Chapter 62: Breakfast Is Served
The knock came just as Cassian had tucked the furs back around Violet's hips for the third time, which was to say it came at the exact moment she had stopped pretending she wasn't going to answer the door herself.
"Your Majesties." Pell's voice, muffled through the oak, carried the strained politeness of a young man who had clearly been briefed. "Two breakfasts. And the juice Her Majesty requested last week. The pressed apple kind, not the cloudy."
Cassian groaned into Violet's hair. "He remembered the juice. I love that boy."
"I'll get it," Violet said, already sliding out from under Evander's arm.
"You will not," Evander said, but she was up, and both kings watched her rummage through the mound of discarded clothing near the window until she found Cassian's shirt, the black linen one she'd stolen months ago and never returned. She pulled it on without buttoning more than the middle three, and the hem barely cleared her thighs. The love bites they'd put on her in the last hour stood out along her shoulders and collarbones in scattered red and violet constellations, and the mate marks beneath them, sun and moon, pulsed faintly warm as she crossed the room.
"You're answering the door like that," Evander said. It wasn't a question. It was an observation, delivered in the tone of a man cataloguing evidence.
"Like what?" Violet called over her shoulder, all innocence, curls a wild brown cloud around her freckled face.
She opened the door.
Pell Quarts stood in the corridor with a lacquered tray balanced on one hand, a second tray on the sideboard cart behind him, and a stoneware jug sweating condensation under his other arm. He was twenty-two, diligent, and had the fastest-blushing face in the palace staff. The moment the door opened, his gaze went to Violet, half-naked in a king's shirt, marked shoulder to shoulder, hair like she'd been dragged backward through a hedge, and his face went from pink to scarlet to something approaching burgundy in the space of a single heartbeat.
"Your Majesty. The breakfasts." He held out the first tray like a man offering a shield.
"Thank you, Pell." Violet took it, and if she flexed her fingers a little on the handle so he could see the two rings' worth of bare hands and the bite marks climbing her throat, well. She was a queen now. Queens were allowed small cruelties.
From behind her, unmistakably, came the wet sound of Cassian kissing Evander, followed by Cassian's low, satisfied chuckle. Pell's eyes made a brief, doomed attempt to look anywhere at all.
"His Majesty, King Cassian asked me to bring the..the," Pell managed, the eggs from the one valley farm you like , and there's the seed bread Her Majesty likes, and, um."
"Thank you, Pell" Violet said warmly. "And Pell? You're doing wonderfully. Close the door on your way out and take the rest of the day at full days pay and full ease, both kings' orders."
He was gone so fast the corridor draft followed him in.
Violet shut the door, leaned against it, and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes. "His face. Cassian, his face."
"He'll dine out on that story for a year," Cassian said. He'd sprawled back against the headboard, bronze and bare and utterly unbothered, dark hair flattened on one side. "Poor lad. Evander, we've traumatized the footman."
"You traumatized the footman," Evander said. He sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed with his beard still soft from sleep, and he took the second tray from her hands when she climbed back up, settling it across his knees with the calm of a man setting up a campaign map. "You kissed me specifically so he'd hear it."
"I kissed you because you were there and kissable. The audience was incidental."
"Everything is incidental with you."
"Incidentally," Cassian said, "come here."
Violet climbed into the middle of the bed with her tray and the jug. They arranged themselves the way they always did in the Royal Wing bed, Cassian against the left headboard, Evander against the right, Violet between them with her shoulder blades against Cassian's chest and her legs stretched across Evander's thighs. It was, she had privately decided weeks ago, the best architecture in the kingdom.
She uncovered the plates. Valley-farm eggs with runny yolks, seed bread still warm, blackberry preserve, sausages glistening with fat, and thin slices of cured ham fanned out like petals. Her stomach spoke first, a long audible growl, and all three of them paused.
"Fuel," Evander said dryly. "We've been drawing on you all morning."
"I'm aware. I can feel it." Violet pulled a piece of bread from the loaf, dragged it through egg yolk, and held it up to Cassian's mouth without looking. He ate it off her fingers, then caught her wrist and kissed the inside of it, slow, deliberate, his stubble rasping her skin.
"More," he said.
"You're a king, not a hatchling."
"I'm a king who was distracted this morning and skipped breakfast before the distraction." He opened his mouth expectantly.
She fed him another piece. Then she turned the other way and held a sausage to Evander's lips. Evander took it with grave precision, chewed, and said nothing, but his hand settled over her ankle where it lay across his lap and stayed there, thumb tracing a small circle. That was Evander's whole vocabulary of tenderness in public, one thumb, and she'd learned to read entire paragraphs in it.
"Preserve," she said, and dipped a corner of bread in blackberry, holding it first to Cassian, then turning to Evander, and when he'd taken his, she licked the smear of purple off her own thumb and watched both kings track the motion.
"You're doing that on purpose," Evander said.
"Doing what?"
"Feeding us like we're the ones being worshipped."
"Aren't you?" She tipped the last of her egg onto her plate and worked on the ham. "You spent the morning ruining me. It seemed polite to return the favor."
