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Didn’t know where she’d come from, when every mage was required to register with the Mages Guild under Faelhorn law. People slipped through the cracks here and there, defying royal decree, but the only ones who ever managed it long-term were those with minimal ability. Or those who, like himself, had dual abilities of equal power, the one able to mask the other.
She entered the marketplace and he drifted closer to her, absently picking through a display of brightly colored scarves—Ferrian’s hells, he was probably going to have to wear something like this soon, they were coming into fashion—while at the next stall over Clare pulled out the dress she’d worn during her performance last night.
And standing this close to her, a handful of feet separating them, he wondered if his sanity was going and he’d imagined the entire encounter with the innkeeper yesterday. Not a single trace of the magic he’d felt from her then escaped her now. There was something else—a soft wash of magic, but it wasn’t the storm cloud he’d sensed before.
The scarf merchant asked a question and he answered absently, unable to convince himself he hadn’t witnessed what he had at the Hawk and Scepter. Yet the more he watched the woman, the less sense she made to him.
She was finally trading the dress. He’d watched her go back and forth with no less than a dozen other clothing dealers and she’d settled on this one? He respected wanting to get the best bargain for something, but he was certain at least one of the others must have offered her a deal of similar value.
So why this one? Why now? She didn’t look tired, as if the morning’s efforts had exhausted her and she was taking the deal because it was here and she was tired of haggling. No, her calculating gaze was sweeping over the vendor’s wares as she pointed out the garments she clearly meant to have in the dress’s place, not a trace of exhaustion in her face.
He ran back through what he’d seen of her that morning. She hadn’t only gone to clothing vendors. She’d been through similar bartering exchanges at almost every shop she’d gone into, picking up items and inquiring about prices.
So many shops she’d gone into, yet she’d never bought anything, and the items she’d looked over had little in common. As if she hadn’t wanted any of them. As if…as if she had no idea how much anything should cost, and she was gathering a baseline in the most expedient way possible, without revealing to even the most casual passerby the gap in her knowledge.
The certainty of it settled into him. It made as little sense as the power he’d felt that was nowhere to be found in her today. The last of the known world had come under the Jackal King’s control eleven years ago, and where the king conquered, his institutions followed. Only one currency remained. There was nowhere she could have lived in the last decade that would prevent her from knowing the value of money…nowhere except one.
His stomach clenched, but he discarded the ludicrous thought as soon as it came into his head. No one had ever left Renault County and lived.
Clare finalized her selections and Numair bought the scarf, turning his back to her. She walked past him a moment later, a careful hand on her purchases, as if she knew precisely the best way to steal from someone walking through a crowd, and therefore precisely the best way to ensure it didn’t happen to her.
He should let her walk away. He’d seen nothing this morning to indicate she was anything other than what she appeared. If a Hound from the Mages Guild stood before her, Numair doubted they would sense anything more than that soft wash of power he’d just felt. Nothing dangerous, though they would no doubt take great pleasure in tossing her into indentured servitude in the Mages Guild and charging her a backlog of fees, no matter how insignificant the power she possessed.
That was the law under the Jackal King’s rule: every magic was found, every magic was trained, and every magic was known, however unimportant it might be.
Numair meant to leave. His feet followed her instead, through the winding crowd, and when she slipped down an alleyway he went too, as if he didn’t damn well know better. He did know better, yet he was still surprised when he rounded the corner, the alley stretching empty before him, and an arm came around his shoulders, a blade pressing to his throat, another to his back.
Surprised, but not afraid. It wouldn’t be so terrible, to slip away into whatever waited past this life. He hadn’t found much good in this one yet.
“Why are you following me?” Clare asked.
She’d had the sense of being watched all morning, but it wasn’t until she’d seen him at the scarf display that she’d been certain. He’d looked a little too long through the sheer green slip of fabric he’d even gone so far as to purchase. It dangled carelessly from a bag in his left hand. His fingers hadn’t even tightened around it, nor had he tensed up, as if the blades she held to him were of no concern.
He was either extremely confident in his ability to get out of this situation, or the prospect of his own death mattered little to him.
He didn’t answer her. She pressed the bone knife more sharply against his back and repeated the question. He shrugged, and something wet and warm trickled over her fingers as his movement sent the tip of the knife at his throat slicing through delicate skin.
His silence woke the anger that always slept just beneath her surface. Because his refusal to answer, his complete lack of concern for the physical danger she held him in—it made her feel helpless. And she hadn’t come to this city to feel that way.
The Song perked up for the first time that day, reminding her that it could make him talk. That with the Song, she would be in control.
But I wouldn’t be.
She would become helpless in its grasp, mastery of her life given over yet again to something else. Maybe not right away, but in time, it would consume her. She denied its offer and strengthened the internal song that shored up the walls of its prison.
The man in her grasp remained still, not so much as a twitch of a muscle. No words.
Doubt crept through her. She didn’t recognize him—sandy, almost-blond hair and a medium build, his clothes common but well-made—and it made no sense for anyone to be following her. She knew no one here, save Verol and Marquin, and since they were lords, if they had changed their minds about letting her go, they would hardly have needed to hire a man to follow her. A man who, furthermore, was doing his best to impersonate a statue beneath her hands.
A man who still hadn’t spoken, and his silence was so easy she wondered if perhaps he couldn’t speak. If he was so compliant because he’d learned that, for him, compliance was the safest path out of danger.
Every lesson life had taught her urged her to kill him anyway. That it was safer that way. Except this wasn’t Renault County, and the rules that had kept her alive there would not do the same for her here. Not in this city that slumbered under a veneer of civility, where people had attachments and families who would be surprised if they didn’t come home rather than surprised if they did.
Her fingers twitched, the action to twist the one knife or drive in the other habitual, instinctive.
She dropped the blades and shoved him to the ground, her knee driving into his low back as she twisted his arms behind him. He didn’t struggle, though she’d dropped him hard enough his breath came out in a harsh, forced exhale.
“Once,” she told him, “we’ll call a mistake. I don’t want to see you again.” She hammered a punch to his throat and he moved then, the struggle to suck in air sending him lurching to all fours. Which he could do because Clare was already off him. She spied only one of her knives and swept it up along with her guitar case and then she was running without looking back, the choking noises behind her a soothing assurance that she wouldn’t be followed.
