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Lina was being kept in the family rooms like the prized hostage she was, and she slept fitfully as Clare crept silently into the room. She watched the woman for a moment, feeling odd, for she had never before watched a sleeping figure she had not intended to kill. How many nights had she stood by the piled rags in the one-room hovel in Renault County, watching the labored strain of alcohol-riddled breaths wheeze in and out of her mother’s bare chest while the latest nameless male snored heavily next to her?
She could still feel the smoothness of the bone gripped in her then-small hands, its tip shaved to a point, longing to sink it into the heart of whatever man shared her mother’s bed. Because even at four and five and six, she had known the way they looked at her was wrong. She had never done it because she’d known killing one would not make the men stop coming while her mother lived, and she had not yet been cold enough to kill her own mother.
Had she been, things might have turned out differently. Some, Clare reckoned, might even argue that the failure of that moment was the one that led her to this moment, this room, but Clare knew it had begun earlier than that. It had begun, really, in her being born. Of all the selfish things Clare’s mother had ever done, bringing Clare into the world was perhaps the worst of them.
But she was here now and, having been born, had no intention of dying. So she stood watching Lina sleep without waking her because something about Lina’s and Alys's situation distressed her greatly. Prior to their current circumstances, the two women had had an abundance of money and influence between them. They were beautiful and clever and yet, somehow, they had still been made near-helpless.
How?
But the answer was obvious. It lay in the look Lina had given Clare when she’d seen Alys's ribbon about her wrist. It had expressed itself in the nerves Alys had barely contained prior to letting Clare sneak onto the estate, when she had wanted so badly to do it herself.
Alaric’s voice rose, unbidden, in her mind. Love is power. It shackles people to each other. It destroys them. And all without you ever having to lift a finger to make it happen.
She didn’t truly understand love, she realized. Her only experience with it came from songs and ballads, where the truth of how it happened hid somewhere between the lyrics. If she was going to avoid it, to avoid this situation, she needed to suss out those truths.
But first, she had a job to do.
She scuffed her toe deliberately on the stone floor and Lina jerked upright, her wild gaze falling on Clare. Her eyes widened and she shook her head, hand moving frantically to the white bracelet on her arm.
Clare gave the woman a look that said, Be still, and before Lina could even think of protesting Clare clamped her own hand over Lina’s, the tip of her middle finger brushing the foul warmth of the band beneath. The Song unfurled eagerly and latched on. With a sigh of such relish it was nearly disgusting, it drank and drank and drank, leaching the bracelet of warmth and power, until the white band crumbled into ash.
Ignoring the awkward feeling of the Song’s satisfaction, Clare reached for the cat-shaped crystal Alys had told her to look for, knocking it from its pedestal atop the bedside stand. Magic pulsed through the walls, the wards shrieking, and Megadari Manor came alive with noise and activity.
“What have you done?” Lina stared at the crumbled bracelet and fallen ward-tripper, clearly unsure if she should be grateful or angry.
“Let your lover know it’s time for her to do her part.”
Lina’s eyes narrowed. “And what is her part?”
“Alas, her ladyship did not see fit to inform me of it.” Which she suspected had more to do with Alys not wanting Lina involving herself in that part, as opposed to not trusting Clare with it.
Lina untangled herself from twisted bedsheets, moving with haste for the door. Clare considered parting from her and slipping from the home the same way she’d entered. Her part here was done, her duty carried out, and as she did not know what Alys intended, the safer course was to leave the woman to it.
It was the smart thing to do. It was what the Clare who’d first arrived in Veralna City would have done. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. An uneasy fear beat in her chest, a fear that she would leave and wake tomorrow in a world Alys and Lina were no longer a part of.
This is how it starts, a cold part of her whispered. With caring if people live or die.
But she followed Lina’s frantic rush down the hall to the open mezzanine area. The inside of the manor was now ablaze with magelight. Lina stood still as death, one hand on the balcony railing, and Clare stopped silently beside her, looking down at the scene below.
Everywhere, men lay dead, dying, or fighting. Every single one of them wore the Megadari crest, but only some wore a thin black band about their left wrist, and at the head of their force were Fitz and Alys. Their banded men fought with the brutality and single-mindedness of those whose job it was to kill, and who were adept at their profession.
Mercenaries, Clare realized.
None of this was what had stopped Lina, however. Her gaze had caught on Alys's brother, on the unnerving quickness with which Alys spotted him and moved. He held no blade in his hand. His face held no fear for his life.
Stupid man, thought Clare.
He looked at Alys and smiled. Magic thrummed through the armband on his bicep. It glowed, hot and white, before crumbling to ash as its twin had so recently done. The confusion on his face brought relief to Alys's.
She pulled a fresh dagger from the sheath at her hip, not pausing for speech or negotiation. No, she simply closed the distance between them while Geoffrey realized too late that he should have been moving. She gripped his shoulder in her left hand, thrust her dagger between his ribs with her right and shoved deep, sliding between ribs to reach the heart.
Too late, his hands reached for her, trying to strangle, but with a cry of sheer primal rage Alys heaved him against the wall, the dagger inside the man making a noise Clare could hear even on the mezzanine floor above as its small hilt caught against flesh, crunched into bone. Alys held until his weight sagged against her, then slid the dagger free, letting Geoffrey’s limp bulk fall to the floor.
Lina made a strangled sound that jerked Alys's gaze up. Then she was sliding down the balustrade and Alys was catching her. Their arms came around each other and they were kissing, Alys's bloody hands stroking madly through Lina’s hair, and neither one of them seeming to mind the mess.
Clare was busy studying the facets of this emotional entanglement, ostensibly in order to best identify how its dangers might be avoided, when Numair walked in.
The two women on the ground floor, surrounded by dead, dying, and wounded bodies, stilled.
