Page 77 of Crowned By the Fae King

Skeletons in the Closet

If I'd thought that life would get easier once the coronation proceedings concluded, I would have been very disappointed. Cass hated almost everything to do with being King, and though he did what was required of him, he would clearly much rather be flying or healing than dealing with matters of state. As soon as people realized that I was an action kind of person and wouldn't make their jobs harder, they started coming to me first instead of him. I didn't always know what to do, but I growled less than Cass about it, I guessed.

Luckily, I was used to hard work; back in Long Beach I'd worked two jobs and occasional side gigs, and at the opal mine shifts were usually twelve hours of physical labor, with one day off out of ten. Things would probably level out eventually, but Cass hadn't even been King for two months. The chaos from his ascension to the throne had only barely begun to settle.

At least the event schedule drastically reduced. Neither Cass nor I enjoyed dealing with the courtiers, and while there were still a lot of useless nobles in the palace, I figured they could more-or-less entertain themselves. There were more important things to do.

Chief among those was dealing with the displaced people and those still trapped underground. The refugees were easy enough, since we could delegate that. Or, rather, Cass could delegate that to Killie, and then when the quartermaster had issues, he came to me and I tried to figure out what to do. The Cass-worshippers were the most difficult to deal with; nobody liked them, and nobody wanted them. Eventually I signed off for them to have their own settlement location in the valley. It was easier than continually dealing with issues in the refugee camps, and all it took was money and supplies.

Managing the Court's regeneration was all on Cass. After some discussion, Cass – and thus, me – returned to a three days on, two days off schedule to let the breakers crack people out of the silver mines in the south. Staying up for three days straight at a time definitely left something to be desired. Aside from the emotional strain of not resting, there wasn't anything to do while everyone was sleeping, and I didn't handle boredom well.

Cass was up with me, though, and he didn't seem to like being bored, either. I spent a lot of my platonic touch asks on things like learning how to braid his hair for fancy events, and he spent his hours with me on late-night card games and meditation, the two of us sitting back-to-back with Cass walking us through Court magic. Vaduin had given us assigned reading before he'd left, and we read that together, too. Night by night we got better at doing Court magic—at least, when I wasn't poring over paperwork, and when he wasn't making himself useful in the healer's ward.

As much as I wished that Cass would put any amount of focus into the business of being King, I had to admit that he was peerless in the healer's ward. The surge of magic during his ascension had burned out every mage who'd been using magic at the time, and while that could usually be fixed if it was caught in time, when someone had gotten their metaphysical self truly brutalized, it took someone with Cass' training and expertise to save their ability to cast. It took healers to wake the people Cass had sent into stasis, too, and with the functional-healer count lower than usual, that meant every healer was in high demand, even the King.

There were also all the people who, like the girl outside the palace, had regrown body parts they'd had removed. Many of them needed the fae equivalent of physical therapy to deal with their suddenly-changed bodies. When I asked, Killie told me that no more than one in five hundred fae had aberrant traits, and that most aberrations were minor in scale, like sharp claws or a smattering of scales. Scaled up to a place as big as Mercy, though, that was still thousands of people with major departures from the typical body plan, and those people needed help.

Sometimes Cass was gone for a day or more, traveling to the other cities in Mercy to help. I spent a lot of my solo free time trail-running or exploring the palace on foot, getting a better sense for the layout of my new home. Being alone hurt too much to stay in one place. At least if I was moving, the loneliness couldn't catch me.

A couple of weeks into it, at one in the morning, Cass came and fetched me from the library to take me to the indoor training grounds. As we passed it, he grabbed a sword in a plain black scabbard off a rack and tossed it to me; I caught it out of reflex.

"What's this?" I asked, baffled.

He grinned at me. "A sword."

"Well, duh," I said, rolling my eyes. I drew the sword and examined it, turning it in the bright lambence-light of the training grounds. It was a rapier with a handsome basket hilt wrought in steel. The black leather grip fit my small hand, and it wasn't so heavy that I'd struggle to swing it.

The blade itself had a blueish gleam, with a ripple to the color that reminded me of ocean waves. It felt cold, somehow, when I examined it with the palace's magic, not like ice but like void.

"Seriously," I said, giving it a swing. It hissed through the air. "What is this?"

"It's Vaylir's coronation gift," Cass said. "You mentioned being interested in learning to fight, and star-iron is the only metal I know of that my feathers won't slice through, so if you're going to spar with me, it's your only effective option." He flashed me another grin, the dimple in his right cheek making an appearance. "I don't know shit about swordsmanship, but she does," he said, angling his head towards a lean woman standing at parade rest near the stands. "Meet your new swordmistress. I'm spending my hours on her. And also a lot of money," Cass added with a rakish grin, "so make the best of it."

She inclined her head in greeting. Her expression didn't shift one iota.

I started smiling. "You had the star-iron made into a sword for me so I could fight you?"

Cass laced his fingers behind his head. "I did. Do you like it?"

"Fuck yeah, I do!" I did some swashbuckling moves that felt great and must have looked ridiculous, because Cass started laughing. "Hush, you," I said, waving the sword at him. "I'm going to be great. Just you wait."

"I eagerly await our first bout, your majesty," he said, bowing deeply to me. "Enjoy your lessons."

"Where'll you be?"

He flashed me another bright smile. "Flying. At least for a bit."

I watched him go, feeling all fluttery and bright. The woman got up when the door closed behind him. She walked over without comment, took my hand, and moved my arm and body into a new position.

"I take it you've never held a sword before."

My cheeks warmed. "No. Is it that obvious?"

"Yes. Painfully so." She stepped back, only to grab my wrist again and raise it an inch higher. I'd dropped it without noticing. "Hold it here, novice."

I swallowed and held it. Vivid greed sparked along my skin, a tingling sensation full of anticipation. It had been a long time since I'd done something for nothing but the challenge.

"Good," my swordmistress said, with no emotion. "Now we begin."

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