39. Settlements

Settlements

W alking into the forest at dusk set off a bunch of trauma I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying around. All my skin went cold, then hot, and I staggered to a stop not fifteen feet into the treeline.

People are talking. Saying it's your fault.

Come on, Q. It's freaky. You're freaking people out.

Just go, before people decide to make you go.

I covered my mouth, starting to shake. I wanted to scream—to find my old bunkmate Gina and scream at her , to snatch at all those people and tell them they'd been cruel, and horrible, and that I'd come back for them. That they were wrong about me. I wasn't a freak. I was their Queen . I'd fucking— I'd fucking—

They'd moved into the treeline, I realized, horror settling into me as I started parsing what I was looking at. Ramshackle shelters, now falling down, the sheets and canvas tarps people had used for roofs dirty and rotting. A charred firepit with pots and cans scattered around it. Two shallow graves, dug up by some animal, with the gnawed bones and gristle visible, half-covered by dirt.

"I forgot them," I whispered, staring at the ragged remains. "I— I—"

Cass wrapped his strong arms around me and folded his wings in front of me, shielding me from the world. The shock of having him touch me again – of having all of his sorrow and kindness and strength flooding into me – made me start sobbing.

"Cassie," I choked out, clinging to his forearm. Hot tears tracked down my face. "I left them here. I— people died. They— They— fuck , Cass, I didn't— I can't—"

"Shh, shh," he murmured. He rested his face on the top of my head. "By the time you made it to me, they weren't here. You couldn't have helped them."

Despair clawed at me. "How can you say that? How can you know ?"

He sighed softly, his breath warming my scalp. "Because I was a soldier," he said. Cass gave me a gentle squeeze. "I know the sort of impact people make on the landscape when they camp in it. By the count of shelters, there were dozens of people here, but the area isn 't cleared of deadfall, nor is the ground trampled bare. They couldn't have been here for more than a week or two."

My wet lashes trembled, but my tears slowed. "You heal the ground," I said. "What if it's just that?"

"No. It's not. I'm confident of that." Cass shook his head, running his nose through my hair. "I'm not growing forests anymore, Quyen. That's how people can build homes and plant gardens in the open land." He huffed another sigh. "There was a landslide in the east a few weeks ago, and it's still a landslide. The cliffs didn't return to cliffs in the night. I think things can still change, as long as it's natural or slow, not violent."

I didn't say anything.

"No guilt for things you can't control," he murmured against my hair. "Let it go, sunlight. Let them go."

I let out a weak laugh. "You're one to talk."

"I can be your cautionary tale." Cass let go of me and stepped around to my front, still holding his wings to block my view. "Do you want to stay tonight?" he asked. "We can't do much to help but stay awake. They've surely already sent the coordinates of our location to Ysten Mine by flicker-bird, and the ground crew will likely start trailblazing tomorrow, and be here within a week. Until then, they have hunters, supplies, and the war-dragons. I don't think they need us, and we need to get back, anyway, for the Feast of Willows tomorrow night. If we leave now, we can fly instead of convincing Mercy to make us a long-distance door."

I scrubbed at the drying tears on my face with one hand. "I thought we were leaving my war-dragon here," I ventured hesitantly.

He smiled at me, eyes warm. "We are. You seem to like flying with me, though, and you're tiny," he said, flashing me a grin. "I can easily carry you home."

"Isn't it, like, twenty hours of flying?" I asked, my brows drawing together. He'd already long-since met his bargained obligations for platonic touch. Four hours of flight, a full day sitting with his back against mine, hugging me in the forest… It was enough to make a girl think that maybe he liked touching me.

"By dragonback, it's closer to twenty-two," he said. His ears cocked forwards in a pose of cheerful focus. "I don't have to worry about getting tired, though. I can fly at my top speed for days, if I need to. It should take us somewhere between twelve and fifteen hours, depending on the prevailing winds, and it's not like we should sleep, anyhow."

My brows shot up. "Wow, okay." I gave him a helpless smile. "Are you sure you want to carry me for that long? It's a lot of physical contact."

In answer, he shook out his wings and got down on one knee, offering me his arms. "I've already told you I like you in my personal space." Cass looked up at me with warm focus. "You're the one who has to deal with my healing, but you keep saying you like it. Besides, if it gets to be too much for either of us, we can always land and take a break, or make a long-distance door and cut the journey short. So why not try?"

"Well, I won't say no to that," I said with a laugh, and let him carry me off.

Cass' top speed was fast enough that talking wasn't the easiest, so we mostly flew in silence. I didn't mind the quiet. In the beautiful dark of the night, with the wind rushing through my hair and my soulmate's body warm against mine, everything felt timeless. I could have stayed there watching the stars from the safety of his arms forever.

