20. Prophets & Miracles

Prophets there were probably still courtiers dangling from the mountain in tree roots, and the people who were able to attend were all shaken. Even the people who hadn't rated being present for the gift presentations looked spooked. Rumor traveled fast, and the gory scene would be easy to go look at if you were bold enough.

Luckily, the event wasn't a milling-around kind. We spent four hours sitting in fancy chairs, eating tiny servings of the fae version of haute cuisine, with every wary eye on Cass.

The strain of all those eyes on him left every muscle down my back tight. Cass kept iron hold of his command over his body, breathing with regimented care and forbidding our bodies from dumping adrenaline into our veins. The contrast of the stress and the lack of hormonal stress response left me antsy, but it was better than a display of pique. At least Cass just looked grim instead of like a loose cannon.

That wasn't to say it was a particularly good impression. The enormous banquet hall managed to be oppressive, the light from the many lamps not chasing away the shadows and the music sounding tinny, like the players were trapped behind glass. I caught Danica suppressing grimaces a couple times as she tried bites of food, too. Either the cooks had been too freaked-out to do well, or Cass' stress was affecting even the food in the palace.

It tasted good to me, but that was no guarantee of anything. I'd been eating rations at an illegal mine for seven months, spent six weeks starving in the forest, and had no idea what fae cuisine was supposed to taste like. Maybe all the spices were wrong, or something.

Nobody wanted to spend the witching hours hanging out with the guy who'd shredded a war-dragon while casually ignoring being incinerated, so we didn't have to stay late after all. Cass got to meditate for an hour before bed, I got to take a bubble bath, and we both passed out without Cass needing to knock us out with healing magic.

I woke up and puttered around while Cass took a quick morning shower and had another meditation session. It was a pleasant experience; I got the sense he was affecting me more, not less, but the result was that I felt centered and calm, and the constant susurrus of the Court quieted to a gentle murmur.

The two of us headed out together in a much better mood than the day before. Cass was even smiling, not just at jokes or anything, but the sort of constant slight smile people wear when they're having a good day. It left a fluttery feeling in my chest. If it hadn't been entirely undignified, I would have been skipping down the hall.

Unfortunately, breakfast was not to be. Cass and I made it all the way down the hallway out of the royal residences and into the main body of the palace before the Royal Seneschal appeared out of nowhere and beelined towards us. Given that she was easily five foot ten and built like a fertility statue, that was no small feat. She must have been lying in wait for Cass.

"Your Majesties," she said, giving us a bow with her hand over her heart. "Though I know you must surely be weary of trials, I must lay another at your feet. The worshippers…" Disgust flickered across her face. "They have become insistent."

Cass rubbed at his temples with one hand. "How insistent, Hierarch Paloma?" he asked, sounding weary. "Surely the death of one dragon isn't anything compared to the ascension. I'd prefer not to bow to their interpretation of events, nor give them the satisfaction of having become too loud to ignore."

"It wasn't the dragon." She glanced pointedly towards a knot of loitering courtiers, and then at me. "Perhaps we could discuss this in a more discreet location?"

"Of course," Cass said smoothly, with the sort of tone of someone who wanted to do anything but that. He didn't even touch the stone wall; it merely parted, revealing a bleak hallway with a brightly-lit round sitting-room beyond. "If you will, hierarch?"

Paloma smiled, in the tight way of angry women facing dangerous men, and walked through the doorway.

I followed her before Cass could make that decision for me. His wings chimed from his surprise, the feathers slicking down into a blade, but he didn't try to stop me, and he didn't say anything about it. He followed me in, and when I took a lounging seat on one of the two brocade couches, he stood behind me like a bodyguard and set his hands on the back of it.

The door closed behind him, leaving us ensconced in a room surrounded entirely by bedrock. It was a pretty place, if a bit claustrophobic; octagonal instead of truly round, with frescos on each wall of a pastoral landscape viewed through arches, as if we were in a gazebo instead of entombed in the palace. Aside from the two couches, there was a carved coffee table between them and torch-shaped sconces in each corner of the room.

The only other decoration was a single globe-shaped lamp dangling from the domed ceiling. This secret room had to have been designed exactly for this purpose: a place guaranteed to be free of listening ears and prying eyes, accessible only by the Monarch.

