16. Rich People Parties

Rich People Parties

E ven knowing that I desperately needed the sleep, I probably wouldn't have actually gotten up off the floor and back into bed of my own volition. For the first time since I'd been trapped in Faery, I had solid ground under my feet—a place to belong, and a reason for being. I didn't know Cass at all, but he was smiling at me like I was a dream come true, the nearness of his touch leaving his every physical sensation filtering into me.

He was so strong , all the power of his body at his easy command. I'd always loved being strong and capable, but Cass was so much more than I could ever be. I liked feeling that— sharing that. His presence gave me something I'd always wanted and could never have on my own.

He was also, unfortunately, a responsible adult, and after only a few more minutes of conversation, Cass put both of us to bed. That was probably for the best. Late-night talks are a fast-track to intimacy, but we already had intimacy in spades. All I needed to have his every emotion thundering through me was to hold his hand. A little bit of distance seemed wise.

Not that I wanted the distance. Even aside from how attractive he was, Cass was the sort of flirtatious and playful I found addictive. I had a distinct desire to plaster myself against his naked body and find out if the in-person experience matched the mind-blowing psychic orgasms.

Still, though. It had been a month and a half for me, and one very long day for him. Cass should get to have some time to get his feet under him.

I fell asleep musing about it, and woke up to the morning sunlight streaming through the window and the scent of some sort of smoky tea… and to darkness and the cotton-mouth feeling of having slept with my mouth open all night. For a moment, I lay there, totally discombobulated, until Cass groaned and shoved himself up, and my senses fell back into my own body .

I was in the sunlit room, comfortable and with breakfast waiting for me. Cass was in the windowless room, his wings and feet hanging off the bed.

Apparently he slept with his mouth open. Bà had told me spiders would make their webs in my mouth if I left it open all night – a vivid threat which had convinced seven-year-old Quyen to tape her mouth shut to sleep – but Cass had apparently not been so lucky.

He probably snored, too. Troubling.

My two remaining body-servant hopefuls were both there when I sat up, sitting primly on one of the couches while they kept their hands busy with sewing, like medieval handmaidens. Hawkish was embroidering a sleeve like it had personally offended her, stabbing the needle in with quick jabs and jerking the thread through. Mortal was working her way down a long seam with single-minded dedication, as if her tenure as my body-servant depended on her ability to perform tasks with efficiency. Though I felt a bit weird about having an assistant, let alone one Auntie's age, as long as that person was able to keep me from looking like a nincompoop, I didn't really have an opinion on the rest of it.

They sat up at attention when I moved. "Good morning, your majesty," Hawkish said.

Before I could answer, the door to the body-servant's room opened, and Cass shuffled out.

The fae woman's eyes went round. The mortal woman's face went red.

Cass froze, then said in a strangled voice, "Ah. Hello."

I bit my lips to keep from laughing, and turned to regard him. Last night, damp from his shower and in the shadows of night, Cass had been sultry and gorgeous. In the light of day? Mussed with sleep? Cass looked like the world's hottest one-night-stand, coming out of his hook-up's bedroom to see her family eating breakfast in the kitchen.

"Good morning, your splendor," I said to him, delighted at the sight. He needed his hair brushed something fierce, and his pajama pants were barely hanging onto his hips. In comparison to how he looked in his coronation and feast clothing, morning Cass was charmingly domesticated, and those acres of bare chest were a feast for the eyes.

He lifted his lip at the honorific and raked his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. "Good morning, Quyen, ladies," he said, inclining his head. "Do you mind if I lay claim to the bathroom? It should only be for a few minutes."

"Fine by me," I said, flashing him a smile. "Take your time."

He inclined his head towards me, then headed for the bathroom at a pace that approached outright fleeing.

Hawkish made a choking sound. I turned towards her and raised a brow. "You can ask, if you want. I don't mind."

"Ah…" she said, sounding disconcerted. "He – that is, His Majesty – did you request that he sleep in the servant's chambers? There are far more fitting places for one such as he…" The fae body-servant trailed off, still staring at the bathroom door. "Why did he acquiesce? He is Mercy's beloved. Perhaps if you slept in the consort's rooms, if you don't prefer to rest alongside your soulmate?"

"Oh. Er." I hadn't anticipated what Cass' behavior would imply about our relationship, or about him. "He, um. Volunteered," I said, trying to find a safe reason for why Cass might be sleeping in the servant's room. "He was sleeping there already. I think he's a bit agoraphobic?" I finished, gesturing at the vaulted ceiling and general cavernousness of the room.

"Ah," Hawkish said again, no less taken aback. "Perhaps your majesty might suggest to His Majesty that if he dislikes the proportions of the monarchal suite, to dream them into a new form?"

The image of Cass opening up a magical doorway flickered through my memory. If he could do that – if he could restore the landscape and make floor tremble – why not change the shape of a room? The thought left me uneasy. What if a room disappeared while I was in it? Would I be swallowed up by the stone?

"Perhaps," I said, giving her a tight smile. I got out of bed and walked over to the little breakfast table, plopping myself down at the single place setting. "What's the schedule for today?"

