21. Influence

Influence

C ass pushed himself up, straightening to his full, looming height. His control settled onto me like shackles, my heart beating with his. "As they have not yet caused me nor Mercy harm, they need neither pay nor die," he said in a dangerous rumble that sent giddy heat skidding down my spine. "Think carefully on your next words, hierarch, lest you find yourself entombed in my palace the way others remain entombed across my Court."

That got a reaction. Paloma's ears flicked backwards, and her eyes darted to the side before she yanked them back to us.

The walls were closer than they'd been, I realized with a shock of horror. The room was literally closing in on us like in a horror movie. The murals had changed, too, painted storms darkening the skies and distant buildings smeared with orange flames and plumes of black smoke. While I watched, smudges of gray spread like ink into the forms of snarling wolves stalking the cattle in the fields.

There were no doors. No windows. The only way in or out had been the hallway behind us carved through solid stone, now closed. It had been made by Cass' will, and it had been unmade the same way.

Paloma's face paled, but she held herself still. "If you do not desire to intervene, we surely must intercede with Ithronel on the Court's behalf. Shall I speak your will to the high priestess, your majesty?" she asked in a smooth voice.

Cass gave her a razor's smile. "Do. I have no desire to see the coronation proceedings disrupted by…" He glanced at me. "…cultists, but neither do I desire them disrupted by blood. Surely the high priestess can dream up a more thoughtful plan for handling religious sycophants than slaughter."

Cass focused for a moment. Another door appeared to our right, one with no tunnel, opening up into a hallway.

She didn't look, but her ear tilted towards it, listening to the sounds of the palace.

"You may go." Cass folded down his wings with a soft shing , the light catching on the feathers.

Paloma stood and bowed, the movement so precise I suspected that it was calibrated to within an inch. She held the pose for a moment, then turned and left without speaking, her back straight and ears pinned back.

The doorway snapped shut behind her. Cass growled and started pacing, moving like a restless animal. The walls stopped encroaching in. The murals stayed the same.

I sat back down on the couch and watched him, tracking with my eyes. "You know," I said after a moment, "if you're going to piss off the religious leaders, you probably shouldn't piss off both factions."

He raked his fingers through his hair. "You said I'm not a god. You called them cultists."

"Well, duh," I said with a snort. "She's your Seneschal, and I'm guessing she's held that position for damn well near forever. She's obviously important, she's an Ithronel fanatic, and she already doesn't like you, so she might as well see me as the moderating force on your heathenish behavior." I shook my head and sprawled back on the couch, hooking my arms over the back of it. "Paloma's not going to like hearing about the benefits of styling you as the god-King of Mercy, you know?"

"Is that what you think I should do?" Cass asked, continuing to pace. He sounded like he was on the verge of disgust. "Take advantage of their hope to cement my position?"

"I didn't say that, your splendor," I said, frowning at him. When he shot me a dark look, I flattened my mouth at him. "Look, all I'm saying is that there's a lot of other options besides 'kill' and 'ignore.' Given that you literally remade the landscape and probably, like, abolished disease, you're not going to be able to escape there being some sort of folk tradition about you, right? So you might as well get ahead of the curve and figure out what you want that to look like, and how to get there."

Cass paused in his pacing, turning to look at me instead, his brows furrowed. "You want me to paint myself as some kind of folk hero? That seems…" He trailed off, and didn't finish the sentence, frowning.

I flashed him a smile. "I mean, maybe. It's worth thinking about all the possibilities, even the ones you don't like, and that means everything from god-King down on through slaughtering people who dare to pray to you instead of Ithronel. I'm a planner. I like having contingencies before I start heading into complicated things."

He snorted at that, a rude sound. "When have you even had time to plan?" he asked, returning to pacing. It was a more thoughtful sort of pacing, though, like going for a walk to sort things out in your head. "You had less than an hour to decide whether to become the Merciful Queen, and things haven't truly stopped happening in the days since."

"Sometimes you have to make snap decisions," I said with a shrug. "It's not like I didn't have a chance to get used to the weird magic shit, or being tied to you and the Court. One of the benefits of thinking things through at a frankly obsessive level is that you get a pretty good idea of how and why you usually make the decisions you do."

Cass laughed, dropping his head back so that his dark waves tangled on his shoulders. The tension dropped out of him, my whole body relaxing alongside his. "Gods," he said in a self-deprecating tone. "I admit that I'm rather ill-suited for my current circumstances. I never wanted anything like this, and healers tend to be reactive creatures." He shook his head and gave me a rueful smile. "Especially battle-trained ones."

"Fish out of water?" I asked, raising a brow at him.

"More like a bull at a revel," he said with an over-exaggerated grimace. "I'll surely survive it, but I'm bound to make a mess of things, and nobody's pleased that I'm there, including me."