I bet there's secret sex rooms, too , I thought, examining the place with fascination. Upkeep had to be a pain in the ass. It wasn't like the maids had easy access. Probably only Cass knew how many of these little rooms there even were.

The Seneschal took the seat across from us, which was probably a power move. I'd gotten the vibe that she didn't really like Cass, and she wasn't doing anything to correct that opinion. "Her Majesty likely doesn't need to be present for this discussion," she said smoothly, directing her smile solely at my soulmate.

"Quyen hasn't been made aware of all the political difficulties yet, of course, but she's my soulmate and Queen," Cass said in a pleasant voice. "Surely you don't intend to suggest that the Queen be left out of the dealings of her own Court."

"I'm sure she didn't mean it that way," I said, giving Paloma a smile of my own. "I saw some of the cultists coming in, hierarch. Cass isn't a god, and they're wrong to treat him like one. He was chosen by Mercy, and Mercy's goddess is Ithronel. Isn't that true?"

His surprised pleasure filtered into me, like sunlight shining off the waves on a cloudy day. The grip of his hands on the couch eased. So did the tension in his wings, the feathers rousing slightly so that they no longer formed one smooth surface.

Paloma examined me for a moment, her expression curious rather than upset. "Many mortals are among those flocking to the palace in false worship. After the events of yesterday, how are you so certain of your soulmate's humility?"

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "There's many fae, as well, if what I saw was any indication of numbers. But…" I glanced up at Cass, who offered me a half-smile, his dark eyes hopeful. I smiled back before looking towards the Royal Seneschal. "When the Court first caught me, I admit that I thought I was meeting a powerful spirit. I even gave the Court offerings. Cass isn't the Court, though. I mean, he is, but the Court is also its own thing, and it's a lot more powerful than we are." I shrugged again, a little helplessly. "He may be god- like , but that's because of the Court's power, not because he is a god. He can die, hierarch. Can a god?"

I wasn't sure why I was so certain that death was on the table. The bandits had called me deathless—one of the Deathless. Something told me I wasn't, though, and that neither was Cass. Maybe it was Mercy, winding through us, the Court making sure we knew not to get too big for our britches. We answered to it , not the other way around. The crowns were to remind us of that, even when we weren't wearing them.

"Even the Deathless may die, but first, they must be utterly forgotten," Paloma said, in a sonorous voice, as if she was intoning a prophecy. Her full mouth curved up. "Some say that death visits twice: first when our lives end, and then when our memories are forgotten. For the gods, the order is different."

Like fae healing , I thought, my brows drawing together. Two truths, lying side-by-side. Something could flip their order: unwounded instead of wounded; memory instead of vitality.

Cass had said that fae healing could be broken. Could deathlessness?

"As I can feel Mercy's yoke, I'm fairly sure the order remains the same for me," Cass said in a dry voice, though he sounded uncomfortable—and maybe a little uncertain. Given people's reactions, and from what he'd said, the extreme reaction of the landscape was right up there in the god tier. If it was unsettling for the common man, it had to be unsettling for him, too.

Discomfort flickered across Paloma's face, but she hid it well. I might not have seen it if I hadn't bartended at a strip club for so long, and learned how to tell when the dancers – who were talented professionals at hiding discomfort – needed a rescue. "Even were you to stand before your worshippers and declare yourself not a god, I doubt they would believe it," she said coldly, though I didn't think the ice was directed at Cass. "The fools would surely believe you misled."

"What's your desire, then?" Cass asked. He shuffled his wings. "You said they were being insistent. They've been on the palace grounds, albeit on the other side of the bridge, for days now. What makes today any different?"

Paloma looked like she'd bitten into a lemon. "Three fae and a mortal claim to have been visited by Ithronel. They say she wept as she spoke of a thief in her palace drinking her springs dry." Her hands clenched so tightly in her lap that her knuckles went pale. "They say her statue stepped off the pedestal and spoke to them in her temple, and indeed, the statue is gone and the priestesses on duty fled. They weren't your worshippers before, your majesty, but they are now, and they're preaching that you can conquer death for all of Mercy on the Silver Coronation."

