38. Skeletons in the Closet

Skeletons in the Closet

I f I'd thought that life would get easier once the coronation proceedings concluded, I would have been very disappointed. Cass hated almost everything to do with being King, and though he did what was required of him, he would clearly much rather be flying or healing than dealing with matters of state. As soon as people realized that I was an action kind of person and wouldn't make their jobs harder, they started coming to me first instead of him. I didn't always know what to do, but I growled less than Cass about it, I guessed.

Luckily, I was used to hard work; back in Long Beach I'd worked two jobs and occasional side gigs, and at the opal mine shifts were usually twelve hours of physical labor, with one day off out of ten. Things would probably level out eventually, but Cass hadn't even been King for two months. The chaos from his ascension to the throne had only barely begun to settle.

At least the event schedule drastically reduced. Neither Cass nor I enjoyed dealing with the courtiers, and while there were still a lot of useless nobles in the palace, I figured they could more-or-less entertain themselves. There were more important things to do.

Chief among those was dealing with the displaced people and those still trapped underground. The refugees were easy enough, since we could delegate that. Or, rather, Cass could delegate that to Killie, and then when the quartermaster had issues, he came to me and I tried to figure out what to do. The Cass-worshippers were the most difficult to deal with; nobody liked them, and nobody wanted them. Eventually I signed off for them to have their own settlement location in the valley. It was easier than continually dealing with issues in the refugee camps, and all it took was money and supplies.

Managing the Court's regeneration was all on Cass. After some discussion, Cass – and thus, me – returned to a three days on, two days off schedule to let the breakers crack people out of the silver mines in the south. Staying up for three days straight at a time definitely left something to be desired. Aside from the emotional strain of not resting, there wasn't anything to do while everyone was sleeping, and I didn't handle boredom well.

Cass was up with me, though, and he didn't seem to like being bored, either. I spent a lot of my platonic touch asks on things like learning how to braid his hair for fancy events, and he spent his hours with me on late-night card games and meditation, the two of us sitting back-to-back with Cass walking us through Court magic. Vaduin had given us assigned reading before he'd left, and we read that together, too. Night by night we got better at doing Court magic—at least, when I wasn't poring over paperwork, and when he wasn't making himself useful in the healer's ward.

As much as I wished that Cass would put any amount of focus into the business of being King, I had to admit that he was peerless in the healer's ward. The surge of magic during his ascension had burned out every mage who'd been using magic at the time, and while that could usually be fixed if it was caught in time, when someone had gotten their metaphysical self truly brutalized, it took someone with Cass' training and expertise to save their ability to cast. It took healers to wake the people Cass had sent into stasis, too, and with the functional-healer count lower than usual, that meant every healer was in high demand, even the King.

There were also all the people who, like the girl outside the palace, had regrown body parts they'd had removed. Many of them needed the fae equivalent of physical therapy to deal with their suddenly-changed bodies. When I asked, Killie told me that no more than one in five hundred fae had aberrant traits, and that most aberrations were minor in scale, like sharp claws or a smattering of scales. Scaled up to a place as big as Mercy, though, that was still thousands of people with major departures from the typical body plan, and those people needed help.

Sometimes Cass was gone for a day or more, traveling to the other cities in Mercy to help. I spent a lot of my solo free time trail-running or exploring the palace on foot, getting a better sense for the layout of my new home. Being alone hurt too much to stay in one place. At least if I was moving, the loneliness couldn't catch me.

A couple of weeks into it, at one in the morning, Cass came and fetched me from the library to take me to the indoor training grounds. As we passed it, he grabbed a sword in a plain black scabbard off a rack and tossed it to me; I caught it out of reflex.

"What's this?" I asked, baffled.

He grinned at me. "A sword."

"Well, duh," I said, rolling my eyes. I drew the sword and examined it, turning it in the bright lambence-light of the training grounds. It was a rapier with a handsome basket hilt wrought in steel. The black leather grip fit my small hand, and it wasn't so heavy that I'd struggle to swing it.

The blade itself had a blueish gleam, with a ripple to the color that reminded me of ocean waves. It felt cold, somehow, when I examined it with the palace's magic, not like ice but like void.

"Seriously," I said, giving it a swing. It hissed through the air. "What is this?"

"It's Vaylir's coronation gift," Cass said. "You mentioned being interested in learning to fight, and star-iron is the only metal I know of that my feathers won't slice through, so if you're going to spar with me, it's your only effective option." He flashed me another grin, the dimple in his right cheek making an appearance. "I don't know shit about swordsmanship, but she does," he said, angling his head towards a lean woman standing at parade rest near the stands. "Meet your new swordmistress. I'm spending my hours on her. And also a lot of money," Cass added with a rakish grin, "so make the best of it."

