by Lucia Ashta
What he spoke was treason, punishable by every way of death King Oderon could conceive of with his wicked imagination. Aletox had never spoken so outwardly before in my presence. In fact, I’d rarely heard him speak more than a sentence. I’d believed him a reserved man of few words. It appeared that Aletox was nothing like I’d thought him to be. Undoubtedly, that had been his intent all along.
I couldn’t deny that he had a fair point. If the government was unjust, then wasn’t it better to strive for a just one? To bring about whatever change was necessary to make it happen? And if that was the case, with the king already ill and perhaps dying, and with the princess in no position to step in to rule (potentially even on a different, unknown planet), wasn’t now the best time to do it?
But I was a soldier. I’d seen more blood and death than could ever be erased from my memory. I’d become hardened to it. To survive the way of the soldier, I’d had to. But I never forgot a face twisted in the anguish of a painful death.
I found it hard to believe that war could ever be worth the price. Perhaps there were circumstances in which this was the case, but these weren’t them. There was no guarantee that the faction that’d take over the monarchy, led by either of my potential fathers, wouldn’t be worse than the current rule. For it couldn’t be said that Brachius or Aletox would rule fairly, with the good of Oers at the forefront. They simply weren’t made that way.
In any case, when I’d said this wasn’t about one woman (or two) and what was best for her, I’d lied. This was all about Ilara. It had been since my heart first opened to her. I couldn’t help but do what I believed best for her, just as Aletox couldn’t resist his nature.
So I played the only card I could think to play that had a chance of settling this without taking into account the validity of the monarchy. Even though it was the most valuable card I held in my hand, it still might not be enough to affect Aletox.
“Agree to the binding then because you owe me.”
His eyebrows popped in surprise. “You think I owe you?”
“If you’re truly my father like you say you are, then you owe me a hell of a lot more than this.”
From off to my side, I heard Lila’s mouth drop open with a pop of her jawbone.
3
“So you want to play the kid card?” Aletox asked, seemingly unsurprised that I’d resorted to this to secure his compliance.
“If I have to,” I said.
“Are you sure you want to use it on something like this? Is this the way you want to use the only kid card you have?”
“Sure. Whatever,” I said brusquely. What kind of a fucker let his child believe he was another man’s son for four hundred and forty three years for some secret, nefarious purpose and then told him he could only expect one favor of him, a favor he begrudged in the first place? I was so close to telling him to shove his kid card so far up his ass he’d never find it again and stomping off in the hope of never having to see his rigid face again.
But… But I wasn’t new to the game that anyone who wished to survive on O for long had to learn to play. Raised as Brachius’ son, arguably one of the three most difficult and dangerous men on all O, I knew better than to run headlong into a thornbush.
I wasn’t a patient man. Never had been, probably never would be. I summoned every drop of patience I could and breathed out. Slowly. Then I said, “If this is what I need to do to get you to agree to a binding, then I’ll do it.” And I left it at that.
I regretted, for perhaps the thousandth time, that it wasn’t possible to force people to have integrity.
Aletox studied me longer, as if he hadn’t studied me enough by now to count every hair on my head. His unconcerned stare was annoying the shit out of me. He’d better wrap this bullshit show of his up fast, because I hadn’t had much patience to draw on to begin with, and I was using my reserves as fast as a mowab chomped a soldier’s head off.
I was tempted to envision a mowab chomping this particular head off, with its dark hair, straight like everything else on him. Thank the oasis I’d gotten my looks from my mom and not from either one of the fucks who reluctantly claimed they planted the seed responsible for me.
“All right,” Aletox said finally, just before I envisioned the good part, where the mowab shook its mandible fiercely to rip the head from the neck. “I’ll do it. But you’d better be careful with how you speak the binding. I won’t agree to just anything.”
“Great,” I said and stalked off, pulling Ilara along with me.
When I searched for Dolpheus within the waves of my mind, he was already there, waiting for me. Join us, I said, anger bubbling along with my thoughts.