Cassian's arm came around her waist. His chin hooked over her shoulder. "Violet. Sweetheart. Light of my three hundred and fifty-ish years. You were ruined before breakfast. We just added minutes."
They ate in a lazy rhythm after that, and the flirtation softened into something quieter, the way it did when they were all fed and warm. Evander poured apple juice into the three cups on the tray and distributed them. Cassian drank half of his in one pull and set the cup on the windowsill with a throw that would have appalled the palace steward.
"I could stay here forever," Cassian announced to the sunlight. "Walled in. Fed by hand. The petitions can read themselves."
"The petitions are a hundred and fifty years behind," Evander said. "They've learned patience."
"One more hour."
"Two," Violet said, and both kings turned to look at her. She shrugged, unbuttoned one more of the shirt's buttons because it pleased her, and reached for the preserve again. "I'm practicing accepting things. It's going terribly. I keep trying to earn breakfast."
"You don't have to earn breakfast," Evander said.
"I know that in my head."
The room went a shade gentler. Cassian's arm tightened. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed, not his performative court laugh but a low, rueful one, and pressed his face into Violet's curls.
"Speaking of confessions," he said. "Since we're being honest today and the door's locked and nobody's dying."
"That's a very specific preamble," Evander said.
"I've been holding one for about two hundred years." Cassian shifted, and Violet felt him square himself behind her, his chest lifting in a breath like a man about to take a rampart. "Evander. Wife as witness. I think you have the most beautiful shoulders I have ever seen on any creature, and I have seen a great many creatures, including actual gods at the Northern Conclave, and I am including in that judgment the way your shoulders move when you take your coat off. It's indecent. It should be regulated."
Violet burst out laughing.
"You have known me for two centuries," Evander said slowly. "And your confession is about my coat."
"My confession is about the moment the coat comes off. Yes. There's more." Cassian's grin was audible. "The thing you do when you're reading and you rub your jaw against your knuckles. The gray at your temples. And when you get quietly ruthless in a negotiation, when your voice drops half a step and you start using complete sentences, I have to leave the room sometimes. Do you know how many trade summits I spent standing in corridors adjusting myself?"
"Cassian." Evander's ears had gone faintly dark. On a man that composed it was, Violet thought, wildly endearing.
"I'm serious! I'm being serious. This is my confession and it's serious." Cassian pressed a kiss to the top of Violet's head, then spoke past her. "And the wolfsbane incident. Winter of the fourth decade. You threw a warlord out a window for insulting Cassian Thorn, and then you dusted off your sleeves, and I decided in that moment that I was in trouble for the rest of my immortal life. That's not sexy, technically. That's just love. But I'm lumping it in."
Evander was quiet long enough that Violet turned her head to look at him. He was looking at Cassian over her shoulder with an expression she'd never quite seen on him before, unguarded, the stern mask set down somewhere on the furs.
"You never said any of that," Evander said at last. "In two hundred years. Not once."
"You never asked."
"I didn't think I had to ask. I thought it was one-sided for a hundred of those years."
Cassian's smile faded into something realer. "It was never one-sided. It was just badly delivered. On both our parts."
Violet reached over and took Evander's hand, lacing her fingers through his where it rested on her ankle. "For the record, I agree with every word. The coat. The knuckles. The negotiation voice. I have that one on good authority from two months of advisor meetings where I had to take notes and could not."
"You took notes," Evander said.
"Three lines of notes and a lot of underlining."
He exhaled through his nose, which for Evander was a laugh, and Violet felt the bond pulse warm, a low sweet heat down the tether connecting the three of them, caramel and pine and smoke.
"My turn, then," she said. She pulled her knees up, dislodging Cassian's chin, and sat cross-legged between them facing the window so she could look at either of them by turning her head, which was easier than looking at both at once. "You'll want to brace. Both of you."
Cassian settled in, delighted. Evander raised one eyebrow.
"I have a filthy mouth when I'm drunk," Violet said. "Not soft-filthy. Epic. Blunt. Filthy in complete, detailed sentences with anatomical specificity. Mira has stories. Dawn has stories. I once told an entire harvest revel, publicly, exactly what I wanted a certain woodsman to do to me, in order, with diagrams I drew in the air."
"There was a woodsman," Evander repeated.
"There were several over the centuries. The woodsman is illustrative. The point is the mouth." She held both their gazes. "And I'm telling you because I'm two months into this marriage and I have been filterless and sober the entire time, which if you think about it means you haven't met the most dangerous version of me yet. Sober me has filters. Drunk me thinks filters are for cowards and speaks in a voice Mira calls the blacksmith's confession."
Cassian looked like a boy on solstice morning. "Say something now. Filthy. As a demonstration."
"I'm not drunk."
"Violet."
"Three cups of apple juice do not constitute impairment."
"I will portal to Goldenpine myself," Cassian said, already shifting his weight. "I know which cellar. I'll be back in four minutes."
"Cassian." Evander's voice cut through, calm as deep water, and Cassian stilled. Evander was watching Violet with that quiet, reading-the-whole-page look. "You're telling us because you want to be that version with us. Not the stories. Her."
