18. Rags to Riches

Rags to Riches

B y the time Cass came out of his room, I'd managed to pull myself together enough to pretend that I hadn't been blatantly ogling him from three feet away. I had my jewelry straightened out, my fancy shoes off, and I was sitting on a couch holding an open book like I was reading it to pass the time as I waited for him.

Cass took the scene in with an impassive expression. One corner of his mouth twitched. "Your book's upside-down, Quyen."

So it was. That was embarrassing.

I gave him a pretty smile. "I'm practicing reading upside-down," I told him, lying smoothly. "It's a useful skill. If you get good enough at it, you can read things people would rather you not." At his raised brow, I gave him a pretty smile. "Managers, mostly, but the skill probably translates to obnoxious fae nobility."

"Hmm." He smiled back, looking amused, and took a seat on the ottoman. "I suppose I'll accept that explanation. Do you want to hear mine?"

It took me a moment for my brain to catch up. Right. An explanation for why the hell we were still going on with the endless coronation proceedings, the thing I'd demanded he defend.

"Sure do." I closed the book – an old-school sci-fi novel with a buxom blonde superimposed on a sleek silver spaceship, clearly pilfered from the mortal world – and propped my head up on one hand. "Let's hear it."

He sighed through his nose. One ear flicked. "I don't belong here," he said softly. "I was born in Ysvai, in Raven Court. My mother is a seamstress, and my father was a soldier. I was their second-born. I was…" Cass swallowed, looking away with his ears pinned back. "…a burden, mostly," he said, his voice going rough. "I came into my magical strength early, and it rapidly grew past my control. When I was seventeen, I nearly killed someone with a kiss. I spent centuries training my power so that I could touch people without harming them."

My brows drew together slowly as he spoke. "You're not royal?"

The corner of his mouth kicked up. "I wish I could say that, but…" He gestured at the palace. "Mercy would disagree with such a statement, I think. I wasn't royal until recently, though."

I leaned back against the couch, regarding him. "So does lineage not matter? Did Mercy pick you because you're so powerful?"

"No, it didn't," he said softly, a pained expression pulling at his face. "Most Kings aren't mages. I suspect that's for the best. It's not normal for a King's ascension to go like this. The forests, the mines, all the regeneration… none of it. I don't blame the High Court for being leery of me, nor the religious administrators." He shook his head, looking off into the middle distance. "I suppose they'll be terrified of me, now. I would've liked to have more time to convince them that I'm not a monster."

I frowned at him. "You saved their lives."

"Do you think that matters?" he asked, raising a brow. "I'm a frightening, dangerous outsider. I doubt anyone who was there will soon forget that I could kill them as easily, and as spectacularly, as I killed that war-dragon."

"And yet you want to make them have dinner with you."

Cass shuffled his wings, looking uncomfortable. "These affairs. I didn't choose them because I like them, or because I, personally, find value in them. I dislike them intensely, in fact. I enjoy card games and house parties, not all this rigamarole." He sighed through his nose and dropped his chin down onto his fist, propping his elbow up on his thigh. "The Court of Mercy is roughly forty thousand years old, and for most of that time, it was a theocracy. This place is steeped in tradition. Vad convinced me it was worth giving the High Court the coronation proceedings so I could do things I actually care about without them fighting me on it, like working with the regenerated wildlings and burned-out healers."

That made my frown deepen. "You're the King, though. You're not just a healer anymore."

He looked away. "King Omahice was dying for some time, and even before that, he gave over most of the actual day-to-day of ruling to the religious administrators and the rest of the bureaucracy. They were preparing to handle a shattering Court after the King died with no blood-heir. They can surely handle one that's in one piece, even if it does have a great deal more trees than it used to."

I snorted, startled into it.

His mouth slanted up, expression warming. "Well, it does," he said, as if that was only reasonable. "If I can figure out how to let people cut them down, we could have a booming lumber industry."

"Ridiculous," I said, shaking my head as I tried to suppress a smile, my earrings swinging.

Cass flashed me a grin. "I try."

"Do you seriously think people are going to be chill about you because you kept to their coronation schedule?" I asked. "That seems like wishful thinking."

"Maybe it is," he said, the levity vanishing. "I don't really have anything else to offer them, though. I am what I am." His jaw worked. "I know I'm not doing a good job at playing the courtier. I don't want to be there, they don't want me to be there, and I'm struggling to remain sane and present when the whole Court is constantly clamoring for my attention. It's as if every inch of my skin is itching, all the time, and scratching only makes it worse." Cass sighed and dropped his head back. "What I'd like to be doing is spending half the day meditating and the other half practicing, but instead I'm stuck wearing fancy clothes and trying not to constantly wield Court magic in new and unsettling ways."