By the time I led Ilara beyond everyone else’s range of hearing, Dolpheus was with us. He knew me better than anyone, perhaps even better than my lover. If this Ilara was indeed someone other than the princess, then he certainly was the person who understood me best on this entire planet. He’d realize I was seething inside, and he’d understand every single reason why.
He got right to the important matters. “What do you need me to do?”
“I’ll strangle Aletox if I have to do the binding. I want him out of here as quickly as we can manage it. Will you do the binding with him? You can be my surrogate in using up my fucking kid card.”
“No problem.” Dolpheus had plenty to say about Aletox and the situation, I could tell. But that’d wait until later, when we were someplace safe and could relax, if that was ever going to happen again. Since King Oderon sent my Ilara off planet, it seemed as if the craziness hadn’t stopped for much more than the occasional night’s sleep. And life was lively before then.
“We have to move fast with him,” Dolpheus said. He understood the urgency. In reality, I shouldn’t have even spared these minutes to confer off to the side. I should’ve proceeded with the binding the second he agreed to it. It wasn’t that I feared he’d change his mind, which he might. It was that he could transport away in a flash, and then we’d be even more fucked than we already were. We certainly couldn’t count on Aletox being a man of his word.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was about to lose my shit, and that wouldn’t have been good. But we do have to move fast.”
“What do you want me to get him to agree to?”
“He keeps any information about the potential of this Ilara not being the princess secret. Anything about the princess off planet. Anything about off-planet travel. Anything that’d help anyone figure the Ilara situation out and learn how to get to either one of them, any of them. Shit. Basically we need him to agree never to talk again. Everything he knows about the situation is dangerous to us.”
“And he’s a tricky fucker. He’ll try to find a hole to slip through. Like the Vikas vipers. He’ll glide through a crack the size of my little finger. He’s smart enough to find one.”
“Ah!” I allowed myself an uncommon grunt of frustration. I caught my hand, mid-motion, running through my hair. It’s what I did when I was stuck in a situation I didn’t want to be stuck in. Therefore, I’d been doing it a lot lately, so much that I was trying to stop. It was too clear of a giveaway to anyone watching me that I wasn’t calm and centered. I couldn’t afford to look weak—ever—and this was terribly close to doing that. My normally wild hair was probably sticking up all over the place.
I brought my hands to my sides with a slapping sound. “You also need to get him to agree not to tell about my togetherness with Ilara. No one beyond the people here know. The less others know, the fewer weapons they’ll have to wield against us until we can figure out the way to fix this fucking heap of a disaster.” I left out the rest of what I was thinking. If we can unmess this mess. Defeatist thinking never brought about anything useful. I’d always known better than to indulge in it. That wasn’t about to change now, no matter how twisted and thorny our circumstances were.
“Basically, Olph, you’re going to have to use all that brilliance you have hidden under those
ladies man looks. You have to nail down the man who’s used to nailing down others. Trap him into keeping as many secrets as you can. And then we’ll just have to let it go and hope for the best.”
“While we prepare to defend ourselves and kick ass.”
“Always,” I said with a smile that felt good. It broke the pressure. Suddenly, I was able to remember that Dolpheus and I’d been in sticky situations more times than I cared to count. We’d gotten out of all of them with all our limbs attached. And we didn’t have a splicing account with Brachius. We survived whole and intact the old way. The natural way. The way that didn’t make us evil (if Lila was to believed, and I still hadn’t decided if she could be).
“Anything else?” Dolpheus asked. “I’d better go before Aletox tries to pull something.”
I sent a piercing look his way. Maybe I’d gotten something from him if I was his son. My eyes, even though they were green instead of gray, could be as ferocious as his. Aletox looked dodgy. But then, when didn’t he?
I shook my head. “Just go and do the best you can. You’ll probably do better than I could right now, anyway. I’m too flustered.”
“Don’t worry about it, man. Everything about Aletox is intended to fuck with us. Let’s just get him out of here and then we can figure out the rest of it.”
