46. Aftermath

Aftermath

I filled her in on the details as I got dressed, and then while sitting in the main room of the monarchal suite, eating a dinner that should have been stone cold and instead was at the perfect temperature, without any indication that it had been sitting for six-plus hours. Dani's expression grew more and more troubled as the story went on, but she didn't have any particular critiques of how we'd handled Faerqen. Coming out of an attack by a goddess alive and with a powerful (if terrifying) ally was probably pretty close to a best-case scenario.

Cass joined us maybe twenty minutes after he'd vanished, with his damp hair braided back and dressed in black combat leathers of some kind. Dani gave him an appreciative sidelong look that had every one of my soulmate-bond-issued possessive hackles raised, and launched into her recital of the state of the union.

Cass gave me a raised brow that told me he'd seen that flash of jealousy on my face. I very studiously focused on Danica instead of meeting his eyes, but I couldn't escape the self-satisfied purr of pleasure curling through our bond. He might not have liked being the center of attention, but he definitely liked me being jealous over him. Maybe he'd wear something like that coronation revel outfit again if I got possessive about it.

I gave myself a mental shake and refocused on Dani's words. It was a lot less pleasant than thinking about Cass in body-chains and leather. The two fires Cass had put out were the two fires that hadn't been smothered yet, not the only ones. Before they'd left, Paloma and about a third of the religious administrators had done their best to leave devastation behind. Every one of the record rooms had been set ablaze, as had a number of important offices. Our quartermaster Killaren had tried to stop a small group from torching his office, and had been badly beaten and left in his burning office to die.

Under ordinary circumstances, he probably would have died, but he was in the Clement Palace, and the palace answered to Cass. Even without Cass' purposeful intervention, his reflex healing was affecting more than the landscape. Like the slow healing of the ground when Cass slept, Killaren's wounds had healed in time for him to wake and crawl out of the burning room—and he'd been fully healed by the time the palace guard had found him, save for fresh burns from rescuing what he could from the flames.

"Give that man a commendation," I murmured, impressed. Cass looked thoughtful. I thought he might actually do it.

The destruction wasn't as bad as it could have been. The Court of Mercy had literally thousands of years of archived records, but it was common practice to use a fae magic called "stilling" on the important ones. It was basically fae agelessness for objects instead of living things, at least how Cass explained it when I made a questioning noise. The objects were frozen in time in the same way that fae remained eternally young.

So we had some records. We even still had some of the religious administrators; the most militant third had done their damage, and another third had resigned non-destructively, but others seemed to be choosing to stick it out. Some of them were probably intent on doing damage from within, but our spymaster was assisting Vaduin in setting up a system of multi-layered oversight so that the damage those people could do would be contained.

The missing religious administrators weren't simply missing. They were straight-up gone , unfindable by either Cass' land-sense or mine. It wasn't physically possible to get out of the Court of Mercy in six hours, even via war-dragon, but Cass grimly pointed out that Ithronel's temple was at the foot of our mountain. Given that caves were pathways between worlds, it was plausible that the goddess had intervened on her servants' behalf, and helped them escape our reach through the lightless depths.

That sucked, but there wasn't anything to do about it. If Paloma's faction was going to cause mischief, we'd have to deal with it when it arose.

The dukes were going to be a problem. All three of them had been honored guests at the Feast of Willows – a title that still seemed to tickle Ace – and so they'd seen everything go down. Talien had already left, claiming that he needed to see to the stability of his duchy, and Ace had silently vanished from sight. Rumor was that he was preparing his own response, and that it wouldn't be particularly kindly towards the crown.

I'd expected Tech to be the loudest voice against us, but to my shock, Dani told us that he'd thrown in on our side, with the same rationale as Talien: stability. Cass was King, and there were no heirs present in the Court. Destroying Mercy, the argument went, would do nothing to garner favor with its erstwhile goddess.

Some of that, Dani said, was probably due to the fact that my swordmistress had dueled him for an unwise comment about the greed of mortal women rubbing off on their paramours, and proceeded to wipe the floor with him. She'd been impressed enough with him, though, that she'd offered to take him on as her second student if he'd be willing to partner with the first: Mercy's mortal Queen. Given that my swordmistress was known as the finest blade on the Western Continent, and that she almost never took more than one student, he'd jumped at the chance.

