Chapter 60: Cassian’s Thoughts

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Seven days.

Cassian had counted every single one of them, though he had never admit that to a living soul.

He stood at the window of his private study in the Glacier’s Crown, watching frost creep along the mountain peaks, and tried very hard not to think about a pair of red eyes.

Focus, you idiot.

The door creaked open behind him without so much as a knock. Only one person in his entire kingdom had the audacity.

"You’re are brooding," Nalani said, striding in with a scroll tucked under her arm. "It’s unbecoming of a Sovereign."

"I am not brooding." Cassian didn’t turn around. "I am thinking."

"You’re doing both, and badly." She dropped the scroll onto his desk with more force than necessary. "Healer Orin sent word. He thinks he’s close. The compound reacts the same way in the last three trials. If he’s right, we might actually have something that reverses the feral state instead of just slowing it."

That got his attention.

Cassian turned, his eyes sharpening. "How close is close?"

"Days. Maybe less, if he doesn’t collapse from exhaustion first." Nalani hesitated, and that hesitation was somehow worse than anything she could have said outright. "Cassian. About Ferrin."

Ferrin. His sword-brother since they were both cubs tumbling over each other in the training yards, the man who had pulled him out of a rockslide when they were eighteen and never once let him live it down.

The man currently chained in the lower cells because his mind had rotted.

"He’s stable," Nalani said quickly, reading the look on his face. "For now. Orin thinks if the cure works at all, it’ll work on him. He’s the least far gone."

The least far gone. As if that was a comfort. As if Cassian hadn’t personally carried Ferrin down to that cell himself, hadn’t looked into eyes that used to know him and found nothing there but froth and hunger.

That was the real reason he had left Shadow’s Edge without a proper goodbye. Not politics. Not pride. A raven had arrived in the middle of the night with Ferrin’s name on it, and Cassian had been on his beast form and halfway home before the ink had even dried in his memory.

He hadn’t had time to explain that to a certain Empress before he vanished. He wasn’t entirely sure he owed her an explanation. But he was sure that not giving her one had been eating at him for a week straight.

"Do you wish to see the Empress?" Nalani asked, far too innocently for someone who had known him for over a decade.

Cassian’s head snapped toward her. "Excuse me?"

"You have read that same letter from the capital three times since this morning." She nodded toward his desk, where a folded piece of parchment sat, official wax seal cracked open, the Imperial crest visible even from across the room. "You keep picking it up like it’s going to say something different the fourth time."

He hadn’t realized he’d been that obvious.

The letter was nothing, really. A formal notice from the Imperial court regarding continued cooperation on the feral sickness, boilerplate language about shared resources and updates on containment efforts. Signed, in ink slightly darker than the rest, by Empress Karina de Laurentis.

Just her name. No personal note. No mention of a white panther who had let a little prince ride on his back through a courtyard.

She probably didn’t even write it herself.

"I have a cure to finish," Cassian said stiffly, snatching the parchment off the desk and folding it away before Nalani could smirk at him about it. "Not a courtship."

"Never said it was a courtship." Nalani’s mouth twitched. "You’re the one who brought her up."

"You brought her up."

"I asked if you wanted to see her. You’re the one who’s been rereading her signature like a lovesick cub for a week."

Cassian opened his mouth to deny it, and that was precisely when the door slammed open hard enough to crack the frame.

Leonidas filled the doorway, his purple eyes blown wide with desperate wrath. He hadn’t bothered to change from riding leathers, and the dust of a hard journey still clung to his boots.

"Cassian." Leonidas’s voice was tight, stretched thin over something that wasn’t quite anger. "We’ve gotten the cure."

Cassian went very still.

"Say that again."

"The royal healers in Shadow’s Edge finished the compound three days ago. We tested it on two of the infected in the lower wards." Leonidas stepped further into the room, and up close, Cassian could see how little sleep had touched him. Dark circles. A tremor in his jaw he was clearly fighting to hide. His cousin looked terrible, and it made him slightly pleased. "It worked. Both of them. Feral state reversed within a day."

"Hmm I see." Cassian kept his face blank, even as something loosened in his chest for the first time in a week. "That’s good."

"I would have sent word to you," Leonidas said, "but I thought you would want it delivered by someone who understood exactly how bad it’s gotten in your territory."

Cassian arched a brow. "How generous of you. Riding all this way just to deliver good news to a man you would gut on the spot if you had the choice."

"Don’t tempt me to consider gutting you, cousin."

Nalani, still hovering near the door, cleared her throat pointedly. Neither of them looked at her.

"Send the formula through official channels," Cassian said instead, moving back toward the ruined desk to collect what could be salvaged. "Orin will want to cross-check the dosage against our strain. The sickness doesn’t behave identically here as it does in Shadow’s Edge."

"Already done. My scribe left for the capital and your kingdom both, this morning." Leonidas hesitated, his weight shifting. "There’s something else."

Cassian let out a groan, covering his face before running a hand through his hair.

"There always is with you."

Leonidas ignored that. "Renira."

Cassian’s hands stilled over the scattered ink pots.

Leonidas’s former mistress who had stooped so low and tried to murder a literal child.

They still didn’t know how she had ended up with her throat opened before she could name the one pulling her strings.

"She talked," Cassian said slowly. "Before she died. She gave up something. And then someone made very sure she couldn’t give up anything else."

"That’s the part that doesn’t sit right with me." Leonidas dragged a hand down his face. "It wasn’t a mob. It wasn’t a mistake. Whoever did it killed her clean, and walked back out without a single soul seeing a face."

"Which means it wasn’t a stranger."

"No." Leonidas’s jaw tightened. "A servant on night duty near the western dungeon corridor says she saw a shadow moving low along the wall. Said it moved wrong. Not like a man. Not fully like a beast either. She said it smelled like the sickness."

Cassian’s stomach turned cold.

"It must be the creature that spoke to Renira," he said. "The one that gave her the poison."

"That’s my read on it too." Leonidas’s fists clenched at his sides. "It used her. Got what it needed. And erased her the second she became a liability."

"Which means there’s something out there orchestrating a plague across four kingdoms," Cassian said quietly, "with enough patience and enough resources to plant a mistress like a seed and wait years for her jealousy to bloom into something useful."

"We’ll find her killer," Leonidas said, low and hard. "I’ve doubled the watch on every dungeon corridor in Shadow’s Edge. I’m having every servant who was on duty that night questioned again. Whoever did this will answer for it. I swear that on my crown."

Cassian said nothing for a long moment. He believed him, actually, which was almost more unsettling than the alternative. A man who had let his own wife weep alone for six years, suddenly this relentless about avenging her attempted murderer’s murder.

Interesting, what almost losing everything does to a man.

"Karina—" Leonidas started.

"I’m leaving," Cassian said, cutting him off flatly, already turning back toward the window, toward the mountains, toward anything that wasn’t the look currently forming on Leonidas’s face. "I have a cure to distribute and a someone to see un-chained. We’re done here."