V3Ch36-A Little Bit Insecure
“Of course,” Colin said after a moment. His eyes betrayed curiosity, but he didn’t ask any questions. He looked toward Dero. “I hope, again, that you may consider my offer. It was intended entirely seriously, with no offense meant toward either of you.”
“If you mean the proposal that Dero marry one of your offspring, that’s out of the question,” Tybalt snapped. “She’s mine. In the village where I grew up… a man would not take such a remark lightly. I am trying to be civil, because we are in your home, but please understand that those words, spoken right in front of me, are deeply offensive. Especially when repeated after we have made our relationship clear.”
“My apologies, Your Holiness,” Colin said, bowing his head a little lower than he had earlier in front of the witnesses. “In our society, marriages are often arranged for political expediency. Love is a happy coincidence, if it occurs - as it has between me and my wife - but perhaps your circumstances are such that you do not need to prioritize making alliances.”
“He actually wanted me for my astute political mind,” Dero said, for once seemingly trying to lighten the mood rather than deliberately causing trouble. “He wouldn’t know who his other wives should be if he didn’t have me whispering in his ear.”
The High Elf King laughed politely.
“A servant will show the two of you to your quarters and take your orders for midday refreshment,” said Kamila. “But we hope we will have the honor of your company at dinner. It is rare we have the opportunity to dine with foreign heads of state, isolated as we are here on our islands.”
“It would be our pleasure,” the necromancer replied with cold courtesy.
The violet haze in the air faded a few seconds later, and Colin summoned one of his staff with a snap of his fingers.
He and Dero allowed themselves to be escorted from the room by a quiet young man who had the look of a teenager.
“Why did we need alone time?” Dero asked quietly.
Tybalt gestured at the servant.
“Don’t worry about him overhearing. I remember the high elf security paranoia from when I last visited. It’s more understandable for him to be a little bit insecure, frankly, now that I know there are actually people trying to kill him.” She nodded at the young man who was escorting them. “Show him your tongue, please.”
The servant opened his jaw to reveal a stump where his tongue ought to be. Tybalt could see where the organ had been cut out, but the wound was old and long healed over.
“What the fuck is that?” the necromancer asked.
“They choose illiterates for their servants and then mutilate them, to keep them from being capable of revealing any royal secret. For the same reason that the High Elf King studied my family’s sound-nullifying magic, I imagine. King Colin has a fetish for secrecy.”
Tybalt frowned. “Are they slaves?”
“No, employees. They had to agree to this. There aren’t many options for commoners better than working for the Royal Family, so if you want to support your family, I understand this is a sought after opportunity.”
These islands must be quite miserable for that to be sought after.
“Can you use your noise cancelling on the area around us? Since that’s apparently an ability you possessed.”
Without ever mentioning it. Not that I can think of many situations where it would have been useful now that she’s joined. I haven’t done much hiding lately. Fort Hadrian could have been made slightly safer with that power, but I deliberately left her protecting Victoria and Vidalia.
“Yeah, I got it around eighty years ago,” Dero said. “Very useful for sneaking around.”
She waved her hand and cast that same violet haze from earlier into the air all around them. Colin truly had copied it perfectly, Tybalt couldn’t help but notice.
“All right, no one outside of our bubble can hear us, and it moves with me,” she said. “What is it that needs this much secrecy?”
“I can’t make contact with my undead,” Tybalt said. “We’re completely out of communication with the outside world.” He couldn’t help but let a bit of worry slip through in his tone. “If something happens to threaten the others, we wouldn’t know a thing about it.”
“I see,” Dero said, nodding. “That is important. We have to be careful, then. We can’t expect much backup besides your contingency plans.”
“More importantly, we can’t stay here long,” he said. “Not unless Colin and Kamila are willing to take down the safeguards they’ve placed around their lands that prevent us from connecting with my undead.”
“Yeah, fat chance of that,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”
Lots of things, Tybalt thought. From the situation with people trying to assassinate the King to this matter of him wanting to tie your families together, to what happened to the last two necromancer high priests that Colin interacted with…
But there was only one subject that preyed upon his thoughts right now, against his will.
“Am I actually hurting your ability to repopulate the dark elf race?” he asked. “I mean, by you living among humans and being with me, does that make it less likely that your blood survives in a recognizable form for millennia going forward? Is that a consideration for you?” He swallowed. “Is it something you’re forcing yourself to give up? Seeing your people… rise again?”
The dark elf blinked a few times before she processed what Tybalt had said.
“You let yourself take everything Colin was saying seriously?” Dero asked, her voice a little incredulous.
Tybalt just looked at her for a long moment.
“You did!” she exclaimed. She gestured to the servant who was still only a few steps ahead of them. “You, get out of the violet haze, I don’t want you hearing any of this.”
