19. Animism

Animism

A beating heart at the center of the world.

Stone holding sparks of life, flooded with magic, as much a living thing as the man holding me.

The maids singing in the laundry, two cats squabbling over a patch of sunlight, the sun-warmed stone, the mountain beneath, the trees cracking open the bedrock, a lingering songbird warbling his music to a wood that couldn't listen, motes of dust floating on a chill autumn breeze—

"Remember who you are," Cass murmured.

Feathers shifting, a heart beating too hard against my chest, the dusky scent of a woman's skin—

"Not me," he said. "Keep hold of yourself, Quyen. Remember. Don't get lost."

His nose ran through my hair. His breath warmed my scalp. His lips pressed gently to the top of my head in a quiet benediction.

"Your splendor," I whispered. "I get it. Why they call you that." My voice shook.

The Court clamored for me, every rock and leaf and sunbeam. The deer in the woods, the water tumbling down steep ravines, the people in the city at my feet—

Cass' lips turned up against my hair. "Better," he murmured. "You're a natural."

Tremors ran through me, leaving me trembling. Talking was helping.

A woman in ecstasy, her lover's fingers buried inside her. Three children running through the streets, screaming with laughter. A horse shying from a snake, the snake's agony as a heel broke its skull, a man's fear and anger as he defended his livelihood.

"Seven weeks of this," I got out. I was breathing too hard. My bones creaked where I clung to Cass.

"Three hundred eighteen years before I was safe to casually touch anyone but a master healer," he said, with the same slow confidence. He nuzzled my hair again, wrapping his body around me, keeping me safe. "Yet even I have to fight not to lose myself to the Court."

Mercy's beating heart, slow and steady, warming my spine.

My north star. The center of the great wheel of the world. No matter how lost I got, I would always be able to find my way home.

I'd proven that already, hadn't I?

I pressed back against the strong wall of my soulmate's body and let the tension drift away. "Far south, and a little east." I inhaled, remembering the late-afternoon sunlight streaming over me, warming the stone, a lost man's hand in mine. "Cliffs. Trees. Opals."

The world sprawled out beneath me, hungry and wanting. Pines. Mountains. A pack of wargs, voices lifted in song.

Hello, old friends, I thought. I knew that song. I'd been that song, once, and walked right into a tree about it.

"Opals," Cass said, his voice going harsh and guttural.

"Opals," I breathed back, remembering the shine and flashing colors. The ones I'd brought with me sang to me, shattering my awareness like a prism shattering light, flinging brilliance and shadow through the world.

Cass growled, the deep warning of a predatory animal. It wasn't a sound that could have come from the throat of a man. That shadow of a beast was part of my soulmate, fangs bared and golden eyes gleaming in the darkness, fur standing up in a ruff.

Show me .

The tunnels were gone, but I remembered where they'd been—remembered crawling through them, the earth pressing in on all sides. It embraced me now, welcoming me, cool and endless, eternal sleep beckoning.

Cass' heart beat against my spine. Cass' breath heated my skin. I didn't lose myself.

There . I found one sleeping form in the stone, buried with the opals, and another, and another. Right arm reaching, air at my fingertips—there!

Relief flooded me. "He's okay."

"Quyen," Cass said with purring amusement, "you built him far more than a cairn."

My awareness drew back with his, through the heap of stones I'd built up around his hand… and then through stone after stone, at least six feet of them, fitted together like a roughstone wall.

"Oh," I squeaked, my blush hitting me like a semi truck. "I, um, I had no idea I could do that?"

He chuckled, the sound wrapping around me. "It seems I'm not the only one affecting the landscape. But he's safe. Come back to me."

Warmth against my chest, a flame held in my arms, almost enough to make me forget the price. Small hands in mine. Every breath and shift of my body controlled, the yearning pressing against my skin with reckless need that couldn't be allowed to run rampant.

Like the forest. Like my power.

