27. Girl Talk, Take Two

Girl Talk, Take Two

I danced. What else was I supposed to do? I'd fucked up with Cass – ignored my instincts in favor of how excited I was to maybe be able to match his stunning power – and now I was alone at a revel in the wee hours of the morning. The least I could do was to see it through.

Talien flirted with me as we whirled across the dance floor. Ace declined to dance, but introduced me to several lords and a lady who would. When Vaduin dragged Cass back sometime around five in the morning, the lights dimmed, but nothing worse happened. Not wanting to publicly force the issue, I didn't join him, and he didn't come to me.

Danica did, though. She found me hiding in the shadow next to a pillar, nibbling on a plate of cut fruit as I watched Cass doing his political duty with Vad at his shoulder, talking to the guests as they started filtering out.

"Hey," she said, a little cautiously, leaning on the wall next to me.

I glanced over. Earlier in the evening, she and Vaduin had both been decked out in their gold-and-white Archangel regalia, but now she was in a simple, dark blue dress, and he was in a similarly toned-down outfit. Even after a night of dancing and partying, Dani looked beautiful. Her mussed hair and slightly-smudged eyeliner made her look like some boudoir painting, lovely and sensual.

"Hey," I said back.

She chewed on her lip. "Vaduin said he didn't know why Cass was so upset, just that it was something to do with you. Do you want to talk about it?"

I ate a piece of melon to keep from having to answer right away. Dani was probably trustworthy, but there were plenty of listening ears. I didn't want anyone getting any weird ideas about the things I could do, and I didn't want to air my dirty laundry in public.

"I fucked up," I said at last. "He asked if he could think about whether it would be okay with him for me to lean into the way I can feel him, and then I just kept doing it." I flushed, the shame of that chilling my skin as I looked at the beautiful dance floor he'd made for me, a bouquet that might last forever. "I pushed him too far."

At least he'd been focused enough on me – angry enough with me – to show it with pinned-back ears and sharp words. I didn't know how the Court might act if it was flooded with ire directed at its Queen, and I really, really didn't want to find out.

"That's normal, I think," she said. The corner of her mouth tugged back wistfully. "God knows I fucked up with Vaduin often enough."

"I don't get that." I shook my head, the breeze of my movement cold against the sweat on my neck, and remembered the electrifying feel of Cass raking those metal gauntlet-claws across my nape. "I just… we're supposed to be soulmates, right? Perfect matches? You'd think it would be easier than this."

"I suspect…" She paused, chewing on her lip again with her brows furrowed. "I suspect it's never smooth, or clean." Danica sighed through her nose and gave me a rueful smile. "Every soulmate pair I know of went through some sort of upheaval along the way. Granted, it's a pretty small sample size, but it feels like that should be true, right? The two of you were on your own trajectories before, and now you're on the same one, or at least on a collision course for one. That doesn't seem like something that would happen without some major upheaval."

I sighed, my eyes going back to Cass as he milled about. It wasn't difficult; the man was a solid six inches taller than most other people in the room, and nobody but Vad got within five feet of him. "I don't like adding to his problems. It seems like his life was already fully exploded before I came along."

Her bright laugh sang through the air. A few ears turned towards us, the fae tracking their surroundings as much with sound as sight. "Yes, that's definitely true. Honestly, though, it might make things easier for the two of you, tonight notwithstanding. He's usually so self-possessed. Controlled, I guess. The fact that he's actually upset enough to do something about it is maybe a good sign."

"Maybe, but I sure hope it's not like this for long," I said, making a face. "Even without paying attention to him, all that tension is making my muscles ache. Better than the way he affects the palace, but it's not great." I sighed through my nose. "I'm fairly sure that some of the reason he affects me so much is that he's trained his reflex healing to manage most of his emotions."

Dani's face grew thoughtful. "That might be a trait of most powerful mages," she said slowly, like she was thinking about the words as she said them. "I had the misfortune of meeting the crown prince of Raven Court this year. He's a famous glamor-mage, and he wears glamor on every inch of his skin. I'm pretty sure he controls his expressions with it."

