocking his ears at me.
“Scratch the itch. Break the ice. Whatever odd metaphor you want to use for it. Then maybe the two of you can stop being strange about desiring each other. I can smell it, you know, and I know you too well to not be rude about it.” He shrugged.
“If it was only Alluin, maybe I wouldn’t say anything.
He’s very reserved, and we mostly interact as general and prince.
But you’ve been my friend and teacher for most of my life, and you like the look of him, too. ”
My damned face started heating. “Dain,” I said, giving him an unamused look. “You’re nineteen. I feel like I’m being lectured on sex by an infant.”
He was undeterred. Dain slung an arm over my shoulder and steered me away from the patch of orchids. “Is it about experience?” he asked, walking me towards the forest path. “Give me a number. If I go fuck that many people, can we have this conversation?”
I pinned my ears back and put on an over-exaggerated expression of disgust. “One hundred million.”
“Mm. Troublesome. Perhaps I should pick up the pace.” He stepped back and put both hands on my shoulders.
“Oh look. There’s Alluin. Pretend that he’s not upwind and I’m surprised to see him.
” Dain gave me a shove. “At least go talk to him. Consider it a princely command. The two of you haven’t spoken more than a few sentences in days. It’s getting tense at camp.”
I growled, but let him shove me. “Fine. I’ll say ‘hello.’”
“Good. Moonrise is in barely an hour, so I’m going to go make myself scarce. Until morning,” Dain said, lifting a hand in greeting to Alluin before taking off at a trot towards camp.
Though I didn’t want to go talk to Alluin—especially not with ‘he’s attracted to you’ and ‘you should fuck him’ as the most recent Alluin-associated thoughts—turning and bolting would be both rude and telling, and I’d promised, besides. I trudged over to him and leaned against a tree with a sigh.
“Hello,” I said.
He didn’t even smile. “Hello.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
Alluin drew in a deep breath. “His scars are almost gone. I asked him to show me.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, fighting back the images that echoed in my vision: red on swords, terror in a boy’s eyes, the horrible glory of battle. “I know,” I said, the words coming out guttural.
“The one on his face is the only one that’s left, and you can only truly see it if he tilts his head to catch the light on it,” Alluin added.
The memories hounded me—my utter, unforgivable failure. “I know,” I said again, gritting it out.
Alluin didn’t say anything for a long moment. He looked distant, almost sad, his eyes fixed on the horizon and the breeze off the mountains teasing through his shorn hair. Then he turned and looked at me, with so much compassion on his face, and said, “Zhiolas. They were my soldiers.”