When I went to go find clothing, Alluin and Zhiolas were still passed out in my bed, naked and tangled together with their legs sticking out from under the sheets, which had been entirely pulled off the bed. Pretty vigorous for two men who'd been fighting nonstop for three days, but given the vigor with which Dain had approached having me at last, I supposed I shouldn't be surprised. Two centuries was a long time to yearn for someone, and the two of them were hardly virginal. I collected my clothing with a smile and left them to their well-deserved rest.

As Dain had done for me, not so very long ago, I held court out of our sitting room, leaving the bedroom dark for him but staying close by in case he woke. Though the vast majority of the armies remained unconscious, filling the rooms and gardens of the palace, there were still heaps of things that had to be done.

The armies themselves were a huge logistical nightmare: that many people require a metric fuck-ton of food and water, and produce an equally prodigious amount of waste. All the people who would usually set up the encampments for such a collection of people were also unconscious, so we did the best we could with books about army camp layouts and with the relatively few conscious people we had. Presumably whoever actually knew how to set up camps would be appalled when they woke up, but in the meantime at least there were latrines getting dug for everyone out in the woods.

Dain's glamor still hid the bodies and even the blood within the walls of the palace, but Zhiolas hadn't been wrong in his estimation of how many people had been killed. Lyraniorn had possessed upwards of sixty-five thousand citizens, and we hadn't been successful in evacuating everyone around it. There were many dead animals, as well—the former Queen hadn't been picky about what flesh she used to make her constructs, and like her son she'd slaughtered the city down to the lambs in the market and the pigeons in the cotes. Not all of the bodies had made it to the palace walls, of course, and a great many had been consumed by the flames, but there were still an appalling number of corpses littering the landscape.

Not to mention iron. Touching iron for long enough burned fae, and if they got it in their bodies it would poison or kill them. I found out to my sorrow that some of our soldiers had been injured by iron shrapnel, but it had been a risk we had decided to take in the war room for the sake of protecting the armies as a whole, and I hoped that they wouldn't begrudge us for it.