But for whatever reason, it still hadn’t happened.
Yet.
“Why else would that be,” she asked, “if not because of my being Fade-Marked?”
Rhea patted Cas’s hand but shushed her, simultaneously offering comfort and warning. The warning was fair; Cas’s voice was too loud, and Madam Rosa’s tavern was more crowded than usual tonight. There were more than a few people close enough to overhear their conversation.
Of course, most of those people were likely too drunk to make sense of her words, and certainly too far gone to suspect what she really was—especially since Cas had her hood drawn up, and she had disguised herself by way of a Mimic-kind crystal before they’d arrived here. Her normally grey hair was now a dark shade of brown. Her disturbingly pale eyes, a much more pleasant shade of soft green. Another expensive crystal gone to dust—gods, she was really burning through them today, wasn’t she?— but she was already in such a terrible humor after their failed mission…
She was not in the mood to be gawked at while she sulked and drank away her frustrations.
And this was precisely what would have happened if she had walked into this tavern with her greyed-out hair and eyes on full display. It had been years since Cas had seen another Fade-Marked aside from herself and Asra, that woman who had taken her in and raised her, and the rare sighting of either of them would have caused at least a minor uproar in most places.
They were rare for two reasons. One, because that Fading Sickness that had left Cas with its telling marks seemed to have mutated in the years since she’d caught it as a child; very few people had survived it when it first started decades ago, but now it had grown stronger and stranger still—and no one who caught the more recent form of it survived.
And two, because those few early survivors such as herself had been ruthlessly hunted down by the father of the current king-emperor, allegedly because he’d hoped they might provide answers for how to cure that sickness. The theory itself was not troublesome. What was troublesome was the fact that all of the Fade-Marked he’d managed to collect had soon after proceeded to simply…disappear.
But his hunting had been in vain; three years ago, the tyrant King-Emperor Anric de Solasen had died a violent death of that very sickness he claimed he’d been trying to cure.
His wife had already died eighteen years before, which meant that his passing left his one and only child as the keeper of a high throne that ruled precariously over the twelve broken realms of the Kethran Empire—realms that had once been a part of four separate, proper kingdoms.
That current king-emperor hadn’t kept up his father’s hunting practices as far as Cas knew, but that was likely only because Varen de Solasen believed that no more of the Fade-Marked remained. And Cas had employed various tricks and disguises over the years, both magical and otherwise, to make sure that he and most of the empire kept believing this. It was a delicate balance, trying to build a reputation that could land her lucrative jobs, while also keeping any whispers about her true appearance and identity to a minimum.
And how stupid had she been to reveal her true appearance to that man in Oblivion?
To just let him live after seeing her so clearly?
That mission was a failure in every sense of the word, she thought, miserably, as she flagged down one of the servers and ordered a third drink.
“Marked or not, you aren’t immortal, love,” Rhea said, after the sound of the server’s footsteps faded away. “And even with all the prepping we did, I still don’t think we truly had an understanding of the environment we were walking into. And also, no, we don’t know everything there is to know about your weirdness, as Zev said. It could still catch up with you yet. Especially if you keep tempting fate by volunteering for the most reckless part of every mission we take on. Laurent would say the same thing. That’s likely why he stepped up before you had a chance to.”
Cas chewed on her bottom lip, thinking.
It could still catch up with you yet.
None of them said anything about this, but the mood had turned noticeably more solemn at these words—because all of them knew the unspoken line that should have followed it.
It could still catch up with you…just as it’s catching up with Asra.
Cas tried to push away the thoughts of that woman she had once seen as invincible. Asra had been asleep when they’d stopped by their hideaway before coming to this tavern.
She was always asleep here lately, it seemed like.
“Besides, we’re a team, right?” Rhea continued, keeping her voice low. “If one of us is going to volunteer to run into a terrifying abyss of darkness and death, then it goes without saying that we all would do it, and so it shouldn’t matter which of us goes first.”
Zev nodded and lifted his drink in a toast to the sentiment.
Cas felt marginally better as she clinked her glass against his. She drank in contemplative silence after that, letting their surroundings fold over her, feeling the vibrations of footsteps and laughter, inhaling the smoke and salt scent of roasting meat and wrinkling her nose at the occasional whiff of sweat that she caught instead…
It truly was more crowded in here than she’d ever seen it. Her quiet, hooded self went unnoticed for the better part of the next hour. She likely could have saved her Mimic crystal; a hood would have sufficed. She simply wasn’t worth gawking at compared to the abundance of rowdy singalongs and heated games of dice and cards that were taking place all around her.
And this was why, when somebody did begin to stare at her, she felt it.
She tilted her head casually to the left, and she spotted him quickly: A man seated by himself at a table in front of the largest of the tavern’s multiple roaring fires.
His legs were too long to be easily contained beneath the small table; one was casually stretched out beside him, the other curled under that table, and the shape he carved against the firelight made her think of a shadow cat resting in its claimed tree, looking perfectly nonchalant and yet equally ready to pounce. He was observing her— and everything around her— with that same oddly powerful-looking passivity. None of the rude or rowdy patrons hovering around his table seemed to bother him.
His coat appeared cleaner and more finely made than most of the clothing worn by this tavern’s regulars, with an equally expensive-looking set of boots and a silver cuff bracelet to match. His hair, relatively long and loosely tied away from his face, was similar to the rich brown shade Cas had magicked hers into, though perhaps a touch darker.
Their eyes met, suddenly, and he didn’t look away.
Nor did she—though she did pull her hood a bit more tightly around her head, and she subtly lifted one of the wavy stands of her hair to make certain it was still brown, even though she already knew it would be; even the weakest Mimic-kind crystal created an illusion that would last for several hours.
“He’s handsome,” Zev commented, nudging her with his elbow and making her jump.
She turned her gaze back to the chipped mug in her hands. “He’s got a staring problem.”
“I wouldn’t complain if he was staring in my direction,” said Zev with a shrug.
“Want to trade seats?”
Zev laughed. He rested an elbow on the table, and his chin on his clenched fist, and he squinted in the staring man’s direction for a moment before cutting his eyes back to Cas with a sly grin. “A month’s worth of cooking duties says you can’t relieve him of that pretty bracelet he’s wearing without him noticing it.”