The servant bowed his head and moved away.
“I can’t believe you took it all seriously,” Dero said, starting to laugh.
The necromancer’s eye twitched.
“Don’t tease me, Dero,” he said in a quiet, deadly voice. “If that man had said those words back in my village, when I was a teenager, I would have knocked him on his ass, no matter who he was. If he’d said them now anywhere other than here, in his own territory, where I’m borderline fucking powerless, I would have started a war over them.”
“You’re completely serious,” Dero said, wiping the smile from her face in an instant. “Sometimes I forget that you’re very young. What, twenty-one years old? Despite everything you’ve accomplished, you’re really—”
“Don’t do that,” Tybalt said. “This isn’t a maturity thing. Any man with red blood would have the same reaction to having to sit there civilly as someone else implies he’s an unfit mate for his woman. Let alone trying to set her up with someone else. There’s only so much I can be expected to tolerate.”
Dero looked at him for a long moment before she spoke again. “Sorry. You make a good point. You’re making me feel strange. I’m not usually this serious. I wasn’t taking what he said seriously, Tybalt. I didn’t mean to mock you. Well, I did, I guess, just now, but I shouldn’t have.”
“All right.”
“I didn’t expect you to be insecure—”
“Don’t—”
“Hey, I’m not. I’m not making fun of you. It’s unexpectedly sweet. I don’t even know how to feel. Grumpy Tybalt isn’t as much fun as your normal self - you clearly can’t take a joke right now - but the fact that it’s about me, that you were serious and actually being possessive when you said, ‘she’s mine,’ is—” A wistful smile settled over her face—“I haven’t been in a situation where I wouldn’t instantly say ‘I’m my own person, not yours,’ for centuries.
She took his hand and continued, “Look, it was all bullshit. Yes, human blood shortens lifespans relative to elven ones, but it also increases fertility. Everyone knows your kind, and the beastfolk for that matter, breed like rabbits. That’s… also not meant as an insult. There’s a reason that out of the women you couple with, I’m the only one who isn’t pregnant. And when I am pregnant, it will take a full eighteen months to bring our child into the world. I know it from experience.” As she spoke those last words, a shadow came over her face. It was gone in an instant, but Tybalt could tell they were treading in an area that was deeply uncomfortable for her. “More important than any of that, one of my tattoo’s effects is that any child I have will be a dark elf. Not a hybrid. He or she will have some of your traits, but still be a dark elf. With the full dark elf lifespan. I removed that bit of the tattoo for the others, since they all want their kids with you to have a chance of being human. But no, since you were worried about it, I want you to know that I wouldn’t be any better off, even from a reproductive perspective - as if that was a special goal of mine in the first place - by breeding with an elf. And if I wanted to live under King Thinks-He’s-Better-Than-Everyone-Else, I would have moved to these islands a long time ago. They’re not hard to find, and I have the power of teleportation.”
He squeezed her hand.
“Well, I’m sorry for being insecure,” he said. “It’s not that I actually thought you were interested in leaving me and running off with the elven equivalent of a teenager or something. It’s more, the idea that we’re wrong for each other, and that I’m hurting you by being with you, is something that would weigh on me. I’ve made a lot of effort to be less selfish in the way I treat my personal relationships, and I thought I’d been doing well. Ever since I apologized to Mariella for some of the lying I did to start our relationship in the first place. I don’t want to create situations where women I’m with are choosing to be with me even though they feel it’s actually worse for them than choosing something else.”
His thoughts were muddled as he spoke, but he thought he’d said more or less what he meant.
“What about what you and Vidalia are doing to that paladin girl she’s mentioned?” Dero asked, ruining the mood in an instant.
“That doesn’t count,” Tybalt said, waving his hand. “You’re going to be my wife. She’s a plaything. And seducing her helps us win against the Royal Army.”
She shook her head. “You’re probably the most twisted man I’ve ever been with.”
“Only probably?”
They shared a short, dark laugh. Then Dero stood on tiptoe to kiss him softly on the lips.
“I’ve decided that we’re at the stage in our relationship where the slight insecurity is charming rather than a warning of some sort,” she said.
Tybalt tilted her head up and kissed her back, this time longer, with one hand wandering to her ass.
They separated after a minute but kept looking back at each other as they resumed walking. Their minds were both in the same place.
They almost bumped into the servant a minute later, preoccupied as both of them were with gazing into each other’s eyes.
The man pointed at a door, then turned the handle and bowed.
Tybalt looked inside and saw a bedroom more lavish than any he’d ever slept in.
“Bring us some good wine,” Dero said from behind him. “Not blood, real wine. And for the refreshments—” She paused and looked over at Tybalt before she turned back to the servant—“we’ll want something with meat in it. We have to keep our strength up.”