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And the brilliant thing she came up with was, “When you realize how much you fucked up here today, don’t come begging at my feet for forgiveness.”
She rose and stormed out, so angry that she went down the main staircase, out the main doors. Footsteps sounded behind her, a pleading call for her to wait. She wanted it to be him, coming after her. But the footsteps were louder than Numair’s ever were, the voice female.
She made herself stop and let Ida catch up to her, but she knew the expression on her face wasn’t anything kind, and she couldn’t force it to change.
Ida wrung her hands together. “Please don’t give up on him.”
“I didn’t. He gave up on himself. He gave up on me.”
Ida just stood there, that crumpled look on her face. And Clare remembered drinking tea with her in the library, remembered the kindness she’d shown that she didn’t have to. Clare wasn’t fooling herself. That kindness to her had been for Numair’s sake, not hers. But Ida had still given it.
“If he wants to answer the question I asked him today, I’ll listen. If he wants my help, I’ll give it. That’s all I can promise you. The rest is up to him.”
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Too Kind-Hearted
The next week proved itself a different kind of hell than the previous one had been. It was as if that moment in Numair’s home had never happened. She saw him, finally, as he must have been for the last ten years, before she’d come along—completely alone—and she understood why he’d wanted to finally be done with it all the night of his nameday celebration.
The fear that he might still make that decision warred with her anger and her hurt. She wore the pendant tucked carefully away, so not even the chain showed, not wanting him to know she still wore it. Her days she spent Songweaving recklessly in the palace. Sometimes at Alaric’s behest, but most of the time simply because he’d given her the freedom to do so. A freedom he had not yet taken away, despite her failure to tell him anything of interest she’d learned with it.
The king’s easy patience frightened her more than threats would have. Threats, direct ones that asserted specific consequences, could be responded to. This couldn’t. She could almost be lulled into thinking he wanted nothing from her, were it not for the fact he watched her constantly. But he never interfered, not even when she sowed the kind of chaos among the courtiers that made Alys pull her aside and ask her if she’d lost her mind.
It was rude, she supposed, to drag people through so many emotions that half of them didn’t come out of their rooms the next day, and the half who did spent it glaring at her as if they wanted to murder her in her sleep. She wasn’t sure when she’d gone from wanting to win them over for practical reasons, to wanting to see just how desperately she could make them hate her.
Had Marquin and Verol been here, no doubt they would have intervened. But they were gone again, and if they had at least told her this time, been candid with her over what they would and would not tell her, their absence was another layer to her growing isolation.
She needed something to break, something to change. So she kept pushing, because without Numair to distract her, she too keenly felt the bars of her new cage. Even if the man who held the keys was, for now, indulgently allowing her to run roughshod over some of the most powerful people in the kingdom. Sometimes, she thought she wanted them to hate her because if she made them hate her enough, Alaric couldn’t possibly believe she could turn around and make them love him.
Nights were more difficult than the days. She had never been a creature that slept well, and the condition only seemed to be getting worse. If she stayed in her room, the single hibiscus flower taunted her from the nightstand, refusing to wilt or die. As did the red envelope tucked into the nightstand’s drawer. She’d almost broken the seal on it a dozen times in the past week, to finally know what it said, what Numair had written her when he’d barely known her. But in the end, it wasn’t his ghost she wanted talking to her.
She spent as much of each night as possible in the city, singing in the streets and the parks. Madame Aria and the Mages Guild Hounds were never far behind. She can be vindictive, Numair had said. Clare suspected the woman was planning something and by the fourth night, when Madame Aria arrived in the palace at Lady Dahlia’s invitation, she knew it.
Knew it, and welcomed it. Anything to break the pattern she seemed to be stuck in. She held nothing back, either in her performance at that evening’s dinner, or the next afternoon among the courtiers in the solarium. When Madame Aria left that afternoon, shooting Clare a look of smug triumph, Clare wondered how long she would have to wait to find out what the woman thought could be done about her.
Familiar laughter broke out to her left, grating on her nerves. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Numair, to see what was happening. She walked out, waving off Alys's offer to accompany her. She wanted to be alone, and so found herself walking the garden paths of the inner courtyard. The heating spells that had once been welcome, even if they’d felt like an absurd luxury, now felt stifling.
She wanted the cold and the welcome numbness that came with it. Heat—warmth, comfort—made it too easy to feel. She blamed that for why, sitting on a stone bench in one of the path’s recesses, she tugged the pendant out from beneath her shirt. She’d resisted the Song’s offers, when they were outside the palace, to tell her what the symbols meant. She’d resisted the urge to ask the palace librarian if she had any books on Deleen Village. She’d resisted the urge to ride to the top of Drake Mountain and hurl the damn thing off the cliff.
“A necklace shouldn’t make a person so sad, little songbird.”
She startled to her feet, fist clenching around the pendant as if she could hide it. There were few people in this world who could sneak up on her. Numair was one. Unfortunately, Alaric was another.
He held out his hand. “Let’s see it.”
She clenched her fist tighter. He grabbed her wrist, squeezing with bruising force. She didn’t let go. His other hand pried her fingers loose one by one, fine muscles screaming as she fought to clamp them back down, until he tsked and said, “Don’t make me break them.”
She glared at him. “Why shouldn’t I?”
He laughed. “Oh, little songbird.” With those words she knew what he would do before he did it, and it was only the intuition that made her fingers snap open in time as his magic pulsed through her hand.
She wondered why he hadn’t started with magic. Why he’d bothered prying her fingers back with brute force at all. If he simply enjoyed her obstinance, or if…if that was a calculating gaze he was giving her now, trying to determine if her fingers had opened at her command or his.
A chill swept through her. He didn’t know—he couldn’t know—that his magic swept through her without effect. Because if he knew that, she wouldn’t still be alive. Would she?
He plucked the pendant from her palm, and she hated him for touching it. Hated him for having found a way to force her to let him touch it. Hated that he was running his thumb over something that was far more to her than the piece of carved stone it was to him.
“Ah.” He made a fist of his own around the piece and yanked. The chain bit into her neck, tore her skin before the clasp gave and it ripped free.