She inclined her head in greeting. Her expression didn't shift one iota.

I started smiling. "You had the star-iron made into a sword for me so I could fight you?"

Cass laced his fingers behind his head. "I did. Do you like it?"

"Fuck yeah, I do!" I did some swashbuckling moves that felt great and must have looked ridiculous, because Cass started laughing. "Hush, you," I said, waving the sword at him. "I'm going to be great. Just you wait."

"I eagerly await our first bout, your majesty," he said, bowing deeply to me. "Enjoy your lessons."

"Where'll you be?"

He flashed me another bright smile. "Flying. At least for a bit."

I watched him go, feeling all fluttery and bright. The woman got up when the door closed behind him. She walked over without comment, took my hand, and moved my arm and body into a new position.

"I take it you've never held a sword before."

My cheeks warmed. "No. Is it that obvious?"

"Yes. Painfully so." She stepped back, only to grab my wrist again and raise it an inch higher. I'd dropped it without noticing. "Hold it here, novice."

I swallowed and held it. Vivid greed sparked along my skin, a tingling sensation full of anticipation. It had been a long time since I'd done something for nothing but the challenge.

"Good," my swordmistress said, with no emotion. "Now we begin."

I drilled with her for hours. Anyone normal would have been shaking within an hour, but I had a direct line to Cass, and I could go tirelessly. It gave me a significant leg up in training; I could outlast my instructor.

When Cass came to fetch me, five hours later, I was so amped he made me go run laps on the castle wall.

I did, even though he'd already spent his five hours for the week. It was fun.

Sword lessons became a cherished part of my nighttime routine, and I added dragon riding lessons not long after. Cass could carry me, of course, but if I wanted to go somewhere on my own, or if we wanted to travel with luggage, the easiest way to do that would be on dragonback.

Despite nearly having been charbroiled by one of them, the war-dragons that were the favored mount of nobility in the Court of Mercy didn't freak me out the way horses did. They were such fantastical creatures, big enough that they didn't look like a real animal, and so obviously dragons that my only frame of reference for them was books and movies. I was as rank an amateur at riding as I was with swordplay, but my instructor assured me I was learning quickly. Since he was fae, I figured it had to be true.

Around late November – at least as far as the human calendar was concerned – I finally got to put those riding lessons to use. The weather (I was told) had been unseasonably good, but we were overdue for our first snow of the season. We needed to draw our mine-extraction efforts to a close so no one got caught in a blizzard.

Since the breakers from Jackal Court had already been working on the extensive silver mines, we'd left them there. The existence of the opal mine made me antsy, though, especially knowing that Talien had his fingers in it. Silver was economically important to fae, but the opals seemed magically important. I still had my handful of them from the mine, wrapped in a towel and stuffed into a bag in the back of one of my wardrobes. I didn't know what to do with them, but at least Cass was unlikely to stumble on them back there. They didn't seem like something he'd react well to, and I didn't want my bedroom wrecked by him trying to control a panic attack.

When I mentioned, hesitantly, that I'd like us to go there before winter hit, Cass winced. He obviously didn't want to go, and I didn't want to dig up his trauma, but I wasn't interested in letting whatever was going on continue to go on uninvestigated. I offered to go by myself, but that went over like a lead balloon. Cass didn't want to go, but the idea of me flying off on dragonback to the mine where I'd been enslaved was apparently worse than maybe seeing an opal, and he agreed to come. We could fly down, picking up the Jackal breakers on our way out, and see what could be done.

I hadn't anticipated how distracting it would be to watch Cass fly. It was like those videos of hang gliders flying with vultures and eagles; Cass moved with so much more elegance and agility than the much larger dragon I rode on, sometimes above and sometimes below, dancing with the wind. The sunlight gleamed off his wings and caressed the dark leather of his flying clothes. He looked like an angel of war, or death, or judgment. Something fierce and implacable; brutal and beautiful.

When I watched him for too long, he wrote C-R-E-E-P on his hand, his amusement curling in my blood .

H-O-T-T-I-E , I wrote back, and heard his laughter light the air.

We reached the Ysten Mine after a flight of about eighteen hours—a distance a war-dragon couldn't have handled without Cass using his connection to the Court to long-distance heal the physical strain, but which we covered easily as a trio. It was dark at that point, though, so rather than flying through the night, we stayed at the mine.

