27. Courtship
Courtship
Watching Dain court Leah was a unique sort of hell invented especially for me.
Not only did he refuse to do any gods-damn courting, but he was insistent that Alluin and I (but especially I) keep our noses out of his business and treat Leah like his friend and companion, not the woman he was desperately in love with.
When I tried to protest this, my prince told me in no uncertain terms that if he had to smell me and Alluin wanting to fuck for the past century while having to silently watch us pretend we were completely platonic friends, I could damn well hold my tongue about Leah.
That was, frankly, rude. Not that it wasn’t true, but drawing the direct parallel between the two sets of us only made my suffering more acute.
Leah was funny, lighthearted, and unserious in a way that leavened what I suspected was an unyielding devotion to the people she loved.
She was a commoner, someone who’d been good at her job and liked to be useful.
Dain was a prince, a leader, the high commander of the Stag Army—a man whose loyalty to his people was absolute.
Aligning playful Leah with my butterfly self and steadfast Dain with my Alluin wasn’t a particularly difficult task.
Pairing me and Alluin was a decision no respectable matchmaker would ever make. Pairing someone like Leah with the crown prince of Stag Court would have been even more laughable, except that Faery itself had spoken for them. They were soulmates. Alluin and I had no such guarantee.
The other part of the problem was that I simply liked Leah.
She’d stepped right into my tiny inner circle on the first day we’d actually had a conversation.
I wasn’t interested in her romantically any more than I was interested in Dain, but she was clever and delightful, and I wanted her to stay in my life.
I liked making her laugh and I liked seeing her happy, and it was making me crazy that Dain wouldn’t just tell her he loved her so that she’d stop inventing reasons not to stay.
I valued my limbs too much to push Dain on the topic, but Alluin wasn’t any better when I complained to him. He was my shield-love, but apparently that didn’t matter when it came to me getting sympathy. The expression Alluin pinned me with said that I was being especially dim-witted.
“What?” I asked defensively.
“Have you considered that perhaps the reasons Leah gives for not accepting Dain’s love are not the actual reasons?
” he said, giving me an arch look. “That perhaps she’s frightened of what it means to belong to him, or that the grief which hovers just over her shoulder grabs her by the throat any time she considers what she might lose by letting herself be in love? ”
“But think about what she gains,” I protested. “He’s Dain! He’s amazing, and he loves her more than life itself. If she just knew—”
“Do you think she’s stupid?” Alluin leaned forward, his gaze direct.
“Part of her must know what she could claim if she were willing to step into a future with our prince, but her heart isn’t willing to go there, and so her waking mind can’t see it.
Won’t see it,” he said, his voice going more strident.
“What sounds like excuses to your ears may be no more than the reasons she makes for herself to explain the reticence she cannot yet understand. If he told her—”
His ears laid flat for a moment. Alluin took a careful breath, a line between his brows, then gave a slight shake of his head.
“If he told her,” he said in a softer tone, “it would surely only steal from her the time she needs to know her own heart. How can they build eternity on a foundation she’s uncertain of?
How can he be certain that she chose him of her own volition, and not because she liked him well enough to choose not to break his heart? ”
The words cut too close to the bone. Unlike Leah, I knew what I wanted.
I’d known for more than eighty years—had known from the moment I’d kissed Alluin on the eve of Phazikai’s destruction.
I wanted to be his like I wanted to breathe.
Hadn’t I wondered, in the dark of night, if Alluin would stoop to choosing me if only I asked him for it?
If I could have everything I wanted, if only I was willing to let alcohol and allure erase the boundaries I wished weren’t there?
“They don’t have a lot of time,” I said quietly, because I needed to say something, and I couldn’t sit there and ask him if I was Dain or if I was Leah. I couldn’t let this be about me.
Alluin sighed and looked away. “I think he’s painfully aware of that.”
I swallowed through the lump in my throat. “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
Duty took Dain to the Court of Mercy, and duty took me to the northern border long before he returned.
Any time I thought of what he intended to do—of the apology he intended to give to the Merciful King—my gut twisted.
