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“Then explain it to me in small words so I can understand.”
He just looked at her.
“I know,” she said bitterly, “you can’t.” The song ended, the dance over. “And until you can, you can go back to missing me, Your Highness. Without this.” She plucked the flower from her hair and slipped it in the breast pocket of his suit. Let him see what it was like to miss her in the same void she’d missed him in.
She walked away without looking back, ignoring the stares of people who’d stopped bothering to pretend they weren’t staring.
Chapter Eighty-One
Phoenix
Clare went back to the Arrendon estate, but wherever Quin and Verol had gone when they’d slipped out of the wedding, it hadn’t been home. The house was empty, the only sign that anyone had been there at all a small parcel on the dining room table. A note on the top—Fitz’s handwriting, so presumably he’d returned to Veralna with Quin and Verol—stated that it had arrived for her by courier not long before.
She knew immediately who it was from, the black box with the black-and-green ribbon. She ignored it at first, debating whether she would open it at all. Because if he’d sent her that damn flower back she would light it on fire. She went to her room to change out of her dress. Obstinance had her sticking to her mourning clothes, selecting a simple pair of gray pants and a tunic. Once changed, her curiosity got the better of her. She returned to the kitchen and the black box, untying the ribbon with a single tug. Inside lay one decadent slice of wedding cake, slightly squashed as if it had been wrapped in a handkerchief and hidden away.
“Bastard,” she whispered under her breath, opening the letter that had come with it.
I can hear you calling me a bastard. She refused to laugh. Because if she laughed, she was going to cry, and crying once in a decade was enough for her. I know I don’t deserve it, but don’t mourn me in black just yet. You can’t help me. But I’m trying to help myself.
Her fingers tightened on the letter, unease coiling in her stomach. This was unreasonable. He didn’t get to do this. She wasn’t going to let him do this. She folded the top of the box back over the cake, carried it to the cold box and placed it inside.
She turned out the magelights and walked in comforting darkness to her room, intent on finding shoes and tracking Numair down somewhere she could yell at him and demand an explanation. Halfway down the hall she heard the unmistakable sound of the front wards unlocking, and she slunk instinctively against the wall, unable to break the habit of hiding, no matter how long she’d been here.
Quin’s and Verol’s voices floated through the darkness—they had not seen it any more fit to turn on a light than she—and she molded herself into stillness, into silence, listening.
“It is out of our hands now,” Marquin was saying. “All we can do is wait.”
“We do not have time to wait. You read the report. Madame Aria tried to have her arrested and Alaric is showing her far too much favor. I don’t know what he is planning, but I want him away from here. Away from her.”
“We have planted enough seeds of doubt across the provinces. If he can be drawn away, he will. She needs us here, Verol. We leave her alone too much.”
“I would know if something was wrong,” Verol said defensively.
“You would know if her life was in danger. That is not the same as knowing she is all right.”
Since it sounded like this was an argument they’d had many times before, and which could go back and forth for hours, she flicked the hall magelight on. They blinked at her in surprise.
“We should talk,” she said mildly. “And this time, I am not interested in being spared any moral burdens.”
She gestured them to the kitchen. They went almost meekly, sitting at the table while she prepared a pot of coffee. She settled it, along with the attending accoutrements, on the table and took the seat directly across from Marquin. She judged him the less likely of the two to talk around issues out of a desire to spare her feelings.
“Let’s begin with what you’ve been doing while you’ve been gone.”
“It’s safer for you if you do not know,” Verol began.
“Safer?” she echoed. “There is nothing safe about my being here. There is nothing safe about my being kept in the dark. I have been stuck here walking the tightrope of this infernal court and Alaric’s attentions, while the two of you have been who knows where doing who knows what in the supposed name of my protection, and I want to know what those things are.” She needed to know if they had any chance of working. If there was anything she could do to make them work.
“Spreading rumors, mostly,” Marquin said, reaching to pour three cups of coffee and slide them to everyone, since no one else had.
“Rumors,” Clare said flatly.
“Yes,” Verol said, giving in. “Rumors about power. As far away from here as we can without being obvious.” He took a long drink of coffee, without the addition of cream or sugar, and Marquin took over.
“There are certain…events that tend to happen around the person who bears your power. Miraculous healings. Sudden bounties of harvest in typically barren places. We have been causing things like that.”
It was certainly better than hastening rebellions as a distraction, but… “Neither of you are healers and rumors alone are easily seen through.”
“It is easy and harmless enough for a mindmage to convince people they have witnessed something miraculous,” Marquin said. “And it takes little enough money to bring bounty to a place that has practically nothing. The trick is in hiding the source. We’ve been ensuring word of the happenings reach Alaric, while making it look as if we’re trying to obfuscate them.”
