Page 13 of Crowned By the Fae King

"C'mon," the woman said, tilting her head towards the palace gates. "There's not a lot of time."

I went with her, because my other option was hanging out with some seriously nervous-looking guards, and she obviously knew Cass. She moved at a good clip; even though I was only maybe an inch or two shorter than her, I had to trot to keep up.

The palace was carved directly into the mountainside, with a bunch of outbuildings and a big wall that looked like it might have been a solid piece of bedrock. The Archangel didn't give me any time to appreciate it, striding past what looked like formal gardens and in through a pair of enormous double doors that a pair of footmen opened without needing to be told to do so.

"Okay," she said once we were inside, in the no-nonsense way of someone gearing up for a lecture, and didn't stop walking. If anything, she stretched her pace, moving with the determination of a commuter at rush hour. "You probably have a thousand questions, and I'll try to answer them while you get clean, but let me try to head some off at the pass. I'm Danica. The Fury on the drawbridge with me was Vaduin. He's my soulmate and Cass' best friend. Cass is your soulmate, obviously, and he's also the King of the Court of Mercy, going on six weeks now, which makes you the Merciful Queen. Today is your guys' coronation, so, um, congratulations—"

"I don't know what a soulmate is," I blurted out, since she was obviously not going to give me any time to speak. The Queen thing seemed less pressing than the why. I'd already figured out that Cass was the King. What I wanted to know was why I was so aggressively attached to him.

She halted, giving me a surprised glance.

"I mean, I do," I said lamely, since anyone who'd ever read a fairytale knew about soulmates. "Like, in books and stuff. But if this whole weird empathy thing is what you mean, then, um. No. I don't know about that."

Danica pursed her lips, shook her head, and went right back to booking it down the shining, inlaid floor of the hallway. "You haven't been here long, then," she said, glancing over her shoulder at me as I trotted after her.

"Uh, seven—no, um, I guess like eight or nine months, now," I said, the anxiety making me jittery. If that emotion was from Cass – and maybe it was, given that it was his fucking coronation day – it was really annoying. "And, uh… super off-the-books. I know basically zilch about where we are, what 'here' even is, or any of the rules aside from 'never make a bargain with the fae.'"

"Black night," she muttered, taking a turn at enough speed that the person heading the other direction down the hallway had to jump out of her way. "Okay. That's fine. It doesn't really matter, since Cass sort of upended most of the rules when he became King. For the record, we're in the Court of Mercy, which is part of the Western Continent of Faery, which for all intents and purposes is like the Faery in books. There's a veil between worlds and everything."

She flung open a door and stepped inside, holding it open. "Shower," Danica said, pointing at another door off the suite. It looked like something out of a five-star hotel, all clean and neat, with furniture that was probably worth more money than I made in a year back home. "Hot water's on the right. You can use whatever soap."

"Uh…" I said, not moving from out of the doorway. "Why? Not that, like, I don't want to be less filthy, but, um… why?"

"Because in a little under an hour, you need to be presentable to both the Royal Seneschal and the high priestess of the goddess of mercy," she said in the patient voice people use when talking to overly-curious children. "And, honestly, because you look like you've been through hell and back, and while Cass is pretty chill with people who look like something a cat dragged in since he's a healer, he looks jaw-droppingly sexy in his coronation outfit, and you'll probably feel better about meeting him if you look nice, too."

A spike of jealous outrage surged in my chest at this other woman talking about Cass like that. That was ridiculous. The man didn't even know I existed, for fuck's sake.

I still headed to the shower, stripping as I went.

I cranked the water, and didn't wait for it to get hot. The cold water hit me like a blast of A/C on a muggy summer's day. It stripped away the tacky layer of dried sweat, and with near-hysterical relief I dumped shampoo onto a sponge and started scrubbing at my dirt-covered skin.

"Soulmates," I said, loud enough to be heard over the shower. "What the fuck are they?"

"We're perfect matches," she called back. I heard her rustling around in the room, and a sharp grunt as she moved something heavy. "It's some sort of big-'F' Faery magic, and fae treat it basically with the same reverence the gods get, if not more so. Something like one in a thousand fae have one, and probably less. Every now and again, a fae ends up with a mortal soulmate, like you and me, and we end up inheriting their immortality, and sometimes other stuff. It's, um…" More rustling. "It's not always a love match. It can be anything."

I shoved the shower door further open so I could hear her better, letting the now-hot spray wet the mat. "Define 'anything.'"

"Literally anything," she said, sounding distracted. "Could be anything from hated enemies to best friends to, y'know, fairytale love." A pause in the banging around she was doing. "The fairytale love is really nice, but I'm told rivalry is, too, so maybe it's all good."

I grunted at that and chose to focus on how nice it felt to have hot water pounding against my body instead of the chilly finger of fear running down my spine. Soulmates didn't sound like Long Beach was in my future. Soulmates sounded like a new life, one bound to a man I didn't know, with me plucked out of the world as his companion.

There were plenty of humans in Faery. Fae loved using us as a labor source. If only fae had soulmates, did that mean that he wasn't really my soulmate? Did the fact that I was painfully aware of him, and he didn't know me from a face in the crowd, mean that I was some sort of cosmic gift to him?

Obsessing about it wouldn't change anything, though, and given the fact that I was getting swept into coronation proceedings, I didn't think there'd be time to discuss until later. "Tell me the empathy thing gets easier," I called, because I needed a distraction. "How'd you deal with it?"

Danica poked her nose into the bathroom, looking rueful. "You're feeling what he's feeling?"

"Yeah, no shit," I said. I stuck my head back under the water to rinse out my hair for the second time. "He's hard to ignore."

She wrinkled her nose. "That's a Cass thing, not a soulmate thing," she said. "I've been blood-linked to him before, and that was weird enough when I knew what… was…" Her face suddenly paled, eyes widening and an expression of mild horror settling onto her fine-boned features. "So, um," Danica said, not-at-all casually, but with the air of someone trying to pretend they weren't about to freak out, "how much of Cass are you getting? And for how long?"

I paused in my scrubbing, giving the Archangel a sidelong look. Yeah. That is absolutely the look of a woman who isn't excited about her dirty laundry getting aired.

It did explain his enthusiasm two weeks prior.

I did my best to suppress the hot surge of jealousy. Cass having a life wasn't a crime. He hadn't even known I existed.

He should have fucking known.

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