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Alys opened her mouth, a mischievous gleam in her eye, and Lina clapped a hand over it. “Gratitude is precisely why we are here. I wanted to thank you. For everything.”
“I like her better than you,” Clare told Alys.
Alys snorted. “I like her better than you too.”
“However, why do I feel like the gratitude is actually a prelude to a request?”
Lina blushed. “We wanted to ask if you would sing at our wedding.”
“You’re getting married? When?”
“In two months.”
“I wanted to sign the paperwork and be done with it now,” Alys grumbled.
Lina’s expression hardened. “And I want to shove all their faces in it. So will you? Sing for us?”
Clare didn’t know anything about weddings, but she supposed she had two months to rectify the fact. “If you do me a favor in return. As it turns out, I’m expected to socialize while I’m here. Keep me company while I do?”
Lina smiled. “We would have done that anyway.”
And Clare would have sung at their wedding anyway. But she suspected they already knew that.
“Do you want to come with us now? We were about to go down.”
Clare did not want to go down. Alaric might have been pleased with the result of her previous night’s work, but she was still unsettled, still…raw. She didn’t know how these people would react to her today, and she didn’t know how she would react to them. She’d forced too much honesty out of them, and hadn’t liked what she’d learned.
She had understood before, of course, the benefits afforded by the company of others. Understood the protection that could be provided by having others claim you, in public, as part of their number. But she had never thought to see a time when that connection was more beneficial than it was problematic. She had never thought to see a time when she trusted enough to make such an alliance.
And she did, on some level, trust Alys and Lina, she realized. Alys, for all her snarling and bluster, was honest in a way that few people were. Lina was…open, in the way her face seemed to reflect whatever she was thinking. And the connection between the two was, despite how much Clare knew she should avoid finding herself in any similar situation, intoxicating.
“Let me change,” she told them finally, because they were waiting for her answer.
Fitz shuffled his feet. “Before you do, could I speak with you?”
She smothered her instinctual reply of There’s nothing to talk about. Better to let him say whatever he needed to say to make himself feel better, so he could stop reminding everyone by his behavior that something had happened. “Fine.”
“We’ll come back in half an hour,” Lina said, rising and pulling Alys out the door.
Fitz still wore that completely genuine mix of contrition and guilt she found so irritating. Because the two things always wanted something out of the person they were aimed at: absolution.
“Stop looking at me like you’re a puppy I’ve kicked.”
“I’m—”
“—sorry,” she finished for him. “I’ve gathered as much. The thing about that, though? You’re the one who’s making this a problem. I don’t want your apology or your explanations. I don’t want to hear your sad story about whatever woman in your life you watched horrible things happen to, so you can assure me you would never.”
His eyes widened, almost comically. Like it wouldn’t be obvious why he’d cried after she’d reacted the way she had when he’d attacked her.
“Your damage is your own. I’m not taking it on to make you feel better. I’m not forgiving you. You made a judgment about me and you did something incredibly stupid as a result. Live with what you did. Ferrian knows the rest of us have to.”
She waited while he processed. Finally, he said, “You want me to act like nothing happened?”
“I want you to learn from it and move on.”
He ran a hand over his face. “You…aren’t who I thought you were.”
“People rarely are.”