The schedule for the day was, to my sorrow, packed. Every hour was accounted for, and none of it seemed like things I'd be good at. Hawkish and Mortal – whose names, I learned, were Tessaean and Katerina – dolled me up for the first event of the day, while Cass got himself ready with a little assistance from Vaduin, who showed up about twenty minutes before our first event to braid and pin my soulmate's hair.

The theme of the day seemed to be natural beauty. I got paraded through a series of formal events, ranging from some sort of promenade in the gardens to a viewing of the clouds while people wrote and recited poetry. They were all contemplative things, at least, so I didn't have to spend too much time struggling to learn High Court protocol on the fly. My purpose was mainly to look queenly, and I knew enough about poetry that I didn't do half-bad at describing the way the flight of hawks revealed the secret patterns of the sky.

Contemplative didn't mean there was space for conversation, though, and by the end of the day the only words I'd managed to exchange with Cass were as formal as the events we'd been made to attend. I fell into the Monarchs' enormous bed, he retired to the body-servant's room to cram himself into a too-small bed, and we passed out with one more day gone and no progress on anything meaningful made.

In the morning, Hawkish was gone, and Cass was wearing a shirt when he shuffled out of the bedroom to go brush his teeth.

Katerina, who had won the position of my body-servant via endurance, explained to me while doing my makeup that the fae kept four overlapping calendars, of which the most important in their day-to-day lives was the feast calendar. The five-day feast week had two pairs of resting and rising days, followed by a feast day. For the resting day, we'd done quiet, artistic things. For today's rising day, we'd be doing politics.

"Politics" turned out to be indistinguishable from hobnobbing, at least as far as I was concerned. We milled around in rooms full of people dressed in fancy clothing, Cass looking like he'd rather be executed than to speak to another lord about the fashions in Serpent Court and me desperately trying to come up with something intelligent to say about the dueling circuit in Pelaimos when I wasn't even sure what Court that was in.

Nobody seemed particularly impressed with my answers; the general sense I got was of wariness. They didn't seem to like Cass, and my presence had to be another black mark in their ledger so far as he was concerned.

I was definitely the more approachable one, though, and so people approached me. Cass couldn't have been more obvious about hating everything to do with the events. He did what was necessary, and not one iota more. By the end of the day, he was more-or-less a scary-looking monolith to the side, while I did my best impression of a social butterfly and slowly picked up reasonable things to add to my meager collection of small talk.

I tried to talk to Cass over dinner, got curt answers that I suspected had more to do with his own endurance for these sorts of things approaching zero than any dislike of me, and ended up having a lovely conversation with a visiting noble about the cocktails being served. At least I could hold forth on the topic without sounding like an idiot.

The next day held more garden parties, including a multi-hour luncheon during which I was unable to correctly identify a single piece of food. The day after that? More fucking hobnobbing.

I didn't even get to have a single real conversation with Cass, let alone try to figure out what the fuck to do about being his soulmate. His stress vibrated across my skin every time he had to converse with someone politely for more than thirty seconds, which didn't help. By the time I flopped into bed I was a horrible combination of wired and tense, with a pressing desire to go find somewhere private and scream myself hoarse. I hadn't realized that the palace being barred to outsiders for six days for the celebration of the glorious ascension of His Splendor, Xarcassah Marys, had actually meant six days of nonstop, hateful events .

Our last event before the formal dinner on the fifth day was a series of gifts from various foreign dignitaries—though, of course, the word "gift" wasn 't used. They were tokens of respect, or friendship, or honor. It varied from Court to Court, and while I was certain the exact words chosen mattered a lot in faery diplomacy, I was champing at the bit to be done. At least there was an hour between this and dinner where I could sit and stare at the fucking wall.

Most of the gifts weren't particularly impressive, at least to my eye, and none of them were for me, even though they were presented to the both of us. But when people had been choosing presents five or six weeks ago, nobody had known I existed. Five days wasn't nearly enough time to find and transport something selected for the mortal soulmate of the Merciful King.

Last in line was Serpent Court. We had to actually leave the formal receiving room for their gift presentation, which piqued my interest. The Royal Seneschal led us through the hallways, all the nobles trooping along after us in a procession, and took us out of the palace to a wide stone courtyard overlooking the valley.

In the late afternoon light, the sprawling valley was a golden splendor, the late-season grain ripe in the fields and the prairie grasses gone to seed. A pair of hawks wheeled in the sky below us, floating on thermals from the rocky mountain slope. One shot up along the edge of the cliff with a mournful cry.

Movement drew my eye away from the landscape, to the dark archways carved into the mountainside. Two men in livery with black-on-black scale patterns stepped out of the shadows.

A fucking dragon emerged behind them.

I stared, boggled, at the creature. It looked exactly like a storybook dragon, with deep green lacquered scales along a serpentine body, enormous membranous wings folded along its back, and a pair of horns jutting back from an armored face. Delicate chimes dangled from those horns, the sweet sound ringing across the open courtyard as its motion made them swing.

Another decoration of some kind caught the sunlight for a moment, a sharp glint of metal embedded in the soft spot just behind its jaw. Or maybe that's for steering it , I thought, too stunned to be intimidated.

