Page 32 of Crowned By the Fae King

I fell asleep musing about it, and woke up to the morning sunlight streaming through the window and the scent of some sort of smoky tea… and to darkness and the cotton-mouth feeling of having slept with my mouth open all night. For a moment, I lay there, totally discombobulated, until Cass groaned and shoved himself up, and my senses fell back into my own body.

I was in the sunlit room, comfortable and with breakfast waiting for me. Cass was in the windowless room, his wings and feet hanging off the bed.

Apparently he slept with his mouth open. Bà had told me spiders would make their webs in my mouth if I left it open all night – a vivid threat which had convinced seven-year-old Quyen to tape her mouth shut to sleep – but Cass had apparently not been so lucky.

He probably snored, too. Troubling.

My two remaining body-servant hopefuls were both there when I sat up, sitting primly on one of the couches while they kept their hands busy with sewing, like medieval handmaidens. Hawkish was embroidering a sleeve like it had personally offended her, stabbing the needle in with quick jabs and jerking the thread through. Mortal was working her way down a long seam with single-minded dedication, as if her tenure as my body-servant depended on her ability to perform tasks with efficiency. Though I felt a bit weird about having an assistant, let alone one Auntie's age, as long as that person was able to keep me from looking like a nincompoop, I didn't really have an opinion on the rest of it.

They sat up at attention when I moved. "Good morning, your majesty," Hawkish said.

Before I could answer, the door to the body-servant's room opened, and Cass shuffled out.

The fae woman's eyes went round. The mortal woman's face went red.

Cass froze, then said in a strangled voice, "Ah. Hello."

I bit my lips to keep from laughing, and turned to regard him. Last night, damp from his shower and in the shadows of night, Cass had been sultry and gorgeous. In the light of day? Mussed with sleep? Cass looked like the world's hottest one-night-stand, coming out of his hook-up's bedroom to see her family eating breakfast in the kitchen.

"Good morning, your splendor," I said to him, delighted at the sight. He needed his hair brushed something fierce, and his pajama pants were barely hanging onto his hips. In comparison to how he looked in his coronation and feast clothing, morning Cass was charmingly domesticated, and those acres of bare chest were a feast for the eyes.

He lifted his lip at the honorific and raked his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. "Good morning, Quyen, ladies," he said, inclining his head. "Do you mind if I lay claim to the bathroom? It should only be for a few minutes."

"Fine by me," I said, flashing him a smile. "Take your time."

He inclined his head towards me, then headed for the bathroom at a pace that approached outright fleeing.

Hawkish made a choking sound. I turned towards her and raised a brow. "You can ask, if you want. I don't mind."

"Ah…" she said, sounding disconcerted. "He – that is, His Majesty – did you request that he sleep in the servant's chambers? There are far more fitting places for one such as he…" The fae body-servant trailed off, still staring at the bathroom door. "Why did he acquiesce? He is Mercy's beloved. Perhaps if you slept in the consort's rooms, if you don't prefer to rest alongside your soulmate?"

"Oh. Er." I hadn't anticipated what Cass' behavior would imply about our relationship, or about him. "He, um. Volunteered," I said, trying to find a safe reason for why Cass might be sleeping in the servant's room. "He was sleeping there already. I think he's a bit agoraphobic?" I finished, gesturing at the vaulted ceiling and general cavernousness of the room.

"Ah," Hawkish said again, no less taken aback. "Perhaps your majesty might suggest to His Majesty that if he dislikes the proportions of the monarchal suite, to dream them into a new form?"

The image of Cass opening up a magical doorway flickered through my memory. If he could do that – if he could restore the landscape and make floor tremble – why not change the shape of a room? The thought left me uneasy. What if a room disappeared while I was in it? Would I be swallowed up by the stone?

"Perhaps," I said, giving her a tight smile. I got out of bed and walked over to the little breakfast table, plopping myself down at the single place setting. "What's the schedule for today?"

The schedule for the day was, to my sorrow, packed. Every hour was accounted for, and none of it seemed like things I'd be good at. Hawkish and Mortal – whose names, I learned, were Tessaean and Katerina – dolled me up for the first event of the day, while Cass got himself ready with a little assistance from Vaduin, who showed up about twenty minutes before our first event to braid and pin my soulmate's hair.

The theme of the day seemed to be natural beauty. I got paraded through a series of formal events, ranging from some sort of promenade in the gardens to a viewing of the clouds while people wrote and recited poetry. They were all contemplative things, at least, so I didn't have to spend too much time struggling to learn High Court protocol on the fly. My purpose was mainly to look queenly, and I knew enough about poetry that I didn't do half-bad at describing the way the flight of hawks revealed the secret patterns of the sky.

Contemplative didn't mean there was space for conversation, though, and by the end of the day the only words I'd managed to exchange with Cass were as formal as the events we'd been made to attend. I fell into the Monarchs' enormous bed, he retired to the body-servant's room to cram himself into a too-small bed, and we passed out with one more day gone and no progress on anything meaningful made.

In the morning, Hawkish was gone, and Cass was wearing a shirt when he shuffled out of the bedroom to go brush his teeth.

Katerina, who had won the position of my body-servant via endurance, explained to me while doing my makeup that the fae kept four overlapping calendars, of which the most important in their day-to-day lives was the feast calendar. The five-day feast week had two pairs of resting and rising days, followed by a feast day. For the resting day, we'd done quiet, artistic things. For today's rising day, we'd be doing politics.

"Politics" turned out to be indistinguishable from hobnobbing, at least as far as I was concerned. We milled around in rooms full of people dressed in fancy clothing, Cass looking like he'd rather be executed than to speak to another lord about the fashions in Serpent Court and me desperately trying to come up with something intelligent to say about the dueling circuit in Pelaimos when I wasn't even sure what Court that was in.

Nobody seemed particularly impressed with my answers; the general sense I got was of wariness. They didn't seem to like Cass, and my presence had to be another black mark in their ledger so far as he was concerned.

I was definitely the more approachable one, though, and so people approached me. Cass couldn't have been more obvious about hating everything to do with the events. He did what was necessary, and not one iota more. By the end of the day, he was more-or-less a scary-looking monolith to the side, while I did my best impression of a social butterfly and slowly picked up reasonable things to add to my meager collection of small talk.

I tried to talk to Cass over dinner, got curt answers that I suspected had more to do with his own endurance for these sorts of things approaching zero than any dislike of me, and ended up having a lovely conversation with a visiting noble about the cocktails being served. At least I could hold forth on the topic without sounding like an idiot.

The next day held more garden parties, including a multi-hour luncheon during which I was unable to correctly identify a single piece of food. The day after that? More fucking hobnobbing.

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