Page 43 of The Moon Blessed King
‘Allof them?’
‘But there were so many?’
‘Why did you kill them in the first place?’ Fen asks. Cat twists, not expecting her involvement just yet, but she had asked the question in a Lunae so flawless that it startled him. He didn’t know she had been practising. He didn’t know that in this, too, she had been trying to be helpful.
‘They said Altas could be ours,’ Angelo replies. ‘That when we were done, we would be free. What are its citizens to us?’
‘Human beings!’ Fen snaps, accent slipping in her rage. Cat cannot bear to look at her. He keeps his gaze focused on Angelo, on the soft and gentle, soothing grace that fills him just by being close to these people. Fen marches forward and the Reapers startle at her presence, unused to someone being so brazen in their proximity. ‘You killedthousandsjust so you could have a city to live in?’
‘Yes?’ Angelo glances between them.
‘Fen is a Giver,’ Cat reveals. Some of the tension bleeds out of the group, though they do not appear particularly mollified by the information. Curiosity echoes through them as quiet hisses and gestures fly about the room. Cat touches his cheek. He feels the smooth skin that Fen gave him all those years ago. ‘She healed my scar,’ he says.
‘So, youhadone?’ a Reaper named Ana asks. He nods, hums his affirmation.
‘I did, same as you. And I have asked Fen…’ He trails off. Her anger still sours the air, her distemper impossible to ignore. He will not force her.
But Ana leans forward. She asks of her own accord, ‘Will you heal us too?’ and it is for Fen to respond.
Cat half expects Fen to answer abruptly, her ire overtaking her attempt at politics. She does not. She waits. She waits so long that Cat turns to gauge her response, taking in her tightly pressed lips, the clench of her jaw. But when she looks at Ana, her eyes do not have the vicious hatred that accompanied most of her challenges tohis plea. If nothing else, she seems contemplative. Her curiosity warring with her hatred.
Fen’s teeth grind so much there is a pop in the corner of her jaw. She casts her eyes over each of them individually and inspects them from head to toe. Then, she sighs, and says: ‘Make a line.’ And whether Fen cares to take note of it or not – her actions todaymatterto him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Fenlia
Fen watches Cat as she works. The first time she healed a Reaper she hadn’t known it was possible. The second, she had known itcouldbe done but still felt pressured into doing it. She had struggled – both with the healing and with her frustration at being asked in the first place. That same frustration exists now, but the actual act of doing the task: that comes easily.
Meanwhile, Cat sits amongst his Reapers, hissing a strange call and response, oblivious to her tension. He is a different person with them. More confident, more at ease. And though Fen has grown used to hearingAlestused in public settings, hearing his true name now, slipping out in between the hissing, feels altogether too personal.
For so long, he has always beenCat, a quiet, skulking creature that Elician plucked from the riverbank by the scruff of his neck and delivered to Kreuzfurt as a gift. Cat admitted to liking the moniker, enjoying the anonymity it provided. And yet, when the Reapers talk, when they use his birth name, the corners of Cat’s lips twitch upwards in the subtle smile he gives only when he is truly pleased.
Fen finishes her job. She heals the last of the Reapers and wipes the black soot from her palm as best she can. There is a pile of it now on the floor. She tries to ignore it.I wish I hadn’t done it, she lies toherself as her chest tightens at the sight of all the people touching their faces in wonder and awe. The youngest of the Reapers, a teenager with bony legs and sharp elbows, shuffles towards Cat and whispers something.
Cat leans in close, hissing and nodding. He responds with soul, with passion, with a desperate yearning, and it is met, beat for beat, by his fellows. Fen turns away. It’s not her place.
During her training in Crowen, Elena always said she needed to focus on the present, on what is right in front of her and not the past or future. But what is in front of her is something she’s not ready to face, something she was not expecting. Cat is her brother’s husband. Fine. She can accept that, just as she can accept how she will no longer be his or her brother’s first priority. But she thought that meant Cat would stay in Himmelsheim. And while he is also supposed to be King of Alelune, it had not occurred to her until this moment that he might have no intention of staying in Soleb at all. For where else would an Alelunen king be, save in Alelune?
‘We should go,’ Fen tells Cat. She tries to keep her voice steady, but she must not succeed. The Reaper Cat is speaking to flinches. He looks at Fen with suspicion, as though she did not just heal his face and give him a new lease of life. As thoughsheis something to be feared.
Cat nods at Fen regardless. He stands, hissing something that is repeated in turn by a few of the Reapers nearest. They collect the teen and Cat stands, saying his goodbyes. The rolling vowels grate on Fen’s ears.
When they leave, Marina is there with the chain. Her eyes look wet. She latches and locks the door, then bows deep enough to be embarrassing. ‘My king,’ she says in Lunae.
‘There is no need,’ Cat mumbles, flushing and awkward.
‘There is every need.’
Cat bows his head, then makes his way down the hall. Fen follows. ‘They still killed everyone in Altas,’ she says.
‘Them and the soldiers, yes.’
‘They’re still…criminals.’
‘For the actions they have done, yes.’
‘So why do anything for them?’