Beasts howling at the moon. Wings and fangs, blood and saliva—

Cass squeezed my hands and let go, breaking the skin contact. It threw me back into my own body with a sense of dislocation. I wavered, almost dizzy, but I stood, because Cass didn't want me in his lap anymore and I was still so wrapped up in his emotions that I acted on them without thinking.

"I think I can put that on a map," Cass said in a rough voice. His wings chimed as he resettled them. "Given the barrow you built your friend, I'm confident he'll be safe until we can get the Jackal Court breakers to that location for extraction."

I turned to look at him, having to work to make my eyes focus. I blinked, squinting to clear my vision, then tried out a smile. "That's good."

His mouth tilted up into a boyish smile. "Feeling better about things, I hope?"

"Better enough to face down dinner, and whatever useless crap we have to endure tomorrow," I said with a grumble.

He tilted his head, one ear turning like he was listening to the room. "Let's stay up late tonight and cancel the promenade tomorrow morning," he suggested, offering me a hopeful smile. "I ought to put the dragon mews back into one piece, anyway, and maybe we could have breakfast together?"

"You'd like to?" I asked, perking up.

"Take a meal one-on-one with my lovely soulmate?" Cass asked with an innocent expression. "Surely. It seems like a pleasant prelude to the evening revel, for which Dani assures me our outfits are spectacular. Even your dress for the coronation didn't rate 'spectacular' from her, so," he added with a smirk, "I'm greatly looking forward to seeing you in your revel gown. The price is getting trussed up, myself, but I expect it's a price worth paying."

I waved my hand at him, as if wafting off the compliment, though a glittery sensation scudded across my skin and lodged in my chest. "A few minutes of admiration hardly seems worth spending hours doing all of that."

Cass flashed me another bright smile. "Would you feel better if I spent the better part of the night possessively ogling you? It's a bit outside my typical repertoire, but I'm pleased to ogle if it would set you at ease."

Blushing, I stuck my tongue out at him. A flash of heat thudded into me, Cass' surge of desire catching my breath in my throat and making my pulse throb. It vanished a moment later, my soulmate locking down his physical reactions, and I let out a sharp breath. "Danica told me possessiveness comes with the soulmate bond."

"It does," he said, shrugging with shoulder and wing. "Generally, the possessiveness and focus increase until soulmates find their balance and everything falls into place. Faery can be… insistent."

"Does it scare you?" I asked, feeling my skin prickle from anxiety that wasn't mine.

"Shitless," he said, with a brilliant smile.

That startled a laugh out of me. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Cass leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. "I looked, that first day, while you were sleeping. Mercy is enormous. Most of that land isn't densely populated, but there's still several million people in the Court." He exhaled through his nose, his expression going tight. "You're the only one, Quyen. My only soulmate. You're my one chance."

With the way he said that, it was clear that "soulmate" didn't have the same uniqueness in Faery as the idea did in the stories I knew. But apparently that didn't matter. In all the millions of people in the Court of Mercy, there was only me for him.

"No pressure," I said, a little dazed.

"I wish that was true," he said wryly. "Given that I almost certainly can't leave the Court of Mercy, and that I doubt anyone's going to want to move to the Court of Mercy while I'm in it, I'm feeling significant amounts of pressure towards not fucking this up more than I already have."

I gave his ottoman a shove, not budging it a single inch. "We made a bargain about that, splendor," I reminded him with a mock-frown. "Starting from zero, remember?"

His mouth curled up into a catlike smile. "I didn't bargain away my guilt."

"Rude," I said, frowning a little more. "The whole point was to start out on even footing, not with you trying to make up for things and me holding it over your head."

Cass huffed a laugh and leaned back. "Your generosity is a great boon, but it's not a simple task for me to grant myself such understanding for my behavior." He laced his fingers together and stretched them over his head—then spread his wings with the song of a drawn sword, moving with easy grace.

