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She had never heard Simian scream before. Screaming was not, in general, a sound that she liked. But she found she enjoyed his screams very much. As justice played out before her, she settled onto the piano bench and bore witness to his torment.
Min quellea.
Be careful what you have named a person, she thought, for they may one day become it.
He started begging when he had barely lived half a year of her time. For a man who enjoyed inflicting pain, he was startlingly incapable of bearing any himself. When he tried crawling to her, the Song brought up a wall, invisible but solid, keeping him back.
Numair left his place by the lyre and came to stand next to the piano bench. She didn’t know what she saw in his face, couldn’t name the emotions hovering just beneath the court mask of Numair Tolvannen. But she knew what she didn’t see: Disgust. Pity. Fear.
She slid to the edge of the bench and Numair sat beside her. When he laid his hand between them, palm up in offering, she placed her own into it. And when Simian’s screams finally subsided into sobs, when her promise was kept, when he stopped calling her min quellea and remembered her name, she was holding Numair’s hand when she granted Simian the death he begged for.
Chapter Eighty-Four
A Promise of Destruction
Siren’s cliff lay on the north-eastern end of Renault County, accessible only by a near-vertical climb two hundred feet up to the brink. The ascent had killed plenty of people over the years Clare had lived in this place, so much so that it was colloquially known as Suicide Cliff. People only climbed it if they wanted the kindest death Renault County could offer, and so they didn’t mind if that death came from falling on the climb up, or casting themselves off to the sea on the other side.
Clare had made the climb more than once, and she found she remembered the best way up easily enough, feet and hands finding carefully chosen protrusions. She had first been called to it not longer after her mother died, and she had been looking for a place to hide. A brutal storm had swept through, and the resultant rain and winds had woken the siren stones above, their haunting sounds driving Clare to climb in order to discover what made them.
She crested the brink, Numair scrambling up behind her. The clifftop was long and narrow, ending on the eastern side from where they had come up in a hollow at the base of an overhang. The hollow, the overhang, and its base for twenty feet in all directions, was pure glittering siren’s rock, broken only in one place where a tree had been dying for as long as Clare had known it.
Though siren rock was named for the man who had died here, it occurred naturally enough in other parts of the world, and Clare might even have believed this deposit was natural, that the legend of the siren’s death was exaggerated, had she not heard their haunting cries as the rain swept over them. Had she not curled into the hollow as a child and dreamed his death as she slept. Had she not seen what lay on the other side.
She crossed the narrow width of the clifftop and looked down at the broken skeletons of ships, piled atop the rocky shore and rammed into one another. They were worn now with age and torn apart from the ceaseless battering of the ocean waves, but they were there, standing sentinel for all who might come after them, giving silent testimony to man’s capacity for inhumanity to their fellow man.
She let Numair take in the sight, lulled into a state of near-trance by the hypnotic calm of the ocean, and went to the Siren’s hollow. There, on a small ledge a foot up, where she had tucked her head as a child and stared at its beauty, Clare plucked the Siren’s Tear free of the rocks that held it. They broke from it gently enough, as if simply waiting all this time to set it free.
“Numair.”
He jumped, shook his head ruefully and turned from the graveyard of ships, arching one brow at her.
“How did you hear of this?” She cradled the Tear in her cupped hands, its power curling against her. So much power, born of death.
“It was something my uncle said when I was younger. That he had once put something he wanted forever out of his reach. The only thing Alaric wants is power. I didn’t put it together until...”
Until she sang the siren’s song at The Musicale House. How foolish of her, to have brought him here. To have brought herself here.
She tucked the stone into her pocket and returned to the cliff.
“We don’t need to climb back,” he said, pulling the gatestone from his pocket. She turned and placed the Siren’s Tear in his hand, closing his fingers around it.
“You don’t need to climb back. Take this and go.”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
“I made a bargain to come here. I have a price to pay, and I can’t delay it much longer.” The Song kept building and building inside her, testing the limits of that wider channel she’d made from its prison.
“I’m not leaving.”
Foolish, stubborn man. She started climbing, the Song’s pressure growing stronger with each handhold, until they reached the top once more and it threatened to bleed out of her eyes.
She didn’t have time to tell him, again, to leave. Not with the impatient, churning violence inside her. She managed a single word, and it was barely her voice at all, the Song’s overlaying it.
“Run.”
She stood atop the cliff, looking over the wretched sinkhole of Renault County, her eyes blazing with a fury, a presence that was not wholly her own, and yet was in its entirety.
She opened her mouth and a promise of destruction poured out.
