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She Had a Right
Clare wasn’t surprised when Alys and Lina practically pounded down her door the next morning. They’d taken to eating breakfast with her in the Arrendons’ suite and, since she’d intentionally avoided them all of yesterday after the Madame Aria event, she was actually surprised they’d been patient enough to wait until dawn to ambush her.
She hadn’t been able to sleep, so when they walked in she was fully awake and wearing one of the pieces Chalen had been able to send her home with yesterday. Alys stopped so abruptly that Lina ran into her back.
“No,” Alys said flatly. “You are not wearing that.”
Clare smoothed her hands over the fabric. “You don’t think the cut flatters me? Chalen tried something different with the waisting this time.”
“You know exactly what I don’t like about it. Wear something else.”
“Hmmm.” Clare tapped her index finger against her chin. “Let me think on it—no.”
“Clare.”
“Alys.”
“He isn’t worth mourning.”
Veralna, being a melting pot for the provinces, had a wealth of cultures with various mourning practices and Clare, by virtue of never having told anyone where she was from, was free to choose whichever of them suited her purposes. As it happened, Dunen Province had two different mourning practices. The first, and the one she had chosen, wasn’t for the dead but the dying. The base color of the garments worn during this period was a dark gray, accented with black that increased as the mourned’s condition did, or with silver if they showed improvement.
“It isn’t him I’m mourning.” Numair wasn’t what was dying. It was the tie between them—the friendship they’d grown that he was starving of water, strangling to death in the slowest way possible, and he wouldn’t even tell her why.
She had a right to mourn that. She had a right to make him feel it die.
“Even if I believed that, which I don’t, everyone will think that’s what you’re doing.”
“Everyone will be too busy tiptoeing around the king after yesterday to care. And this will give me an excuse to not be around them as much. I can hardly be expected to socialize happily while in mourning.”
More importantly, it was a calculated move to buy her time with Alaric. You simply need to let this go. Let him think she was. He was being patient with her because he was certain she would come to the conclusion that willingly accepting his offer was the only way forward, and she intended to use that patience to find an alternate route.
The focus of Alys's ire predictably shifted at mention of the previous day’s events. Unfortunately, it shifted in a direction closer to the truth than Clare would have liked. “The king’s interest in you—does he know you’re a Reaper? Is that why he’s so obsessed with you?”
“I would appreciate it if you didn’t use that word again, especially in the palace, and he is not obsessed with me.”
“I know the Arrendons well enough to know not a single word spoken in their rooms is going to leave it, and he is. King Tolvannen is practically an island unto himself. He has connections, yes, and working partnerships. He interacts and he knows when charm will keep certain people happy and when threats will keep others in line.
“But he does not have friends. He does not have confidants. He does not have lovers, and please take a moment to appreciate the magnitude of that last one. In all the years of his rule, no one has heard a whisper of him taking a lover or indulging with a prostitute. And now he’s taking leisurely strolls with you in the gardens and the royal portrait hall, allowing you to use magic on his court in any way you see fit, and having you dole out punishments in his stead. You are the one who called him by his given name in front of the entire court. You’re too intelligent not to understand how that looks.”
Clare grimaced. “Of course I understand how it looks. But it is not obsession.” Alaric’s obsession was reserved entirely for his kingdom, his interest in her only a means of further maintaining it.
“It is?—”
“What would you have me do, Alys? I cannot ignore him, I cannot reject him, and I cannot escape him. If you know the easy answer here, I would love for you to give it to me.”
Alys's mouth opened, clicked shut.
“This”—Clare indicated the mourning clothes—“is me buying all the time I can.”
“To do what?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? “I don’t know.”
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Don’t You Dare Come to My Wedding
Alys didn’t mean to do what she did. But she was, as her mother had often bemoaned while Alys was growing, loyal to a fault, and Clare had earned her loyalty. The woman was strange—so cold at times she almost felt like a non-human entity rather than a person—but Alys had also found her honest in a way few people were. With what she was—and the question of how a Reaper other than Alaric had survived was one she still hadn’t put together—Clare had never had to bow to any of Alys's demands. But she’d helped her anyway.
