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“The first prince of Faelhorn,” Alys said slowly, giving Clare an odd look. “Where did you grow up that you don’t know that?”
Clare could have kicked herself. “I only meant I haven’t seen him at all.”
Alys made a disbelieving noise, but she let it go. “About six months ago he took dreadfully ill. The healers are at a loss. He occasionally manages an appearance, carefully monitored, of course, but otherwise no one is allowed to see him.”
“It’s why Lady Meraland’s been such a delight to be around,” Lina chimed in. “Apparently, she actually likes the man, as opposed to simply wanting to marry him.”
She remembered Lady Meraland’s dazed confusion that day in the hallway, her hollow, “I went somewhere I wasn’t supposed to.” Had she managed to see Prince Brennan? If Verol had manipulated her memory that day, was this why? And if so, what about the first prince’s condition necessitated the secrecy?
Aloud she only said, “I wonder they don’t all simply bypass the princes and try for the king.”
Lina and Alys gave her twin looks of incredulity. Alys said, “Even excepting the fact that King Tolvannen earned his moniker getting his hands dirty, and responds to the slightest rebellion with crushing force—there are, after all, some women who find that sort of thing appealing—you do realize he doesn’t talk to anyone, don’t you?”
“He talks to people,” Clare muttered.
“Outside of business and ordering people around.”
“He talks to me.”
“So I’ve heard. And that is why everyone here hates you, wants to be you, and will say anything if it means they can be seen in your company.” Alys nodded to their right. “Look, your first hopefuls are headed our way.”
They were indeed. A group of two women and three men, to all appearances merely wandering the outskirts of the gymnasium, though it wasn’t difficult for the practiced eye to guess their true aim. Clare mused darkly upon the difference a king’s attention could make. Yesterday they’d all been waiting to see who would pick her up next, and if she was worth associating with. Now, they were apparently willing to pretend she hadn’t been responsible for the social fiasco the previous night had been, and all because they were stupid enough to think Alaric’s attention was synonymous with his favor.
“I don’t feel like talking to them.” Despite the fact that talking to them—to everyone here—was precisely what she’d been ordered to do. The thing about that was, she didn’t appreciate taking orders. She might perform as she had to, and she would do just enough to placate Alaric, but she had no intention of throwing herself into this role. The bonds he’d placed on her were already chafing, and she had a tendency to rub herself raw against restraints.
She turned in the opposite direction of the approaching group, and made her way to Numair’s instead. He noticed her approach but wouldn’t meet her eye again, as he’d refused to all last night, and the thin line of tension in his body suggested he was waiting for her to treat him as everyone else did. The green scarf around his neck said he was hoping she wouldn’t.
She inserted herself into his surrounding circle and said to him, without preamble, “I’m bored.”
She’d talked over a woman who now fell silent, waiting for Numair’s response. He finally met her gaze, and the tension in his body melted at whatever he found there. “Bored,” he repeated.
She nodded. “I can’t see how anyone finds fencing interesting. I’m told it’s because I lack the male inclination to poke things.”
No less than three of the surrounding individuals choked on thin air.
“When you put it that way, it does seem like a lesser sport.” A smile curved Numair’s lips. “So I suppose we should find something more interesting to do.”
The trepidation that crept onto the surrounding faces said that when Numair suggested they do “interesting” things, the results were often questionable.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Surviving
The following days dragged on in a grinding, repetitive fashion, each one drawing the net Clare was caught in a little tighter. She found herself once again hating what she did. In that brief time she had spent with Marquin and Verol on the journey here, and then in those first few days in Veralna, her music and her talent had finally felt like they were hers. Even though she’d been playing for others, the music had still been hers. Because she had been in control. She had chosen—what to sing and when, and she’d had a goal. Something to strive for and attain.
Now…now, on the surface, everything she wanted had been dropped at her feet. She couldn’t rise any higher than playing for Alaric, and yet this wasn’t what she had wanted. It was a facsimile of it, because she had not shaped its creation. She had not laid the careful groundwork and watched it come to fruition. She had not felt the triumph of success.
She had been outmaneuvered—run into a dead-end alley and trapped. She had not come to Veralna to belong to a man, and though Alaric had not claimed ownership of her in any technical sense, he might as well have. Nothing she had now was hers, no matter how ridiculously Alaric paid her, which was a form of mockery in itself. Everything she had, from her money, to her job, to her social status, to the rooms she lived in, was his. If the situation possessed a key difference from the one she’d fled in Renault County, a difference that made this one more bearable, it was yet still a cage she was unwilling to reside in forever. But she once again found herself unaware of how to escape it.
So she took the only ready escape she had, the only control she could. After each day spent in the palace, wasting hours of her time on frivolous people and acting ridiculous with Numair—because that was the only way he could be, and she refused to let him alone in it—and after each evening turning Alaric’s court into whatever he wanted of them, she took to the streets in the later hours.
The Fools began to joke that she was a demon rather than a woman, for she never seemed to sleep. She wasn’t sleeping. She ran herself ragged performing in the city—Hightown, Midtown, Lowtown, she didn’t care—and Veralna had a betting pool on where she would appear next. She was succeeding in diminishing the prestige provided by the Musicians Guild licensing system—and angering Madame Aria, who never failed to show up, when she could, with Hounds from the Mages Guild, intent on finding some use of illegal magic—but that wasn’t why Clare was doing this anymore.
She needed it—the act of proving herself over and over again, without Songweaving, without the Song—the knowledge that she was worth something. Something that could not be quantified by money or desire, but only by the rapt attention of an audience, by adoration. By the questionable love of strangers for an icon they could never hope to touch or know or have. And if she found some camaraderie in the musicians she worked with, it wasn’t the same kind of camaraderie they had between each other. They had put her on a pedestal, this woman who had managed to grant them the legitimacy that had been denied them by their inability or refusal to pay the Musicians Guild. She was more a god to them than a peer, and she did not want to be a god.
On the two nights of the week that Verol—and therefore she—was not required to stay in the palace, she would stumble from the streets of Hightown to Numair’s estate. But he was never there. He was running himself as ragged as she was. They were both growing more and more tightly strung, like threads caught between competing spindles, pulling them in separate directions. Always, always Alaric watched them, but she didn’t know what he was watching for. She had only the distinct impression that he observed them like a scientist might observe the stages of an experiment and she couldn’t help but wonder, once he considered the experiment concluded, what he would decide to do with the results.
It was, therefore, a relief when she woke to find the palace in a state of shifted energy, because Alaric was leaving. Unrest, it seemed, was brewing in Trin Province, adjacent to the Veralna Province boundary, and he would be seeing to it personally. He took a quarter of the First Army with him, leaving her with a parting note that said only, I leave the court’s evening mood in your hands, little songbird.
