Page 36 of Crowned By the Fae King

What did it say about me that I liked that even more than the view from the front?

Rags to Riches

By the time Cass came out of his room, I'd managed to pull myself together enough to pretend that I hadn't been blatantly ogling him from three feet away. I had my jewelry straightened out, my fancy shoes off, and I was sitting on a couch holding an open book like I was reading it to pass the time as I waited for him.

Cass took the scene in with an impassive expression. One corner of his mouth twitched. "Your book's upside-down, Quyen."

So it was. That was embarrassing.

I gave him a pretty smile. "I'm practicing reading upside-down," I told him, lying smoothly. "It's a useful skill. If you get good enough at it, you can read things people would rather you not." At his raised brow, I gave him a pretty smile. "Managers, mostly, but the skill probably translates to obnoxious fae nobility."

"Hmm." He smiled back, looking amused, and took a seat on the ottoman. "I suppose I'll accept that explanation. Do you want to hear mine?"

It took me a moment for my brain to catch up. Right. An explanation for why the hell we were still going on with the endless coronation proceedings, the thing I'd demanded he defend.

"Sure do." I closed the book – an old-school sci-fi novel with a buxom blonde superimposed on a sleek silver spaceship, clearly pilfered from the mortal world – and propped my head up on one hand. "Let's hear it."

He sighed through his nose. One ear flicked. "I don't belong here," he said softly. "I was born in Ysvai, in Raven Court. My mother is a seamstress, and my father was a soldier. I was their second-born. I was…" Cass swallowed, looking away with his ears pinned back. "…a burden, mostly," he said, his voice going rough. "I came into my magical strength early, and it rapidly grew past my control. When I was seventeen, I nearly killed someone with a kiss. I spent centuries training my power so that I could touch people without harming them."

My brows drew together slowly as he spoke. "You're not royal?"

The corner of his mouth kicked up. "I wish I could say that, but…" He gestured at the palace. "Mercy would disagree with such a statement, I think. I wasn't royal until recently, though."

I leaned back against the couch, regarding him. "So does lineage not matter? Did Mercy pick you because you're so powerful?"

"No, it didn't," he said softly, a pained expression pulling at his face. "Most Kings aren't mages. I suspect that's for the best. It's not normal for a King's ascension to go like this. The forests, the mines, all the regeneration… none of it. I don't blame the High Court for being leery of me, nor the religious administrators." He shook his head, looking off into the middle distance. "I suppose they'll be terrified of me, now. I would've liked to have more time to convince them that I'm not a monster."

I frowned at him. "You saved their lives."

"Do you think that matters?" he asked, raising a brow. "I'm a frightening, dangerous outsider. I doubt anyone who was there will soon forget that I could kill them as easily, and as spectacularly, as I killed that war-dragon."

"And yet you want to make them have dinner with you."

Cass shuffled his wings, looking uncomfortable. "These affairs. I didn't choose them because I like them, or because I, personally, find value in them. I dislike them intensely, in fact. I enjoy card games and house parties, not all this rigamarole." He sighed through his nose and dropped his chin down onto his fist, propping his elbow up on his thigh. "The Court of Mercy is roughly forty thousand years old, and for most of that time, it was a theocracy. This place is steeped in tradition. Vad convinced me it was worth giving the High Court the coronation proceedings so I could do things I actually care about without them fighting me on it, like working with the regenerated wildlings and burned-out healers."

That made my frown deepen. "You're the King, though. You're not just a healer anymore."

He looked away. "King Omahice was dying for some time, and even before that, he gave over most of the actual day-to-day of ruling to the religious administrators and the rest of the bureaucracy. They were preparing to handle a shattering Court after the King died with no blood-heir. They can surely handle one that's in one piece, even if it does have a great deal more trees than it used to."

I snorted, startled into it.

His mouth slanted up, expression warming. "Well, it does," he said, as if that was only reasonable. "If I can figure out how to let people cut them down, we could have a booming lumber industry."

"Ridiculous," I said, shaking my head as I tried to suppress a smile, my earrings swinging.

Cass flashed me a grin. "I try."

"Do you seriously think people are going to be chill about you because you kept to their coronation schedule?" I asked. "That seems like wishful thinking."

"Maybe it is," he said, the levity vanishing. "I don't really have anything else to offer them, though. I am what I am." His jaw worked. "I know I'm not doing a good job at playing the courtier. I don't want to be there, they don't want me to be there, and I'm struggling to remain sane and present when the whole Court is constantly clamoring for my attention. It's as if every inch of my skin is itching, all the time, and scratching only makes it worse." Cass sighed and dropped his head back. "What I'd like to be doing is spending half the day meditating and the other half practicing, but instead I'm stuck wearing fancy clothes and trying not to constantly wield Court magic in new and unsettling ways."

"You could still cancel dinner," I pointed out. "There's plenty of other shit to do. Even if there's nothing we can do to help the investigation into which one of our beloved courtiers arranged for a barbeque—"

Cass laughed, a bright sound of disbelief that made me grin. "It's a long list," he said wryly. "Most of the nobility are the kind of people who might do things like geas dragons to blast me with fire, and not care about who dies alongside me. Vad calls them the vipers," he said. "I have three dukes who would surely love to see me dead, a palace full of courtiers who seem to be torn between being afraid of me and wanting me to be their tame monster, and a collection of religious administrators who see me as an existential threat." Cass exhaled sharply. "If I die, this whole fucking Court is plunged into chaos. I'm not canceling dinner. I don't need another black mark against me."

Well, that put to rest any chance of me arguing him out of it. Fae couldn't lie. He'd said he wasn't canceling dinner, so he wasn't going to.

"Okay, fine," I said, unsuccessfully trying to suppress my annoyance. "No canceling dinner. But what about the rest of it? If it's not bloodlines and it's not power, how'd you become King?"

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