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She knew the moment he entered the room. His presence was a dark, oily film spreading through the air, settling onto her skin, clogging her pores. She wanted to spit out the taste of him, to expel all the air from her lungs and rid herself of his scent, his taint.
The final notes of the song echoed in the air. Simian exhaled in ecstasy as Clare’s hands slid from the keys to fold in her lap, her head demurely bowed.
“Min quellea.” Anyone unfamiliar with him might be forgiven for thinking the words a lover’s endearment. They meant my queen, in the language of Simian’s people, but it was a slippery language, and quellea was a word that had a trifold meaning: queen, slave, torment.
She had been the first two, in Simian’s mind. Today she would be the third.
“You came back.” He spoke the words both as if he couldn’t believe them and as if their truth had always been a foregone conclusion.
“Yes.” She stood, graceful, sliding the piano bench back without making a sound. “I came back. I made you a promise the day I left.” She turned, taking in the sight of him. The last two years had not been kind. The blond hair was shot through with gray, the yellow eyes sunken into the sockets, the hollows below them deep and prominent, as if he hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, much since she left.
She hoped he hadn’t. She hoped his obsession was such that he had been locked in endless unrest.
Her gaze took in the perfectly tailored shirt and trousers that couldn’t hide the weight he had lost, traveled to rest on the white gloves covering his hands. The remembered feel of them on her skin made her gag, but it was when he took them off that things became worse.
“Do you remember what that promise was?” she asked him.
His gaze roved over her, his tongue licking out to wet his lips. “You made a mistake. You’ll be punished, of course, but it’s nothing that can’t be forgiven.”
“I promised you that I would make you feel everything you had ever done to me, and that I would only grant you death when you begged me for it.”
Simian’s eyes turned hard, that mix of anger and erotic stirring that always preceded some of his most imaginative horrors.
“Take her to her room,” he ordered the guards. “Throw the other girl out.”
Simian waited. No one moved.
Clare smiled. “They don’t belong to you anymore. They belong to me.” Her eyes rose to the guards. “Seal the room. He doesn’t leave.”
Two of them closed the wide double-doors at Simian’s back.
“I didn’t expect this day to come so soon,” she said, walking toward him in that slow, bored manner he had so often approached her with. “I thought it would take years, decades, before I had any chance of coming back here in a position to keep that promise. But fate is an unpredictable thing, and I find I am glad to be here now.”
Simian watched her approach, his gaze flickering briefly to the guards, then back to her.
“I don’t know what you’ve promised them, but don’t think this will end well for you. You may hold them, but I hold the county.” He wasn’t worried. No, he was excited. Because everything was a game to Simian, and since he believed he held the upper hand, this game promised to be fun. Interesting. That was why he had said he would keep her forever, wasn’t it? Because she always made things interesting.
“Just when I think I have you broken, you cobble yourself back together on me, and I get to break you all over again. That’s what I love about you, min quellea. How repairable you are.”
Always she had been min quellea to him. Her mother never named her, and no one else had seen fit to either, Simian included. He liked her that way, a nameless slate he could write himself onto. But she had named herself. Clare Brighton, a name that meant so much more because she had chosen it for herself and hidden it away in the deepest recesses of her heart. She had never shared it with anyone in this place because if she never shared it, it could never be taken away from her.
Alone at night, in the darkness of the prison cellar with the rats and the bugs crawling around her, she could take that name out and hold it, and imagine what it would be like to be Clare Brighton. During the day she could chant the name in her mind, and tell herself the unspeakable things being done to her were not really being done to her, because Clare Brighton was who she truly was, and Clare Brighton was not yet alive.
No, Clare Brighton had finally been born when she’d met two lords on the outskirts of the Valedon Swamps, and their light had drawn her back from the madness. She’d had a choice to make, then, on who she would be. Who she would become. And now that Clare Brighton was alive, she was never going to be hidden away again.
Clare stopped within touching distance of Simian, and the Song rumbled in her chest, as eager as she. It had lived through him with her, after all, and Clare considered for the first time what her years here must have been like for the Song, feeling everything she felt and yet unable to do anything. Trapped, as she had been trapped. Was she as bad as Simian, locking it away in a cage and only letting it out when it was useful to her?
Even as she thought it, she knew there was a difference. She had had no choice in the Song’s being a part of her, and she knew that if she let it out, let it free, there would be no more Clare Brighton. There would only be the Song. She was not willing to die. For the Song to be free and she to live, it would have to view her as an equal.
We are not equal, Clare. The Song’s voice was not unkind.
You believe we are not, and so we fight. But we are of the same mind right now, are we not? The Song had lived this hell with her. The Song hated Simian as much as she did. In this experience, in this vengeance, they were united.
We are, the Song agreed. And when Clare stepped forward, reaching out her hand to Simian’s cheek and smiling, the Song smiled with her.
Simian Hensa’s face went bloodless. Clare’s fingertips touched his skin, and the Song’s power flowed from her.
“Live, Simian. Live everything you have done to me, and when you cannot stand it any longer, beg Clare Brighton for release.”