There was that phrase again—"Silver Coronation."

"That's ridiculous," Cass snapped before I could say anything. His dark wings mantled with the sound of a drawn sword as he leaned forward, casting me in shadow. "How can fae say something like that?"

Her face pinched tighter. "I expect that they believe every word, your majesty."

I raised my hand like a child in school and gave Paloma a pretty smile. "For the sake of a mortal who's only just recently made it to civilized lands, what's the Silver Coronation?"

Cass sighed gustily and dropped forward, catching his weight on his forearms on the back of the couch. "Wild magic is influenced by the sky," he said, relaxing away from sharp frustration as he spoke. "The most visible manifestation of that influence are the sky-called shapeshifters, of which moon-called are the most common."

"No shit?" I asked, craning my neck to look up at him. "There's fae werewolves?"

His ears lifted and tilted towards me as he laughed. "Something like that." He settled his wings behind him and smiled down at me, the expression lighting up his whole face. "All celestial lights, including meteors and auroras, affect power. The three major comets are the strongest of these. Strange and terrible magic can be done when the comets are in the sky, and all three of them will be lighting our nights in a little less than two years."

"Huh." I digested that. Maybe there was more to astrology and geomancy than I'd given people credit for. "How often does that happen? And why 'Silver Coronation'?"

"The comets are sometimes called the Scepter, the Sword, and the Crown," Paloma said with an air of benevolent instruction. "Llystaeon, Incantes, and Mistravel. Those three items are commonly used during coronations, and the white light of the comets is reminiscent of silver."

Cass draped himself more firmly along the couch, his wing shadowing me. "And they align, oh, every three and a half million years or so."

I gave him an over-exaggerated frown and received a boyish grin in reply, showing a dimple in his right cheek. "Do not tell me there's three-and-a-half-million-year-old fae."

"Fae? No," he said. "At least, not that anyone knows of. The oldest living fae are somewhere around a hundred fifty thousand years old. Anything older than that is liable to be a god or a monster, and possibly both."

"Fucking hell," I muttered under my breath. That was, like, the Stone Age of the Stone Age.

"You've got a mouth on you," Cass said, sounding pleased about it.

"That's what men tell me," I said, smirking up at him for a moment. Heat thudded into me, Cass losing his grip on his physical experience of sexual attraction for a moment as his eyes widened. With a wicked grin, I turned back to Paloma.

"Alright, so," I said, acting as if the byplay was a totally normal thing to do in front of a religious administrator. Fae were chill with public sex, so presumably it was. "Four people claim to have had a religious vision, and they're preaching that Cass is their holy savior who will end death itself." I exhaled a sharp breath through my nose. "Obviously, we don't want some sort of cult on our doorstep. What's your solution, hierarch?"

A strange light settled into her face—not quite mania, but something akin to it; a bloodthirstiness that made my hackles rise. I recognized that look. I'd seen it before, on the faces of gangbangers and reckless adrenaline junkies. Those people were the ones to stay far, far away from, unless you liked games of Russian Roulette and tattoos of black tears.

"They claim you want to abolish death," she said with calm satisfaction. "Prove them otherwise. Remind them that there is a god of death, too."

"I'm a healer ," Cass said, his voice going cold.

"You're battle-trained. You fought in the Annihilation War, and those deadly wings you wear are the proof of the blood on your hands," Paloma said, meeting his eyes without fear. The silver tears painted on her face glittered. "You're a killer. Stymphalian birds are creatures made for tearing through armies, and so are you."

A dangerous, animalistic rumble started in my soulmate's chest. He leaned forward. "They're not my enemies."

"They're the enemies of the goddess of mercy," she said. She didn't flinch away from his anger. "Does that not make them your enemies, King of Mercy?"

I got to my feet, all my skin cold. I couldn't forget what it had been like to slaughter people with the power of the Court—how easy it was. If I could do something like that, with no training and no knowledge of how human bodies fit together, what could someone like Cass do? "She's the goddess of mercy ," I said in a flat voice. "Aren't you her priestess?"

The smile Paloma gave me would have chilled the blood of seasoned soldiers. "To grant mercy is to make debtors," she said, like she was quoting something, "and faery things pay their debts, or die."