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“M-Madame Aria, miss.”
“And where can I find Madame Aria?”
He was wild-eyed now, struggling to breathe in the grasp of the Song’s power. It was not persuasive and lulling, as it had been with the innkeeper at the Hawk and Scepter. Now it was harsh and demanding.
“She keeps her office in the Hightown branch,” he gasped.
“Thank you.” She yanked the Song free of him with a brutal pull, and he sucked in a breath, his gaze mutinous, head tilting at that angle that said he was about to call for help. “One more thing,” she said icily, the Song curling lovingly around her words, dripping from the syllables. “You won’t mention anything about this, or me, to anyone by any means at your disposal.”
She exited the building, the Song slithering over her body in giddy serpentine movements. Her fury didn’t dim in the slightest in the two-and-a-half hours it took her to exit Midtown and make her way through to the north end of Hightown.
Here the buildings were all glittering white stucco, as if crushed crystal had been mixed into the aggregate solely to catch the sun’s brilliance and reflect it. No doubt most people found the statement dazzling and impressive. Perhaps on a different day, Clare would have as well. At the moment she was sweating from exertion despite the cold, and her shoulders and back ached from having hauled her guitar in its over-sized case so far on foot.
The case still contained everything she possessed in the world, and she still had no permanent, safe place to leave it. She fingered the worn, frayed strap, knowing she must look half-wild. She wore a clean tunic and one of the respectable pairs of leggings she’d purchased, but her face was flushed and her feet were still stuffed into the too-large boots Verol had given her on the trip here.
She felt the oddest pang of longing as she remembered the mage and his husband. The second-guessing sense of Maybe I should have stayed with them. She shook her head. She didn’t second-guess. This unusual sense of attachment, this brief wanting for human companionship, was the Song nudging her toward the outcome it wanted. There could be no other explanation.
The Song’s power still whipped around her, and people took subconscious notice of it, giving her a wide berth on the crowded streets. She did not yet rein it in, halting a passing pedestrian for directions to the building that housed the Musicians Guild. Only once she stood outside its glossy mahogany doors did she finally temper the Song.
She had been hasty and furious in Midtown. She was still furious, but she could no longer afford to be hasty. She didn’t fully know how this world outside Renault County worked—knew even less than she had imagined she did—but she didn’t need to in order to understand that publicly displaying the power that lurked within her was a sure bet for drawing the kind of attention she did not want.
Had she the slightest bit of sense, she would walk away and consign herself to that fate she had seen splayed out before her earlier as the clerk had explained the guild’s fees: that fate of working herself to the bone day in and day out, pouring her heart and soul into an endless sucking chasm while she hoped for that singular moment that would change everything.
A tsking sound burst forth from her memory, and for a moment the mahogany doors in front of her swam, replaced by a different set carved of sun-bleached white stone. A familiar and wretched weight pressed at her back, a hand reaching over her shoulder to stroke bony fingers across her cheek.
You were not made to live and die in the quotidian mundanity of the masses, min quellea. You are so much more.
Revulsion was a churning sea in Clare’s stomach. She stomped booted feet on the memory, grinding it beneath her heels, scrubbing at her cheek to erase the feel of phantom fingers.
“Clare Brighton,” she whispered. “Clare Brighton, Clare Brighton, Clare Brighton.” Not min quellea. Not his. Never that. Never again.
She hadn’t been made for anything. She was making herself. So that one day she could walk back through the horror palace of her past and make the perpetrator of so many atrocities scream—make him scream her name, as he pleaded for mercy.
She squared her shoulders and walked through the guild’s doors. This wasn’t smart. But she refused to sink into obscurity here just as she refused to play by the Musicians Guild’s rules.
With every footstep she took she drew on all those unasked-for lessons that had been drilled into her. Lessons that corrected her posture, her bearing, her gait. Lessons that had her face softening into a beatific expression, so that as she strolled across the glossy marble foyer, she drew every eye in the room. She was not attired like a court lady—the battered guitar case on her back should have marked her as contemptuously beneath notice—but everything about her manner and bearing screamed that she was important. That she was to be respected.
She approached the clerk at the licensing desk. “I’m here to see Madame Aria.” Not a single trace of power limned these words. Clare wouldn’t allow them to, wouldn’t allow that anything she did here today was anything other than herself.
The clerk blinked, startled, but she recovered a moment later. “Of course. Follow me.”
The woman led Clare to a large, airy office, sunlight filtering in from the outside windows. The woman within looked up sharply as the door opened, arching a single eyebrow in questioning command.
The clerk fidgeted beneath the weight of that glare. “I have…” She trailed off, as if just realizing she had never asked Clare’s name. Swallowing, she tried again. “Your appointment is here.”
“I have no appointments.”
“You do now.” Clare stepped past the clerk into the room and shut the door in her face, absolving the poor woman from any further attempts to explain herself.
She took the chair across the desk from Madame Aria, settling her guitar case carefully beside her. It was an effort not to sigh in relief at the temporary reprieve of its weight. The head of the Musicians Guild watched all this with silent, condescending boredom, and waited. She kept waiting. Clare didn’t speak. She simply sat in her chair, her legs crossed, her hands clasped lightly over her knee, holding the other woman’s gaze.
Finally, Madame Aria leaned back in her chair. “You have guts. I’ll grant you that. But I am not a man, to be amused by a pretty face and a display of bravado. I won’t listen to you sing or play or whatever it is you do. But if you leave now, I won’t call the city guard on you for trespassing.”
“I am not here to sing or play. I am here because I have recently had the pleasure of having your guild’s fees and practices explained to me, and I wanted to put a face to the name of the woman who makes her living preying off people’s hopes.”
Madame Aria’s expression didn’t shift from its bored calm. “We provide licensing and a reasonable standard for quality of product. If you haven’t the talent for the guild, I’m sure you’ll find Lowtown much more to your liking.”
Clare uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, bracing her forearms on her thighs. “The place I come from isn’t a kind one. But it is, I suppose you could say, an honest one. If someone robs you, or extorts you, they do not attempt to claim they are doing anything other than that.
