AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Neither happened, and after the second weekend, she stopped going. Verol and Quin still hadn’t returned. They’d written that they would be back for Alys and Lina’s wedding, but for now their estate was empty. She felt like a ghost haunting it, and the reprieve it brought her from being in the same building as Alaric wasn’t worth the trade-off of the Song’s uninhibited presence. At the palace, it still hid, but outside of those walls, it battered at her ceaselessly.
It was terrified, and she had learned the first time it had spoken to her as a child that it had only one solution to terror. One thing she would never give it, because it would save the Song, but it would not save her. And she still stubbornly wanted to save herself, even if she didn’t know why.
A dark voice whispered that this world was no different than the one she had left. That she was no more free, no more powerful, no more hopeful than before. But there were differences. She had the illusion of all those things now, where she hadn’t before. And the illusion whispered that she should accept what Alaric offered her, in order to maintain it.
But she had never had it in her to bend, even when it was smart, even when it would keep her alive, and she still didn’t. And Alaric had been…distracted the last two weeks. It was more than merely giving her the space to “mourn”. Far more runners than normal had arrived in the palace lately, bringing him reports that apparently necessitated delivery no matter what he was engaged with at the time. Several had been brought to him during dinner, and she would often find him looking at her after he read them, as if he wanted to cut her open and find out what was inside. As if he’d thought her a flower, then plucked it only to discover her a mere weed.
By the time Alys’s wedding finally arrived, Clare’s uncertainty around Alaric, combined with the isolation she’d spent the last few weeks in, had turned her half-back into that mad creature that had roamed the swamps. Especially since one of those reports had finally drawn Alaric away a few hours ago, a fact she’d known before anyone else, because the Song had flooded in behind her eyes once more.
Its returned presence made her temples throb, and she had certainly not arrived at Alys's estate in any fit mood for a wedding. A fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Alys, who had taken one look at her and told her to, “Have an emotional crisis when it isn’t my wedding” and “I’ll still kick him in the balls for you if you give me permission, but he better not show his face here.”
So she’d done her best to force herself to be the Clare she’d become in Veralna. Now she was standing off to the side of the stage, fiddling with the voice crystals despite knowing they were perfectly tuned. She’d spent the last week combing through the palace library’s archives of the Veralna Times, scouring the society pages for information on weddings, because she’d never seen one before and hadn’t really had any notion of what she was supposed to do at one. She now knew entirely too much on the dreadful affairs, though apparently the cake was something to look forward to.
Unfortunately, she didn’t think she was likely to get a slice of it. She was to sing the first ten dances before giving way to a purely instrumental group, but by then she doubted there would be any cake left. The dessert in question sat atop a ridiculous pedestal, a crowning, six-tiered marvel of chocolate perfection with piped blue icing and the Megadari house crest ostentatiously repeated on each tier.
“I confess myself dying to know what it is about that cake that puts such a look on your face.” Numair’s voice came from behind her, soft and tired and worn.
Her heart thudded so hard she was surprised the cage of her ribs didn’t break. She was angry with him. So unspeakably angry. For leaving her alone and being able to do it so easily.
And she missed him just as fiercely as she wanted to tell him to go drown in Ferrian’s hells. It wasn’t that she couldn’t be alone. She knew how. She’d always known how. She’d just preferred to be alone with him.
She waited to answer. Waited to see if she wanted to answer, trying to feel in the silence between them what had made him approach her tonight. But she couldn’t find the answer. If he’d said anything else to her, anything that wasn’t a blatant plea for her to remember that first day in Galina’s, she didn’t know if she would have responded.
“It’s the manner of acquiring a piece,” she replied finally, moving to fiddle with another voice crystal that lay closer to the sound of Numair’s voice. He stood behind one of the foliaged trellises gracing either side of the stage, foliage that had grown noticeably larger and thicker so as to more easily conceal a person who wanted to stand behind it unnoticed.
All it took was a single look at his face for everything she thought she knew to spin from its axis. He looked like hell. Oh, his face was so well-glamoured that no one save her would see, but she did see. She saw the sunken darkness beneath eyes devoid of their usual brilliance, saw the harsh prominence of his cheekbones. Money could buy newly tailored clothes that fit perfectly as a body changed, but they couldn’t hide the fact that he’d lost weight—too much weight, in too short a time.
She took quick stock of the area and slipped behind the trellis when no one was watching. Her eyes roved over him, catching on a glamour-covered bruise peeking out from the collar of his shirt, dark purple covering the entirety of his neck up to his left ear.
He realized where her gaze lay riveted and grimaced. “I should have guessed you would be able to see through glamour.”
Her anger at him gave way to anger for him—she could return to the former once she’d fixed this. “Who did this to you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.” Anger stirred the Song inside her and it rose on a howling wind of fury. Overhead, clouds moved to blot out the sun, shadows creeping over the wedding scene.
There was nothing normal or human in her voice, the Song echoing in the pauses between her words as she demanded, “Who. Did. This?”
Numair’s eyes widened. His hand snaked around her waist and he pulled her further from the stage, greenery growing around them with haste to form an enclosure that hid them completely from sight.
It was the physical contact, the fact he’d touched her without asking, that made her realize thunder now rumbled in the skies above, and the darkness that coiled about her was unnatural. She closed her eyes and made the Song relent. The skies cleared, the darkness receded, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
He started to let her go.
“Don’t.” Barely more than a whisper from her, but he froze, his hand on her back. She wished he hadn’t heeded her command, wished he’d ignored her and left. Because this—being this close to him, seeing the real him again—was bad for her.
She looked up, into his eyes. “Why now?” Tell me you changed your mind. Tell me you’ll let me help you.
His free hand touched the hibiscus flower she’d woven into her hair that morning. She’d arranged it carefully, so the petals brushed her face. She shouldn’t have worn it. But he wasn’t supposed to have been here, and she hadn’t been certain she could stand being around so much happiness without it.
“This is…distracting,” he confessed.
She jolted. “You can feel it?”
“It’s my magic. Of course I feel it. Every touch.” He brushed his fingers across the petals, then lightly down her face. “Every time.”
Every time she’d picked it up since he’d left. Every time she’d held it for hours when she couldn’t sleep. Every time she’d held a lit match an inch away and tried to make herself touch the flame to the petals. Every time she’d missed him.