"Eugh," I said, giving her an over-exaggerated look of disgust as I took the offered escape from the topic of Cass. "That sounds way worse than keeping yourself from getting turned on."

She laughed again at that, shaking her head with amusement. "To be fair, it's a lot more obvious when men get turned on than women. I bet a lot of men would love to be able to have total boner control."

Her delight was infectious. We held our straight faces for about five seconds before bursting into peals of laughter.

"Gods!" Her grin lit the room. "There's definitely pros to being a woman. Vaduin's got super basilisk smelling so he can always tell if girls are turned on, but for pretty much everyone else, it's a tightly-guarded secret."

I snorted at that, a smile still playing across my lips. "I'm fairly sure all Cass has to do is pay attention to know, but not because of any super-sniffing."

Dani laughed again. She had a nice laugh, bright and carefree, the sort of woman who knew how to cut loose when the time called for it. "Nah, he's all fae, save for the stymphalian wings. Maybe eagle-eye vision, too, but he's mostly just got the wings."

"Stymphalian?" I asked. "Paloma called him that, too. I'm guessing that's some sort of fae monster?"

"Oh, yeah, they're like… battle-herons?" she said, wrinkling her nose. "Their feathers can cut through any metal almost like it's not there, even iron and steel, and they, uh, have poisonous poop that makes it deadly to wade in the marshes they live in." Dani started turning red. "I, um, haven't asked Cass if he's, uh…"

"Got killer shit?" I asked, unsuccessfully trying to smother my amusement at the thought. "I'm going to assume a 'no' on that one."

She bit back a laugh and nodded, her blush only succeeding in making her look prettier instead of like a tomato. That was so unfair. "He's one of the later-made Furies, so he's a lot less monster-y than some of the others. You can really see it when he and Vaduin are side-by-side like this. Vad's the first official Fury Ayre made."

I raised one brow. "So they were made?"

"Right. Duh." Dani bopped herself lightly on the forehead. "I keep forgetting you're a relative newcomer. Zooming out." She took a step back and held up her left hand like she wanted a high-five. "Okay. If my hand is our region of Faery, my fingers are Mercy and my palm is split about sixty-forty between Raven Court and Stag Court, Stag on the right, with some smaller Courts sprinkled around, and my thumb is Lightning Court."

"Okay…"

She tapped the middle of her palm. "A little over eighty years ago, Raven and Stag Courts fought a really bloody war, which people now call the Annihilation War." Her face grew grim, an expression that gave her the look of someone who had seen more blood than she wanted to remember. "It ended when the Stag Prince – now the Stag King – razed a city to the ground. Personally." Dani clenched her jaw. "Those two Courts are still pretty fucked up about it, obviously, but during that war, the youngest Raven Prince got into a fight with a manticore and ended up merging himself with it using his amalgam magic. His father had him do the same thing to others, and make people into… well, bioweapons."

I stared at her, horrified. "Vad and Cass."

"Yeah, and maybe like eighty other people," she said, dropping her hand. The corner of her mouth tugged back in a sad-looking smile. "There's about thirty of them left. A lot died in the war, and some of them were human, so…"

"Fucking hell," I muttered. I glanced back out over the revel, expecting to see Cass, but he'd vanished again. Must have finished talking to the important people. Guess that's my cue to escape . To Dani, I said, "Was it… I mean, did they choose it? Or were they…" I trailed off. I wasn't sure how to ask it.

"They were all volunteers, if that's what you're worried about," Dani said, her voice kind. "Ayre – the manticore prince – he struck a bargain with his father. Anyone who became a Fury would be freed of all their debts and oaths to the Crown at the end of the war, and all of them received a fairly large heap of gold for their trouble."

"I wonder why he did it," I said, mostly to myself.

Dani gave me a soft smile. "You should ask him."

"Yeah," I said, closing my eyes and asking the palace to find him for me. "Maybe I will."