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“Isn’t there always a man behind atrocities?”
“Who?”
Why did people always want a name, as if naming a person would somehow make them less terrible? “He is called Simian Hensa. And he is the sickness that plagues Renault County. As I understand it, long ago this was a place people came to live without magic. No mages were allowed in, and any born were killed or exiled.
“Simian was born here, but no one recognized what he was. Not until it was too late. He projects his emotions, his desires. People feel what he feels, becoming reflections of him. And once he found the quellstone, discovered what it could do, with no other mages to oppose him?”
She shook her head. It had been far too late, by that point. “The founders of Renault County misunderstood the stone, because of the name. They thought it quelled magic, period. But it amplifies the power of the mage who claims it. Only once claimed does it quell the magic of others.”
Except hers. Just as possession of the Song alone caused Alaric’s magic to slide past her, it had done the same with Simian’s. It was the first thing about her that had fascinated him. And that was before he had learned that she could sing with her own power, and though it couldn’t affect him, because the quellstone was his, he could pour what she made into what already belonged to him.
The sun had almost sunk below the horizon when Clare and her swarm came to a halt at the twenty-foot-high walls that held such an unpleasant place in her memory. They were as imposing as she remembered, pure white blocks formed from quellstone. And between them, a gate made of bone, with guards posted at the entrance.
“I had a choice,” Clare said softly, as she drew the guards into her Song, “around the time I was fourteen. Death in the quellstone mines, or walking through these gates. I walked through.”
As she did again, now. When Numair stepped forward with her, she hesitated. “You came this far. You don’t have to come the rest of the way.” You don’t have to see this. I don’t want you to see this.
He gave her a hard look. “Where you go, I go.”
She turned and met his gaze, looking straight into night-black eyes. “I am not a good person. I am not a forgiving person. This will not be pleasant.”
“I’ve never had much time for forgiveness. I’ve always found it damages too much the person it’s asked of.”
He was insane, this man. Or he was her mirror. Perhaps he was both. Perhaps they were both.
“Welcome to the Castle, then.” Simian had named his stronghold to fit what he thought he was: a king.
A monster.
She was a monster too, she supposed, if only of a different breed.
Clare walked through the gates. She couldn’t bring herself to allow them to close behind her. Instead, she left her swarm there, filling that break in bone and iron and quellstone, because the people could never hold her in. She took the gate guards with her, along with any others she met. Any of the Castle’s ordinary workers who came within her radius fell into her thrall, and she sent them to join the rest of her swarm.
She and Numair walked the stone path through the vegetable garden, where half-starved skeletons dug at the hardened earth, planting seeds or pulling weeds, or stumbling along its surface with buckets of water pulled from Simian’s well, their lips cracked and bleeding and their skin ashen with dehydration. Many were the people she had seen too hungry and thirsty to resist stealing a carrot from the ones they pulled, or a handful of water meant for roots. Many were the dead buried beneath Simian’s bloodfruit trees in the back orchard, and many more were the screams that had been her macabre lullaby through endless nights.
The guards hauled open the wide, front doors of Simian’s Castle, and Clare passed through them. Like the first time she had done so, it was like entering a different world. In the rest of Renault County, the ugliness was out in the open. Here, the twisted hid beneath a veneer of fine, decadent beauty.
Magelight sconces were set into the walls, patterned between elaborate tapestries. Plants, that most elusive of life in Renault County, draped tastefully over standing planters. Porcelain tile of a soft gold formed the floor of Simian’s receiving room, all the way up the seven steps to the carved white throne that sat atop a layer of thick, white fur rugs.
Numair’s gaze locked on the empty throne. “Is that made of…”
“Human bone,” Clare finished for him. “Yes.”
Numair looked warily to the guards. He clearly didn’t like the idea of going any farther into the building. “Can you send them to search for him?”
“There’s no need. He will come to us.”
Clare led them through the door to her right, the guards following at her heels. The halls were as familiar as they were terror-inducing, panic and adrenaline flooding her body in waves. She locked both away from her, as she had done in order to survive her years in this place. That severed piece of her screamed and wailed in terror, while the rest of her remained cold and empty.
She climbed the stairs to the second floor, took the right wing to the room at the end of the hall.
Please let it be empty. Please let it be empty. Please let?—
The door swung open at the brush of her fingertips. It was exactly as Clare remembered. The pale wood four-posted bed with the thin, gauzy white curtains, a bed she had never been allowed to sleep in. The wardrobe filled with court finery, each dress a thing impossible to get into or out of without help; the memory of rough hands on her day in and day out, dressed like a doll and posed like one. The corner of the room with the chains drilled into the wall, the circular drain set into the floor. Fire arced across the scars on her back and she swallowed hard, stifling her reaction.
The girl lay propped in the corner. Blood ran down her legs, dripping steadily to the floor, flowing to the drain. Her head lolled to the side against one wall. With the fall of dark hair obscuring her face, she might have been Clare’s double. She was the right height, the right size.
How many dark-haired girls had been buried in Simian’s orchard since Clare left?
