Page 83 of Crowned By the Fae King

She laughed, raising her sword. "No answer for me, thief?" she asked. "No pleading? You made my Court your bones and its power your blood. You have spared nothing for me. I have bitten and bitten, and you have denied me."

He was always channeling. Always casting. They'd bound him with opals, and it had felt like bleeding out.

She was the Court's vampire, and he couldn't bear to let her feed.

Ithronel's face went hard. She came to a halt in front of us. "I demand what is mine by right," she said with low menace. "If you will not bleed for me, I may see fit to make you bleed. The red in your veins will satisfy me as well as the power of this Court."

He just stood there, watching her come for him. He wouldn't fight, I realized. He would rather die than accept what he'd been born to be.

No.

With terror freezing my bones and blood, I stepped in front of Cass. My hands shook as I held my arms to the sides, blocking her way to him. "Don't," I said.

"'Don't'?" she asked with silken hatred. Her tear-reddened eyes gleamed with eldritch light. "You dare to challenge a goddess in her own Court?"

My eyes burned. A single tear fell from my trembling lashes. "Please. I beg mercy."

I didn't care about the price. She could have whatever she wanted from me. I couldn't stand by and watch Cass die, no matter what it cost me.

Ithronel pulled her arm back, with the point of the sword pointed directly at my heart, unmoving. "I have no mercy for you," she snarled.

No—!

Bronze flashed between us in the fraction of a second before her sword impaled me. It struck Cass' wing with the sound of a bell, making my ears ring.

Cass looked down at me for one heartbeat, his expression tormented.

"Cass," I whispered.

"Hide," he said, and threw himself into the fray.

Schism

Ithronel reeled back with the angry hiss of a viper. "Foolish creature," she sneered, shifting her stance into a fighting one. "If you will not—"

Cass didn't give her a chance to give her villain speech. He struck with his wing, the feathers slicked down into a killing edge and his stance low and strong.

The star-iron sword met his wing, her downswing vicious. It cut through the air with a thunderclap. People screamed. My eyes jerked to the side to see bloodied courtiers. She'd cut them with the wind, she was a goddess—

No, I told myself viciously, scrambling to get out of the way of those aerial strikes as Cass' wings and her sword clashed again. This is no time to panic. You can help them. I'd helped the people trapped in the woods when I hadn't known anything. This didn't have to be any different.

I huddled under the table and closed my eyes, the clang and crash of every strike ringing through the air. The force of her attacks hurt, Cass' wings and my back wrenching with the blows. It didn't matter. I had to set it aside.

All the late nights spent meditating with Cass as we honed our connection to the Clement Palace and to the Court of Mercy flooded into me. He'd told me I was a natural, when all it had been was six weeks of wild power scouring that connection deeper. The depths of those channels beckoned like the sea. Fall into me, lose yourself in me—

Protect them, I whispered to the palace, thinking of all my terrified people. Wealthy, important, frightened, faery… the Clement Palace showed them to me in scattered fragments, scenes seen through their eyes. A hundred different views as Ithronel and her King clashed, a goddess cleaving stone and air alike, leaving gouges across my soulmate's perfect wings. Cutting him open with the wind, blood drenching his shirt and pants, but her sword never biting into flesh.

Protection. I made myself think of it—made myself turn my heart away from Cass and imagine it. Walls of stone. Distance between a furious goddess and my people. Space for Cass to fight, where he didn't have to defend anyone.

The palace obeyed. Walls shot up from the ground like blast doors in a movie, slamming into the ceiling with a BOOM that threw plates to the floor. Physical geometry didn't matter to a place as ancient as the Clement Palace. In a heartbeat the center of the banquet hall went from near the heart of the palace to being divided from everything by swathes of bedrock, and I flung the walls away from each other to give my soulmate room to move.

A spike of hot exultation ran through me. I dug my fingers into the marble floor with my teeth bared, and went to war.

Cass fought with brutal force. The moment the walls went up, he stopped trying to block Ithronel's attacks with the broad sweep of his wings and went for vicious blows. He kept his hands up in a defensive position. If he touched her, he could fight with his power, but he couldn't get close. Her reach with that sword was too long.

My sword lessons had taught me enough that I knew I didn't have anything to contribute to the clash of swords and wings. Cass knew how to move, and how to fight. He knew how to face swords.

Ithronel used hers like a club. Her power screamed through the air, cut along its path, but she wasn't a swordswoman.

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