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Her first thought was to find Numair, and because it was she ignored it, going instead to the suite. She wasn’t surprised to find Quin and Verol waiting.
“I’m alive, as you can see.”
“That truly isn’t funny,” Verol said stiffly. “What happened?”
She shrugged. “That’s between me and Alaric.”
“We cannot help you if we do not know what is going on.”
She arched her eyebrows. “Even if I needed your help, precisely how long will you be around to give it? A few hours? A few days? Do I get a calendar of the times at which you’ll be available so I can schedule my difficulties around it?”
“Clare…” Verol rubbed wearily at his temples. She finally looked at him—really looked—and saw the exhaustion in him. The dark circles bruising the underneath of his eyes, the way his already thin frame had lost weight. Marquin didn’t look much better. “We didn’t mean to make you feel abandoned. We didn’t mean to abandon you. I didn’t consider how it might look to you, us leaving after the Reaper bit came to light. You didn’t seem to need or want us?—”
“I don’t.”
“—and I was frightened. Not of you, but for you. I selfishly want to believe you can be hidden beneath Alaric’s nose forever, but I know that is unrealistic. He is already too interested in you.
“We left because we were trying to protect you. We will leave again for the same reason, and there are things I will not tell you because I do not want you to bear the weight of them. But I can do far more to protect you out there than I can here. All the more so because my absence makes it seem as if I care less for you. As if you are perhaps not what Alaric knows my magic seeks out, and simply a broken man’s attempt to replace the daughter he lost. Whatever we can do to draw him away from here, we will.”
A bad feeling spread through her. “He left suddenly because there was unrest in Trin Province. Was that you?” Verol’s eyelids fluttered shut briefly, and her stomach turned. The wealth of new foulness she’d felt clinging to Alaric’s body… “How many?”
“How many what?”
“How many people died to distract him from me?”
Verol’s voice was weary. “It would have happened anyway. Not this quickly, but rebellion there was inevitable, and it would have ended the same. I simply…allowed it to happen at a more advantageous time.”
“How many?”
He exhaled audibly. “What number would be acceptable? One? One hundred? One thousand? You are not responsible for them. Only he is.”
“You could have stopped it.”
“No,” Quin said, finally wading into the argument with a gentle squeeze on Verol’s shoulder. “He could not have. He cannot change who people fundamentally are, what they want. Once they chose their path, he could at most have delayed what happened, and that is if he spent himself to the dregs. It is far easier to nudge people in a direction they already wish to go than it is to haul them back from a decision they have already made.”
That doesn’t make it right. She didn’t say the words. Since when had she ever cared about what was right? When had anyone else ever cared about the rightness of what was done to her? She was not certain she even knew what the word meant. She only knew that this didn’t feel right, and it was made all the worse by the fact she wasn’t certain she would have cared, if she hadn’t felt every sundered life clinging to Alaric’s body just now.
“There is a reason,” Verol said softly, “that they call me the Butcher. A mind can only be cut into so many times, can only be nudged and rearranged so many times, before it falls apart. What I do for Alaric here—doing it without destroying anyone?—it takes the majority of my focus.”
“What else does he have you hide besides his age? Brennan Tolvannen?” They shared another one of those wordless looks, the kind where she suspected they were speaking where she couldn’t hear. “He took me to see him.”
“When? Why?”
“Just now. I believe he wanted to prove a point.”
“What point?”
She shook her head. “You have your secrets, and I have mine. That’s what you took from Lady Meraland, wasn’t it?” Alys had said the woman was in love with the first prince. “She found him in that…state, and you had to take it from her.”
Verol sighed. “It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. I told Alaric to send her away, but he wants her here.”
She sat with it for a minute, trying to reconcile a lifetime of knowing that the only thing she could do was look out for herself with this nascent sense that, while that might have been the only way it was possible to live in Renault County, the wider world was more complicated. The sense that the difference in her societal place in this world had altered her culpability in ways she didn’t fully understand.
A selfish part of her wanted it all to be simple again. Wanted the only answer to be that she had to take care of herself, because no one else would do it for her, and everyone else was doing the same for themselves. Except there were holes in that theory, in the form of Quin and Verol, Alys and Numair and Chalen.
“And if I asked you to stop doing things on my behalf?” she asked.
Verol’s only answer was a sad smile.
