Page 80 of Crowned By the Fae King

I'd never seen snow before; not really. It fell in the San Gabriel Mountains, of course, so I'd seen the whitecaps, but I'd never, personally, been in the snow. It was cold, and white, and fluffy. I tried to catch some on my tongue, an impossible task when in flight, and finally licked one off of Cass' black hair, startling a laugh out of him.

It kept snowing through the morning as we flew north, surrounding us with flurrying white, but Cass' land-sense meant we wouldn't get lost. The center of my world was the heart beating in his chest, but the center of his was the thrones of the palace, and he flew for them with total confidence. He did slow down, though, flirting with the wind and letting me enjoy my first snowfall. We spent hours playing in the snow, Cass swooping and diving through it, the enjoyment as bright as the glittering white all around us.

We finally broke into dazzling sunlight sometime around the late afternoon. This far north, and this late in the year, the days were shorter than I was used to, but even though the sun was low in the sky, it was probably somewhere around four in the afternoon. The sprawling valley the palace overlooked was covered in a snowy blanket. Taeskana stood against that white in lovely spires, huddled up against the mountains, and the various small towns and villages in the basin looked like pictures out of a winter painting.

"Look," I said with pride, pointing down at a small town in the valley, dark against the snow. "Check it out. They've gotten so much built already. I'm really glad the snow held off for so long."

Cass' brows pulled together. One ear cocked forward, then pinned back. "I don't recall any of the new settlements being there," he said warily.

"Yeah, it wasn't in the original plans, but it wasn't that hard to add it in," I said, beaming at him. "The Cassites were getting shit on, even after I made sure they had room in the camp by Taeskana, so I authorized Killie – Killaren, I mean, the quartermaster – to put together an alternate location for them. I hear it's shaping up into a nice little town. I was hoping we could visit them like we said we would, but I was waiting to ask until after the Feast of Willows tonight, so nobody named Paloma gets their tail in a twist."

"Cassites." A flat word.

"Don't worry, it's not like they have any statues of you or whatever, at least not that I've heard of. I'm the only one calling them that," I said. I wet my lips, trying not to be annoyed—to hang onto my happiness at seeing something good springing up. "The worst they're doing is wearing cassiterite pendants, which is extremely dorky. It's a kind of oil-brown gemstone, if you… didn't know," I said lamely. "The color is a little like your feathers, and the name is… pointedly Cass-related, which is probably why they picked it."

His jaw clenched. A moment later he reverted to flat calm, my heart matching his in a steady beat. "You should have asked me."

The temperature around us plunged. As far as I could see, the air glittered, all the humidity freezing out as Cass' anger turned the winter chill to brutal cold.

Rage spiked in my chest. He was controlling his reactions again—controlling my reactions. After all that time aloft, after the snow and the camp and everything, it made me crazy that he would do it now. I glanced back at the settlement, half-expecting it to be in flames, but it stood there, untouched.

"Why?" I said in a sharp tone. "You didn't want anything to do with them. If you had your way, they'd still be camping in a shantytown outside the palace wall."

"Because," Cass said through gritted teeth, powering for the palace, "the Court of Mercy was a theocracy for more than twenty thousand years, and even now, the religious administrators have a great deal of power. Did you even think about what this will look like to them? Our Royal Seneschal is a priestess, for fuck's sake."

"She's a paladin, not a priestess," I sniped back. "The high priestess told me. If you're going to bitch about the Ithronel cult, you might as well know what you're talking about."

His fingers tightened on me. "Oh, now they're the cult?" he bit off. "What happened to 'Cass isn't a god, and they're wrong to treat him like one'? Decided you liked the limelight too much?"

"Fuck off," I said, stung. "It's not about that, and you know it. I was trying to help."

"Well, you didn't." His voice was barely more than a growl.

"Like hell I didn't! Should we have just let them rot?"

He didn't respond.

I flicked him on the neck. "Cass! Seriously!"

He didn't say anything. He didn't even look at me.

"Seriously?" I asked again, wrath burning inside me and unable to show, my heartbeat steady and body calm, my anger tied down like an inmate at an asylum by the man holding me in his arms. "Fine," I spat. "Do what you always do. Avoid the fucking problem so you don't have to be seen. Let's see how well that works. At least I did something."

Cass folded his wings, picking up speed, aiming at the palace walls.

Where Paloma was waiting for us.

Feast of Willows

Cass dumped me onto the ground almost before he'd landed, snapping his wings down with an audible shing! My feet skidded in the snow.

"Your majesties," Paloma said without preface, her eyes hard. Her breath fogged in the frigid air. The silver tears painted on her face glittered. "Are you aware that the cultists have built a temple to the King?"

"It's not a temple," I said, still spitting mad and still with my body locked under Cass' control. "It's a town hall. It's on the goddamn architectural map, labeled and everything."

Her lip lifted in disgust. "So you knew," she said, half-sneering. "You gave that rabble of sycophants a land-grant. You."

I took a deep breath, hating that my body was calm against my will—hating that it would help me; that calm was the right appearance to have in front of a Royal Seneschal who served her goddess first and her Court second, if at all. "I know you dislike them, but they're harmless," I said, trying to paste a smile onto my face. "They've been quarantined, haven't they? It's not like Cass listens to prayers. Ithronel does."

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