I nodded my gratitude to my best friend and watched him stride away, as confident as ever. Dolpheus was deserving of every legend told about him. He was as fierce as I was, and as loyal. We’d had each other’s backs since we were boys. He’d get this done. No matter how wily Aletox tried to be, Dolpheus would match him and perhaps best him.
Once Dolpheus reached Aletox, I turned away. I didn’t want to watch. Seeing Aletox accept that Dolpheus was going to do the binding instead of me was just going to piss me off even more, because I was sure he’d bristle that I’d delegated the task he was so ‘graciously’ agreeing to.
The second my eyes alighted on the woman I hadn’t even looked at since we walked away from Aletox, all thoughts of what we needed to do to keep her safe in the future whisked away like the crisp flight of birds.
“Oh my oasis. Ilara.” I pulled her into an embrace, wishing that my suddenly pounding heart would speak all that I wouldn’t. I folded my arms tightly around her, offering her sanctuary from the prying eyes and the madness that spanned a universe.
Then the woman I never thought I’d witness cry cried. And my heart, the one I’d only begun to feel since I fell for her, clenched at her loss.
I didn’t know which of all the losses in particular she mourned just then. She had her pick.
I just held her tight. If I could do nothing else right now, I could be her shelter through the worst of the storm.
I kissed her crown again, and she shook in my arms. Just once. Even devastated as she seemed to be, Ilara, princess or not, wouldn’t allow herself to break down in front of anyone. Not even me.
And I had the feeling this Ilara was as strong as my Ilara. I couldn’t conceive of the existence of any Ilara who wasn’t fierce, strong, and determined, and passionate, wild, and courageous. For the Ilara I’d known so intimately had been all these things and much more.
Whether this Ilara possessed the title of princess or not, she had the makings of one.
4
When Ilara stilled within my arms and her head grew heavy against my chest, I pulled her chin up so her eyes would meet mine. The cosmos that swirled in her irises was wild and raging, a small view of the eternal that couldn’t make sense to a single human mind, but the grief was absent. All that remained was a fiery determination that affirmed that this Ilara was indeed much like mine. It’d take much more than a steely-eyed man—or three of them, Aletox, Brachius, and her father, the King—and the prank of a universe to keep her down.
I took her in like a big gulp of water when I’d been dying of thirst. She was so many things to me. Beyond telling her I loved her, I hadn’t found the way to say all that she was to me. Learning to tell her I loved her was accomplishment enough for a soldier with no memory of his parents ever telling him they cared. My mother left when I was eight. I liked to think that before abandoning me, she peppered me with affection. But I didn’t remember whether she did or not. I just knew that she’d left. And what kind of a mother left her son to a dubious fate with a father that wasn’t much of one?
But my Ilara brought this dormant part of me to the light. And it wasn’t because she was soft and tender. She’d resisted falling in love much as I had. In the end, it was our mutual ferocity and the long-held lie that we didn’t need love that had done it for us both.
Once we’d tasted love, so tantalizing and rich on the tongue, we hadn’t been able to get enough of it. If we’d been frenzied lovers before, we became ferocious in our lovemaking afterward. Love became a drug we craved. We sought it out at every turn, within every stolen moment we could find in the complicated lives of a soldier and a princess, forbidden from loving each other.
We craved the ritual of love more than Brachius must crave his daily visit with a pot of hakusha tea, the one he claimed the source of much of his unconventional genius.
Here she was. Ilara. An Ilara at any rate. In my arms again. Solid and real, no longer a specter of my imagination.
And still I couldn’t tell her all that I felt. But she met my eyes as openly as I believed she ever had. I had no doubt she could read what they contained.
She squared her shoulders toward our joined future—whatever it might look like and however long it might last.
I didn’t want to consider what might happen moving forward. If there were at least two Ilaras out there, what would I do once I managed to return the real princess, the one I’d pledged my loyalty to before I did this woman?