"What?" Cass asked, when I stared at him, aghast. "I told you she was expensive."

The corner of my mouth tipped up. I'd had no idea that he'd gone so far out of his way to find me a teacher—that he'd found me, quite literally, the best swordmistress in the world. I wondered how many other things like that he'd done for me. How many times Cass had quietly moved heaven and earth for me, without ever looking for the thanks he'd once told me he'd be greedy for.

No one had ever done something like that for me. I'd never even thought to look for it.

Thank you, Cassie , I said silently.

He shivered, an almost imperceptible motion. It was my pleasure, your majesty.

Danica finished her readout and fell silent. The three of us looked at each other, the gravity of the situation lying heavily over the room.

Cass broke the silence with a sharp sigh. "Well," he said grimly. "Let's get to it."

Since the breakers were still working at the abandoned opal mine, Cass and I didn't have any plans for sleeping—which was good, because while things were no longer literally on fire, they were definitely metaphorically on fire. It probably would have been easier to divide-and-conquer, especially given that people obeyed Cass and talked freely with me, but both of us seemed to have the same plan of aggressively being a team to counteract our old patterns. Cass even initiated several silent conversations when we encountered complex problems.

He hadn't wanted to argue with me in public—that's what he'd said about not challenging me when I'd been dealing with the Cassites that first time. Discussing things in private, though… well, that was different, wasn't it? Even though he'd been uncomfortable with me affecting his thoughts at first, he seemed to grow easier with it each time, until I caught him giving me a half-smile when I was the one who reached out for his advice.

We worked for almost forty-eight hours straight. On Vaduin's advice, a big chunk of that time was dedicated to something called open court, where we sat in fancy chairs on a dais and anyone who wanted a ruling on anything or to ask a single question could come to us. Since Cass and I didn't technically need rest or food, we took our seats at eight in the morning and didn't leave them until almost midnight.

I wore my star-iron rapier on my hip. Cass wore Ithronel's star-iron greatsword in a scabbard strapped between his wings. We had conqueror's crowns, after all, and since our chances of reconciliation with Ithronel were approximately negative infinity, "I defeated a goddess and took her sword" was a pretty powerful way to say "don't fuck with me."

At that point, we did have to sleep, or become increasingly unhinged. Cass and I both unceremoniously flopped face-down in our respective beds, and passed the fuck out.

He woke up before me, because when I got up he was already in the shower, and there was a face-down piece of paper on the floor in front of our adjoining door, as if he'd slid it underneath. Bemused, I picked it up to discover a hand-drawn copy of a page from some sort of botanical guide, showing a blooming purple iris. It had been done with exacting perfection, like a scientific illustration. In classic half-unreadable doctor's scrawl underneath, Cass had written, "The purple iris is used in the language of flowers to indicate high regard, such as that for a Queen."

I turned towards the door to the shared bathroom, one corner of my mouth lifting into a disbelieving smile. When had he even had the chance to draw me an iris? Had he been saving this for me?

It lifted my spirits, and when I finally got to sleep again, three endless days later, I dreamed about irises.

There seemed to be no end of things to do. The religious administrators weren't the only ones to vacate their positions; we lost almost half of the staff by the end of the week. I couldn't blame them. Fae had to think about the long game because they were probably going to live to see the ramifications of their decisions hundreds and thousands of years in the future. Even the people who hadn't been scared off by the way Cass affected the Court couldn't necessarily tolerate the level of risk that an untrained and freakishly powerful King setting himself against a goddess brought to the table.

We held open court every five days, on the second day of the feast week. At first, it was a tense and horrible experience, but eventually the flood of freaked-out people subsided to a more normal level of unhappy people. It gave us an insight into what was going on at the ground level in the Court, too. Some of it was as expected – conflicts between the Cass and Ithronel factions, temples barred to worshipers, Cassites or Nellies (as Cass started calling them) driven out of towns of the opposite leaning – but the vast majority of it was a lot more pedestrian.