We flew into cloud cover as the sun rose, painting the sky lilac and pink. Not long after, snow started falling, big fat flakes of it drifting down and stinging my skin. Every tireless beat of Cass' wings sent them whirling, the wind of our passage painted with snowflakes.

I'd never seen snow before; not really. It fell in the San Gabriel Mountains, of course, so I'd seen the whitecaps, but I'd never, personally, been in the snow. It was cold, and white, and fluffy. I tried to catch some on my tongue, an impossible task when in flight, and finally licked one off of Cass' black hair, startling a laugh out of him.

It kept snowing through the morning as we flew north, surrounding us with flurrying white, but Cass' land-sense meant we wouldn't get lost. The center of my world was the heart beating in his chest, but the center of his was the thrones of the palace, and he flew for them with total confidence. He did slow down, though, flirting with the wind and letting me enjoy my first snowfall. We spent hours playing in the snow, Cass swooping and diving through it, the enjoyment as bright as the glittering white all around us.

We finally broke into dazzling sunlight sometime around the late afternoon. This far north, and this late in the year, the days were shorter than I was used to, but even though the sun was low in the sky, it was probably somewhere around four in the afternoon. The sprawling valley the palace overlooked was covered in a snowy blanket. Taeskana stood against that white in lovely spires, huddled up against the mountains, and the various small towns and villages in the basin looked like pictures out of a winter painting.

"Look," I said with pride, pointing down at a small town in the valley, dark against the snow. "Check it out. They've gotten so much built already. I'm really glad the snow held off for so long."

Cass' brows pulled together. One ear cocked forward, then pinned back. "I don't recall any of the new settlements being there," he said warily.

"Yeah, it wasn't in the original plans, but it wasn't that hard to add it in," I said, beaming at him. "The Cassites were getting shit on, even after I made sure they had room in the camp by Taeskana, so I authorized Killie – Killaren, I mean, the quartermaster – to put together an alternate location for them. I hear it's shaping up into a nice little town. I was hoping we could visit them like we said we would, but I was waiting to ask until after the Feast of Willows tonight, so nobody named Paloma gets their tail in a twist."

"Cassites." A flat word.

"Don't worry, it's not like they have any statues of you or whatever, at least not that I've heard of. I'm the only one calling them that," I said. I wet my lips, trying not to be annoyed—to hang onto my happiness at seeing something good springing up. "The worst they're doing is wearing cassiterite pendants, which is extremely dorky. It's a kind of oil-brown gemstone, if you… didn't know," I said lamely. "The color is a little like your feathers, and the name is… pointedly Cass-related, which is probably why they picked it."

His jaw clenched. A moment later he reverted to flat calm, my heart matching his in a steady beat. "You should have asked me."

The temperature around us plunged. As far as I could see, the air glittered, all the humidity freezing out as Cass' anger turned the winter chill to brutal cold.

Rage spiked in my chest. He was controlling his reactions again—controlling my reactions. After all that time aloft, after the snow and the camp and everything, it made me crazy that he would do it now. I glanced back at the settlement, half-expecting it to be in flames, but it stood there, untouched.

"Why?" I said in a sharp tone. "You didn't want anything to do with them. If you had your way, they'd still be camping in a shantytown outside the palace wall."

"Because," Cass said through gritted teeth, powering for the palace, "the Court of Mercy was a theocracy for more than twenty thousand years, and even now, the religious administrators have a great deal of power. Did you even think about what this will look like to them? Our Royal Seneschal is a priestess, for fuck's sake."

"She's a paladin, not a priestess," I sniped back. "The high priestess told me. If you're going to bitch about the Ithronel cult, you might as well know what you're talking about."

His fingers tightened on me. "Oh, now they're the cult?" he bit off. "What happened to 'Cass isn't a god, and they're wrong to treat him like one'? Decided you liked the limelight too much?"

"Fuck off," I said, stung. "It's not about that, and you know it. I was trying to help."

"Well, you didn't." His voice was barely more than a growl.

"Like hell I didn't! Should we have just let them rot ?"

He didn't respond.

I flicked him on the neck. "Cass! Seriously!"

He didn't say anything. He didn't even look at me.

"Seriously?" I asked again, wrath burning inside me and unable to show, my heartbeat steady and body calm, my anger tied down like an inmate at an asylum by the man holding me in his arms. "Fine," I spat. "Do what you always do. Avoid the fucking problem so you don't have to be seen. Let's see how well that works. At least I did something. "

Cass folded his wings, picking up speed, aiming at the palace walls.

Where Paloma was waiting for us.