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The dress the girl wore was one Clare had worn often enough, gold brocade with tight, fitted sleeves and a plunging neckline. Dark red stained the bodice until it wasn’t gold anymore, so much that Clare thought the only reason the girl was still alive was because the tight lacing of the dress was compressing her wounds, slowing the bleeding.
Simian hated ruining things. People, he didn’t mind ruining, but his things? He must have been truly angry to damage the girl with the dress still on her. His anger was like the ocean, a massive reservoir of endless potential. Rarely ever was it completely calm, and even when it was, ripples broke the surface at random, could grow into tidal waves without warning.
The girl’s head turned, and the fall of hair fell away, revealing a bleeding, broken mass where the left side of her face had once been. The cheekbone was caved in, the white of bone visible through the skin and the blood that was going tacky, and the left eye…
“You’re her.” The girl slurred the words like a benediction. “The one he lost.”
It had taken years of planning to break out of Simian’s Castle. Years, and the only place she had had to escape to was the rest of Renault County. It had only taken Simian’s men two months to find her, and as bad as the rest of Renault County was, it was the idea of going back to the Castle that had sent Clare into the madness she’d spent the next two years in. Because that in-between place, where nothing touched her and lived, had been the only way to survive the trek out, across Alaric’s reaped ground, without fully surrendering to the Song.
“Please.” The girl lunged at her wildly. The movement should have been impossible for someone in her condition, but the hazy sheen in her remaining eye spoke of the liberal dose of Glaze Simian must have shoved down her throat. He would have wanted her awake—awake to feel everything he did to her, and awake after to reflect on it.
The girl’s hands closed around Clare’s ankle. Her good eye looked out from the ruin of her face.
“Please kill me.”
Clare didn’t need to contemplate her answer. As she crouched, the girl relaxed, her hands sliding off Clare’s ankle.
“Thank you.” She died with a smile on the working half of her face as Clare’s knife slid into her throat, piercing the artery, the remaining burden of her blood swirling quickly down the drain.
Where did the drain go? Was the girl’s blood even now mixing with Clare’s own deep below? With the blood of all the other girls who had come before and after her?
Numair gently extracted the knife from her hand, and only then did she realize the hand was shaking so badly she’d almost sliced her own thigh.
“It was a mercy,” Numair said softly. “She would never have lived.”
Clare didn’t tell him what she knew and he did not. That the Song could have fixed her body—that it even might have, if she had asked it to, had been willing to pay whatever price it demanded—but it could never have fixed the girl’s mind.
Sometimes people broke, and they could never go back together again.
Had she put herself back together, or was she still broken? She didn’t know.
Numair wiped the knife blade clean and offered it to her. She took it, sliding it back into its sheath, and crossed the room to the door at the opposite side. The adjoining room was a mirror to Simian’s receiving room downstairs, all gold tile and tones, expensive rugs and magelight sconces. No throne occupied this room, and for that Clare had been grateful. She had enough memories of the things he had made her do on the one downstairs.
In appearances, this room actually looked like an ordinary music room, instruments sitting in stands, gleaming. Guitar. Violin. Harp. Flute. Lyre. They lined the edges of the room, and in the center sat the piano.
This room, more than anything else, was the reason Simian had chosen her. For her hands, picking at the battered strings of a guitar. For her voice, foolishly singing somewhere she’d thought no one would hear.
“Stand there.” Clare pointed Numair to a place where he wouldn’t immediately be noticed by anyone entering the room. “And don’t interfere. He is mine to deal with.”
“If you need help…” He trailed off, gaze going to the brutish guards standing passively in her wake, shook his head, and went to stand in the shadows near the lyre.
She sat at the piano, settled her fingers into position, and played.
This room was the only thing she had never fought Simian on. He could twist everything else in her life, but she could not allow him to twist what she was, and music was what she was at her core. Her music was not always pretty, and it was never innocent, but it was her. So she did not fight him here because this room was the only reason she had survived him for five years.
For all he had no interest in leaving Renault County, Simian wanted to believe himself a king equal to Alaric. Better than Alaric. For that, he had an obsession with having a queen. Once Clare had arrived, she became that obsession to him.
So she wore the dated court clothes that had arrived before Renault County had become inaccessible by traditional means. She learned the lessons taught by one of Alaric’s cast-off courtiers that had arrived even earlier. A man who well knew that the only thing keeping him from the true horrors of Renault County was his usefulness to Simian, and that usefulness lay in making Clare into a lady. It also lay in Clare never getting it quite right, though, because if Clare was ever perfect, then there would be no need for him anymore.
Young as she had been when she first came to the Castle, it had taken her some time to figure that part out—that she could never be perfect enough to escape punishment. Not from her tutor, because he needed her imperfection. Not from Simian, because he simply enjoyed punishment.
This room was the only time she could ever escape them. It had not taken her long to take what she knew of the guitar and apply it to the other instruments in the room. In that first year, Simian had brought her anyone he could flush out of Renault County who had musical ability—remnants from before the county was closed off—and Clare had taken the basics they had been able to give her and moved far beyond them.
This was the one arena where no one could try to justify their continued presence by claiming she had not learned well enough. Because when Clare played, when she sang, even the monsters in the room fell silent. She was not always allowed to come here, was not always allowed to sing. But when she was, sometimes, if she played until her fingers ached on the keys or bled on the strings, until her voice was nearly gone, sometimes then, Simian was so enthralled that for a few days he forgot to be sadistic.
Sometimes he would even let her sleep on the floor of the room that was supposedly hers, instead of shoving her back into rags and sending her down to the cellar room with the iron bars and the rats, and the insects always scritching, scratching, scrabbling.
Her fingers trembled on the keys and she turned it into a trill, twisting the notes, the rhythm, to meet her demands.