The average person wasn't that interested in religious war. They cared about things like "my neighbor rebuilt the wall between our lands on my side of the invisible line" and "several trees grew through my house and I want a new one." Dealing with that was a lot more straightforward, and people seemed to appreciate that the man who'd caused the chaos was cleaning it up.

We got some help from the Cassite faction, too. People who lived as long as fae did weren't often inclined to keep the same job forever, and some of the Cassites had once been part of Court administration. Some still were, even, in various positions, and once Cass and I managed to hammer out a truce between the Ithronel-aligned administrators and the Cass-aligned ones, it was an enormous relief to have trained administrators stepping up to fill the gaps.

To my surprise, Tech was a useful person to have in the High Court. He was bombastic and far too ambitious to have as a comfortable neighbor, but he'd been a prince up until the Court of Mists had been conquered seven hundred years ago, and he knew how to handle courtiers. We couldn't exactly trust him, but he did a good job keeping the peace in the High Court, and so Cass and I kept a wary truce with him.

It was even kind of fun to have him around. I kept up my sword lessons, both to keep from going insane and because it was incredible to have the world's best swordfighter as my teacher, and that meant that Tech and I interacted more than we otherwise would have. He was glorious to watch in motion, as precise and talented in the ring as he was on the dance floor, and it gave me a chance to see "very good" pitted against "perfect." I still got called "novice" while Tech got called "swordsman," but when we were students together, he treated me like a peer instead of a Queen.

I liked that. Hell, I liked him . It would suck if he ended up being my enemy—but as I'd told Ace, I did like a little spice to my life. While I wouldn't have minded less spice on the divine front, I did enjoy the bracing knowledge that one day I might be facing someone like Kettekh Alair on the battlefield.

Cass kept up his exercise, too, taking an hour a day to fly so that he could burn off some of the emotional tension. Even when the breakers had to pack it in for the winter, we occasionally stayed up for a couple days at a time, using the nights to practice meditation or work on research. Because Cass' tolerance for courtliness was low and because physical movement worked so well to soothe both of us, we also got in the habit of going for a walk in the mornings and evenings, moseying through the woods for thirty minutes or so.

We usually had courtiers tagging along for those walks, but the rules were strict: no more than three other people could come, no talking unless you were pointing out interesting wildlife, and anyone who made themselves annoying was barred. People still came, of course; being near royalty looked good, even if you were there in silence, but at least we could mostly ignore them.

Every couple of days, Cass found a new way to leave me flowers, and never in person. Kat found me a vase, and my collection slowly grew: long sprigs of dried lavender, a purple iris made of colored glass, a slender stiletto dagger with an enameled hilt depicting a cluster of violets, a bearded iris cast in pewter, an ivory fan carved with wisteria, a spiky flower I didn't recognize made with amethyst petals. I even walked into the bathroom one morning to discover that an entire wall of the room had been replaced with a vertical garden laden with blooming orchids and some sort of little white star-shaped flower that smelled like honey .

I had no idea how to thank him. The couple times I brought it up, trying to express my gratitude, Cass told me I deserved far more than flowers, but that he was glad to have made me smile.

It got me thinking of how I might make him smile. Even though he was giving me flowers, I got the sense that Cass wasn't a particularly materialistic person. His hobbies were primarily movement-based, he didn't go in for fancy jewelry or clothes, and, if anything, he could use an escape from the endless luxury.

Escapes were in short supply. Even as we started to fill empty positions, we were short-staffed, and there was so much to be done. Nobody turned down our assistance, even when we had to be told what to do like children. Endless meetings, endless work…

He needs a vacation , I thought one evening, watching Cass methodically demolish dinner while reading through a sheaf of papers. Most of our days were like this, colocated and entirely absorbed with tasks. It was important, but he was important, too— we were. If we could only get a little time together… if there could be a way we could get our heads above the water, be alone and without any responsibilities for even an hour…

Well, why not? I thought, an idea starting to percolate. We have a schedule. I just have to figure out how to clear it.