"You could still cancel dinner," I pointed out. "There's plenty of other shit to do. Even if there's nothing we can do to help the investigation into which one of our beloved courtiers arranged for a barbeque—"

Cass laughed, a bright sound of disbelief that made me grin. "It's a long list," he said wryly. "Most of the nobility are the kind of people who might do things like geas dragons to blast me with fire, and not care about who dies alongside me. Vad calls them the vipers," he said. "I have three dukes who would surely love to see me dead, a palace full of courtiers who seem to be torn between being afraid of me and wanting me to be their tame monster, and a collection of religious administrators who see me as an existential threat." Cass exhaled sharply. "If I die, this whole fucking Court is plunged into chaos. I'm not canceling dinner. I don't need another black mark against me."

Well, that put to rest any chance of me arguing him out of it. Fae couldn't lie. He'd said he wasn't canceling dinner, so he wasn't going to.

"Okay, fine," I said, unsuccessfully trying to suppress my annoyance. "No canceling dinner. But what about the rest of it? If it's not bloodlines and it's not power, how'd you become King?"

Cass wet his lips. "It's complicated, and primarily because I'm a very unusual mage," he said, sounding uncomfortable. He rubbed at the back of his neck. "How much experience do you have with fae healers? More than for your life-debt, I mean?"

"Tch, I don't even have that," I said, lifting my lip at the memory. "Off-the-books mine, remember? We were off the books, too. I got tricked. He's dead, though, so," I said, viciousness coming to the surface. "That put paid to that."

He leaned back, ears pinning and expression going hard. "You were stolen ?" he asked in a cold voice, and with such animalistic territoriality that I expected to see the floor growing fangs. "Who allowed that?"

It didn't, though. Nothing changed. He was angry, but the palace wasn't showing it— he was.

"I don't know," I said, watching Cass. "The Duke of Flies, maybe. At least, we were sending everything south to somewhere called 'Flies.' I'm assuming that's the same place."

The muscles in his temple jumped. "Well," he said, his voice low and dangerous. "That's good to know."

I made myself relax, trying to ease him out of his angry focus with my body language. "Fae healers," I said, looking at him from under lowered lashes.

"Hmm." His jaw clenched again, but the tension went out of his shoulders and mine. "Healers typically revert damage. It's…" Cass pursed his lips. "It's similar in some ways to glamor. The two truths lie alongside each other; the body you had and the one you have. We switch the order. It can be broken if we link it to an oath or bargain, and the healing is shattered, revealing the other truth."

He sighed through his nose again, and twitched one ear as if he was fending off a fly. "I can do that, of course, but I'm also a command healer, in that I can control the body itself and cause true healing, and I'm a reflex healer, in that I do it automatically."

"You mentioned the command healing before," I said, when he didn't continue. "Is that and the reflex healing why I'm getting affected by you all the time?"

"Presumably." Cass grimaced, lifting his lip. "It might also be because I have what's called 'blood-unity,'" he said with a self-conscious shrug. "Not many fae have it; perhaps one in three thousand. Magically speaking, I'm indivisible. If my blood's alive, it's a part of me, and distance doesn't matter. Which also seems to be the case with me and the Court, and if we balance, I suspect it will be the case with me and you," Cass added, my cheeks warming from his embarrassment.

"That doesn't seem bad," I offered. "It's kind of nice not having to worry about getting hurt."

Cass breathed a laugh, a smile tugging at his mouth. "That's generally the benefit of being blood-linked to me, yes." He gave me a lopsided smile. "It's all the rest of it people tend to dislike."

"It's not so bad," I said, smiling back at him, a warm sensation curling under my breastbone.

"Well, regardless," Cass said, his expression soft and almost… affectionate. "I used that combination of characteristics and my talent for channeling power to try to save King Omahice, who was dying from a nearly-incurable ailment called 'deliquescence.' I poured my blood into his veins to do so, which made his body mine. I even succeeded at the task."

He fell silent, his expression drifting back towards unhappiness. I reached out with one foot and nudged his ottoman, careful not to touch him. "King Omahice is dead, though."

He nodded, a tight motion. "He killed himself. My blood was in him, and his in me." Cass looked sidelong at me, his dark eyes unreadable but his grief and bitterness coiling through my veins. "He wanted me for an heir, and Courts follow blood, not birth. So."

