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You don’t make my choices for me.
You have made that abundantly clear. But you do not make mine for me either. And my answer is no.
Her trembling turned to rage. As much as she didn’t want to go back, the idea that she couldn’t, that she might lose him, was untenable. Do you think you will ever taste freedom if you refuse me this? Do you think I will ever let you know peace if he dies? Recreate the portal, or I will make the first prison I built for you look like a palace.
If you want it so badly, trade me for it.
What do you want?
If I open the portal, if I aid you until you find your prince, you will give me what I wanted the first day we spoke.
Clare hesitated. It was a fine line. One so easy to cross. So difficult to cross back from. You may have the first thing you wanted that day, she allowed. If you get me to Renault County in time. Help me find Numair, keep him safe, and alive. And you allow me to deal with Simian. Then you get what you want.
Pondering silence, the seconds stretching out. Then: Very well. We have a deal.
The Song rumbled inside her and Clare embraced it. Magic tore from her, the gate yawning open to reveal the dirty streets of a place Clare had never wanted to see again. Her stomach revolted, and she barely had time to grab a nearby wastebasket before she was throwing up everything in her stomach.
And when she was done, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and passed through the gate into hell.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Welcome to My Home
The stench hit her first. The smell of urine and septic waste, of dankness and mold, of sickness and rot curling into her nostrils. There were no safe places in Renault County, but the Song had spit her out in the closest approximation of one that existed here, on the east rooftop above what had once been a market square.
But an approximation of safe wasn’t actually safe. Her knife was in her hand and she was turning the instant she registered the soft scuff behind her. She struck, the blade jabbing into soft neck tissue then carving a line out. Blood gushed as she wrenched the knife free, and the body was falling before she’d even registered what the person looked like.
Young. Male or female, she couldn’t tell. Rail-thin and the hair shorn close to the skull. Vacant brown eyes stared up at her, but they didn’t try to speak as the lifeblood poured out of them. Rarely did anyone in Renault County have dying words. She felt a trace of something—guilt? Remorse?—that had never been present in her time here before. If you couldn’t kill in Renault County, then you couldn’t live.
A commotion drew her attention back to the square below. The market was a remnant of a time when Renault County had still been accessible to the outside world. Legend had it that at one point a few merchants had still dared to travel here. Legend had it that at one point, you could even leave, if you were willing to pay the exit cost. But the guards at that gate wouldn’t tell you what the cost was until you’d agreed to pay, and you weren’t guaranteed to survive the price.
But as long as Clare had been alive there had been no guards, and no market visitors. Because to step outside those gates, to touch the ground on the other side, was to die. It was the easiest escape out of Renault County, and the corpses of those who found such a death preferable to life within were piled on the other side.
In the absence of merchants, the market had become more theater than trading place, and it was ruled by Jaol’s gang. Jaol himself had been dead so long that no one Clare encountered had ever actually met the man, but the figurehead changed so frequently that no one bothered to learn the new names. If you ruled the market square then you were Jaol, and that was that.
The Jaols never lasted long—the people who made the market their home expected entertainment out of their leader, and entertainment was difficult to provide in a place where people thrived on cruelty and debauchery, and every form of both had already been seen a thousand times. Yet tonight the square below her teemed with people, excitement thick in the air, as if finally, finally, something new had come their way.
Dread was an iron band around her chest as the crowd below, looking like nothing more than rats packed into a tunnel, made a thin opening on the eastern side. Through it the current Jaol strode, two men behind him hauling a body between them.
She recognized the clothes, the fall of silky black hair. His head lolled limply as they dragged him, and the world came to a crashing halt, the noise of so much vermin beneath her fading out. She didn’t hear what Jaol said as he motioned to the guards and they hurled Numair into the small space that had opened in the center of the crowd.
He didn’t move, and the silence she’d erected was pierced by a high ringing. Then she saw it—a small, quick slip of his hand into his pocket—and the sound came crashing back in on her.
You promised, she told the Song.
I have not forgotten, the Song answered, and its power inundated her.
She opened herself to it and jumped from the roof. As she plummeted she realized what Numair had taken from his pocket—seeds—because a violent burst of greenery erupted around him in a protective enclosure of brambles. The band around her chest eased. Fine. He would be fine until she reached him.
She hummed as her feet hit the ground, using the Song’s power in the only way she knew how—the same way she wove emotions, only now she wove something different, power cushioning her landing. A three-foot hollow opened in the ground beneath her, wide cracks radiating out from it all across the square. The noise halted. Prior to this day, Clare could not have thought of a single thing that would cause Renault County’s inhabitants to collectively turn silent and focus on one thing. Clare landing at the edge of the market in a haze of magic and splintered earth, did.
She sang a high, eerie note and the twenty people nearest to her dropped. The gathered crowd stared at her. She bared her teeth. They swarmed at her…and hit a wall of magic.
She trilled her next notes instinctively, feeding the barrier, every body that fetched up against it sliding lifelessly off it. They were piled six bodies high before the tide of people stopped madly rushing in. In the lull, Clare dropped the note, sliding into a song. Without the first note in play her barrier was down, but the song she had given it up for was more versatile, more useful. As her voice spun the words, her mind spun ribbons of power, floating them out to ensnare those closest to her. She spun and trapped, spun and trapped, gathering the inhabitants of the market in the Song’s magic.
But the channel from the Song’s prison was too narrow—she could not pull the power fast enough, and as the horde pressed in on her, she knew it wouldn’t be enough. So she widened the channel. The subsequent influx of power was intoxicating, a high euphoria that enveloped her as she sang, until every single living thing in the market, save one, was hers. They rocked back and forth in unison, feet locked in place, swaying gently in her thrall.
She felt each and every presence held captive to her and marveled at how simple, how easy, it was to hold them. The Song liked it too, wanted to take the lone individual she had not sought to bend to her. The one that waited beyond the sway of bodies, encased in a living shelter of thorns.
