Page 132 of Crowned By the Fae King

"Finish what you were saying," I told him. "Why do you think Cass being burned out is good?"

The muscle of his jaw twitched. "Not being burned out, necessarily. Getting cut off from the Court's power. From all power." He sighed and shook his head. "I've gotten a lot more experience with mages in burnout than I ever expected due to the power flare during your ascension to the throne. Physical changes instead of power gain are a symptom of your channels being fucked. That's what's hurting."

Cass went still. "What?" he asked, looking at me, then at Liyn. "I'm fine, physically?"

"I would never have guessed you were shot this morning," Liyn said. "Frankly, I would have guessed two or three years of natural healing. The scarring isn't pretty because you weren't stitched, but it's clean and old. Whatever poison they put in you to block your healing is long gone. The damage to your channels feels completely raw, but your body's whole."

A sharp exhale escaped Cass' lips. He slumped back down onto the bed, turning his face away from Liyn. "What about my healing?" he asked, sounding like he was on the verge of breaking down. "How fucked am I?"

"Without any magic in your channels, if you can get even a day or two of rest with a healer guiding the process, I think you won't lose anything. You're on the verge of starting to lose coherence, and you know as well as I do how fast that can turn to uncontrollable devolution, but you're not there yet, and without a power source, you're not going to get there." Liyn got to his feet, his expression giving nothing away. "You always were a powerhouse when it came to channeling, Xarcassah. You don't need a native source. Heal and get the Court back, and you're surely going to be as insufferably accomplished as you've always been." He flashed a sharp smile. "Except you won't be turning into a monster anymore."

My soulmate lifted his lip, but otherwise didn't answer.

"Will you stay and help him?" I asked, looking up into Liyn's sharp-boned face. "We don't have a lot of people we can trust."

"Of course I will," he said sharply. "Whatever else may have passed between us, I'm a healer, and he's my King. If I can help, I will."

"Thank you," Cass said roughly.

Liyn froze.

I did, too.

Cass turned his head and looked up at the other healer. "I don't deserve any measure of grace from you. You're right. I've spent these many years blaming you for how things ended between me and Issara." He sighed through his nose, weariness settling onto his shoulders. "You were petty and cruel to me about her choosing you, but that's hardly worth the grudge I've held. So," Cass said with a weak laugh. "Name your price, I suppose."

Liyn stood there in silence for a long time—minutes, maybe. At last, he took a careful breath, and said, "Forgive me."

Cass' eyes snapped back to Liyn, brows flying together and ears dropping in shock. "What?"

The other healer shrugged, looking awkward. "We could have been friends, once. Two men who fell outside of the world's expectations for beauty and interests. The weasel and the war-dragon." His mouth pulled back in a sorrowful expression. "I was so obsessed with being the one she chose that I didn't see that she'd done it to bring you back in line. I picked the wrong side, Xarcassah. I'd like to be freed from that debt."

For a long moment, Cass only lay there, staring at Liyn.

"Cass," he said at last. When Liyn frowned, my soulmate smiled, the corners of his mouth trembling. "My friends call me 'Cass.'"

Keeping it Together

Liyn didn't need to stay with Cass every minute of every hour to help direct his metaphysical healing, so I had my assistant Kat set him up in the sitting room to hang out between his sessions with Cass. The painkiller effects of his magic wore off quickly, though, and left my soulmate wracked with agony he was wholly unequipped to deal with. He didn't even have childhood memories of being in uncontrollable pain. This was a new and awful experience for him.

I washed the blood off of him and helped him into clean clothing. Once I'd gotten the worst of it off of me, too, I stayed with him in bed, the two of us lying face-to-face on our sides on top of the ruined quilt. I trusted Vaduin to check in if anything critical happened, and if we couldn't trust our guards, we were fucked either way. Nothing seemed more important than helping Cass get through the first vicious effects of burnout. We lay there for hours, breathing in the cadence of meditation, our world punctuated by visits by Liyn every ninety minutes to ease the pain and boost his soul's recovery speed.

Hunger started gnawing on me, and without Cass' magic it only got worse. Sometime around two in the afternoon I finally realized Cass would be hungry, too, and got up to get us both something to eat. Liyn stopped me by the door and told me quietly that Cass would need to eat mostly meat, and that he probably shouldn't have any uncooked greens at all.

The price of the assassination attempt tallied higher. Carnivory, feathers, claws… whoever had tried to kill us had a lot to answer for, and I intended to extract every ounce of repayment a fae would have demanded.

I fed Cass by hand. He was too exhausted to even keep his head up, so I sat there with his head on my lap and fed him bite by bite, unwilling to leave him hungry or thirsty.

He didn't comment on half his food being meat. Maybe he already knew why.

Vaduin came back around six or seven in the evening with the first report from the investigation. The six archers had indeed been reduced to unidentifiable rubble, but some of the bodies of the other assailants had been identified. Two were mercenaries; the price must have been incredibly high to go after Cass. One was a guardswoman from Taeskana known to be a devout worshiper of Ithronel, and another was a soldier in the First Army who'd requested a transfer to the palace nine weeks prior.

There were no interesting scent trails for Vaduin to follow. The approaches the people had taken to their posts led down to Taeskana or into the palace and immediately vanished into places full of people. None of them had any distinctive smells on them, except that they were all freshly washed with unscented soap, and each was wearing a small amount of pine oil to baffle scenthounds.

Someone had been planning this for a long, long time. Someone who knew enough about Cass and Vaduin to have a good chance of success, and of getting away with it afterwards.

Neither Tech nor Yllana had been interrogated. They were both too high-ranking to be grilled by anyone without a Monarch present, and Vad wasn't sure that he would be successful at getting anything out of either of them even if he tried. They were confined to their respective suites, though, "for their safety" while the investigation into the attack that had cost Tarra her life continued.

I made Vad a door to Dani so he could go home. He didn't have any clothes here, and it wasn't like this would wrap up in the next day or two. Investigations took time. He could go home, get things settled at the duchy, and come back with Dani to help.

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