"So." I watched him, waiting for him to finish, and not taking my foot off his seat. I liked the effect of my nearness to him. The halo of his senses radiating into me was so much better than the control that transferred effortlessly across the distance.

"Here I am, in all my upsetting glory," Cass said wryly. He braced himself on his thighs again, meeting my gaze. "I'm trying to balance the demands of the High Court with everything else." He made a face. "I suppose I'm trying to reduce the number of times people try to kill me without regard for who else might suffer. If I could abdicate, I would, but we're all stuck with me."

"What about the people underground?" I asked, bouncing my foot as the thought brought my anxiety back to the forefront of my mind. I'd dreamed about it so often, of being trapped in the dark, unable to move, swallowed whole— "Why couldn't you delay the coronation until they were all safe? We're just leaving them there. I feel gross going to fancy dinners and talking about fashion when there's people buried alive."

"Those underground are in stasis. They're not being harmed," Cass said, though his unease filtered into me, amplifying my stress. "They might even be safer underground than above it."

"His hand might get chewed off," I said. My stomach lurched even thinking about it. To be helpless, trapped in stone, all unaware…

"That's really troubling you, isn't it?" Cass asked softly. When I refocused on his face, he smiled at me, a gentle expression, and held out his hand. "Let's find him."

All the stress and anger fell away in the face of that smile. I reached out in a half-daze, but paused before I set my hand in his. "Just like that? You didn't want to touch me."

His smile stretched, the corners of his eyes crinkling and the sparks of gold in his dark gaze catching the light. "I don't want to overwhelm you, and I'm not very comfortable with casual touch when I don't know the person well," he said. Cass wiggled his fingers at me when I still didn't touch him. "I know I'm a lot to handle, and because of what we are, I doubt I can dampen it with you. The easiest way to find your friend would likely be with our bodies fully aligned, but I think we can do it with only skin contact."

"Aligned?" I asked. My hand drifted towards his. "What, like, sitting in your lap?"

Cass flicked one ear, looking uncomfortable. "You're small enough that the simplest would probably be you sitting between my legs, back against my stomach, with our fingers interlaced. But that's—"

"Okay."

He blinked, ears dropping down into a pose of self-consciousness. "Okay?"

I stood up and smiled down at him, a sparkling ebullience taking residence in my chest. "Okay," I said again. "I want to find him, and you're no more overwhelming than our Court. Let's do this the easy way."

"Our Court," he said, almost in a murmur, without any censure at all. Cass resettled himself on the ottoman, moving to make me space. Every inkling of sexual desire vanished as he spread his legs. Nervousness took root instead, Cass' control and Cass' emotions indelibly part of me. He looked up at me, brows slanting. "If you're certain, then I'm willing. I didn't—" His breath caught in his throat. He had to swallow, a half-despairing expression flitting across his face. "I didn't expect you to want to touch me ever again after seeing that."

I wasn't certain about any of this. It didn't matter, though. I'd made my decision, and I would follow through, even if it was overwhelming. "Give me a little credit, splendor. I'm your soulmate, after all," I said, and set my hand in his.

Even with everything about him flooding into me, Cass' obliteration of our sex drives made it easy to sit between his legs, and to scoot back until my hips were flush with his groin and my legs were pressed against his thighs down to my knees. He was so big , his abs against my back like a wall and his powerful body surrounding mine. He was—

— exhausted and frightened and aching with hope, controlling his breath and his heart and the way his blood wanted to rise. Balanced against the weight of his bronze-feathered wings, looking down at his soulmate, trying not to demand anything of her—

—a world unto himself.

I leaned my head back against his chest. The warmth of his body soaked into me, hotter than any human man, radiant heat that melted all the tension out of me. My lungs were so much smaller than his, but he was built like a bird, and he breathed like one. We fell into a rhythm, even our heartbeats matching pace, our bodies falling into complete alignment.

"Are you doing alright?" Cass asked, his deep voice vibrating through me.

I knew he had to know already. Even if the control went one-way, he'd been aware enough of me during his ascension to the throne for our soulmate bond to form. But I liked that he was asking, so I murmured, "Doing good."

Cass set his hands on my thighs, palms up. "Focus on your memories of him," he said, pitching his voice low. "Remember him, and remember where you found him."

He sounded like a zen master opening a meditation session. It settled me, drawing me down into that place of deep calm and focus.

I slid my fingers through his, and let Mercy flood into me.