I huffed a breath through my nose, not quite a snort. "Guess I'm your consolation prize, huh?"

He stopped mid-pace and turned on his heel to look at me, frowning.

"What?" I asked, trying to laugh it off. "Don't tell me you'd do it all over again just to end up with a grouchy mortal hotwired into your body."

"I…" His frown deepened. "I'm not certain if I would, or not. Having a soulmate is an incomparable gift, but I hate almost everything about being King, and the collateral damage has been severe."

I winced at that, remembering the horror of finding that first tree-impaled body. At least a hundred people had died at the mine. Multiply that across the whole of Mercy…

"On topic, you should probably go talk to the high priestess yourself," I said, though I was disappointed to miss the opportunity to spend casual time with him. "Paloma's not going to paint a great picture of you to her, and if they've got a line to Ithronel, I doubt you'll like the outcome of those particular prayers."

Cass growled and raked his fingers through his hair. "Ugh, you're probably right. I suppose I can do that."

I eyed him warily. Hopefully things would settle down once the six-day coronation rigamarole was over. I couldn't imagine that this many events was the normal state of affairs for any functional High Court, and it was obviously taking a toll on Cass. "Could you show me how to make doors before you go? Maybe send me off to talk to the treasurer?"

His ears perked up. "For your family. Of course."

I got back up the couch and stretched with my hands over my head. "Just point me in the right direction. It can be my first act of state, or whatever."

Cass breathed a laugh at that. "The doors are fairly simple," he said with an easy smile, setting one hand on the wall. "The palace is the living center of the Court, and it's attuned to us. Focus your attention on it the way you focus on me, and ask it for what you want."

"I did that with trees," I said, coming over to do as he said. "Some of them grew around people instead of through them. They didn't like that."

"The trees, or the people?" Cass asked.

"Neither of them, really." I looked up at him and flashed him a smile. "Are you helping me, or am I flying solo?"

He flicked one ear. "I expect you'll be able to do it on your own, but I'd like to listen in so I can guide you if I'm wrong."

"Thoughtful," I murmured, more to myself than to him. I turned my attention towards the palace, falling automatically into meditative breathing as I did. Awareness filtered into me. It felt similar to my awareness of the Court, but far less intense, as if the palace acted as a filter. Maybe more like a search engine , I thought, sifting through the information. Rather than everything all at once, the palace responded to my thoughts with smooth consideration, giving me more of a curated experience.

I got the sense that sitting on the throne would be even better—that if Cass had been anyone other than who he was, the best way to find my trapped man would have been to sit on the throne and use it as a guide. Focus, Quyen. "How do I find the treasurer?" I asked in a hushed voice.

"If you don't know exactly who or what you're looking for, search for the traits of the place you want to go, or the person you want to find," Cass said, his voice low and soothing. He sounded practiced; as if he'd talked a hundred people through using magic for the first time. "Someone connected to me, and to the High Court, who touches the coin of the royal purse. Ledgers, maybe. Someone important."

I obeyed, putting together my thoughts as if I was typing them into a computer. The Court of Mercy was alive, but it wasn't a thinking being in the way of a person, and its wants and impulses didn't necessarily align with mine. Being clear seemed better than asking for things willy-nilly. Fae person, important, knows Cass, handles money that belongs to the Court, pays people their salaries…

As I tacked on requirements, the flood of information diminished. It was a little like looking at one of those screens in spy movies, where there's a thousand different video feeds on a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall screen. As I narrowed the search, feeds blipped out, the remaining ones growing bigger and bigger in my mental space.

Of course, the feeds weren't nice little videos. They were full-body, surround-sound experiences, and doing more than the mental equivalent of seeing them out of the corner of my eye was all-consuming.

"Is our treasurer a blond pretty-boy with a fetish for necklaces?" I asked. My voice sounded far away. I wavered on my feet, struggling to keep my balance when my mind was very much elsewhere.

"That's the quartermaster, yes," Cass said with warmth. "Killaren Oester. He can surely help you do as you need."

Relief flooded through me. "Great," I breathed, leaning against the wall. I want to see him, I told the palace. Make me a door?

It thrummed under my hand, a sensation I felt not in my body but in my connection to it. A dark doorway appeared next to my hand, the stone going misty before vanishing, showing only shadow beyond.

Cass' pleasure wound through me, all heated pride and sparkling admiration. "I told you that you were a natural."

"I guess I am," I said, smiling helplessly. I looked up at him. "See you at lunch?"

"That's the plan," he said, smiling back down at me.

He smiled like he meant it, ears lifting and tilting forward and the corners of his eyes crinkling. It left me on the edge of breathlessness. Who even smiled like that? With no guile; no concern or consideration for what others might do when they knew the secrets of his heart? He was so open. So trusting.

"See you then," I said, because I couldn't keep staring up into his face without my own emotions coming into view, and stepped into my door.