The breakers weren't particularly interested in hanging out with us, which only made sense. They'd been spending weeks cracking open the stone of the earth to pull out living, unconscious bodies, and then watching the earth seal itself closed again. That seemed like the kind of thing to make someone leery of, say, the person responsible for it all.

Even though Cass acted like the distant politeness rolled off his shoulders, I couldn't escape his stress. Neither could anyone else : in a new location, with a whole new set of stressors, Cass locked up, and all the creatures of the forest voiced his unhappiness for him.

There wasn't much that could outdo the eerie wails and cries of unnamed monsters in an ancient forest for horror-movie ambiance. Cass knew it was his fault, too, which only served to create a vicious feedback loop of unhappiness. I used my platonic touch for the day to get him to meditate with me on his lap, which worked to calm everything down until we got up to get ready for bed, and the first person he encountered flinched back from him like Cass might kill him if their shadows touched.

At least Cass could fall asleep at will, or it would have been a long night.

In the morning, I passed my dragon off to the breakers and had Cass fly me the last four hours to the opal mine site. Two breakers and a whole team of workers mounted on war-dragons flew in our wake. It turned out to be a good plan; even though he had been able to put a pin in the map, my familiarity with the area meant a more precise location, and we were able to land in the open area that looked down over the valley where the mining outpost had once stood.

The months hadn't been kind to the remains of the outpost. Everything had been so rawboned, the wood not even cured, and there had been enough dead that scavengers had gotten into everything. Dirty garbage strewed the ground, visible among the dried weeds and fallen leaves. Brambles had grown over much of the broken buildings over the course of the summer, but they'd dropped all their leaves in anticipation of winter, so it left everything looking rough and scraggly, like an overgrown lot.

Only the barrow over the man whose hand was sticking out of the stone was still cleared. The stones had fallen leaves caught in the cracks, but it sat there, a twenty-foot-wide hump of stone spreading across the meadow, looking like the sort of ancient ruin that would endure forever .

The breakers started there. I sat on a boulder curled up, my arms around my legs and my face half-hidden by my knees, and watched them pull one of the fae overseers from the ground.

For one searing moment, hatred lanced through me. I'd spent all that time worrying about him, afraid for him—had cared so much I'd changed the landscape for him, when he was one of them —

"He's a victim, too, lioness. He didn't deserve to be buried alive any more than the others we came to save," Cass said gently from where he stood. "Perhaps he was wicked, and enjoyed plucking mortals from their world and forcing them to labor. Or perhaps he was bound by promises to his lord, and his choice was obedience or death. Either way, did he deserve to have his hand chewed off and carrion-beetles burrowing into him from the raw wound? You saved him from that."

His wings pulled in tighter as they laid the man out in state, his clothing shredded rags and his body covered with rock dust. He breathed, slowly, like he was asleep, the first breaths he'd taken in months.

Cass turned away. "Don't regret your compassion," he said, sorrow in every word. "Whatever his sins, compassion for a stranger doesn't make you culpable. It makes you kind."

All my anger crushed into gray ash. I closed my eyes, trying not to cry. "It was so awful," I said through the pain lacerating my throat. "Day after day. Night after night. Crawling into the dark and hoping I didn't die." I swallowed, hard, my throat so tight I almost couldn't manage the action. "People died down there. Suffocated, or were crushed by stone. Inhaled too much rock dust and coughed their lungs out. All for fucking shiny rocks."

He shuddered, his wings clattering. "It shouldn't have happened like that."

"It shouldn't have happened at all," I said softly, watching the dust rise as the breakers worked. Stone shattered into sand. Solidly-built men started hauling it out, shoveling the fine gravel into carts and dragging it away to the location one of the breakers indicated.

The Duke of Flies had a lot to answer for.

I watched for hours. The heap of sand grew, spilling across the meadow. Living bodies slowly accumulated, one by one, each laid out like a corpse at a field hospital with blankets gently wrapped around them.

Cass stayed with me, his back against mine and his wings framing the stone we sat on, meditating. Our shadows traced the time across the ground. His meditative calm kept me from weeping, and from panicking. Only when the air started cooling and the activity changed from extraction to encampment did I get up. I wanted to rail at them not to stop, that it had been too long already—but unlike me and Cass, they had to sleep. To rest.

I couldn't bear to be there, with them, eating dinner under an awning with braziers and laughter. It was too raw.

I turned away and walked into the forest.