Violet's throat went tight. She nodded. "She wasn't safe to be, for fifty years. Marcus hated her mouth. He used to go quiet and cold when I talked like that, make a joke to the room at my expense, and I learned to keep it locked. And I didn't realize until the albums, until watching that grey little woman in the grey little dresses, how much of me was in that lock." She turned her wine cup, empty, between her hands. "So. Sometime. Not today. But I want to drink something stronger than juice with both of you and say appalling things and have you laugh instead of wince. That's my confession."
"Done," Cassian said instantly.
"I'll bring the Clave frost-wine," Evander said. "The good vintage, not the diplomatic bottle. And we'll be home for it. No audience."
"No audience," she agreed.
"Besides," Evander added, and the corner of his mouth moved, the rare half-smile, "I find it difficult to believe any version of your mouth would trouble me. I've read your formal reports. Your sober mouth is already blunt. You once wrote that a petitioner's warding scheme was 'structurally optimistic.'"
"It was structurally optimistic."
"You underlined it twice."
Cassian howled.
The light shifted across the drapes while they finished the bread and the last of the ham, and the room went drowsy and golden. Violet ended up half in Cassian's lap and half across Evander's knees, feet tucked, one of Cassian's hands absently combing her curls. It was the sort of stillness they rarely got, all three in one place with nothing on fire.
"Since we're confessing," Evander said, into the quiet, and both of them turned. He rarely opened first. When he did, it was worth attending. "I should explain something I've never explained well. The events. The feasts you attend alone. The delegations."
Cassian's hand stopped in her hair.
"You've taken it personally for a long time," Evander said. "I know that. You thought I didn't want to be seen with you. That I was ashamed, or still angry, or keeping distance on purpose." He looked at the window, the light, back at Cassian. "I'm an omnivert, Cassian. You charge in a crowd. I discharge in one. Every feast costs me a day of silence to recover from, and for the first century of our marriage I didn't have the language for that, so I just didn't go, and you filled the silence with the worst available explanation. I'd watch you work a room and come home glowing, and I'd lie in the dark in my own wing feeling like a bad husband because I loved you and the room hurt."
Violet's chest ached. Cassian had gone completely still behind her.
"The harvest revel," Evander continued. "The one where you danced with every elder's daughter and arm-wrestled the Gullhaven harbormaster. I left early. You asked me the next morning why I never come to those things, and I said I had correspondence. I had no correspondence. I sat by the fire with my ears ringing and counted the hours until the noise in my skull went flat again." He paused. "It was never rejection of you. It was mental healing. It was me, recovering, so that I could be worth anything the next day. I should have said so. I didn't know how, and then a hundred years passed and it seemed too late to start."
The silence held for three heartbeats.
"You could have told me," Cassian said. His voice came out rough.
"I know."
"A hundred years, Evander. I thought you'd stopped wanting me in rooms."
"I know." Evander's jaw worked. "That's the confession. That the door was never closed, it was just that I needed it quiet, and I let you believe the worst rather than say five sentences out loud."
Cassian moved. He reached past Violet, caught the back of Evander's neck, and pulled him forward over her lap until their foreheads touched, an awkward tangled knot of three people and two empty breakfast trays, and Violet laughed wetly from inside the middle of it.
"Five sentences," Cassian said against his mouth. "You owe me a century of five sentences."
"I'm aware. I'm behind on delivery." Evander's hand came up and gripped Cassian's forearm, hard, the way wolves hold on. "Starting tonight. The Wintercourt feast. I'll come. Both evenings. And I'll leave after the toasts and tell you beforehand that I'm leaving, so you don't lie awake constructing meanings."
"You'll hate it by the second hour."
"Probably. And I'll stand in the corridor with you for the third, which you've apparently been doing alone for two hundred years anyway." Evander's blue eyes cut to Violet. "You knew. Didn't you. The noise thing."
"I suspected. You always took the long way back from court, through the empty gallery. Nobody takes the long way unless they need the quiet." She smiled at him. "Also you once described a state dinner as 'two hundred people saying one sentence in different coats.' Nobody says that who doesn't mean it."
Cassian groaned and let his head fall back against the headboard. "A century and a half of water petitions and a hundred years of marriage silence, and the witch diagnoses both of us in an afternoon. I'm abdicating. She rules now."
"Denied," Evander said.
"Moon rune gets a vote too," Violet said, and pressed her right shoulder toward him, and the frosted silver mark answered with a warm pulse that made all three of them shiver.
The bond thrummed, fed and settled, three strands pulled taut and easy. Outside, Thornhold went about its day, petitions and patrols and one scarlet-faced footman collecting a story he'd tell for a decade. Inside, Cassian refilled the juice cups because Pell had left the jug, and Evander checked nothing, for once, and Violet lay back against the mountain of them and thought that a whole day in bed, doors locked, was beginning to look less like a sentence and more like an education.
"There is," Cassian said eventually, "a bath drawn in the plans for this afternoon."
"There is," Evander agreed.
"And a certain Clave frost-wine in the plans for tonight."
"Also agreed."
Violet smiled into Cassian's shoulder. "Well then. I suppose I should rest my mouth."
"Rest it," Cassian said. "You'll want the strength."