AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Soft warmth heated the cold in her veins and she snapped back to the interior of the carriage. That gentle white glow that had led her out of the swamp two weeks ago filled the carriage, emanating from Verol, his concerned face hovering inches away but he wasn’t, thank Ferrian, touching her. The soft glow—was it this Kinthing? Was that why she’d been so drawn to it, had been so willing to travel with the two of them?
“Are you all right?”
Her gaze snapped up. Verol’s worried green eyes stared back at her.
No, she wasn’t all right. She needed out of this carriage, away from the warmth of that light and Verol’s concern and Marquin’s silent judgment, and the lassitude stealing over her that told her she was safe here, and she should stay. Away from the contentment seeping out from the Song, that ancient power humming as if this was the best place in all the world for it to be.
“Will the guardsman be an issue?” she asked.
Verol clearly wanted to press the question of whether she was all right, but he didn’t. At mention of the guardsman, thunderclouds appeared in his eyes. “He won’t remember anything, and he is currently rethinking his choice of professions.”
Mindmage, her memory supplied. A Mindmage could mess with a person like that.
“Is he still in my room?”
“No. Are you?—”
Her mouth spouted words while her heart beat faster and faster behind her chest, demanding she get away, get out. “Your assistance, though unasked for, is appreciated. I have a long day tomorrow and I’m afraid I need to sleep.”
She grabbed her guitar case and flung the carriage door open.
“Have you given any practical consideration to how you will—” Verol cut off mid-sentence as she leapt out into the rain. He undoubtedly would have followed, but she heard Marquin’s low voice telling him to, “Let her go, Ver. Let her go for now.”
For now. As if it was inevitable that she would come back to them.
Inside the inn, the night clerk was still hunched over asleep. She sprinted up the stairs and into her room, checking every inch until she was convinced it was as empty as her soul. The broken door refused to latch. She shoved a chair against it, levering it beneath the handle to hold it closed. It wouldn’t keep anyone out, but it would give her warning if anyone tried to enter.
She stared at the room. She wasn’t going to sleep tonight. Not on the bed that had turned her stomach even before she’d found Moretz sprawled across it. Not on the floor where broken glass and red wine splattered the floorboards and rug. Not in the bathroom where she’d hurled her stomach up earlier.
Sleep. Ferrian’s hells, she wanted to sleep. Sometimes, she thought she hadn’t slept in lifetimes, and she wondered if the lack could drive a person mad. If maybe nothing lived inside her at all, and the Song was a figment of her imagination.
It sparked inside its cage, clearly irritated at her dismissal of it. And annoyed that she’d run from Verol and Marquin.
“Be as irritated as you want,” she snapped at it. If the Song wanted something, then she didn’t. It was as simple as that. It should be as simple as that.
So why did she feel…lonely? Why did some part of her wish she hadn’t left that carriage? Why did she miss the camaraderie she’d felt on the road, from two people who had never asked anything of her, and only ever helped her?
Because people can’t be trusted, answered the practical side that had kept her alive. Because people are never fully what they appear and the moment you want them to be…that’s when they are most dangerous to you.
She found a corner of the room that gave her a good view of the window, the door, and the bathroom, slid down against it and pulled out her guitar. She settled it on her lap, fiddling with strings that didn’t need tuning before her fingers found the position she wanted.
She’d passed so many nights, survived so many nights, by writing songs in her head she’d never actually played, because she’d only ever wanted to play them for herself. Because they were her soul and she hadn’t wanted to give it away.
Now…now she’d give away every last piece of it if it bought her what she wanted. So she strummed the guitar and heard aloud the notes that had only ever existed in her mind and she sang, softly, the words that went with them. Sang and played, until the chaos in her mind went quiet, and the night rolled through to dawn.
Chapter Six
The Answer to a Question
Numair Tolvannen had far more urgent things to do than follow a woman he didn’t even know through Veralna’s Midtown. A fact he reminded himself of more than once as he watched Clare Brighton flit from vendor to vendor as the morning light eventually gave way to early afternoon.
But he was tired, an aching exhaustion that dragged at him every second of every day, and watching her haggle over prices with half the city’s vendors while never once buying a thing was distracting in an oddly soothing way. It didn’t take away the feeling of enervation that had ridden him the last few years but it did…move him sideways of it.
Let him forget, for a time, as her voice had let him do last night. He’d never heard anyone sing like that. It wasn’t her words or the chords she’d strummed or even her voice itself. Someone else with a pretty voice could sing and play the same things, and he wouldn’t have felt what he had. It was something about her. It was the voice and the words and the songs but it was more. It was in the way she sang, defiance in every line of her body, as if she wanted them all to love her, but she would hate them for it when they did.
And that—that was why he was here, truth told, even if he told himself he followed her because of that hot flame of power that had slipped from her yesterday in the Hawk and Scepter, when her voice had shifted and she’d calmly informed the innkeeper of how honored he would be to have her sing for him…and he had agreed.
What she’d done wasn’t unheard of. It was something well-within the abilities of a diamond-ranked Mindmage, but there was only one diamond Mindmage in Veralna, and Clare was not Lord Verol Arrendon. Besides which, Numair had seen Verol work and what Clare had done—it was the same end effect, but not the same means of getting there. She was something different, and he didn’t know what it meant.
