Page 72 of Crowned By the Fae King

I stopped Cass before he went to get ready for bed. "I was thinking," I said, looking up at him. "It's silly for you to sleep in a bed that's too small for you. Someone told me we should be able to get the palace to rearrange the monarchal suite, since you don't like the big room. What do you think about doing that?"

"Ah…" My cheeks heated as his darkened. "I'm not sure I'm comfortable sharing a bed."

"I didn't imagine you would be," I said, flashing him a smile. I walked over to one of the couches and dropped down onto it. "We could still rearrange some walls. I'd like Kat to have her proper room, and, honestly, you should have an assistant to help out with your clothes and cleaning and stuff, too. Hair, even, now that Vad's heading back to Mirage Duchy, as long as it's not too weird for you."

Cass made a face. "I suppose that's true," he said reluctantly. "I don't sleep well when I'm in open spaces." He shrugged, not looking at me. "I'm not safe to others when I'm sleeping, and not only because of my power. I could hurt someone in a dream if I move my wings wrong, so I dislike there being space near my bed where someone might be."

"Okay." I gave him another smile. "So we make the shared bedroom small, and divide your side up into a small bedroom and a staging room for dressing or reading or whatever, and your assistant's room can open up into the staging room. Would that work?"

He paused, thinking, his ears shifting. "I don't see why not," Cass said after a moment, sounding surprised about it. "If it's awful, I suppose we could change it."

"That's the spirit," I said with a grin. "So how do we do it?"

Doing it was easier than I anticipated. Palaces were apparently very responsive to their Monarchs even when one of them wasn't a land-tied command healer, and shaping the palace to suit the residents was one of the responsibilities of the Monarch. It ended up being a lot like making doors or finding my lost man; we sat cross-legged on the floor with me on Cass' lap, talked our way through what we wanted, and asked the palace for it.

We ended up settling on a suite of rooms larger than my whole house back in Long Beach. The central bedroom, hosting the massive bed I'd been sleeping in, clocked in at twelve by fifteen; large enough to fit the bed and a few decorations without being claustrophobic, but not wide enough for Cass to spread his wings. It had a pair of windows on the back wall and opened up to the massive ensuite bathroom on the front and our private rooms on each side.

Cass' private room got a bed. Mine did, too, for symmetry, though it was never going to get used. We each got our own staging room and body-servant's room – mine for Kat, his for a manservant to tidy his room and manage his clothing – and the staging rooms opened up onto a shared sitting room and entry room. It was an outrageous amount of space for two people, but that was kind of nice. The monarchal suite was our home-within-a-home. Maybe we could add a private garden off the back sometime. Plant some irises.

It was nice to have a home again, I thought dreamily, staring up at the white, normal-height ceiling while spread-eagled in my enormous bed. Cass was sprawled out on his own bed – formerly the consort's bed – with all his limbs fitting. He had a smile on his face, the sort people wear when their entire day has been wonderful. I was smiling, too. I couldn't help it.

S-L-E-E-P-W-E-L-L, I wrote on my arm.

He let out a happy sigh, and I sighed with him, his smile warm on my face. Y-O-U-T-O-O, came the response, drawn on the back of his hand.

Yeah, I thought, closing my eyes. I liked having a home.

Pony Rides

There was a chapel to the gods in the palace, but the temple of Ithronel that served the Clement Palace and the city of Taeskana was located near the base of the mountain, situated in a natural cave. Cass could easily have flown us there, but the whole point of this venture was to ostentatiously show obeisance to Ithronel. Given what the high priestess had told me the day before, I didn't think it would do anything to help us in the end, but it was a nice way to appease our Royal Seneschal and hopefully cool the fervor of the people encamping outside the palace.

That meant horses.

I had never ridden a horse. I had never even seen a horse, not in person. The moment the handler came around the side of the palace with the animals Cass and I were supposed to get on top of, all the blood ran out of my face. I stepped behind Cass without even meaning to, hiding.

Horses, as it turns out, are big animals. Horses big enough to carry six-foot-seven men, even ones with bird lungs and hollow bones, are fucking enormous.

"Nope. Nuh-uh," I said, while Cass tried to stifle his laughter. "No way. I have changed my mind on every possible conceivable level."

"It's not so bad," he said, his voice bright with humor. "I have to ride with my wings half-open and it's still not that bad. They're only horses."

He tried to step to the side to make me look at them. I did not comply.

"They're huge!" I protested. "It's like someone took a fridge and stuck it on stilts! Stilts with knives on the ends!"

"You're hiding behind wings made of knives," Cass pointed out in a reasonable voice.

"Yeah, well, you're not going to try to kill me with them." I grabbed onto the back of his shirt so he couldn't stop acting as my personal shield. "And don't tell me that I'll be fine as long as I stay on its back. That thing could reach around and bite me, and you know it."

Cass started laughing, the feathers on his wings rousing and his head dropped back. "You're the one who wanted to do this, your majesty. I wanted to hide in the palace and hope people forgot I existed."

I peeked under his wing at the horses to see if they'd gotten any better.

Nope. Still enormous.

"I'm not even going to be able to steer that thing," I said, returning to hiding behind him. It was undignified and ridiculous, but my other option was getting tossed onto a horse by a handler who was obviously doing her damndest not to laugh at her Queen, and that was not going to happen. "I'll walk it right off a cliff and then we'll fall to our mutual deaths. You'll have to put 'crushed to death by falling horse' on my tombstone."

"As if I'd let you die," Cass said playfully. He bopped me in the sides with his wings, making one of the horses snort. "Come on, dove. You're going to make us late."

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