AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She didn’t mind the wait. The oddest feeling was in her chest, growing stronger the more she watched everyone around her relaxing, settling back into drink and conversations, bursting into impromptu singing every now and then with random people grabbing for instruments to accompany. They laughed. They played. They threw darts at targets tacked to the wall. They danced and they flirted.
It was only once she identified the strange feeling that she realized it wasn’t her own. The Song was content. Almost more than content, almost…happy. It hummed in her veins with a deep satisfaction, of a kind Clare had only ever felt in fleeting moments, when a set of chords or lyrics finally came together in her mind in just the right way.
It irritated her, that the Song should be capable of feeling such a thing, and in a place such as this. It wasn’t as if it had made this camaraderie that stretched around her. It wasn’t as if it was a part of it. It didn’t belong here any more than she did.
I don’t have to belong to appreciate.
She nearly jumped at the Song’s voice in her mind. She still wasn’t entirely used to the small measure of freedom she’d granted it, and she disliked this reminder of it. The reminder that it knew her, deeper even than the bone, because it knew her thoughts and her fears and her horrors.
The damn thing laughed at her irritation. Though you could try to belong. It might make both of our lives more interesting.
I don’t want to belong. A truth or a lie, she wasn’t certain. She was only certain that she never could belong. Oh, she could observe the crowd and mold herself into a person who pretended to belong, and whom everyone would like and accept. But that person would not be her.
“Hey, new girl!” The shout came from a woman with dark skin and long locs spilling over her shoulders. She looked happy and bright, surrounded by friends, and Clare was suddenly, intensely, jealous of her. “Amarrah says you sing.”
“A little,” the man beside her who, if the resemblance was any indication, was a relation of some sort, broke in. “She told Amarrah she sings a little.”
Laughter rippled through the bar, but it wasn’t mocking like the laughter the court gave Numair, nor was it harsh and cruel like the laughter of her childhood. It was just…laughter. Maybe it would turn into something that indicated a judgment if she failed whatever test was sure to be thrust upon her but, for now, it was a nebulous thing.
“I suppose I do,” she answered. Then added, “A little.”
“Well then, new girl who sings a little, you owe the bar the newcomer’s tithe. Sing us a song.”
She wondered if there actually was a newcomer’s tithe tradition, or if she was being thrust into the spotlight because she was a stranger who’d bought her way in here. Like the reasons behind most things in life, she supposed it didn’t matter. She closed her eyes and sang. The itch to Songweave scraped at her, but she resisted it.
If she won the respect of these people, she didn’t want to do it through her magic. She wanted to do it by herself, by coming to them on their terms. And a true musician didn’t need magic to make the recipients of their song feel. Music, in the hands of the adept, was its own magic. The way the artist’s emotions bled into their work, felt in where they chose to give emphasis, where to speed or slow, when to soften to the point of barely being heard.
She gave this song that purest version of herself, the her that was stripped to the bone, bare of Songweaving, bare of the Song, only her voice and her drive and her soul in the words. The noise and business of the room quieted, until she could feel the tension of the breaths held all around her.
The final note poured out of her. She let it linger, let it fade, and opened her eyes. Triumph curved her lips at the shocked stillness that surrounded her. She had done this. Not her magic. Not the Song.
Her.
Amarrah was staring at her, brown eyes filled with a suspicious understanding. “You never told us your name.” The soft words were yet loud enough to carry through the silent room.
“It’s Clare.” She lifted her hand to her hair, tucking the brown waves behind her ear to reveal the black diamond. “Clare Brighton.”
Chapter Fifty
Not Nice
Clare was exhausted by the time she stumbled back to the Arrendon manor. As she’d expected, the musicians at the Fool’s End bar had not been struck with awe at the revelation that Veralna’s black diamond Songweaver had taken it upon herself to visit their humble meeting place. Her reputation was, after all, all of a week old.
But the fact that she’d sung for them without the weight of that title, that she had impressed them without it, had counted in her favor. Especially when the magic sensitive among them had attested that it was only her voice, and not her power, that she had used.
And despite them declaring her a probationary new member of The Fools—as they had apparently named themselves after the bar—she was well aware they considered her presence that evening an oddity. That they were looking for a reason to exclude her from their ranks. She couldn’t blame them. They had worked daily, for years and some of them for decades, to scrape a living together and here she had come, an unknown, who had cut through the muck straight to the pinnacle of Veralna’s society in a matter of days.
She would hate herself too, were she them. So they’d offered her inclusion with a caveat: if she truly wanted to be one of them, she could sing with them. On the streets the next evening.
They’d expected her to refuse. She hadn’t.
She had no problem lending her voice and her title to the street performers. In fact, that part of her that vindictively wanted to quash Madame Aria liked the idea of a public show in which she clearly distanced herself from the Musicians Guild.
She locked the Arrendons’ front door behind her, knowing she should return to the palace suite, but unable to just yet. It wasn’t even the thought of Fitz being there that bothered her. He’d made an unbelievably stupid gambit, but seeing his reaction to her terror, she was not afraid of him.
She was afraid of herself. Of every raw, repressed feeling she’d relived in those moments before she’d understood what was actually happening. Of the cruel, stark reminder that it took so little to make a person helpless.
She had fled Renault County but it refused to leave her, its lessons carved into her bones, stitched into her skin. It was the furnace that had forged her, and though she had shattered herself and crafted a new person in her place, the common core of both was the same. The memories couldn’t be erased, only buried, until a storm hit and the earth turned soft, and they clawed their way back to the surface.