His shirt rode up, and I didn't even have the wherewithal to look, utterly captivated by the sight of his gleaming wings. The dark metal shone with undertones of bronze, each feather perfect, without scratch or kink. He could have been an illustration, too perfect to exist, except that I felt the movement in each feather deep in my soul, as if I could close my eyes and be the man across from me, my wings spread and tension in my powerful frame.

"I can feel it when you do that, now that I've touched you," he murmured. Instead of pulling away, though, Cass put his hands behind his head and tilted his wings for me, showing off their strength. "It's like you're reading over my shoulder, except my body instead of a book."

"Does it bother you?" I asked absently, watching the light shining off the deadly edges of his feathers. I traced my fingers through the air as if I could feel them under my hands, imagining.

Cass beat his wings once, sending a gust of wind across me, then folded them neatly behind him. "It's not unpleasant," he said, which wasn't quite an answer. His mouth tilted up. "Pleasurable, even. It does draw my magical attention to you, though, so if you'd prefer my awareness not linger in your body, perhaps refrain."

Memories of how very aware of his body I could be – of drowning in his pleasure, feeling his hand wrapped around his cock like it was mine, and of being able to fall into lockstep motion with him – flooded my mind. My cheeks heated at the thought that he might do the same to me . Fuck, what would it be like if we had sex like that? If we did anything like that?

"That seems fair," I said, somehow managing to say the words without sounding like I was on fire with lust. "You, uh. Have my permission. For what it's worth."

One brow lifted. "I do?"

I shrugged one shoulder, trying to ignore how warm my face was. "It seems like I have an all-access pass," I said in as nonchalant a voice as I could muster. "If you don't get any bodily privacy, it feels like I should give you the same, uh. Liberties. So. Permission granted."

"That's…" Cass paused, tilting his head as he considered. "Kind," he said after a moment. "It's not my intention to be a voyeur, but I appreciate knowing that I have explicit permission."

"Not much to voyeur about," I said, smirking at him, starting to regain my footing. "Whatever you're doing to lock down your sex drive is obliterating mine. It doesn't seem like I'm capable of going past 'sexual attraction' to 'actively turned on,' let alone doing anything about it."

He winced and rubbed at his cheek with his knuckles. "I knew that was likely to be the case," Cass said uncomfortably. "I'm affecting you much more strongly than I even affect people when I'm blood-linked to them, but you did say we could do chastity for a while, and chastity is much less difficult when my body isn't, ah, demanding something else."

"It's fine. Seriously," I added, when he gave me a wary look. "It's not exactly the same, but I'm used to having next to no privacy. My family lives in a two-bedroom that's about eight hundred square feet. The boys get one bedroom, Bà gets the other, Auntie has a twin behind a screen in the living room, and I sleep on the futon couch." I paused, then said, "Slept."

That loss tugged at me, a heavy pang of pain. I would never see them again. I knew that—had known it, really, from the moment I woke up in Faery with a blood-sealed promise binding my life to a fae master.

It didn't make it any easier to bear.

"I know you can't turn off the link, but are you actually okay with me listening in?" I asked to fill the silence. I bounced my foot, trying to burn off the anxiety and grief. "A lot of it I can't ignore, but there's a difference between overhearing and eavesdropping."

Cass blinked at me for a moment, then breathed a quiet laugh, his shoulders and wings relaxing. "People rarely ask that when they're linked to me," he said. His ears leaned towards me, shifting the loose waves of his hair. "I generally don't mind the scrutiny, but it's also always been temporary before. Our entanglement is likely permanent. May I think about it?"

"Sure." I flashed him an easy smile. "You can also change your mind. Forever's a long time."

"I appreciate that." Cass rolled his shoulders and got to his feet. "I suppose we ought to get ready for dinner. That hour delay is vanishing faster than I'd hoped."

I made a face. "Yeah, I guess."

"Chin up, Quyen," he said with a playful smirk. "After tomorrow, we get to start dealing with a whole new set of horrible problems. Isn't that exciting?"

"Actually?" I said, lips twitching with good humor. "I think it kind of is."