Away from Leah or the business of the Court, there was little I could do to have Dain’s back but ensure the northern border remained safe.
I didn’t even have Alluin to talk sense into me when I started getting maudlin, so I did my best to put what Dain might be facing out of my mind and focus on my own tasks.
Dain was capable and clever, and Alluin and I had taught him well.
Whatever happened now was out of my control.
I simply had to trust that he would come home safe in the end.
Though I’d been told there might be difficulties with the marquess on the Court of Mercy side of the border, everything remained calm.
I strung my battalion out along the length of the border that we’d been given, installing companies in the various outposts and forts in the region.
We patrolled, we repaired the buildings, and we helped the local inhabitants with snow removal and a few minor rockslides as the snow began to melt.
Spending months in the field was usually refreshing for me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d left at home—about Alluin, mostly, but also about Dain and Leah.
His birthday kept ticking ever closer, and with it, the end of their time.
I’d never heard of soulmates failing to balance within a year and a day, but I’d never heard of soul-splicing before it had happened to me, either.
Maybe no one talked about failed soulmates.
Maybe no one bothered to remember them at all.
I was finally recalled to the palace in the early spring, though it took several weeks to collect my battalion and make our way back to our usual postings.
The suspicious part of me wanted to believe that Queen Ronelis had removed me from the mix on purpose, but the rest of me knew she rarely bothered to even consider the Armies.
My orders had come from General Dykaestra, who led the Second Army. They’d surely originated with her.
It was the middle of the day when I reached the palace garrison, so once I’d completed the formal handoff, I took my doe and moseyed up to the Antlered Palace to check in on Leah.
Dain encountered me first, intercepting me in the outer yard after I’d stabled my mount. “Zhiolas. Can you yell at me? Really dramatically?” he asked without any lead-in. I didn’t even have time to be glad that he was back and not visibly maimed or branded.
I blinked at him. “I mean, sure, I could, but…why?”
“Leah kissed me,” he said, his ears turning back and brows tensing. “It felt so good when I kissed her back that I didn’t control myself, and then the soulmate bond took over—”
“You’re balanced?” I asked, shocked.
“No,” he said, the answer coming hard and fast. “She was shocked, Zhiolas. She had to feel how much I love her. How much I want her.” Dain looked away, breathing hard.
“I can’t bring myself to face her. Can you imagine what it would be like if Alluin kissed you, wanting nothing more than the physical pleasure of such a thing, and instead had to feel how much you wanted him?
And was shocked by it, as if all this time, he’d never so much as suspected? ”
My guts twisted. “You’ve told Alluin. He knows.”
Dain breathed a humorless laugh. “Not that either of you have listened to my relationship advice, but yes, I’ve told him you desire him. But Leah didn’t know, and now she does. So will you yell at me so my mother has a reason to throw me out of the palace for a few days?”
“I want your word that you’ll try not to take any of the words we yell at each other as an attack, but to remember that I’m lending verisimilitude to your request,” I said, mouth tugging to the side.
“Agreed, and I ask that you do the same for me,” Dain said, pleading in his golden eyes. My beloved prince, as hopeless in matters of the heart as I was. How could I deny him?
I inclined my head to him, then fisted my hands and put on an expression of anger, baring my teeth and pinning my ears back. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I snapped at him, raising my voice. “She’s your gods-damn soulmate, Dain. Just fucking talk to her!”
He snarled back, every line of his body going tense and his wing-arms flaring into dangerous arcs.
“How I handle Leah is my decision,” Dain said, raising his voice as if he was angry, though I knew my prince would have gone cold if he’d actually been taking offense.
“Do you think I want relationship advice from you? You won’t even kiss the man you’re married to! ”
“I am not married to Alluin!” I said hotly, heat rising on my neck despite myself. “We are friends.”
“Oh, yes, friends,” Dain said in a nasty voice, taking a step towards me. “Friends who co-own well nigh everything, who live together, who raised a fucking prince together! Such friendly behavior. You don’t have any fucking right to tell me how to handle my relationships!”