Dragons were real .

While the handlers walked it in a circle, the Royal Seneschal straightened, her expression calm, and pulled out a scroll. "From His Majesty Laekhen Varla, the Serpent King, a token of respect. This war-dragon is one of the finest of my mews, with flame to rival the great drakes of the Shifting Lands. On the maternal side, the pedigree includes—"

I tuned the recitation out. The war-dragon was far more interesting. It didn't look particularly intelligent; unlike a cat or dog, who would be attentive to its environment, the great beast had a glassy-eyed look. It moved almost like it had been programmed, its movements smooth and precise, exactly the same each step. The silkiness of the motion gave it an unreal look, like something in a video game .

The handlers brought it to a halt in front of Cass while the Royal Seneschal was still reading from the lengthy scroll. It lowered its head—inhaled—opened its crocodilian jaws—

I didn't even have time to fear before Cass reacted. He threw one hand back and whipped his wing up in the fraction of a second before the dragon's flame hit him, burning so hot it shone blue. The entire fucking courtyard flung backwards from Cass' gesture, the structure tearing in half and skidding along the side of the mountain. The force of it threw people to the ground and off the fucking cliff —hit worse than any earthquake I'd ever experienced, the stone tiles buckling and the roar of the stone making my ears ring.

Pain screamed through me for less time than it took to process it, like an electric shock. The wash of heat struck with physical force. My lips cracked. Little plants in the stones turned into shriveled scraps. Blistering burns raised on people's skin and vanished in the same heartbeat.

Terrified, I yanked my eyes away from the stone tiles falling into the abyss and back to the dragon.

Back to what was left of the dragon.

The entire other side of the courtyard had turned into a field of twelve-foot-high curved stone knives. Blood and gore dripped down. Recognizable bits of the war-dragon hung like giblets. Every one of those massive blades had sprung up into the dragon and torn it apart in the reverse of a predator's bite, leaving mangled meat where a monster had stood.

He'd done it in seconds. In less time than it took for someone to scream.

Cass stood in front of the carnage like a fallen angel on a battlefield, whole body moving as he panted. His wings glowed red-hot. Blood tracked down his bare, soot-black skin where the feathers met his flesh. Only scraps of his clothing remained.

He wasn't immune to fire, I realized with horror, as the scent of cooking flesh wafted across the chasm between us. His wings were burning him, searing muscle and skin, and he was healing the damage as fast as it occurred.

It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt. My heart beat with regimented calm and my ribs moved slowly as I breathed. Every cell of my body answered to my soulmate's steely control.

Cass reached up and took off his half-melted crown. Black hair came with it, charred to the gold. Black hair grew to replace it before the crown hit the ground.

He took off his earrings. His torc. Dropped them to the stone, the ringing of the metal hitting the slate cutting through the sobs and whimpers of the huddle of courtiers. The cracks at the edges of the courtyard spread, slates and pebbles crumbling into the abyss.

"Hierarch," he said, his voice devoid of emotion and every syllable spoken with careful restraint. "Are you well?"

The Royal Seneschal. Paloma. My eyes darted over to where she'd stood and found her still standing there, staring at Cass with a fixed expression. Her clothing was charred and fragmenting, but I couldn't see any evidence of burns.

He healed her when it flamed, too , I realized, staring. He'd healed all of us.

"I await your instruction, your majesty," she said, pitching her voice to carry.

"Have Yllavar select a token of my appreciation for the Serpent King, and set a team to searching the dragon's remains for the geas-talisman that controlled it," he said with deathly calm. "Find Vaduin, and have him assist with extracting the courtiers entangled in the roots along the cliff. None of them hit the ground, but some fell rather far before I caught them. They'll surely need to be pulled up on ropes." Cass took a deep breath. He spread his wings and crouched. "Delay dinner by an hour. I need a shower."

Paloma put a hand over her heart and bowed, a precise movement. "As you will it."

Cass didn't respond. He flung himself into the sky, wings clawing at the air.

Every knife in the courtyard retracted with the same motion. Bits of dragon splatted to the ground. The stone beneath looked untouched, blood gathering in the runnels between slates and dripping down the raw cliffside.

The flow of blood didn't stop, either. It welled up from the cracks between the flagstones, the amount of blood on the courtyard not diminishing even as the soil turned to mud and as it painted the cliff crimson.

A Court bleeding for its King. A man's agony reflected in the world around him.

I swallowed hard, nauseated by the smell of cooked flesh and the iron reek of blood.

The two men who'd been leading the dragon had been torn to shreds with it. They hadn't been Serpent Court dignitaries, or even Serpent Court's servants. Those deaths hit harder than the horror-movie gore of the scene. They'd been innocent. They'd been ours, and now they were dead. Collateral damage.

Cass had killed them. Had that been conscious choice, or a reaction?

Maybe it didn't matter. There would have been so many more dead if he hadn't acted. But they were still dead.

Someone ought to pay for that , I thought, my skin cold. Someone had put innocent people in danger to try to kill a King, and they deserved to have that cost come calling.