There was no easy or ready solution, so I didn’t bother with it right now. Life was sticky enough without paying the debt of future worry ahead of time. Nothing about my future had unraveled as I imagined it would. Not once had I considered that, once I finally managed to find the way to return Ilara from another planet, she might be the wrong one. Yet here we were. When events could surprise in such an astonishing way, what was the point in anticipating or predicting? A waste of energy.
I allowed myself a prolonged moment of being with this woman, a perfect-looking match to the woman who’d haunted my dreams and most waking moments for years. I smiled in entreaty, and she smiled back. Her smile was as laced with knowledge of uncertainty as I imagined mine was.
I said, “I won’t claim that I have any idea what this mess is going to look like when we’re finished sorting it. We’ve entered a realm of circumstances I doubt have ever existed before now. But I can tell you this. Wherever we go, whatever we do, and however we do any of it, I’ll be at your side. I love you now as I have before. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t change. Whether you’re the princess or not, you’re the woman I want to share all of myself with.”
I tried to keep going, proud of myself for saying what seemed like all the right things. I’d told her I loved her, words that still caught in my throat before I could nudge them past even after all this time. But I’d gotten distracted. Just thinking about how much of myself I wanted to share with her awakened the sleeping beast. My dick stirred beneath tunic and pants, and I quickly urged my thoughts elsewhere, beyond the smooth body that had melted and opened in my hands so readily during the night. If she was a flower, then she’d bloomed and spread her petals for me, releasing all the fragrance I yearned for to drip into my mouth.
I wanted so much more of her than the moment could give us. We remained in a vale filled with people. I felt the curious stares upon us even as I determined to push them away from the shared moment that should belong only to the two of us.
Ilara’s eyes grew rounder. The cosmos swirled more erratically, a sure sign that her emotions were in turmoil. “I’m not the princess,” she said. “We may as well admit it and save ourselves some hassle.”
I didn’t know what ‘hassle’ w
as, but I didn’t think she meant what she said. The nonchalant tone told me her words were forced.
She was as torn as I was. Her heart had already connected to mine, and this woman didn’t love easily either. Whether she was my Ilara or not, that much was plain. Love was the bloom of the forbidden plant. And we’d tasted it together last night, hungry tongues entwined. There was no easy path of retreat from that joined point.
“You may still be the princess,” I said.
“Yeah. But it seems more likely that I’m not.”
“Let’s not worry beyond need. Let’s meet one challenge at a time.”
“The likelihood that I’m not the princess and that I’m actually on the wrong planet seems like something a lot bigger than a simple challenge, wouldn’t you say?”
I huffed and debated saying the silky thing, something soothing, something I didn’t really feel. The reality was that every nerve in my body felt on edge, plagued with a discordant mixture of relief and apprehension, arousal and dread.
When my lips parted, I still didn’t know what I’d say.
I clasped a hand to either side of her face, a bit more roughly than I meant to, and I pulled her to me. I kissed her agitatedly. With passion and fire, with fury and frustration, with a hell bent tornado of twisted emotions that were unlikely companions.
When I finally untwisted my tongue from hers, I was breathless. So was she.
And then I spoke the truth. Bare as I felt. “I have no fucking idea what we’ll do or what’ll happen next. I’m terrified at the thought that you might not be the princess because I don’t want to consider the possibility that I might not be able to love you. You, the woman right in front of me, right now. I’ve already fallen headlong into you, and I don’t want to pull away. I want all that you are. Every little infinite speck of you. And the thought that I might not be able to have what I’ve desired for so long leaves me ready to scream as loud as I possibly can, something I’ve never done before.
“I’ve trained to be a soldier since I first learned to walk. Fighting for what I believe in—or something like that—is all that I know. I’m not allowed to be weak or frightened any more than I’m allowed to falter or be indecisive. I feel full and content and replete with all the goodness you fill me with inside. Equally, I feel empty and hollow and confused, uncertain. But I do know that I’ll fight for you, whether you’re the princess or not, because you have my heart. No matter who you are or who you aren’t, you have me. You can have all of me that you’ll take. And I want every bit of you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.”
